Typical Tea Partier

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIUBa8aHws&feature=player_embedded] This guy, Jesse Kelly, is running for House Representative in Arizona. He’s not just a typical Tea Partier, he’s a typical Republican. He’s also advocating Austrian economics, for you Austrians on here. The questioner asked him that, given that we are experiencing salmonella outbreaks every three weeks now in our food, should we change federal regulations on ag from what they are now, voluntary regulations with industry policing itself (working great, eh Austrians?) to more hard-edged compulsory regulations whereby the state would force companies to produce clean food, inspect them regularly and fine them or shut them down if they don’t pass muster. He says that people need to “make sure for themselves that their food is safe.” LOL. Incredibly, he gets a huge round of applause from what is apparently a Tea Partier suicide cult (?) in the audience. White Americans never fail to astonish me. Following the Austrians once again, he blames the BP oil spill on government regulations (!?). If only Big Government would have left BP alone, the spill never would have happened. That’s probably the view of BP too, I would wager. You might be interested to note that, appropriately, BP is funding the Tea Party candidates in the US. Republicans have always opposed just about every regulation on business that you can possibly think of. As the Republican Party is just the party of the capitalists, it takes little research to discover that capitalists have never met a regulation that they didn’t hate. They usually propose “voluntary regulation” which doesn’t make sense. If regulation is cool enough to do it yourself, why not just have the state do it for you, eh? Voluntary regulation has always been a scam. It doesn’t cost a company any less to inspect itself than to submit to inspections by the state. The only reason lying capitalists propose “voluntary regulation” is so they won’t have to regulate themselves. It doesn’t take a lot of research to figure out that the record of capitalists in regulating themselves anywhere on Earth is pretty dismal. Hence the state tends to step in. All government regulatory agencies are socialist institutions. I’m pointing this out because a lot of readers don’t seem to understand what socialism means.

The Bottom Line on Austrian Economics

You are right about most of these economic doomsayers being right wing populists. Have you ever visited LewRockwell.com? They’re pretty much the epitome of this kind of thinking, predicting apocalypse every other Tuesday or so. Im still waiting for the dollar to collapse. BTW, what do you think of Austrian Economics in general? That school of thought is popular on Stormfront and libertarian and Paleoconservative circles. It seems to have gained ground in recent years, especially since Peter Schiff successfully predicted the housing bubble collapse. Search Youtube for “Peter Schiff was right!”. He says it with a stone face, even as the host and guests burst out laughing at him. This is what got me interested in Lew Rockwell’s philosophy, I used to be a libertarian. If Austrian Economics is wrong or flawed, then how was one its main champions correct on the housing bubble, which nobody else predicted?

Being able to predict that a bad idea will fail at some point does not mean that one has a program that will work to accomplish anything, much less prevent the bad idea from failing. It merely means you have good skills of prediction. Good powers of prediction does not indicate a program for success. Think about it. Just means you’re good with a crystal ball. I’m not an expert on the Austrians, but let me try here. Problem is that it was Austrian economics, in a moderated form, that failed in the latest economic collapse. The countries that imposed the most “Austrian” type economics, moderated however, were the ones that were most destroyed in the latest economic crash. Check out Latvia and Iceland. Those that kept strong state controls over banking like Africa and China got off the easiest. The 3rd World is run on a moderated version of Austrian economics. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Those who say that it’s not the real Austrian deal, fine. The anarcho-capitalists are the real pure Austrians. Their favorite societies are the Old West, especially during the Gold Rush, and modern day Somalia. The Gold Rush! Somalia! Yeah! Anarcho-capitalism works great, huh? Austrian economics is bad for White workers, bottom line. White workers should not support an economics that is out to screw them. That said, Austrian economics doesn’t even make sense. It’s microeconomics. That means it is based on what actions you and I will take as a rational actor economically. But you can’t extrapolate microeconomics to macroeconomics, because masses of people do not behave in an economically rational way. The Austrians want to get rid of all regulation and let the market do whatever it wants. What happens then is you have regular blowups like the recent economic crash. Or witness the economics of the late 1800’s, wild booms and busts all the time. It’s just insane. Little to no government, no worker or consumer protections, no environmental or societal protections, business just runs amok. It’s like the 3rd World. It’s not compatible with a civilized society. Besides, it says nonsense. Austrians say that government caused the last economic crash. Government ruins the environment, not business. Government harms consumers, not business. Government hurts workers, not business. Government health care hurts sick people, not capitalist health care. Government schools create idiots, not expensive private schools so costly 8 Land reform doesn’t work and starves peasants; landless peasants are happy, healthy and have full bellies. Stimulus spending and deficit spending don’t work for getting a country out of a depression/recession; what works is gutting government spending. All government spending will eventually destroy economies that engage in mass state spending, that is, social democracy will destroy every economy given enough time. It’s all bunch of nonsense!

There Is No US Debt Crisis

La Fleur writes:

Speaking of the debt, what is the general consensus here on where the US dollar is headed? There are scary posts on financial sites claiming we’re headed for either hyperinflation or default, and soon. What do you guys think? 

I have seen those financial sites she reads. They are all coming from the Populist Right (They are basically the Tea Partiers), and I think they are unnecessarily alarmist. One would do better to read the economists on Counterpunch or Paul Krugman. The real risk? Not inflation and of course not default. But deflation. There is no debt crisis. Bottom line. Our debt is the 3rd lowest in the industrialized world. It’s about 6 Because our debt is so low, deficit hawks (all rightwingers by the way) have decided to add up all of the state, county, municipal and even consumer debt to conclude that our debt is by far the worst in the world. Dishonest accounting? You betcha! I say when debt gets to 10 Japan has the highest debt around at over 20 The result of the bubbles was an economic depression, and the dreaded deflation has had Japan in its grip for 20 years or so. The government has tried everything from

How Does the Republican Party REALLY Feel About Immigration?

I don’t know…It was the Democrats and Left that passed the 1965 Immigration Act. That’s just the facts. The Right were racist elitists, but it seems they’d rather have lived in a White country than plot to destroy the middle class—back then. But by the time Regan came around the Right picked up illegal immigration, too, and were using it for their machinations. Then years going back and forth, both Left and Right supporting or ignoring it.

The plot to destroy the middle class began in the 1970’s, really got under way with Reagan and dramatically accelerated under Bush. Keep in mind that this is just a theory mine – I can’t prove that such a plot was actually concocted. The Right was silent about the 1965 Immigration Act. Immigration, legal and illegal, really ramped up under Reagan. In 1979, it was only 400,000/yr or so. The Right in the US has never opposed legal immigration as far as I can tell. The Republican Party has always been 10 Obama has deported vastly more illegals than Bush did. Remember, Bush tried to legalize all of them. And illegal immigration exploded under Reagan. The Right are complete assholes, just like they are about most everything. They want to have it both ways. First of all, they love these illegals for the purposes of smashing down wages, and really that’s all the Right, which is the political arm of Business, cares about. However, the Right’s base screams about the illegals, so the Right, while encouraging the illegals to come and doing nothing to get rid of them while they are here, feeds their base with anti-illegal rhetoric which is just that. Even Proposition 187 in 1994 under Governor Pete Wilson was not intended to stop illegals. We know this because Wilson fought any and all efforts to crack down on businesses hiring illegals. The Right just pushes anti-illegal rhetoric to get votes from non-elite and working class Whites who in their right minds would not be voting them. It’s a double game, like most crap the Right does. Obama has deported illegals at a higher rate than any administration in history. The bottom line for the Right is always money, capitalism and business. As long as Capital demands that these illegals be here, the Right won’t get rid of them. End of story. There have been interesting moves at the state level. In Arizona, a rightwing Republican governor passed a very harsh anti-illegal measure that was surely opposed by her business constituents. Granted, that’s an interesting dynamic. Bush and McCain tried a very sneaky double game. They tried to legalize the 12 million illegals so they could be used as cheap labor, but at the same time would make it almost impossible for them to become citizens, at which point, they may well vote Democrat. The law would have converted illegals into citizens at the earliest in 17 years, and only after making them jump lots of hurdles. Only the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party has said anything at all about immigration. The main wing of the Republican Party, capital, business, money interests, loves immigration. Recall that capitalism needs constant growth in order to function. Capitalists love growing populations because it means more consumers, more houses, more this, more that = growing economy. The Left has always supported the illegals, true, but at least they are consistent and have a solid ideological position. Obama plays a bit of a double game on the illegals. He tells the Hispanics he’s going to legalize them in order to get their votes, then he never does it! He never does it because he knows it’s political suicide. So both sides are sort of feeding the bases phony lines that they are not willing to follow through on. But back in the 1970’s, super liberal California governor Jerry Brown used to regularly cheer on raids against illegals. It wasn’t a very controversial issue back then – most everyone was against them, but it was seen as kind of a joke, because it was like bailing out the ocean.

California Truth

Repost from the old site. There is something to be said for deep, hard and cold honesty and realism, like this great article, My Negro Problem – And Ours , from Norman Podhoretz in 1963, back when he was still a liberal and Commentary was still a Jewish liberal magazine, before the Henry Jackson – Patrick Moynihan-fueled transformation into neoconservatives in the 1970’s. Read it! More along the same lines, from the comments page of American Renaissance, commenting on an article about illegal immigration:

Look at Los Angeles in the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s. Blue sky, snow-covered mountains, beaches, orange groves. Streets and highways that were uncrowded. Modest middle-class White Americans with full employment in American industries and whose only direct connection with crime was watching a Hollywood gangster movie with George Raft, or Bogart. Look at Los Angeles now. A third world jungle. Air filthy, orange groves long gone, graffiti and gang slogans everywhere, infrastructure collapsing. The middle class replaced by super-rich behind gated communities and the teeming hordes of the permanently poor. Jobs gone replaced by minimum wage service industries, schools worse than useless. Whites replaced by illiterate mestizos. The Golden State destroyed in one generation. That’s quite an achievement.

The “illiterate Mestizos” in the text above are illegal aliens and in many cases, their horrific spawn. I would add I don’t want to get into race reality or any of that, but this is a perfect description of my state and my city, my home. I will never go back to my home as long as I live, or at least I pray I will not. It’s not my home anymore. It’s like it’s been taken over by body snatchers or aliens. And it’s not necessarily about race either. Growing up in the Los Angeles area in the 1960’s and 70’s, there were Blacks around, but only some, and in the circles I ran in, all college-going and middle-class. There were assimilated Hispanics too, like my best friend since 4th grade, but they were just like everybody else other than having some quirky ancestry, and they were definitely a minority anyway. There were scattered Asians here and there – Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, all assimilated Americans. That was the thing – everyone was an American. I didn’t know any immigrants except the Bolivian exchange student at my high school. There was no such thing as people who didn’t speak English – everyone did. There weren’t any signs in foreign languages, unless you went to Chinatown or Olvera Street. If you wanted to see Chinese people and eat Chinese food, you went to Chinatown. If you wanted to see Mexicans and listen to mariachis, you went to Olvera Street. On a recent trip back to Orange County, the nature of this catastrophe really hit home for me. Orange County is now a 3rd World country. There’s a group of very well-off rich and upper middle class people of various races living lavish and ultra-lavish lives, and then another vast, usually darker-skinned group, that looks like the teeming masses of the Third World, and they are often right in proximity to each other. There’s a White working class that looks broken, in debt and exhausted. I’m sure the rich and upper middle class love it this way, as studies show that they have made out like bandits since 1980 while most everyone else has gotten creamed, and this transformation neatly corresponded with Reaganism and the Republican free market revolution of the past 30 years. It also corresponded with California liberalism. Our very own Jerry Brown liberals from the 1970’s got together with the Reaganites and ruined my city and my state. It doesn’t make sense. Looking at the 3rd World country that Orange County has become, with it’s Latin American gaps between an opulent, venal and indifferent upper class (At what point will they become an “oligarchy”?) and hordes of teeming 3rd World-like impoverished and overworked masses (At what point will they become revolutionary?), the rich with their gated communities and their security guards and the poor shoveled 30 to a dwelling, how could any progressive person not despair? What’s next? Biweekly riots by the Right, the Left or just college kids? Violent, striking teachers in the streets, broken up with tear gas and clubs? A military coup? The army in the streets? Armed leftwing revolutionaries? Right-wing death squads? If not, why not? If there’s a monument to the failure of mass illegal immigration and even mass immigration, it’s Los Angeles and the surrounding area. When you go to downtown LA, you are in shock. Most parts of the world that look like that need a passport to get to them. Yet this is purportedly part of our country. I’d like to point something out. How would Japan like it if we flooded 40 million East Indians or Mestizos into their country? How would India like it if we flooded 300 million Chinese into their country? How would fucking Mexico like it if we flooded 35 million Koreans, East Indians or Africans into their country? No sane, decent or self-respecting country or people puts up with this shit. Every country has an ethnic group that makes up the majority, and a culture that goes along with it. Along with that, a language or languages. We can sit back and bitch about India or Mexico, but those are their countries and their cultures. If you’re an Indian or a Mexican, you want to speak your native language, be around mostly folks who look like you, and be a part of your national culture. Mexicans don’t want 35 million Japanese flooding into Mexico, speaking Japanese everywhere, putting up signs in Japanese, playing Japanese music, eating Japanese food and turning Mexico into the Mexipan. Yet this is what we have done here in California. We, the native peoples of this state (not including the Amerindians, who are nearly extinct), have sat back and allowed a bunch of foreigners to displace us and replace us in our homeland. Hardly any other decent or self-respecting people on Earth would allow that. Why? Because it’s normal to resist being displaced and replaced in your homeland. It’s not rightwing or conservative or reactionary or racist or Nazi or anything like that. It’s just…normal. For feeling alienated by this, we are not skinheads or KKK members. We are normal human beings, reacting the same way any normal human would in the circumstances. Much as I dislike White nationalists for the blatant racism of the overwhelming majority of them, it seems that it is only they who give voice to these most plaintive feelings that any rational native Californian must harbor. Almost no one in the media can tell our story. The media is full of the glories of diversity – the diversity that is our de facto displacement and replacement. Anyone giving voice to these feelings, which so many of us must feel, is accused of racism. But how can merely being normal and human be conflated with racism?

An Anti-Indian Diatribe

This comment comes from an Indian woman living in India. I agree with every world she says. She is right. This is why I support the Maoists in India. They seem to be the only force able to change the country for the better. Everything else has been tried and everyone else has failed. Even most of the Left, Indian social democracy, the Indian socialism of Congress, the Indian Communism of the Indian Communist Party in Bengal, neoliberalism, nothing has worked. The neoliberals say, “Just give us time! Just give us time! It will work after a while.” When is it supposed to start working? They’ve had 62 years. Time to start something new. Neoliberalism in particular has failed. It’s enriched maybe 1 What a delightfully typical Indian middle-class response. Might I ask how much your two-car household (of which one is a Volkswagen – woohoo) pays its maid and how many hours she slaves for that sum? Is she offered a cup of tea from the same crockery that you and your spoilt spawn use? Or does she have a cast-off plastic mug with a crack down the side? Get real! The reason India is a mess because of people like you who quote numbers that reflect your mundane middle class existence in some twisted self congratulatory fashion. Like building tanks? Shame they did not build more power generators and roads of some quality. Or invest in revamping an education system that makes us a nation of unthinking idiots blinded by our own smug mediocrity. This cheap healthcare you speak of? Is it accessible to the 900 million poor? Think your maid could afford cancer treatment for her children at a private hospital…? Or even a simple root canal? This uneven distribution of wealth you are talking about from your substandard ivory tower – by which I refer to whichever building you currently live in – no doubt built on the foundations of bribery, corruption, and poorly paid migrant labour, not to mention seriously compromised building standards – but I digress…This distribution of wealth begins from you and me. One less gold necklace for the wife, one less play station for the spawn, and a fairer wage to those we employ – put your money where your mousepad is. The Government is going to do nothing for the poor in our country… that 900 million who eke out a living in this our MAHAN BHARATH. But given the apathy and false sense of pride we Indians wear today like some sort of holy mantle – and no one may as a result, say anything against it – that just consigns the vast majority of this so called democratic (my arse) nation to live out this misery, passing it on to the next generation with no hope, no sense of a future and no change. This is a country where Chief ministers own TV stations and there are over a million court cases pending. This is a country (in a nation of primarily dark skinned people) were we have a best-selling cream called Fair and Lovely (for f’s sake, does no one get the implications, but me) and a movie industry which perpetuates the myth that being light skinned means being beautiful. This is a country where politicians can march into a restaurant and drag out four girls, beat the crap out of them and no one does anything…this is a country where no one wants to face the truth. We are where we are today, because of a multitude of factors, driven by international market forces, not our own so-called greatness. because we are not that great. We are unthinking, we are complacent, we are arrogant and most of us – let’s face it – are pretty damn stupid. Indian journalism…I have never seen worse journalism in my life. Diluted, watered down rubbish is what the media gives us, while it airs advertisements of how brilliant we are as a nation. Yes we are filthy – even the middle classes and above. Most of us are unaware of deodorant – though God knows most of us need it and it’s happily available. As a nation, our parenting skills are the worst on the planet. With children being kept up at silly hours, babies sleeping with parents till they are teenagers, and learning the same bad habits we acquired from our parents…and as for our social and religious hypocrisy – we could teach Saudi Arabia a thing or two. I keep using the word ‘we’ here, because you see Rahul, I come from the privileged classes, I went to some of the best and oldest public schools in the country and am a member of most of India’s most ridiculously posh colonial clubs. But luckily for me, I see through the very thin veneer of 21st century civilization we cover ourselves with. Underneath it, we have not changed for 2000 years. And no amount of car manufacturing, or tanks or UN reports or self-glorification is going to change that fact. The only thing that will change it is when people like you – my peers – wake up to how awful we really are as a nation on so many counts. You can bang on about our colonial masters and tell me how bad it was and how wonderful our dhoti-clad Mahatma was…but without a thought would deny our fellow brothers and sisters an decent wage or plain simple human rights. Frankly…I would cheerfully welcome back the British. Give me a Margaret Thatcher over an Indira Gandhi any day. Or a Tony Blair over a Manmohan Singh in a heartbeat. We are socially sick, morally destitute, spiritually bereft and politically corrupt and the only reason we deny it as much as we do, is because we know all of this is true. Want to do something for India…well stop rabbiting on about the tanks and wheat exports and car manufacture and our civilized behaviour and wake up and smell the roses. or in our case, our neighbors’ rotting garbage neatly deposited in front of our front gate. Your views above are valid and they work…for a small, small fraction of India’s population. It is however not true, not by a long shot for the vast majority. Does this not concern you, at all? Does your pride in our country not make you want the same privileges for everyone? And even if you say you do, I’m inclined not to believe you, because how else would you have a maid come and sweep and clean for you everyday for a pittance, unless she was deliberately kept poor and stupid, by a ruling class and a political and social system that thrives on oppression and control and domination. And oh you know what else…I hope the whole world wakes up and sees what a mess we are…we need to be collectively shamed into making things better. Nothing else will move us – and frankly I’m not sure even that will. We will progress – as momentum gathered over the years and our massive population will ensure the economy continues to grow. But your Playstation addicted child’s (I can’t believe you said that so proudly btw) child may see a different country and it wont be a better place. Today we have a polluted, corrupt, elitist society – and you sunshine, are part of the problem. You and everyone else like you. But if you plan on telling me how unpatriotic and overly Westernized I am…feel free. Patriotism is not blind faith. It is the recognition and subsequent correction of a problem. And we have too many. Starting with a mindless, automaton middle class steeped in it’s arrogance and self-righteousness. Let’s make a change there! I for one would like to call for a mass, cross country non-violent action – let’s not vote again for any leader, let’s not pay taxes, let’s picket peacefully outside our politicians houses and refuse to co-operate with the Government until they start doing their fucking job. Like creating sensible policies, promoting on merit, holding themselves fully accountable and fire-able for non-performance. Why are the civil services in India given housing, or cars and drivers and peons and all that malarkey? On one hand the Government bleats incessantly about our colonial past, tearing down beautiful old building,s changing names of roads and towns and cities…and yet they cling to the worst aspects of tat colonial rule…an awe and reverence of the Government Servant. In a democratic country they are there to serve us, not the Queen, but we haven’t quite worked that out have we? I would also like to add at this point that for a country that breeds like rats, and that gave the world the Kama Sutra, we are sexually repressed and ignorant – to put it very mildly. And that could be a whole other conversation. I could go on and on…but a word to Mr Lindsay… ashamed as I am to admit it…Kudos…you summed up India – the real India – perfectly. And it is my sincerest hope that someday I can say otherwise. My views make me a pariah in my own country…but I see myself as voice in the wilderness… no doubt I will be beheaded. My apologies to you for using this space to have such a rant, but in my humble and much-disliked opinion…every little helps! Indians need to hear this from another Indian. And a female Indian at that! 🙂 In my next life, I shall be born as a particularly objectionable reptile of some sort for not being a true-blue daughter of the soil.

"Interview with Philip Giraldi: Israel's Policies are Manifestly Evil," by Kourosh Ziabari

Another good post from Rebel News. Once again, I’m republishing because I’m not sure how long they will be around. Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist. I’m not sure if he’s a typical anti-Semite at all. I’m having a hard time figuring that out. On the contrary, I would just say that he seems to be a typical American. Giraldi is a good guy, very smart, unfortunately a rightwinger, but he’s lifetime CIA, so what do you expect? I don’t think he’s anti-Semitic at all, and I agree with everything he says below. He’s a breath of fresh air in such circles. Deserves to be more widely read.

Interview with Philip Giraldi: Israel’s Policies are Manifestly Evil

Friday, 15 October 2010 23:37 Kourosh Ziabari

Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Now, he chairs the Council for the National Interest as the Executive Director. CNI is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the transformation of United States’ Middle East policy. As a CIA officer, Giraldi served in different countries including Turkey, Italy, Germany and Spain. He is now a Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance. He has appeared on several radio and TV programs including Good Morning America, MSNBC, NPR, Fox News, BBC, Al-Jazeera and 60 Minutes. Giraldi works with the American Conservative magazine as a contributing editor and writes a regular column for the Antiwar website. He is an outspoken critic of the hawkish policies of the United States and has publicly decried Washington’s unconditional support for the state of Israel. Philip Giraldi joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the latest developments of the Middle East, the prospect of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the possibility of a peaceful compromise between Iran and the United States and the impact of Israeli lobby on the long-term policies of the White House. Kourosh Ziabari: Why is the Israeli lobby so powerful, influential and authoritative? Almost all of the major media conglomerates in the United States own to well-off Jews who are committed to maintaining the interests of the state of Israel in the U.S. Some experts say that Israel is the representative of the United States in the Middle East region, but some others suggest that it’s Israel which determines the future of political developments in the United States. What’s your take on that? Philip Giraldi: The Israel Lobby is so powerful because it deliberately set out to establish control over key elements in the United States. It has demonstrated a number of times that politicians who are perceived as being unfriendly to Israel will face serious problems in being reelected because the Lobby mobilizes to provide money and media support to opponents. This means that congress is afraid to oppose anything that Israel and its Lobby wants. The same holds true for the presidency. Every presidential candidate must be seen as friendly to Israel or he will be attacked in the media and denied millions of dollars in political contributions, making it a safer option to support Israel. Finally, pro-Israeli interests control much of the media and, more important, dominate the opinion and editorial pages, making the only narrative that most Americans hear about the Middle East highly favorable to Israel and highly critical of all Israel’s enemies. As a result, Israel is able to control U.S. foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East and also much of the Muslim world. KZ: The recent call by the Iranian President on framing a fact-finding group to probe into the 9/11 attacks sparked intense controversy around the United States. Is it because the United States considers 9/11 a red line which should not be crossed? PG: Many Americans believe that 9/11 was never properly investigated. Some believe that the U.S. and, or Israeli governments were actually involved. The Federal government does not want the case to be reopened because a truly open investigation might reveal things that it would like to keep hidden. I do not know what exactly those things might be, but, at a minimum, there was a high level of incompetence within the government in the lead up to the attacks, both by Democrats and Republicans. KZ: The former Italian President had once said that Mossad had played a role in the 9/11 attacks. Is there any convincing evidence that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks? Can we rely on some implications including the five dancing Israelis who were seen cheering while the Twin Towers collapsed, or the closure of Zim Shipping Company’s headquarters at the World Trade Center two week before the 9/11 attacks? PG: Most intelligence officers believe that Israel, which was conducting a massive and illegal spy operation inside the U.S. aimed at Arabs living here, knew at least parts of the 9/11 conspiracy. It did not share that information and it is also clear that leading Israeli politicians welcomed the attacks because they made Washington a totally committed ally in full agreement with the Israeli view of Islamic terrorism. The Israel view, i.e. that anyone hostile to Israel is a terrorist, has done great damage to the United States because it has created enemies where no enemies previously existed. KZ: What’s your take on the exercise of double standards by the U.S. over Israel’s nuclear issue? PG: There is no justification for Washington’s hypocrisy over Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Israel should be held to the same standard as everyone else, but the action of the Israeli Lobby means that it will never be accountable for anything as long as Washington is in a position to protect it. KZ: As someone who has closely worked with one of the most sensitive parts of the U.S. government, do you like the continuation of belligerence and hostility between Iran and the United States? Are these two nations fated to be at odds forever? Can you foresee promising horizons of reconciliation and friendship? PG: I do not believe that Washington and Tehran are natural enemies. I believe that they have been turned into enemies by the media and the activity of the Israel Lobby. Unfortunately, that situation will not change until Washington completely overturns its policies in the Middle East, something that might not happen in our lifetimes. Many young Iranians, the bulk of the population, do not harbor any real hostility towards the United States and if the policies were to change I believe the two countries could again become friendly. KZ: Is it plausible to be a former CIA officer at the same time as being an outspoken critic of the U.S. administration? You’ve been quite forthright in your criticism of the U.S. foreign policy, especially with regards to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Haven’t been any pressure on you to soften your tone or retreat from your stance? PG: I have never been pressured to soften my criticism of the US government’s foreign and security policies. There are many former intelligence officers who have also been highly critical of developments since 9/11. It is because intelligence officers quickly recognize lies when they hear them and are not very tolerant of a government that lies its way to war. KZ: Iran marked the 20th anniversary of the conclusion of 8-year war with Iraq last month. Iranians well remember that it was the United States and its European allies, who persuaded, equipped, funded and aided Saddam Hussein in invading Iran. 20 years later, they came together to topple the very Saddam they had supported in war with Iran. Saddam killed more than 400,000 Iranians. My uncle was one of them. Can you put yourself in the place of an Iranian citizen who witnessed the war? What would be your feeling then? PG: For the United States, the support of Saddam Hussein against Iran was a quid pro quo that goes back to the holding of the U.S. Embassy hostages in Tehran after the Islamic revolution. It was revenge pure and simple in hopes that Iraq would prove victorious and bring down the Iranian government. As an Iranian, you have a right to be outraged by what happened but the Embassy seizure was also outrageous. The U.S. response was, as it often is, disproportional and I am ashamed of my government’s support of wars to fix political disputes. KZ: and for the final question, how do you estimate the prospect of Israeli-Palestinian conflict? PG: There is no hope for resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict as long as the United States continues to permit the Israelis to expand and commit crimes against humanity directed towards the Palestinian people. Evil is evil no matter how you try to dress it up and the Israeli policies are manifestly evil. The Palestinians cannot ever accept a peace settlement that requires being held in a large outdoor prison camp by the Israelis supported by the United States.

Transcript of Reason Radio Interview with Me on October 13, 2010

Since the sound quality was so poor, I decided to make a transcript of this interview available for you all. Enjoy it. Robert Stark: We’re going to be discussing California issues, how the states have changed, and how it affects trends facing the rest of the nation, but first of all, I came across this article on Robert’s site called Some Sensible Positions for Liberal Race Realists and White Advocates. Your first point is to amend the Constitution to get rid of the anchor baby thing. Very sensible position that most Americans would support. Robert Lindsay: I don’t know if they could get it through Congress and pass it as a Constitutional amendment, but all White advocates should be supporting this move. It is a very reasonable position to take. My position is that White advocates should not be taking crazy positions – almost all of them are taking these crazy, loony positions like “freedom of association” that are simply never going to fly. This move to amend the Constitution to get rid of the anchor baby thing is a reasonable position. Your average reasonable person, especially White person, says, “Sure, why not? Good idea.” The Left is trying to portray this as racism, but hey, let them scream! Because your average normal American, at least White people, and even some Black people, looks at this and says, “What? They’re calling these people racists? Because they want to amend the Constitution to get rid of these stupid anchor babies? That’s not racist, that’s just rational.” Robert Stark: I think that even liberal European countries don’t give out citizenship to anchor babies. Robert Lindsay: Some countries may allow it, but I think most of Europe has gotten rid of it. Ireland recently had birthright citizenship, but they just got rid of it. We’re one of the last countries around to have this. Robert Stark: Ireland has only been getting a lot of immigration recently because of their economy. Robert Lindsay: There has been a recent trend for at least White countries to get rid of birthright citizenship. As far as the rest of the world goes, I don’t know, but I would be surprised if there is much birthright citizenship. Most countries don’t agree with the concept. Why should you get birthright citizenship? If you’re born in some foreign country, you get citizenship of whatever country your parents are citizens of. Robert Stark: Yes, it should be based on the parents. Robert Lindsay: You’re still a citizen of some country! You have a right to be a citizen of some country in the world. If a female American citizen and I go over to…Peru and have a child there, why is that kid a Peruvian citizen? That kid is an American citizen. It’s born of American citizens. Despite the fact that we are living in Peru now, we are still just American citizens living in a foreign country. Robert Stark: What are your thoughts on dual citizenship? Robert Lindsay: I understand that there is a lot more dual citizenship going around than people think. I mean, the anti-Semites go on and on about US Jews being “dual citizens” of the US and Israel. But my understanding is that there’s a lot of dual citizenship going on here in the US and in other countries as well. Immigrants from many different countries the world over who are here in the US actually have dual citizenship – US citizenship and citizenship in their home country. So apparently it’s not just a thing with Jewish Americans having Israeli citizenship – they are not the only ones. Robert Stark: I think the Israeli issue is not so much the dual citizenship – a lot of immigrants have that – the main thing is that many people in positions of power in the government and politics are more likely to have dual Israeli-US citizenship. Robert Lindsay: The real concern is that, say, your average person who has Irish and US dual citizenship is not some sort of virtual agent working for the Irish government. Your average person with Israeli and US dual citizenship is practically an Israeli agent! And that’s the whole problem right there. That’s the whole problem with dual loyalty and the Jews. Robert Stark: Yes, the dual loyalty is a problem. And due to multiculturalism, it’s tolerated, when we really should not be tolerating dual loyalties. Robert Lindsay: Dual loyalty is a problem with Jews due to the nature of Judaism and the Jews. Most other ethnic groups are not so ethnocentric as the Jews so we don’t worry about dual loyalty much with them. But due to the nature of Judaism, Jews are loyal to the Jews first and their native land second if at all. That’s why this dual loyalty thing keeps cropping up with the Jews – it’s inherent in the Jews themselves. It’s not an anti-Semitic canard. Robert Stark: Yes, it’s just how they are. Robert Lindsay: With the Jews, dual loyalty isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Robert Stark: Your next recommendation is to avoid overthrowing civil rights laws. Can you go into detail about what some of these civil rights laws are? Robert Lindsay: The White advocates want to get rid of all civil rights laws! Every White advocate I have heard of wants to get rid of every single civil rights law that we have on the books in this country. They hate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They hate the Housing Rights Act, they hate the Voting Rights Act. They want to get rid of all of them and all anti-discrimination laws too. It’s true that Rand Paul is running for Senate now, and he agrees with that position, but nevertheless, that is a very fringe position to take. The day to get rid of civil rights laws has come and gone! The civil rights laws are here to stay! Robert Stark: So you think that would be a very difficult idea to sell to your average person. Robert Lindsay: Worse than that. It’s not going to happen! Those days are gone. That was maybe doable in say, 1980 or so… Robert Stark: I think the real big issue is immigration…You’re critical of people who want to get rid of non-White immigration. Instead, you are calling for IQ tests. Robert Lindsay: Yes, this would actually be a very interesting thing for White advocates to support. They were actually suggesting this in Germany. I don’t have any problem with that at all, but I don’t want it for spouses of citizens. If you marry someone from another country, they don’t need to take the test. But it’s a good idea, especially with these problematic immigrants. Some of these immigrants are a real problem. Robert Stark: What groups do you see as most problematic? Robert Lindsay: The Hispanic immigrants are a problem. Especially the ones from Mesoamerica. The ones from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras…And to some extent, those from the Dominican Republic. Robert Stark: Is it because they are coming here illegally? Or is it legal immigrants as well who are a problem? Robert Lindsay: I don’t think that all of the problem Hispanic immigrants are illegals. I would think that with Hispanics, the problem is IQ-related. If you said we are only taking Hispanics with an IQ of 98, which is the US average, therefore, all Hispanic immigrants, no matter how many you allow, are not going to cause an IQ decline in the country. I would imagine if you set it at 98 – your average Hispanic and their offspring who are causing problems – their IQ is below 98. The ones who are not causing problems, who are assimilating well, who act like you and me, their IQ’s are 98 and above. It’s a pretty good cutoff. It’s the dumber ones that are causing all the problems. Robert Stark: How would this plan deal with the numbers of immigrants coming into the US? Do you think there should be a cap per country? Because right now, we take in I think almost 2 million people a year legally. Robert Lindsay: Is it really 2 million? Robert Stark: I think it’s maybe 1.5 million, but anyway, it’s pretty high. Robert Lindsay: Sure, White advocates should advocate for a cap. 200,000, or 400,000…some kind of a reasonable cap. Robert Stark: Isn’t this what Pat Buchanan has been advocating? Robert Lindsay: I think that is a salable position. A lot of Americans might go along with that. And it really puts the pro-immigration, multicultural, PC crazies on the spot, because it forces them to say, “Terrible! They want to limit immigration to 400,000 a year! How awful! We need 2 million billion zillion a year instead!” Robert Stark: As opposed to advocating for zero immigration, they won’t be able to play the card saying you are racist. Robert Lindsay: Sure. You sound like some kind of a nativist nut if you say, “Yeah! We want zero immigration!” And it’s never going to happen anyway – zero immigration is not doable. Instead, you say, “Hey, we just want limits.” Then people have to stop and think, “Wow! 400,000? That’s a lot? How many do we actually let in every year, anyway? 2 million billion trillion zillion? Wow! Well, that’s way too many.” And it puts those idiots on the spot. They have to defend those insane high numbers as the only way to go, and they will have to say that those limiting immigration to say 400,000 a year are part of some evil racist plot, and that’s not going to work. Robert Stark: And focus on the overpopulation issue as well. That’s important to bring up. Robert Lindsay: Yes, I also wanted to say that in 1991, there was an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that dealt with something called “disparate impact.” And this, in contrast with the rest of the civil rights laws that need to stay, has got to go. Thing is, most people don’t even know what disparate impact is. No one’s heard of it, no one understands it. But for instance the Ricci case, the firefighters case in New Jersey, was a case of disparate impact. Disparate impact says that if you give tests to a bunch of applicants, and the Whites pass the test, but the Blacks flunk at a higher rate, then there must be something wrong with the test. And you have to go back and redo the test or dumb down the test. It says that every time you have a racially disparate impact in any outcome, it’s always due to racism or bias in the testing, and that’s not necessarily true. Maybe the Blacks just could not pass the test. Most people would be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact. And you would really put the PC idiots and the Black groups, etc. on the defensive because they would have to defend disparate impact and these crazy cases like the New Jersey firefighters, and most White people, and even a lot of Blacks, thought that case was an outrage. The goal is to push the PC-multicultural people into a corner and force them to defend things that sound really bad, and make us sound like the reasonable people. You see? Robert Stark: The next one is getting rid of US colonies. I don’t think we need to go into too much detail here. It’s pretty simple, but in a nutshell, the US colonies are places like Puerto Rico and American Samoa. And they are big sources of immigrants. And because they can’t really be screened like foreign immigrants, they can simply come in in large numbers. Robert Lindsay: Yes. They are unscreened immigrants, and they cause tons of problems. Our legal immigrants don’t really cause a lot of problems, to be honest, because we screen them really well. But the Puerto Ricans and the American Samoans can come here just like that. For them to come to the US is like you or me moving to Nevada. It’s like moving to another state. And it’s because they are unscreened that these groups cause so many problems. And there’s no reason to have colonies anyway! Robert Stark: It’s ridiculous. We should let them secede. It doesn’t make sense. Robert Lindsay: Why do we have colonies anyway? What are we, an imperialist country? Ok, we’re an imperialist country. Let’s have a conversation about this. Do Americans want to be an imperialist country? Let’s put these imperialists on the spot. Let’s force them to defend US colonialism! Robert Stark: I think that Puerto Rico is a product of the Spanish American War. And I think the same with Samoa. So in a sense it is imperialism. Robert Lindsay: I don’t know how we got Samoa. There’s also Micronesia, but Micronesia is not so much of a problem. But Micronesia is a colony too. We should not have any colonies. No country should have any colonies. And this is a Left position. Only the Left is totally principled on this position and says no nation should have any colonies. So by doing this, White advocates would be lining up with the hard Left, but that’s OK! Because the Hard Left takes a very principled anti-imperialist stand on this. Let’s force these elites to defend US imperialism! I want to see these guys on TV defending our imperialism and colonialism. You see, the Puerto Ricans and the Samoans and the rest don’t want to go – they don’t want independence. Robert Stark: They want it both ways. They don’t really view themselves as Americans, but they still want the benefits of being American at the same time. That’s the problem. Robert Lindsay: They like it the way it is. And if they become states, it is not going to be so good of a deal economically for them. But the way it is now, as colonies, it’s basically just a total scam for the colonies. But if they go on their own and become independent, they will probably just become ordinary 3rd World countries, and they will have a lot of problems as far as that goes. Why are we coddling these people? Robert Stark: Another issue that is very important is schools. You are talking about these White advocates who are so fixated on Brown vs. the Board of Education, that it’s basically a done deal, and they are wasting their time. Robert Lindsay: Brown vs. BOE is a done deal, right? Are they going to get rid of it? Even this crazy rightwing Supreme Court, are they actually going to get rid of Brown? It ain’t going to happen! Robert Stark: So your main focus is on busing and that kids should just have to go to their local schools. Robert Lindsay: Well, we shouldn’t say it’s evil or anything like that. “Oh! They’re busing Blacks into White schools! That’s terrible!” The main thing is that busing is just stupid. I mean, why are they doing it? Robert Stark: And it ruins good schools. Like the schools I went to in LA public schools – they used to be decent schools, but they got completely ruined. And both the middle school and high school I went to were in fairly wealthy parts of LA. But they’ve both basically turned into ghetto schools through the use of busing. Robert Lindsay: Well, sure, but I don’t want to say that because that sounds racist. Instead, I would just say that it’s a complete waste of money. And I would say that there is nothing wrong with a White school. They act like a White school is some sort of pathological thing. “Oh! Look at that school! It’s too White! Oh, we can’t have that! We need to make it half Black!” There is nothing wrong with a White school. It’s perfectly acceptable for a White school to be a White school and a Black school to be a Black school. Robert Stark: The multicultural and diversity types, they use diversity as a code word for non-White. For instance, true diversity would be a school where each ethnic group would be say 2 Robert Lindsay: It’s ridiculous! The diversity thing has become like a fetish. I’m an integrationist, but we don’t need diversity everywhere. If some town is naturally a White town just because a bunch of White people went and moved there and few non-White people decided to move there, well, that’s OK! We don’t have to go fix it up by say, importing 20,000 Black people. If some town is naturally Black, well, that’s OK! Maybe a bunch of Blacks wanted to move there, and maybe non-Blacks did not want to move there. There is nothing wrong with naturally segregated places, as long as it’s voluntary and we still have laws in place to ensure that anyone can go live anywhere they want to. And when you say that Blacks can’t learn in a Black school, and the only way that Black people can learn is if they’re around a bunch of White people, that’s very insulting to Black people. It really insults them. It says they’re inferior, and it’s a real burn on Black people. And I don’t know why Black people want to believe this insult about them. What’s wrong with a Black school? Robert Stark: You’re right, that’s what busing implies – that Blacks are inferior, and they need to be around White people in order to learn. And affirmative action implies the same thing. Most of your proposals are pretty reasonable, but saying we support affirmative action? California, which is a liberal state, actually voted to end affirmative action. I don’t see how saying we support affirmative action would appeal to most of the public if the majority of people are opposed to it. Robert Lindsay: Well, you could always say you support affirmative action but only if the non-Whites are just as qualified as the Whites. But the point is that that pretty much rules out most affirmative action right there! This was how affirmative action was supposed to be, but it’s never been that way. Robert Stark: But that still is reverse discrimination against Whites – if they are equally qualified, choosing the non-White. I think the best strategy would be to have economics based on economics or geography. It would benefit a lot of middle class Whites in middle America. If you look at the Ivy League universities, they are really dominated by the ultra-wealthy and then a few slots left over for affirmative action. And this is your last point – say we have no problems with well-behaved Blacks who wish to fully integrate into White communities. Robert Lindsay: Right, that’s a good idea, because almost all of these White advocate types are segregationists, and they push things like freedom of association. That’s what this Rand Paul is pushing. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get freedom of association back in where White communities can have housing covenants that say we don’t want any Black people, or we only want White people. Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen! Instead, we should say that if there are Black people out there who wish to move to our communities and are willing to assimilate to the values of our White communities and White culture – welcome to our city! Robert Stark: Then you say that this will force the PC crowd into the dubious role of defending Black culture. Robert Lindsay: Yes, because then they will say, “Oh! They only like White culture! Racists!” To that, we should respond, “We like White culture. We’re White, we like our culture. There’s good and bad about it, but we prefer our culture. And personally, we feel that a lot of Black people would be better off adopting White culture or assimilating to White culture than in getting into their own Black culture.” And then the PC crowd will scream, “They’re saying White culture is better than Black culture!” But your average person, especially your average White person, hears that and thinks, “Hm. You know what? White culture is better than Black culture!” Robert Stark: The one point that we left out is to support the immigration of White Hispanics into the US. So, how is that really practical? You’re saying our immigration policy would have to explicitly address race, and do you think that would be practical? Robert Lindsay: Well, White advocates are already saying that they only want White immigration coming into this country. Robert Stark: What are the White advocates’ position on White Hispanics? Robert Lindsay: They never discuss it. The only thing they say is that we will only accept immigration from Europe. And that’s never going to happen. We may as well branch out and say, “Well, we’d like the White Hispanics to come here.” Because then it would be a lot harder for the PC Left to accuse the White advocates of racism. “They hate Hispanics! They hate Hispanics!” And people would look at that and say, “Are you sure they’re racists? They don’t seem to mind the White Hispanics.” And then the PC Left will retort, “Sure! They like the White Hispanics, but they don’t like the non-White Hispanics!” Robert Stark: They would still be able to play the race card, but it would cause division among Hispanics. It’s interesting, because on our last show, we were covering the Rick Sanchez incident. Rick Sanchez is basically White, but because his family is from Latin America, he takes this view that he’s somehow a minority, and it’s sort of our own fault, because in Latin America, the Whites down there in many cases are fairly racist against the non-Whites down there. But we classify everyone from the region as effectively non-White, i.e., Hispanic. It’s ridiculous. Robert Lindsay: The White advocates in the US are almost all Nordicists. They don’t like the White Hispanics very much. They tend to label them as non-Whites. And the only Whites who they think are really White are from Northern Europe. Robert Stark: Well, the first immigration act in the 1920’s was a Nordicist thing because it favored northwestern Europeans. Robert Lindsay: It was, true. White racism in the US has always been Nordicist, but your average White person in this country is no longer a Nordicist. Robert Stark: I think this Nordicism thing has pretty much died out… Robert Lindsay: No, no, no… Robert Stark: Because if you look at these pro-White forums, there are Italians, Greeks, or Eastern European descent, but you are personally into that Pan-Aryanism philosophy. Robert Lindsay: It’s a good thing, Pan-Aryanism, because once you get into Pan-Aryanism, it gets harder and harder to call White advocates racists. Because the PC Left says, “Oh! They’re racist!” Sneer sneer. Then people say, “Hey, wait a minute. They like Moroccans, right?” Then the Left says, “Well, yeah, but they’re still racists!” Then people say, “Wait a minute. They like Syrians. They like Iraqis and Lebanese…” The Left says, “Doesn’t matter! They’re racists!” Sneer. Then people say, “Hey wait. But they like Turks. They like Armenians, Chechens, Iranians…” Robert Stark: David Duke is into that Pan-Aryanism stuff, because he visited Syria and Iran, and he pointed out that he saw people who were so called Aryans when he was there. Robert Lindsay: Well, we shouldn’t be saying that. We should instead be saying something like, “All Iranians are White.” We shouldn’t say, “Well, there’s a few of them who are real Aryans, but most aren’t.” Grumble grumble. Robert Stark: All of them? Do you consider Ahmadinejad White? Robert Lindsay: Yes! Absolutely. If you look at Iranians on a gene map, they’re right next to Norwegians, Danes and English. They’re White people! And if you look at them, they look White. The people I talk to are California racial liberals, but they almost all say, “Iranians? They’re White! They look like White people.” And if you talk to Iranians, they all claim White too. So this whole idea that Iranians are non-Whites is just kind of a fringe concept. It ain’t gonna fly. Robert Stark: People assume that all Middle Easterners look alike, but there are some big distinctions. Someone from Saudi Arabia is completely distinct from someone from Lebanon. Robert Lindsay: Well, yes, but I think Saudis are mostly White. Yet some of them, like Prince Bandar, he’s a pretty Black looking guy. Some of those Gulf types, they have so much Black in them that you can’t really call them White anymore. One thing I wanted to go back and talk about on my list here. We need to get serious about throwing seriously disruptive students out of school. Everybody wants to know, “What do we do about the schools?” For the whole White advocate crowd, and many ordinary Whites, the overarching racial question often is, “What about the schools?” The White advocates look at the mess in mixed schools and scream, “Re-segregate the schools! Black schools for Blacks! White schools for Whites! Get rid of Brown versus BOE!” Well, you know what? That ain’t gonna fly. Robert Stark: I agree. The way you deal with these kinds of racial issues is you go around the race aspect by just dealing with people based on their behavior. And the anti-racist types, they’re still going to call you racist because they make excuses for bad behavior. But screw them. All we need to do is to say that students who are continuously disruptive should be send them to separate schools. And if they get their behavior under control, then they can go back to the regular schools. But it’s unfair for students who want to learn to have to put up with that crap. Robert Lindsay: They’re destroying the schools. I hate to say it, but it’s especially true with the Blacks. There seems to be a tipping point of around 1 But once again, the PC crowd will be backed into a corner, and they will be forced to defend these students who act absolutely horrible, and just flat out destroy schools. They destroy Black schools, they destroy mixed schools, they destroy all kinds of schools. And in response to their charges of racism, we will say, “Well, it’s not just for Blacks. We will throw the bad Whites out. We’ll throw anybody out.” Robert Stark: Yes, anyone. You can’t call it racist, because it’s a colorblind solution. Robert Lindsay: And once again, we will force these PC characters to defend the worst acting, most horrible students in the whole country, total brats, that are destroying schools for everybody else. And that’s a terrible thing to defend. I want to see them defend that behavior. See, that’s a reasonable thing that’s actually doable. Getting rid of Brown versus BOE, getting rid of integration – those are not reasonable goals. Robert Stark: Yes, these people, they’re just living in a fantasy. Like on immigration, they want to shut it all down, but in reality, we will be very lucky if we can even stop amnesty. Robert Lindsay: Agreed. We probably can’t even stop amnesty. We can’t even throw these illegals out of here. Robert Stark: Yes, we can’t even throw out the illegals. Robert Lindsay: First things first. Robert Stark: Practical solutions that are doable… Robert Lindsay: I don’t think we can deal with legal immigration at all right now. First things first. First of all, we need to deal with illegal immigration, and we can’t even deal with that! These PC crazies want to legalize all the illegals, for Chrissake. Let’s deal with that first. Politics is the art of the possible. And these people, these White advocates, especially these White nationalists, they are advocating positions that are totally unreasonable. They are completely non-doable, fringe, ultra-radical positions. I doubt if these folks have the support of 5-1 Robert Stark: Well, if you look at the new A3P Party, most of their platform is pretty reasonable stuff that sounds similar to the stuff that you’re advocating here. Robert Lindsay: It’s a good idea! It’s a good idea to come across like a moderate. One of the goals of politics is to come across as reasonable and to force your opponent to take crazy positions and defend those crazy positions. Fine. Put crazy words in their mouth, and then make them defend them. Robert Stark: These issues all tie together, but originally I intended to discuss California, and we still have a decent amount of time. To start off, we are both from California, and we are both originally from the LA area, and both of us have moved up to Central California. And Robert, can you tell us, what are the changes that you have seen throughout your life and that have happened to our state and what are some of the biggest and most negative changes that you have seen? Robert Lindsay: Well, I’m not going to call for a return to White California. That’s an era that is done and gone. And I did not mind growing up in a multicultural California. When I was growing up in the 1970’s, California was about 70-8 I don’t have to live with all White people. We can have some non-Whites around. We grew up with the Mexicans. The Mexicans are a part of this state. They’ve been here from the very start. This state used to be a part of Mexico. The Mexicans – they’re part of the neighborhood! Robert Stark: But the problem is the sheer numbers. Because the PC, Open Borders types try to say, “Oh, you hate Mexicans. You’re scared of Mexicans.” But most White Californians are pretty used to being around Mexicans. They’re part of the landscape. It’s not really an issue that they are here. Instead, it’s an issue of numbers. Robert Lindsay: Yes, right. The Mexicans in this state assimilated really well back in the 1970’s. And now, there are a zillion of them, they’re not assimilating, and they’re causing tons of problems. And they were not causing tons of problems back in the 1970’s. Robert Stark: You wrote that Mexican-Americans are assimilating into low class White culture. Robert Lindsay: The assimilated Hispanics, the ones that are second and especially third generation, a lot of them are assimilating to a sort of a White trash culture. Like the lowest of the Whites, the worst of our people. Robert Stark: I saw that a lot at the Wallmarts in Fresno. Not so much in LA. Robert Lindsay: Yes, it’s not a good thing that a lot of them are assimilating to. One thing that I have noticed is that the Hispanics who have a deeper connection to Mexico – first generation immigrants and some of their children – now I don’t really like the illegals all that much, but we have a lot of them around here. But actually the ones that have a really deep and intense connection to Mexico, who are still into the Mexican culture, a lot of them tend to act pretty good. They have a tight-nit family structure. Robert Stark: Yes, I noticed that when I was in a public high school in LA, the recent immigrants minded their own business, but there were others who emulated the whole gangta rap culture. They wore baggy jeans and listened to rap. Robert Lindsay: Those are not the recent immigrants! Robert Stark: Yes, the gangbanger types are children of illegals or in some cases, even grandchildren of illegals. Robert Lindsay: Yes, they are the children of the illegals. And now we are getting into multigenerational gangbangers. But around here, the ones that are still deeply connected to Mexico, they generally act pretty good. They act like Mexicans, people from Mexico itself. They act like peasants. If you go down to Mexico – I used to go down there 25-40 years ago – your average Mexican generally acts pretty good. They are conservative, traditional people, they have a very tight-knit family structure, and they keep a close watch on the girls. And for instance, the traditional Mexican girls, they don’t try to sleep with every guy in town. It’s dishonorable to be a slut or to be a prostitute and sell your body. But I see these Mexican Americans who are assimilated, 3rd generation, and they start selling their bodies on the street and shooting heroin and just sleazing out to the max. And the ones around here that are deeply connected to Mexico, a good, proper Mexican girl, she won’t do that! To them, the worst thing on Earth is to be a whore. And, you know what? I’ve got to respect that. There is something valuable about that. The family is often very protective of the girls. They have good, strong role models. The male has a strong role model. The female has a strong role model. The Mexican women are very feminine, they’re very nice to men, they’re very friendly. I don’t really have anything against the peasant culture of Old Mexico. There’s a lot to be said for peasant cultures. In many ways, they are good, traditional. Robert Stark: You also said that you have seen the cultural decline of the White middle class. You wrote an article about that. Can you explain some of the things you have observed about the White middle class over time? They also seem to be assimilating into lower class culture and they seem to be getting less intellectual. Robert Lindsay: Part of what is going on is the wiggerization of White people. Things are just getting a lot trashier. Back in 1970’s, White culture, if you had tattoos, you were considered to be a sleaze. Especially a woman, if a woman had tattoos…we knew women who had tattoos, and people hated them and treated them like they were whores. The only people who had tattoos were people like bikers or maybe Marines. For a White middle class person, that would be considered a totally sleazy thing to do, to get a tattoo on your body. White people were supposed to be like these White bread, upper middle class, well-mannered types. Now, just about every White woman you see is decorated like a cannibal! They have all these piercings all over their bodies. I don’t want to put them down too much, but it seems sleazy to people from my generation. It seems as if there has been a trashification of our people. Robert Stark: That sort of thing used to be seen only in lower class Whites, but now it’s seen in middle class people too. It’s due to the TV. People don’t value intellect so much anymore. Robert Lindsay: Maybe, but White culture has always been anti-intellectual. You can go read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life where all the way back in the 1950’s, he was talking about this sort of thing. I think that what’s going on is that White middle class people, especially young people, have decided it’s cool to look and act like a low class person. Robert Stark: We have been talking a lot about race and demographics, but I would like to talk about the issue of the environment in this state and the over development and urban sprawl that the state has been seeing, and how both liberals and conservatives deal with this issue. It’s fascinating because liberals are promoting all this immigration, and business interests go along with them, but the conservatives – they’re apologists for this urban sprawl and this horrible overdevelopment. Tom McClintock, who is this anti-immigration politician in the state…I knew this woman who was running for state assembly, and she was complaining about all of these tract homes going up in Ventura County, and his attitude was that they could do whatever they wanted to with their land. But I see that mentality as the same mentality as the people who are for Open Borders or defend job outsourcing. It’s really just as bad. Robert Lindsay: Well, you see, he’s just a typical Republican. I don’t get the Republicans or the capitalists’ point of view. For instance, on housing, their POV is that…we have to keep on building houses? What? Forever? How long are we going to be building these units called “housing starts?” That can’t go on forever. We have to keep building new houses, new houses. And in order to keep building new homes, you need an increasing population. This is the whole growth-based economic mentality. And I don’t think it’s sustainable – endless growth forever. You can’t. Robert Stark: So the immigration issue, it’s basically the same mentality. If you look at the places where the elites live like Marin Country or Malibu or Carmel, they’ve done a great job of conservation and low, sustainable growth with lots of open space there. They want to keep their own places beautiful. But if you look at the big money interests, they profit off an increasing population because that means more consumers. Some of these people are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but it doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s just all about growth is good for making a profit. Robert Lindsay: Endless growth. But isn’t that kind of crazy? Isn’t there ever going to get to be a point where people have enough money, and we don’t need to keep on growing forever? Apparently, you can’t have this endless growth without having endlessly increasing population. And more and more houses. And more and more cities. And more and more roads. And more and more everything. Robert Stark: These neoliberal types, they say we need to keep bringing in more and more immigration as a way to grow our economy. It’s insane because it’s not sustainable, and you can’t have an economy that is based on that model. Robert Lindsay: What’s going to happen? At some point, the whole world is going to look like New York City. What are we going to do? Are we going to start building cities on top of cities? Are we going to start building cities underground, or on top of the ocean, or under the ocean, or up in the sky? And this endless growth thing, it can’t possibly be an environmental position. If you’re an environmentalist, you can’t take this endless growth position. Why do we always need new houses in the US? I don’t understand why. Obviously because our population is growing, right? Are we going to start building second homes? Why does everyone need a second home? Do people need third houses? Do they need fourth houses? Robert Stark: Or the size of the homes. They want these gigantic homes on one acre lots, and it’s wasteful of space. It’s not at all resourceful. And these same types – they claim to be fiscal conservatives and fiscally responsible. But this endless growth is not fiscally responsible because it’s very wasteful of natural resources. Robert Lindsay: Those huge lots are not so great. It would almost be better to pack people into cities and then have big open spaces. But people like those big lots. I was living on a one acre lot up in the Sierra foothills. It’s not bad, there are still a lot of wild animals out there with 1-5 acre lots in the country, with those rural ranchettes. Robert Stark: It’s fine if people have big lots up in rural areas or in nature, but the main problem is suburbia, which is a disaster. Robert Lindsay: There are no living things anymore in suburbia. The only animals are the humans and their pets. There are a few animals that are adapting to suburbia – the raccoons, the skunks and the opossums. In some of the suburbs now, you have some coyotes. Robert Stark: Thank you for being on, Robert. Robert Lindsay: Sure.

The Fake Social Security Crisis

Sharon Angle, the Team Crazy Tea Partier from Nevada, like most Tea Partiers, wants to get rid of Social Security. They are pushing some insane nonsense about its insolvency. Republicans never care about whether anything is insolvent or not. After all, they’ve been deliberately trying to drive government bankrupt for 30 years as part of an evil plan. They just use the “insolvency” thing as a ploy to cut or get rid of Social Security. When FDR put Social Security in in 1935, he was reviled by Republicans as a Communist for doing so. He made it to their #1 Pantheon of Evil for doing that. It follows that many of them, especially the latest batshit nuts incarnation, have hated it ever since. And it shows. Because they’ve been trying to get rid of it. We have a lot of supporters of US corporate capitalism on this site. Some of them call themselves liberals and even socialists. The Republican Party is the party of the corporations. They push the corporate agenda and only the corporate agenda. If Republicans are pushing to cut or junk Social Security, that is because that is what their corporate masters want. So Corporate America obviously wants to cut or get rid of Social Security. When you support US corporate capitalism, you support zeroing out Social Security. Got it?

Of The 13 Wealthiest Countries, 12 Are Socialist (Social Welfare States)

Uncle Milton is an upper middle class bourgeois White worker who has a strong anti-worker, pro-boss and pro-corporate attitude and champions radical neoliberal economics. And I don’t even think he works in management. Go figure. But he’s a pretty typical upper middle class White collar office worker in the US. In this comment, he goes on and on try to say that our list of 13 wealthiest countries, of which 12 are strong social democracies, are not really socialist systems. He rules out a number of them as being “dependent on international finance” which means somehow that they are not social democracies (?). He also rules out Ireland, Sweden and Norway for some bizarre reason. He rules out Qatar and and UAE since they are not democracies and since they abuse their guest workers. According to him, that leaves only 3 “real” social democracies on the list. First of all, I use social democracy as a code for socialism, which in this case, is simply code for an extensive welfare state, an activist government with high social spending that cares for its citizens and tries to provide a very good life for them. It means you have an extensive safety nets, social welfare programs, high levels of state social spending, etc. From what I can tell, UAE and Qatar treat their citizens very well in terms of social welfare programs, a safety net, state social spending, etc. It must be very nice to be an actual citizen of Qatar or UAE. Sure, they treat their immigrant labor like shit, but those aren’t citizens. The US doesn’t even treat its own citizens right! The Gulf states beat us by a mile in that regard. Every single country on that list is a good socialist state in terms of treating its citizens very, very well. They have extensive safety nets, strong social welfare programs and high levels of state social spending. All except the US. The US shits right on top of its very own citizens, and its citizens love it that way. The US government spits in the face of its own people, and the American people, supplicant submissive masochistic sluts that they are, love it and grovel for me. And Uncle Milton cheers this on. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Rightwing Myth: The US is Wealthy Because It Is So Rightwing

It is true that the US is extremely rightwing in economic matters, but its philosophy in this area does not differ much from most Third World Countries, most of whom actually follow some pretty rightwing economic policies. In many parts of the Third World, governments do little or nothing to help their people, governments are essentially the limited governments that Libertarians and US rightwingers love so much, public spending is limited to minimal outside of security forces, and the state is for all intents and purposes a dictatorship of the rich, whatever the formal democratic nature of the state is. Rule by the rich is enforced by police, army, other security forces, or death squads and other hired thugs. This is such an essential feature of rightwing rule worldwide that one wonders when the US will adopt such thuggish suppression of the Left. Some countries are simply so poor that they just don’t have the money to help their people whether they want to or not. These countries are often burdened by oppressive amounts of outside debt. A rightwing commenter from Russia recently suggested that the fact that this country was so conservative was the reason it was so rich. He was making the standard conservative = prosperity, socialism = poverty equations that the Right loves to toss around. Let’s see if there’s anything to it. Theories must be tested.


		Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Conservatism, Economics, Government, Left, Libertarianism, Political Science, Revolution, Socialism9 Comments on Rightwing Myth: The US is Wealthy Because It Is So Rightwing			

Myth: FDR Didn't Have a Clue About His Economic Plan

In the comments, Randy voices what appears to be a myth about FDR’s economic policy:

I don’t recall where I heard about it, but FDR was pretty much making shit up as he went along. He’d wake up in the morning and basically throw darts at a dartboard to determine his economic policy. I think this is something that I heard on NPR – This American Life, pretty much hardcore left wing people.

Honestly, I don’t know a lot about the subject. I haven’t read any books on FDR or the Depression. Please understand that this was a crisis situation, and they had to get out of it. The Republicans, just like today, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to offer. Hoover had sat on his fat ass for 3 whole years of the Depression saying over and over that we could not interfere in the sacred “Business Cycle.” My father lived through that era as a child, and he practically spit out those words “business cycle,” all the while waving his hands abracadabra like a magician when he told me about Hoover’s ideology. Indeed, Republicans of the day had turned “the business cycle” into a religious totem in the same way neoliberal idiots worship a fetish priest called “the invisible hand.” It’s all crap. There is no magic in capitalism. Sure, it’s an engine, a powerful one at that, but unregulated it’s often more akin to a runaway freight train than anything else. No one quite knows what the unregulated market is going to do. We do know it’s going to blow up from time to time, and maybe take the economy of the whole world down with it. Unbelievably, instead of seeing this as an obvious bug in desperate need of patching, this bug-virus aspect of capitalism is elevated to the status of a feature! It’s as if Microsoft Word would totally blow up from time to time, destroying all your data, ruining the program itself and requiring a total reinstall. Instead of people screaming about this horrible bug, users would rave about the great auto-destruct feature, a glorious aspect of the great Microsoft World Cycle, a creation in destruction that beat all of the more stable word processors hands down. And everyone would rush out to buy the crazy program that sooner or later would Hiroshima all your data. That’s what worship of the business cycle amounts to. No one even knows if it’s a cycle. Maybe the world economy gets progressively more and more fucked as these crashes happen. Nor does anyone know when the system will blow up. If capitalists could make a killing blowing up the system like they blew up the US financial markets, they’d probably be doing it all the time. So there is no cycle, there is no magic hand. There’s just chaos, like a wild virus on the loose in the ecosystem that no one understands and no one knows what it will do next. When we regulate capitalism, we take out some of the economic hurricanes and killer heat waves and thereby make the system more stable and easy to work with. But capitalists live for the killings and the crazy weather. The crazy weather that takes the gambling house down on top of the flush players grubbing through their winnings. Republicans are the same now as they were then – insane. Keynesianism was a new thing then, but most sane governments around the world relied on massive government stimulus deficit spending and public works projects to get out of the Depression. The greater the stimulus, the deficit spending and the public works projects, the quicker they came out of it. The Nazis came out of the Depression before anyone else with this same tried and true formula. A lot of the projects FDR came up with were radical, even revolutionary, and no one knew if it was going to work or not. In a sense Randy’s anecdote is correct; FDR was throwing stuff up against the economic wall to see what would stick. But at least it was an activist economic regime, in contrast to the loser Republicans with their failed ideology, dead in the water then the same as today. Republicans are just insane people. They must know that state stimulus deficit spending and public works projects are the way out of a deep depression, but they have always denied it and instead pushed for insane shit that only deepened and prolonged the Depressions. I don’t understand Republicans. They’re either liars or ideologues or insane, or maybe all three.

Do US Conservatives Resemble Nazis?

The short answer is no, they do it. This is tough to swallow, because we on the Left love to call the US Right Nazis, but we really need to stop doing this. I’m tearing Johnny B. Goode apart in the comments, but let’s give some credit where it’s due. Certainly Johnny is correct when he says that the extreme statism of the Nazi regime is anathema to US conservatives, who, for better or for worse, buy into the the “limited government” thing in terms of democracy vs dictatorship. As proponents of limited government, US conservatives in general are not very authoritarian, though Bush was getting a little close. Nevertheless, the case is harder to make on repression grounds, though there the Nazis have US conservatives beat. US conservatives like to ban books from school libraries, but they don’t set them on fire. They don’t run concentration camps or execute dissidents. They don’t even imprison them, though the FBI gets pretty weird towards strong dissidents at times. The no-fly lists, the Patriot Act, widespread wiretapping, “free speech zones” far away from candidate appearances, detention of suspects without trial or even charges, trial of suspects in kangaroo courts, etc. are all examples of how US conservatives love repression and hate freedom when it comes to the law and order and national security stuff. Nevertheless, they’re still a long ways away from Nazis. The Nazis’ extreme intervention in the capitalist economy of Germany surely would be anathema to US small government conservatives, as would the euthanasia, animal rights, anti-smoking, abortion rights, generous pension, full employment, guaranteed employment, Keynesian deficit spending, public works, public education spending, national health care, secular separation of church and state and gun control projects. So in economic and social terms, US conservatives in many ways resemble more the extreme opposites of Nazis. It’s almost as if on economics and social stuff, no one could be further from a Nazi. As such, it’s wrong of those of us on the Left to call US small government conservatives Nazis. Sure, US conservatives suck, but Nazis they ain’t. They’re another critter altogether.

Is "Limited Government with Checks and Balances" a Conservative Concept?

The US rightwinger is still in the comments section, exemplifying once again the sheer insanity of US conservatism. But is conservatism elsewhere any better? I doubt it. Latin American conservatives seem pretty insane. So are the Indian and Filipino rightwingers. But the only place on Earth you hear this Nazis are Leftists stuff is in the US:

If you feel that the Nazis did not exemplify socialism as you understand it, they sure didn’t exemplify the right wing concept of a restricted government with limited powers and checks and balances either.

Listen. A restricted government with limited powers and checks and balances is not a rightwing concept. If anything, it’s progressive. As far as limited government goes, the founding fathers were opposed to tyranny. Hence the limitations on the state and system of checks and balances. They had nothing to say about economics or socialism or any of that. They were more worried about monarchy, a sort of dictatorship of the king. The Constitution was set up so that monarchists and other dictator types could not reinstate themselves. The Republican version of “limited government” means no socialism. No taxes, no government spending, no state intervention to better our lives, no state intervention in the economy. The founding fathers had nothing to say about this type of libertarian anti-socialist philosophy. There was no socialism back in those days, and no government anywhere tried to help its people. What the conservative scum do here in the US is twist the founding fathers’ fears about monarchist tyranny into their hatred of socialist economics, progressive taxation, redistribution of income, limitations on and regulation of business, etc. They’re basically putting words in the Founding Fathers’ mouths. According the Right, when the government raises your taxes or puts in a national health care system, this is a violation of the “limited government with checks and balances” that the Founders envisioned. Ridiculous! Do these punks actually believe this BS or are do they know they’re lying and they just figure it’s a good lie? Once again, on a worldwide scale, conservatism is not about limited government or checks and balances. In the few cases where it is, it is because the Right is in the opposition, and they are trying to thwart a Left regime, as in Venezuela. Truth is that on a worldwide scale, the Right hates democracy. There has rarely been a case when a ruling class will not resort to a military coup to overthrow a Left government that they don’t like. Conservatism on a worldwide scale is an undemocratic system of elite rule kept in place by the military and by police and security forces’ repression if necessary. They often run death squads against the Left to keep their power. The opposition press is bombed and opposition journalists are jailed or murdered. The system is also typified by extreme rightwing control of the media – typically ~9 “Limited government with checks and balances” is not a conservative concept. Maybe in some twisted version of US conservatism, but not in general. At any rate, the only reason that US conservatives subscribe to extreme checks and balances is when a liberal regime is in place. Then they hope to so overuse the checks and balances system to gum up the works and make it so government can barely function. When a rightwing regime is in, as in George Bush’s regime, the government runs roughshod over the checks and balances system, and the Right never says one peep, because checks and balances are only for liberal governments. So US conservatives don’t even really believe in checks and balances really. Worldwide, conservatism is typified by:

  1. Extreme lack of democracy
  2. Dictatorship
  3. Military control of the state
  4. Coups against Left regimes
  5. Near-total control of an extremely propagandistic and lying media
  6. Repression against the Left by security forces and the judicial branch
  7. Death squads
  8. No separation of powers – the three branches are linked.
  9. Frequent dissolving of the legislative branch by the executive branch.
  10. Massively corrupt judicial branch in the hands of the elite.

Good Things About Nazis

Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no good, eh? I suppose National Socialism was ok if you were a Aryan German who was not a criminal, homeless, or mentally or physically handicapped, or a dissident. All those folks went to concentration camps, or prison, or slave labor, or got bullets in the head. There was a positive aspect, to wit:

  1. Full employment
  2. Heavy spending on public education
  3. National health care
  4. More or less guaranteed employment for non-troublesome workers
  5. Secular, separation of church and state
  6. Anti-smoking public health initiative
  7. Pro-choice, free abortion available on demand
  8. Euthanasia
  9. Gun control
  10. Generous old age pensions

All of these fall into the realm of what we consider to be social democracy or modern social liberalism. Nazism was definitely a very strange movement. It’s almost unclassifiable. In terms of whether they were capitalist or socialist, they may well have been something else altogether, something in between. Socialists generally favor the workers at the expense of the capitalists and the rich. They are usually hated by big business because they side with labor and restrict the profits of capital. Nazis didn’t side with workers against capital. Capitalists generally favor the capitalists against the workers, consumers, society, the environment, the nation, everything is sacrificed to the God of Capital. Workers, consumers, society and the environment are openly attacked by the capitalist state. This doesn’t describe the Nazis either. They seemed to be trying for some sort of a balance between the interests of capital and the interests of the workers. Surely, society, the environment, the nation and the state were elevated above both workers and capital. Nazi fascism was all about the state. Everything was for the state. Workers worked for the interests of the state. Capitalists ran their enterprises for the betterment of the state. Capitalists who defied government directives could go to concentration camps or prison or be executed. Workers who defied their bosses or went on strike (harming the state) faced the same fate. It’s probably best to see Nazi economics as some weird Third Way that isn’t really capitalism or socialism. They also mixed in some social democratic policies along with some liberal or even progressive social initiatives. All of these good things of course were negated by the bad, which crushed and overwhelmed anything good they did with a tidal wave of evil.

Another Rightwing Lie: FDR Didn't Get US out of the Depression, WW2 Did

FDR did stop the Depression. It began in 1929 and was mostly fixed by 1934. The economy became stronger in 1935 and 1936, and only experienced a mini-depression in 1937 because FDR listened to the Republicans. He stopped listening to them in 1938, and the economy got back on track. Pearl Harbor didn’t happen until Dec 1941. The US Depression was well over by that time. FDR got out of the Depression the same way most every sane government always does – through Keynesian economics – massive deficit spending and even public works projects. While we are on the subject of Nazi economics, I will say that some of the aspects of Nazi economics were admirable. The Nazis inherited a horrible Depression, like FDR did. They got out of it the same reasonable way he did – massive Keynesian deficit spending and public works projects. Unemployment was staggering when the Nazis took over. Within a few years, Germany had full employment. This is all good, but many other things they did were bad. Anyway, Nazi economics is irrelevant to Nazism. Their claim to fame rests on their:

  1. Racism
  2. Eugenics program
  3. Censorship
  4. Concentration camps
  5. Repression of dissidents
  6. Racial mass murder
  7. Killings of the physically and mentally unfit
  8. Extreme militarism
  9. Attacks on the surrounding states in order to conquer them to turn them into vassals of imperialist Nazi Germany, where they also committed racial mass murder and repression.

Nazis economics is not important. It’s not relevant whether they were capitalist or socialist or whatever or this or that. That they were capitalist or socialist or some weird thing in between has nothing to do with 1-9 above. They weren’t killing and repressing people in the name of some poltico-economic project. Nazis barely cared about economics. All they cared about was militarism, ultranationalism and racism. It’s true though that the Nazi economic project in the 1930’s was very successful. In some ways, it did resemble a standard liberal Keynesian project, and it was similar to the New Deal in a lot of ways. Germany climbed out of the Depression faster than any other nation due to this Left economic project. Good for them. In 1936, the rightwing media and the Republican Party had been on a jihad for four whole years nonstop against FDR the socialist/Communist bringing Communism to America. FDR was probably one of the most hated men in America among the wealthy US elite. By 1936, they had bombarded the American people with enough lies and crap about “excessive government spending” and an “out of control budget deficit” that the propaganda was starting to work. There was no excessive government spending. What there was was necessary to get us of out of the Depression, and it worked like it usually does. There was no problem with a budget deficit. Compared to nowadays, things were fine on that front. But the American people, suckers then like they are today, fell for the bait. They were aroused into a frenzy over the need for deficit reduction. FDR and the Democrats warned them that deficit reduction in a hazy economy would be a bad idea and would hurt the economy. They were right. FDR fell for it and enacted deficit reduction and heavy cuts in government spending. Predictably, that resulted in a mini-recession in 1937 as GDP declined by 3. Republicans didn’t make sense then, and they don’t make sense now. I don’t think they’ve ever made sense. Deficit spending and public works projects work. There’s no better way to get out of a Depression or bring down high unemployment. There’s no better job creation engine on Earth than deficit spending and public works projects. Works like a dream. I suppose Republicans ideologically do not want to believe this, because ideologically they are opposed to deficit spending to stimulate growth and public works projects. So to be consistent ideologically, they have to lie and say that stimulus-led growth and public works projects don’t work and all they do is ruin the economy and lead to Depressions and high unemployment, when in fact the truth is the opposite. Do Republicans ever tell the truth about anything? Ever?

More "Nazism is a Left Movement" Insanity

A rightwinger writes the following in the comments, arguing that Nazism, bizarrely enough, is a movement of the Left.

I have to disagree with you comment that the right wing and conservative movement being about smaller government is “just rhetoric.” If you look at the U.S. constitution, you can see that it is very much about enumerating, specifying and limiting the powers of the federal government while reserving power to the much smaller governments of the states and to the people. The separation of powers in government to executive, legislative, and judicial branches that keep each other in check was specifically designed to prevent the kind of runaway government that exemplified Nazi Germany or the British Crown in the 1700’s. I fully agree with you that the U.S. government has not lived up to that ideal in many ways, but this government has hardly been in the hands of right-wingers or conservatives for the past half century. Also, some bloggers claim that the fact that Nazis fought against other left wingers proves that they were not socialists. This argument has no more validity than saying that different denominations of Christianity fighting each other proves that any one of them wasn’t Christian. Within any belief system, you may well find factions fighting over who will be top dog. The unbridled centralized power of the Nazi government to control the economy and corporations, while trampling on the rights of individuals and exterminating millions of people based upon race and religion is just an especially warped form of socialism. I maintain that one of the biggest lies of the twentieth century has been that Nazis were right wing. That kind of centralized government power is completely inconsistent with right wing ideology which strives to put strict limits on government. George Washington said it well: “Government is like fire – a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

There is a field called political science. They don’t agree with you. Nazism is considered by political scientists to be a movement of the far right, for what it’s worth. There is a recent movement by some lunatics, mostly in the US, to repackage Nazism as a movement of the Left. This movement is led by extreme rightwing loons like libertarians, extreme Chicago School neoliberals and the Austrians who follow Mises. Because the rightwing in the US is insane, it’s filtered down to the Republican Party as a whole. You would be hard-pressed to find a single respected political scientist anywhere on Earth who thinks Nazism is a Left movement. It’s not. It’s not a Left movement. Not at all. The founding fathers were actually liberals, progressives, and in some ways libertarians. A movement for limiting the extreme powers of government at that time was a very liberal movement. Back then, conservatives were all big government types. The rightwing in the US at the time, the Federalists under Hamilton, were big government types. They were monarchists, elitists who were anti-democratic. The rightwing has been opposed to democracy all over the world and at all times. Conservatism is a movement of elites, typically wealthy elites. Democracy is bad for business. Your notion that the Right is about small government is ridiculous. Here in the US it tends to be, but they don’t even do very good on that score. Government is usually much more repressive under a US rightwing regime than under a left one. George Bush’s regime was one of the most dictatorial we have ever seen in the US. It was a radical rightwing regime. Around the world, rightwing regimes have almost always been big government projects, at least in terms of the national security state. They are typically quite repressive too. The “small government” conservatism is pretty much a uniquely American phenomenon. Other than Thatcher’s Britain, show me one more rightwing government since WW2 that believed in or practiced “small government.” This is a fetish of US conservatism not shared by the Right of the rest of the world. I have a hard time understanding why this “Nazism is a Left Movement” has got going. This is a recent thing. When the Nazis were in power, they were generally loved by the Right all over the world because they were some of the most badass anti-Communists that ever lived. After the war, former Nazis sought refuge in hard rightwing regimes in South America and joined with CIA groups and the rightwing governments of Taiwan and South Korea in fighting the Left all over the whole world. Post World War 2, many hard right dictators have lauded the Nazis as their heroes. No one on the Left has. I suppose it is because we say that Nazism was a far rightwing movement. Well it was, and it is. Big deal. So the right is defensive about this because they don’t want to be associated with Nazis. It’s ridiculous. It’s as if every liberal had to renounce the Khmer Rouge and deny that they were a Left movement for fear of being tainted with them. There have been plenty of nasty folks on the Left. The Khmer Rouge were mass murderers. Mao, Stalin, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, Hoxha, Mengitsu – they all killed lots of people when they were in power. But the Nazis were not among the mass murderers of the Left. Those were the mass murderers of the Right. As if it matters though, really.

Quote From Sarah Palin, Republiscum Hero

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic?” –Sarah Palin, admitting that her family used to get treatment in Canada’s single-payer health care system, despite having demonized such government-run programs as socialized medicine that will lead to death-panel-like rationing, March 6, 2010.

What an evil bitch. The health care in her own state was so crappy, and Canada’s health care was so much better, that she used to haul her own family over to Canada to get treatment in their socialist health care system. Then she demonizes and goes on jihad against Obama’s health care system on the basis that it is Communism, when it doesn’t even come near the socialism of Canada’s. The reason that Sarah “Whore” Palin opposed the Obama plan? Mostly party line. What an evil hypocrite bitch. Symbolizes her party perfectly.

Danish Psychologist: “Integration of Muslims in Western Societies Is Not Possible”

I am going to reprint this article in toto below. I agree with every single thing that this man says. Further, I agree with his conclusions. All immigration of Muslims to Europe must stop. We should help repatriate Muslims those Muslims who wish to return to their Islamic societies. We should only allow in Muslims who have essentially left their religion and are no longer Muslims. We don’t have a similar problem yet with Muslims in the US and Canada as they do on the Continent, so I see no need yet to cut off Muslim immigration to the US or Canada. Which European countries should halt all Muslim immigration? Those which are having serious problems with Muslims and crime and terrorism: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, the UK and Germany. I’m not aware of any other European countries that are having serious problems with Muslim immigrants and crime/terrorism and antisocial behaviors. If you can think of any other countries this applies to, let us know in the comments. This is one area where the Left has gone stark raving insane. They support the mass immigration of unassimilable, antisocial, criminal Muslims in the West for no rational reason. Instead, who is protesting the invasion of this reactionary culture to the West. Our very own Western reactionaries! We dropped the ball in fighting Muslim reaction, so now it is up to our own reactionaries to fight their Muslim reactionary brethren. Ridiculous! I do not feel that this psychologist is a reactionary or a conservative. On the contrary, he seems like a very liberal of even Leftist fellow, judging by his language. He’s simply doing what we no longer do on the Left: Tell it like it is. It is incomprehensible to me why we on the Left are supporting this reactionary culture. Why would this immigration ban be such a hardship for the poor Muslims? Let them stay in their sandboxes. If their Muslim culture really is so fantastic and wonderful, surely their Muslim societies must be better places to live than the depraved and degenerate West, no? Eh? This is not so? Why is that, Muslims? Oh Muslims! Look in the mirror for the answer. Danish integration problems with Muslims became public worldwide in 2006 when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Exactly two years later riots broke out again because of the reprint of the Mohammed cartoons by all major Danish newspapers. Currently 7 In February 2009, Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist published a book entitled Among criminal Muslims. A psychologist’s experience from Copenhagen. In his book, Nicolai Sennels shares a psychological perspective of this Muslim Culture, its relationship to anger, handling emotions and its religion. He based his research on hundreds of hours of therapy with 150 young Muslims in the Copenhagen youth jail. EuropeNews interviewed the author about his book and its consequences on integration of Muslims in Europe. EuropeNews: Nicolai Sennels, how did you get the idea to write a book about criminal Muslims in Denmark? Nicolai Sennels: I got the idea in February 2008 during a conference on integration in Copenhagen, where I was invited as the first and only psychologist working in a Copenhagen youth prison. My speech at the conference was about the fact, that foreigners’ culture plays a significant role concerning integration, crime and religious extremism. I emphasized, that people from a Muslim culture find it difficult, if not impossible, to create a successful life in Denmark. This statement was met with great resistance from Danish politicians and also my own boss from the youth prison. I was quite surprised since I thought that my point is obvious: some cultures fit better into Western societies than others. All of Europe is currently struggling to integrate Muslims but this endeavor seems to be impossible. According to the Danish police and the Danish Bureau of Statistics more than 7 My statement resulted in a legal injunction, a kind of professional punishment, which stated, that if I ever repeat this, I could be fired. According to the Copenhagen authorities it is apparently permitted to state that the serious problems among Muslims are caused by poverty, the media, the police, the Danes, politicians, etc. But two things are definitely not allowed: 1) discussing the significance of culture and 2) our foreigners own responsibility for their integration in our societies. Unfortunately many very powerful politicians lack a clear understanding of the psychological aspect of culture and the influence it has on integration. EuropeNews: What were the reactions in Denmark? Sennels: The book was received with a great amount of attention, already before the book was officially published on February 24 2009. It was on the front page of one of the biggest national newspapers in Denmark, and I was on the radio and TV participating in debates with politicians and other experts on the subject. The first publication of the book was sold out after three weeks. Since then, there have been some big changes in Danish integration policy, which seems to have been influenced by the book and the attention it got. From my personal point of view, the widespread attention shows that my statement is true: there is simply a great need for a deeper understanding of how Muslims’ culture influences their chances for integration. The very famous politician, Naser Khader, who is Muslim and the author of the bestseller “Honor and Shame”, wrote a review of my book and stated that it should be “obligatory reading for students, social workers and teachers.” Jyllands-Posten, the brave newspaper that first published the Mohammed cartoons, calls the book “an original piece of pioneer work”. EuropeNews: Let’s have a closer look at the book. You talk about four myths of integration. The first one concerns the difference between the cultures of immigrants. Sennels: What I discovered during my work at the youth prison was that people of Muslim heritage have other needs for social work than Danes or people of non-Muslim cultures. These different needs require more attention, and psychologists need to do more research on these topics in order to be able to create effective social politics. I completely agree with my critics that personal and social problems can lead to anti-social behavior among both Westerners and Muslims. However, there is still extremely disproportional anti-social and anti-democratic behavior among Muslims. The Danish Bureau of Statistics published a report (1 and 2) stating that Muslim countries take the first eight places on the top 10-list of criminals’ country of origin. Denmark is number nine on this list. EuropeNews: So that means, we have to treat Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants in a different way? Sennels: Seen from a psychological and also humanistic perspective, it is very clear that people from different cultures have different needs when they have or create problems. My own experience is that Muslims don’t understand our Western way of trying to handle conflicts through dialogue. They are raised in a culture with very clear outer authorities and consequences. Western tradition using compromise and inner reflection as primary means of handling outer and inner conflicts is seen as weak in the Muslim culture. To a great extent they simply don’t understand this softer and more humanistic way of handling social affairs. In the context of social work and politics this means that they need more borders and stronger consequences to be able to adjust their behavior. EuropeNews: That leads us directly to the second myth: it is often said, that the criminality of immigrants is caused by social problems, not by their cultural background. In your book you disagree and point to the religion of the Muslims as a source of criminality. Sennels: Well, I would rephrase it as “Muslim culture” instead of “religion” because there are a lot of Muslims who don’t know what is written in the Quran and who don’t visit the mosques. But they are strongly influenced on a cultural level. And there we see that especially anger is much more accepted in the Muslim culture. One example: in Western culture and also in other non-Muslim cultures, like in Asia, you see aggression and a sudden explosion of anger as something you’ll regret afterwards, something you are ashamed of. It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. If somebody steps on your honor—what I as a psychologist would call self confidence—you are simply expected to show aggression and often also verbal or physical revenge. So, aggression gives you a low status in our cultures, but a high status in the Muslim culture. There is however another and much deeper reason for the wide spread anti-social behavior in Muslim communities and their strong aversion against integration—namely, the very strong identification that Muslims have with belonging to the Muslim culture. My encounter with the Muslim culture has been a meeting with an exceedingly strong and very proud culture. This is certainly something that can ensure an ancient culture’s survival through changing times—Islam and the Muslim culture are excellent examples of this. A strong and proud culture unfortunately also makes the culture’s members almost unable to adapt to other values. In Germany, only 1 EuropeNews: As you already pointed out, a lot of Muslims have a strong connection to their religious identity. The third myth you dismantle in your book is about the percentage of extremist’s and fundamentalists among Muslims. It’s often presumed that this percentage is relatively small. What is your experience? Sennels: People hope that most Muslims are modern and accept Western values. My experience is different, and this has been proven by the statistics in Europe that I just quoted. In February 2008, we had some deadly serious riots by young Muslims in Denmark. Those riots were partly a reaction to the great focus by the Danish police on the steeply rising crime rates in Muslim areas. The other reason was the reprinting of the Mohammed cartoons in all Danish newspapers. This reprinting was an act of solidarity with the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose life was, and still is, seriously threatened. In these riots, we saw Muslims who don’t practice the Islamic religion in their daily lives standing up for their culture and religion in a very aggressive way. Copenhagen was smoking for an entire week due to several hundred of fires, and the police and firemen trying to calm the situation down were also attacked. A big part of the rioters ended up in the prison where I worked, and I therefore I had the chance to talk with them. Almost all of them were Muslims, and they all claimed that what they have done—starting fires, attacking the police etc.—was justified since Danish society, through its pressure on integration and through reprinting the Mohammed cartoons, has proven itself to be racist and against Islam and Muslim culture. The few Danish people among the rioters were completely different. Their explanation of their actions was predominately a search for adventure or excitement. EuropeNews: The fourth myth is that poverty among immigrants leads to their bad social situation. In your book, you tell us that the opposite is true. Sennels: You can formulate this important question like this: do people get social problems because they are poor, or do they become poor because they create social problems? My experience is that the very low focus on supporting one’s children in school and on one’s own education and the lack of motivation for creating a professional career is a crucial factor for the poverty, which many Muslims experience in both our societies and in Muslim countries. On top of it, one fourth of all young male Muslims in Denmark have a criminal record. Poor reading skills, a strong aversion against authorities and a criminal record simply make it very difficult for you to get a well paying job. It is anti-social behavior that makes you poor. Not the other way around. Unfortunately many politicians see poverty as the main cause of integration problems. I think this is a horrible and one-dimensional view of poor people and of people in general. The idea that people’s behavior is decided by the amount of money they have on their bank accounts every month is an exceedingly limited view. I myself, as a psychologist who graduated from the humanities department of the University of Copenhagen, would say that people have many more and stronger factors in their lives than money, which influence their behavior and way of thinking. EuropeNews: What is the conclusion on your research? Is the integration of people of Muslim heritage into Western societies possible? Nicolai Sennels: I would say that the optimists, the people who say that integration is possible, carry a very great responsibility. There is a very great risk that they are selling us hope, a dream, that has no foundation in reality. This means that they will be the ones who are responsible for Europe looking away from and not addressing its problems until it is too late. There is simply no research in Europe that supports the optimists’ view. On the contrary, all the research that we have on integration of Muslims in Western societies shows that we are continuing to head in the wrong direction. So I don’t know how these optimists come to their conclusion. Maybe it is a vain and childish hope that everything will turn out well, just like in the fairy tales. Or maybe it is a pseudo-Darwinistic idea that everything will develop in a positive direction. One thing is for sure: they don’t base their judgments on facts. Of course there are exceptions but for the largest part integration to the necessary degree of Muslims is not possible. Clever and compassionate people are working all over Europe on the problem, and they have spent billions of Euros on the project, yet, the problems still continue to grow. The psychological explanation is actually simple. The Muslim and the Western cultures are fundamentally very different. This means Muslims need to undergo very big changes in their identity and values to be able to accept the values of Western societies. Changing basic structures in one’s personality is a very demanding psychological and emotional process. Apparently very few Muslims feel motivated to do so. I only know a few who managed, but I also know that it was a long and exhausting struggle on an inner level for them and that they often pay a high personal price on the outer level because their Muslim friends and families despise and/or disown them for leaving their culture. EuropeNews: But what we are going to do with the Muslims, who are already here? Sennels: I see two possibilities. Firstly, we should immediately stop all immigration of people from Muslim countries to Europe until we have proven that integration of Muslims is possible. Secondly, we should help Muslims who don’t want to or are not able to integrate in our Western societies to build a new and meaningful life in a society they understand and that understands them. This means to assist them in starting a new life in a Muslim country. We actually have the economic means to do this. As I mentioned previously, the Danish National Bank calculated, that every immigrant from Muslim countries costs 300,000 euros on average. With this money, we could help these people to live a happy life in a Muslim country without having to integrate in a society they don’t understand and therefore cannot accept. Having money enough to support one’s family and live in a country where one feels at home with the surrounding culture would be a great step forward in the quality of their lives. And we should help them achieve this. Not only the individual Muslim, but also European societies will benefit. Muslims immigrating from Europe to Muslim countries will function as ambassadors for more free and democratic societies: due to their experience from living in a democracy with real human rights and their knowledge of the social systems in Europe, they will take very important ideas and values with them. In this way they can do what hopefully most of them dream of, i.e. help their Muslim brothers and sisters in their home countries by changing the poor conditions and from which they moved away from initially.

Why Are Religious Schools Allowed to Discriminate on the Basis of Religion But Not on Race?

In the comments section, BAG asks:

Okay, Uncle Milton, but what I don’t get is why it’s okay to discriminate based on religion, but not race? The way I see it, either all discrimination is okay, or none of it is okay.

We’ve had a ton of problems in US schools with discrimination on the basis of race. On the other hand, we’ve had zero problems in US schools with discrimination on the basis of religion, or very few for that matter. Some universities used to discriminate against Jews, but those were not religious schools. It’s a sociological phenomenon. If you allowed religious schools to discriminate on the basis of race, this could create a major social problem. In places like the South all these “Christian” schools would spring up overnight more or less with “No Niggers” signs hung out front. That would not be acceptable. We fought a great big conflict to get rid of de jure segregated schooling in this country. It’s true that these laws leave Whites with no way to escape sending their kids to schools with Blacks other than moving away from them, but it’s really not much of a problem in terms of private or religious schools. Sure, private and religious schools have to accept Blacks if they meet the criteria, but if you screw up or screw off in private or religious schools, they boot you right on out of there. So I imagine that though private and religious schools in the US surely have Blacks in them, I’m quite certain that those Blacks are studious and well-behaved, else they are gone. I mean, these are religious schools! You can’t very well force them to accept people of other religions! That’s insane. On what basis could you force Christian schools to accept Hindus, Muslims and Jews? On what basis could you accept Jewish schools to accept Hindus, Muslims and Christians? It’s nuts, and no one is being harmed by these restrictions anyway, so there’s no reasons to fix them up.

Is India a Democracy?

A commenter asks me to read a news article today quoting neoliberal corporatist shill Barack Obama saying that India is a “thriving democracy.” I suppose compared to places like the Arab World, Iran, most of Africa, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Indonesia, Brazil and Paraguay, it’s a relatively democratic place, considering the nightmarish conditions of your average Third World shithole country, an assemblage that India is a part of. First of all, I would like to commend the commenter for his interest in democracy, provided it is sincere. Is it? Do high caste Hindus really want a democracy in India? When in human history have upper class elites ever supported democracy? Leaving that aside, the notion that Indian democracy should safeguard what it has and build on it is a noble one. India’s handling of the language question was a superb showcase of democracy, especially compared to the utter failure of neighbors like Myanmar, Pakistan and Nepal on the language question. India’s handling of the language issue, after a false start, was a par exemplar for the Third World. Let us give credit where it is due! I acknowledge that India is a relatively democratic place. But let’s face it, at the rural level, India is not very democratic and never has been, possibly ever in its entire blighted history. Rural India is a horrid dictatorship of high caste thugs and their private armies. They have the state, cops and courts on their side, and peaceful protest is useless. This is after all why the Maoists took up guns in the first place, after decades of futile peaceful protest. Almost all of the Congressmen in India are known criminals – thieves who have stolen typically millions of dollars. My understanding is that peaceful demos are regularly attacked by police. Is this true or not? And there is some pretty nasty stuff going on Kashmir. Young men being abducted off the street, tortured and murdered, then dropped on the side of the road. Their crime? Throwing rocks I guess. Hindu nationalist gangs regularly run rampant through India’s cities and rural areas, threatening, beating and even murdering Christians and Muslims, burning down their property and even their villages. They have the full support of the local Hindu police and state in these actions. How is this democracy? Here in the US, rural America is not ruled by a dictatorship of upper class thugs. The vast majority of Congress are not obvious thieves and criminals. The bribery that goes on 100 million times a day in India is a crime in the US. In Indian state hospitals, you either bribe the doctors to take care of your sick relative, or they will leave them to die. What’s so “democratic” about that? What good is my marching off to vote once every few years if I have to bribe state doctors not to kill my relative? Good Lord. At Indian universities, Dalits have their own gangs of thugs. Professors are threatened to pass on Dalit students with good grades. If they do not comply, they are beaten or worse. Hence, India’s education system is largely a joke, its degrees watered down with threats, fake marks and mass bribery. In the wonderful Indian democracy, we have recently heard that most large Indian newspapers are charging politicians for favorable coverage. No bribes to journalists, and you get negative stories. Pay off the Fourth Estate and expect plenty of nice fat puff pieces.We have not even descended that far here in the US yet, and we’ve sunk pretty low. This is democratic? How is it democratic that “supporters” of the Maoists are regularly beaten, tortured, raped and murdered? Exactly what crime have they committed? Can you cite the crime that says it is illegal to be a “supporter” of the Maoists? What does it mean to be a “supporter?” Can you spell it out for me please? If it’s illegal to be a Maoist supporter, why can’t you just arrest them and put them on trial? If it’s a crime deserving of death to be a Maoist “supporter” (Define please), why should the Maoists not have a right to kill ever government “supporter,” whatever that means? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, no? My understanding is that journalists who merely report on Maoist rebels are now being accused of violating Emergency Laws. For instance, Arundhati Roy is being threatened with arrest by the high caste criminal gangsters who run Chattisargh. Please tell me exactly what crimes Mrs. Roy has committed in writing in her articles. Specify the precise laws she violated, how and why. Say I want to go to India as a journalist. Explain to me, if I plan to write about Maoists, how it is I can do so without violating the law. Explain what the laws are and how we journalists can somehow not run afoul of them. Thanks! Meantime, I will have to think over that “Indian democracy” bit just a little.

Larry Summers Leaves the Administration!

Three cheers! Summers and especially Rubin have pretty much wrecked this Administration. Obama’s Administration has been run by bankers from the very start. The financial reform bill was stripped of most of its useful teeth by Rubin, Summers and Senators on the Hill. Now he can go back to Harvard where he indoctrinates students in the Economics Department with neoclassical, nonsensical brain poison.

The Market Virus

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, huy notes that, while he is a social democrat, he still sings the praises of the free market system. He points out drug companies and IT as two great industries. I disagree: Private drug companies are evil! Have you ever seen a more horrid bunch of gangsters and criminals? Here in the US all the pharmaceutical companies are all just flat-out crooks. They keep harmful drugs on the market and refuse to pull them. The only way to pull them is to sue them over and over, and even when we do that, they still keep them on the market a lot of times. These people are just flat out murderers. And when they get too pissed about being sued, they get their bought and paid for Congressswine to legislate “tort reform”, which means no more suits. Or SLAPP suits, in which you get sued for suing the POS corporation! They fake their studies, lie on their data, and buy and pay for doctors to lie for them. The medical field is becoming seriously corrupted by the big money behind these scum companies, and the # of doctors going corrupt as a result is really frightening. It’s a serious problem as even our best medical journals are in danger of being corrupted. Furthermore, it has been conclusively proven that we pay much higher prices for the same drugs that other nations in the West get for much cheaper. What advantage do we get from these high prices? Much higher profits for drug companies on US sales! I’m sure your average US consumer is delighted by that! Or maybe, if his mind is truly market-infected, he is delighted by that. The IT companies? It’s hard to say. Microsoft is an illegal monopoly, was one, and will be one into the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine how much damage they have caused to computing. Intel has a monopoly on CPU’s with similar major issues for consumers, notably outrageously high prices and forced install of Intel chips by computer makers. On the ground, there is no competition in broadband. The glorious days of dialup competition are gone forever. You have the cable monopoly or the phone DSL monopoly. They are both evil, and neither has any competition but the other. The cable monopolies are not regulated at all, and cable is insanely overpriced. The phone monopolies are barely regulated at all anymore, but some are better than others. The worst of all are the huge ones like ATT, which desperately needs to be regulated. An unregulated private monopoly is pure evil and needs to be smashed or at least heavily regulated. Capitalism in the US has created a Gramscian hegemony whereby a vast number of folks identify with the capitalists and the market. Once you do that, all regulation and control by the state is out the window. Very rightwing capitalists own all of our media and use it try to slam pro-corporate, pro-monopoly lies into our heads 24-7. A lot of workers and consumers, especially once they start getting some money, “go corporate” in their minds and essentially support the whole human-hating, society-hating, worker-hating and consumer-hating agenda of the corporations. Our lack of government involvement in broadband and cell phones has meant that we spend outrageously high prices for junk service. Other nations have involved the state heavily in their cellular and broadband systems. They pay dramatically lower prices than we do and get dramatically faster speeds and more features. We’re sitting here in the US getting ruined because we worship these corporate pigs who are reaming us. Why? Because the ideology of “the market” has infected every aspect of American life. Even the people who should be protesting getting hammered by these corporations are singing their praises even while they are getting reamed. Their minds have been colonized by a virus. The market virus.

US Drug Companies Abuse US Consumers

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, James Schipper notes:

Drugs are not a natural monopoly, so why are pharmaceutical companies making such large profits? Answer: patents. Once a pharmaceutical company has a patent on a drug, it has a monopoly for several years. The reason for this patent system is that it is thought to encourage research and thereby allow consumers to gain access to new drugs.There is no doubt that a lot of new drugs are coming on the market, but whether the patent system ultimately has more advantages than disadvantages is hard to say. What is certain is that it keeps drug prices high and also encourages wasteful research for near-duplicates. If company A develops a new drug against, say, headaches and acquires a patent on it, then company B can’t compete directly against it by selling the same drug, so it will try to produce a drug that is very similar but different enough to circumvent company’s A patent.

In part it is patents, true. And it is true that the patent system encourages totally wasteful drugs that do nothing for consumers but fatten the wallets of corporate slimeballs. Once again we see that capitalism is great at making money, but often little else. In what sense is a costly waste of a drug good for the “productivity” or “growth” of the nation? It’s not. It’s wasteful. Again we see the inherent wastefulness and stupidity of capitalism. Europe and Canada have socialist health systems that negotiate low prices for drugs. The drug companies do it for the business, and they still make tons of money. Here in the US, the state thinks that drug companies have a right to superprofits at the expense of people. It’s corporations versus humans, and in the US, corporations win, and humans get screwed every time. There are now movements afoot to extend patents beyond their very long life. This will go on as long as the Corporate Enemy has legislators by the balls. One of their loony arguments is that they need super-profits in order to reinvest money in new drugs. However, the Corporate Enemy is denied super-profits in Europe, and they still come up with lots of new drugs. It’s apparently just a great big gigantic lie. This nonsense reached a crescendo when the US government forbade the re-importation of cheap drugs from Canada into the US so that US consumers could get better deals. Amazingly, there was no hue and cry from US consumers stuck with unpayable drug bills that are completely unnecessary, because the corporate media refused to show them how they were getting screwed. How many Americans so love the “market” that they would joyfully pay twice as much for drugs so fat cat drug companies could rake it in? I guess your average Libertarian is that insipid, but no way is your average American. US capitalism attacks the worker, consumer, society and the environment day in and day out without end. This is the magical “market.” It’s making all of our lives so much better every single day, they say. Really? It is? Why does it seem like it’s screwing us instead? You’re either for the corporations or for the humans. I’m for the humans. Down the corporations! Up the humans!

Recessions Are Getting Worse and Worse

As you can see, recessions are getting worse and worse in the US in recent years.

This is why voters are getting angrier and angrier. But they are venting all of their rage in a rightwing direction. That’s not going to help the matter. Republicans never help grow jobs. They could care less about jobs. Who cares about jobs?

Jobs means labor. Labor is the enemy of capital. Capital and labor battle it out to divide up the spoils of profits. The objective of capital is to give as little of the profits to labor as possible. That means hiring the fewest workers that they can possibly get away with, paying them the lowest wages they can get away with, giving them the worst possible benefits that they an get away with.

So the fewer workers the better, all other things being equal. Capital is always trying to eliminate jobs via mechanization, overwork, forced overtime, etc. Any way that capital can figure out to eliminate a job, they will do it. Why then should we expect capital to give two flying fucks about about how many people are working? Who cares!

As long as profits are going great, capital doesn’t care if the unemployment rate is

When the unemployment rate goes up, the stock market tends to rise. When unemployment starts dropping below a certain point, the stock market starts dropping and you see all sorts of weird articles in the business press talking about how unemployment has gotten too low. They start demanding that the Fed raise interest rates to drive up unemployment. A few weeks later, Alan Greenspan does just that. The corporate media, from “left” to “right,” raises a gigantic cheer.

The recessions are getting worse because Project Middle Class Death is working quite well.

This project formerly had Alan Greenspan at its helm. Greenspan was in charge of a ruling class project initiated in the 1970’s that was intended to reduce the wages and wealth of the US middle class by 1/3. This project had the total support of both political parties, “left” Democrats and “right” Republicans, along with the entire “left to right” spectrum of the corporate media. When it comes to class politics in the US, true liberals are rare to nonexistent.

Even the Democratic Party is sworn to neoclassical economics that only benefits the top 2

Wages have been flat since 1980 or possibly as far back as 1973. The gap between the rich and upper middle class has skyrocketed. Bottom line is that business is bad, and we are in a recession due to lack of consumer demand. Neoliberal voodoo doodoo economic hokus pokus won’t get us out of this mess.

Giving businesses and the rich more tax breaks won’t create more customers in the stores. As if businesses are not hiring more workers due to their tax burden! This is why Obama’s latest neoliberal stimulus proposal is so flawed. The centerpiece is yet more supply side tax cuts and tax breaks for US business. I can assure you that that won’t create a single job.

US businesses are sitting on a mountain of cash. They don’t even know what to do with it. Profits are going like gangbusters. If I run a business and have no customers, I have a problem. If at that same business, you give me a tax break, I now have more money. But so what? I still have no customers. Why should I hire even one more worker as long as we don’t have any more business? I run a business, not a government make-work project.

All of the supply-side neoliberal gimmickry on Earth will not stimulate demand and create more customers. As the customer base declines, the risk of deflation unfolds.

Since Republicans have nothing to offer the economy but neoclassical and neoliberal supply side tax cuts and tax breaks for the rich and business along with huge cuts in government spending, this cannot possibly help the economy. Not in any possible world can it help the economy. Not in the best of all possible Milton Friedman Fantasy Worlds can it help any possible economy.

This is where Keynesianism steps in. The only actor that can stimulate demand in such a case is government. The credit markets are dried up, and the banks have not been loaning much to business for 30 years now. There’s no money in it. The money is in doubling down at the Casino in the Sky at the latest Derivatives Magic Show table. If the banks aren’t putting money into the private sector, and business doesn’t want to borrow anyway (no customers, remember?), once again, Keynesianism tells us, it’s time for Government Man to come to the rescue.

Neoliberalism a la Milton Friedman has never been proven to work anywhere. In fact, everywhere it has been tried, it has failed. Its theories about monopolies have been proven to be incorrect.

In Latin America, it failed for last 20-30 years, such that most Latin Americans want to chuck it. Even establishment hacks at Time Magazine admit it failed in Latin America. It was tried in nearly pure form in Chile at the start of the Pinochet regime, and it so badly ruined the economy that Pinochet threw all of his Chicago boys out and went back to socialism of a sort.

In Russia, it allowed a bunch of international Jews to strip the country, its assets and its wealth blind, creating a huge number of millionaires and killing millions of Russians by reducing life expectancy. A good analysis of neoliberalism shows that it reliably ruins a country’s education and results in large declines in many health figures such as infant mortality and life expectancy. In other words, neoliberalism kills.

But neoliberalism isn’t designed to fix economies, save lives or send folks to school. The neoliberal project is one of income transfer. It involves a massive income transfer from the bottom 8

Neoliberalism also regularly blows up economies. That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s supposed to do that. It’s called boom and bust.

“You Can’t Be a Maoist and a Clintonite Democrat!”

I keep hearing this over and over from some of my friends. I just had a talk with a friend of mine about this. He’s like me. Basically a liberal Democrat on the left wing of the Democratic Party. However, he has long called himself a Communist. He now calls himself a democratic socialist. He has long supported Communism overseas, especially in the USSR. According to my critics, this guy can’t possibly exist. Neither can I.

And yet we do.

My critics are badly mistaken. My friend says they don’t understand politics in the US. For instance, in many countries, it makes sense to join a small Left party and vote for them. In a parliamentary system, you might just elect a deputy or two, and you won’t hurt the rest of the Left at all. In the UK, you can reliably vote Green and elect some folks here or there. In Abiezer Coppe’s town, nearly 5

That’s not possible in the US. The Green Party never goes anywhere and can barely elect a soul to any office in the land. There’s no point voting Green.

Here in the US, voting Left third party is just throwing your vote away. At worst, you’re helping to elect Republicans. At best, you’re masturbating in a voting booth. There’s no point even getting involved in Left Third Party politics here in the US. Why bother? I could go join some kooky Commie sect, but why bother? I would spend the remaining 30 years of my life whacking off politically and not accomplishing a damn thing.

The truth is that in the US, the only action on the Left is in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is truly a big tent party. It has everyone from rightwing unreconstructed racist Southern Democrats all the way to out and out socialists and Communists. I’ve known many socialists and Communists in the US who typically vote Democrat. Some were even active in Democratic Party politics.

So, our rightwing critics are right in a sense. A fair number of liberals are anywhere from soft on Communism to out and out Com symps and fellow travelers.

My father was an anti-Communist liberal Democrat all his life. He was furious at my politics and nearly regarded me as a deadly enemy politically. That’s because I was just too “Village Voice Left,” as he put it, for his tastes. Nevertheless, towards the end of his life, he was sympathetic towards the late USSR, East Bloc and Cuba. He was still an anti-Commie liberal, but he got more socialist in his old age.

My mother was similar. An anti-Communist Republican, she once told me philosophically that in many 3rd World countries they were probably better off Communist, as capitalism had largely failed there anyway. She’s lately moved to the Democratic Party. Comments like hers are fairly common among fairly liberal middle class Whites.

My point is, I am simply on the Left. Sure I support the Democratic Party. They aren’t exactly peaches and cream, but the US is a deeply reactionary country, and Democrats are the only vehicle for progressive change.

I also support socialists of all types, including social democrats. I have a soft spot for Communists and Chavez types, though I’ve never lived under a Communist regime, so I don’t know if I would actually like it or not. Perhaps given that experience, I might take a different stand on Communism.

People question how I can support Maoists in Nepal, India and other places.

Easy. All of the rest of Left politics in these places has failed. The Indian Congress Party is a socialist party. So is it’s evil twin in Nepal, the Nepalese Congress Party. Worse, revisionist Communism has even failed in India, looking at the experience of the CPI-M in West Bengal. Revisionist Communism has badly failed in Nepal, with a Marxist-Leninist party in bed with the worst of the Right in the present government.

There’s never been an effective Left party of any type in the Philippines. There probably never will be.

What’s the alternative in Colombia? The Left can’t even organize without getting massacred. Obviously, the Left needs to take up guns to defend themselves.

While I’m not a Maoist, it’s clear that rest of Left politics in the places above has failed, so it’s time to give the Maoists a chance. Let’s see what they can do. What the heck, nothing else has worked.

Americans Don’t Support the Tea Party Agenda

Epic fail for 3 out of 4 Tea Party positions. Republicans vow to push ahead anyway.

As you can see, generic Tea Party positions only have the support of ~3

Position 1: Roll back health care reform. 3

Position 2: Replace Medicare with vouchers. 3

Position 3: Extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts. 2

Position 4: Create Social Security accounts. Unfortunately, this has 5

This is the age-old Republican plan to get rid of Social Security. Republicans hated SS when it was put in in the New Deal. In 1947, when the Republicans passed Taft-Hartley limiting US labor, this was only part of a jihad intended to replace the entire New Deal, an offensive that had the support of the National Association of Manufacturers and US Chamber of Commerce.

The NAM and the CoC, along with the Republican Party, have been trying to get rid of Social Security and rest of the New Deal ever since, but they usually do not say so. Instead, Republicans say they want to “save Social Security by reforming it.” It’s not true. They’re still trying to kill it. The Social Security private accounts scheme is the latest devious plot. People support it because they don’t understand it’s a plot to kill SS.

We have people on this site who vote Republican sometimes and who call themselves Libertarians. If that means you, I have some questions.

Do you want to get rid of Medicare and Social Security? If no, why are you voting Republican or calling yourself a Libertarian?

Do you support Medicare and Social Security? If you support them, then why do you vote Republican or call yourself a Libertarian? Republicans only want to get rid of them by stealth. Libertarians oppose them on a doctrinaire basis.

Going Out of Business Sale

US democracy, RIP.

For US democracy.

Courtesy of the Citizens United decision at the US Supreme Court. Citizens United was caused by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. We have commenters on here who vote Republican. If you vote Republican, do you support the Citizens United case? If you oppose the CU case, then why do you persist in voting Republican?

We also have commenters here who either support or are warm to Libertarianism. Of course, Libertarians were overjoyed at the CU decision, even more than Republicans. It’s part and parcel of Libertarian theory that anyone can buy any election they can afford. Do you agree with that? If you don’t agree, then why are you a Libertarian?

P.S. ~8

Are the Rich Always the Enemy?

A commenter, apparently an American liberal Democrat (correct?) offers an apologetics for the wealthy, and as such illustrates one of the problems with American liberalism, namely a veneration of the rich, an apology for their class politics, and a lack of class analysis:

Is it really a wrong to be wealthy? What if you generate a large income by doing something you believe in? By following your dreams? I see nothing wrong with that. Nobody gets hurt, except through their own envy. Also, as for the rich born rich, they’re no worse than the poor born poor, who have no choice but to live according to their class.

If we can’t be blamed for having inborn traits, and can’t be blamed for being born into the class that molds us, that should include the rich. Not meant to be an apologetic for evil rich people, but just a reminder that they’re people too and need to be forgiven as much as anyone else.

First of all, believe me, the rich are the last people on Earth who are in need of forgiveness. They’ve been granted nothing but, on a silver platter, from Day One.

Of course there is nothing in and of itself wrong with being wealthy. In particular, artists, actors, directors, writers, and other creative types have simply gained wealth by a lot of folks buying the product of their latest creative effort. Many of these folks never adopt the mentality of the rich and continue to be very progressive people. I hung around with these types in Hollywood for many years. As long as wealthy people do not pursue a politics of the rich, then of course we have nothing against them.

For the rest of us, the rich who pursue a politics of the rich (which is typically most of them) are the class enemy. They are not a class enemy because they have wealth, but because of the class politics they pursue on behalf of their wealth, which involves a frontal assault on the bottom 8

Those few among the rich who work against their class interests and work for the rest of us are not our enemies and are welcome to join us.

However, everywhere on Earth and at all times and into the future, the rich pursue their class interests to the detriment of all of the rest of us. The rich are always looking for ways to lower their taxes.

Lowering rich people’s taxes does not benefit the rest of us in any way, shape or form. In fact, it hurts us, because those taxes are being used to redistribute income from the unneeded vaults of the rich to starving accounts of the rest of us. In other words, taxation of the rich is a way for the rest of us to redistribute the wealth that the rich have obtained. Trickle-down economics is and has always been a fraud, but it’s amazing how many non-wealthy people believe in this fairy tale.

It’s important to note that extreme wealth in and of itself is unjust, no matter how it was obtained. Does Bill Gates or Warren Buffet have a right to all of those billions, when there are countless Americans without health care or homeless, without even any shelter? Of course not. In these cases, a just society will confiscate some of their wealth to give people homes to live in and health care if they are sick.

The rich are the class enemy as long as they are pursuing their class interests politically. When they do so, they act as an army attacking everyone else. When the bottom 8

Capitalist society is characterized by continuous class war. This class war is mostly being waged by the top 2

The Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Repost from the old site.

The Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulves vulpes necator) has been rediscovered around Sonora Pass on August 11, 2010.

It was spotted by a camera that had been set up to monitor other wildlife in an area where Yosemite National Park, the Stanislaus National Forest and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest all come together. The sighting was actually on the Humboldt-Toiyabe, not on the Stanislaus as many news reports had it.

Part of the confusion may have been that the sighting was near the border between the Humboldt-Toiyabe and Stanislaus Forests. I know that the fox was not seen right at Sonora Pass. Instead, I believe it was spotted in the area to the south of the pass. I am guessing that it was seen near the Leavitt Creek area.

Saliva analysis on a sock filled with chicken parts at the bait station confirmed that it was a Sierra Nevada red fox, and that it had a rare genetic signature previously only seen in museum specimens from the 1920’s.

This is the first proof of the Sierra Nevada red fox outside the Lassen area in a very long time. It’s great news!

The only confirmed population is a tiny population of only 20 foxes in and around Lassen National Park where the Northern Sierra meets the Southern Cascades.

This area has historically seen more sightings around Lassen than any other part of California (sighting map for Northern California). This concentration is focused in Lassen, Tehama and Shasta Counties in and around Lassen Park. There have also been a few sightings in Modoc, Siskiyou and Trinity Counties.

The existence of the Sierra Nevada red fox has recently been confirmed by a team led by John Perrine of UC Berkeley. The team has located a small population of 20 Sierra Nevada red foxes existing in and around Lassen National Park in the Cascades Range. A later study proved that these were Sierra Nevada red foxes and not Eastern Red Foxes, which are abundant at the lower elevations in California.

A good description of the Lassen study, along with several rare photos of the foxes, can be found here. In the Sierras, the Sierra Nevada red fox was typically found at about 9,000 feet, with one record at 4,000, another at 5,500 and another at 7,000 feet. In the Cascades, they are usually found at around 6,000 feet, dropping down to 4,000 feet in the winter and moving up to 8,000 feet in the summer.

A report by the DFG in 1987 said the Sierra Nevada red fox was endangered, but noted that sightings continue in the rest of the Sierra Nevada outside the Cascades within the traditional range of the species.

I am aware of some recent sightings on the East side near Mammoth Mountain at high elevations.

They reportedly still exist in Mineral King south of Sequoia National Park.

In the same region, there have been a number of sightings in the Sagehen Road area near Olancha on the Inyo National Forest in the past 12 years. The sightings were at the 4-6,000 foot elevation. This is near the South Sierra Wilderness Area. Map here.

There was a reliable sighting in 1993 at Sequoia National Park.

There have been sightings of the Sierra Nevada red fox in the past 30 years on the Sierra National Forest. In 1971, a Sierra Nevada red fox was sighted at Florence Lake at about 9,000 feet. In 1973, there was a sighting at Soda Springs near Mammoth Pool Reservoir at 4,500 feet. In 1987, there was a sighting along Highway 168 between Auberry and Shaver Lake at about 4,300 feet, a very low elevation. In 1991, there was a sighting at Papoose Lake north of Lake Edison at about 10,390 feet.

There have also been a few sightings in Yosemite Valley in the past decade or so.

The last documented sighting of a Sierra Nevada red fox as near Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park in 1990. This sighting was verified via photograph. The fox was photographed in the middle of winter at about 9,000 feet.

On the Stanislaus, there have been a number of sightings around the Emigrant Wilderness, in particular something called the Waterhouse Wilderness Study Area on the northwest edge of the Emigrant Wilderness.

In Mono County, Sierra Nevada red foxes have been reported from Bridgeport Valley.

In Nevada County near Lake Tahoe, there is a sighting from 1994 along Highway 89 north of Truckee.

In addition to the Lassen area, there is also a recent sighting around Antelope Lake and around Lake Almanor and Jonesville on the Plumas National Forest.

There are recent sightings around Little Lake on the northern edge of the Lassen National Forest.

There are recent sightings around Mount Shasta and around Glass Mountain on the Klamath National Forest.

There are also recent sightings around the Trinity River near Mount Eddy on the northern edge of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

There is also a recent sighting near Canby on the Modoc National Forest.

Between 1940 and 1959, 135 Sierra Nevada red fox pelts were taken by trappers, an average of 7 per year. That number dropped to 2 per year from 1970-1974. The California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) banned all Sierra Nevada red fox trapping in 1974.

The Sierra Nevada red fox has declined drastically and desperately needs Endangered Species listing.

This cool paper by C. Hart Merriam shows that Sierra Nevada red foxes were formerly common at high elevations in the Mount Shasta area, that tracks were seen almost every day (!), but the foxes were very wary and never entered the traps the researchers had set. It is interesting that fishers were also present in this area at the time.

This report makes one wonder just what it is that has driven V. v. necator to near-extinction. I strongly suspect grazing.

One of the best historical sources on the Sierra Nevada red fox is this chapter from Joseph Grinnell’s hard-to-find Furbearers of California from 1937. One thing it makes clear is that the Sierra Nevada red fox was much more common in the first four decades of the century than it is now. You can view it here.

At the time of Grinnell’s writing, this fox was preying heavily on Sierra Nevada snowshoe hares and White-tailed hares, both of which are now pretty rare in the Sierras. I wonder if that is related to their decline? The decline of the White-tailed hare in the Sierra, formerly common on the East Side, is related exclusively to grazing.

All high-elevation grazing needs to be banned from the Sierra, as it is a catastrophe. Cows do not belong in high elevation meadows. We can start by getting rid of grazing in wilderness areas (Allowing grazing in wilderness areas was the only way that the Wilderness Act of 1964 could be passed).

I am not impressed with the ability of the US Forest Service to preserve wildlife in general, not to mention sensitive or endangered species. I spent years monitoring the Sierra National Forest, and the workers I met with were some of the most corrupt and dishonest people I have ever dealt with.

The mentality was devoted to resource extraction, and even wildlife biologists, botanists and fisheries specialists routinely issued “no significant harm” findings on virtually every single Environmental Assessment Report I saw.

Even less impressive is the CDFG, though at least their heads were in the right place. Individuals working with the DFG are good people, but the Commission is run by political clowns.

There are all sorts of species that need to be listed as threatened or endangered, but the DFG has hardly made even one such listing in the last decade. The DFG has been routinely denying petitions to list any species as threatened or endangered for a decade or so now.

Further, there are questions about how much a CA T& E designation even helps a species, as the DFG seldom intervenes to help even the species they have listed as T & E.

In the early 1990’s, the CA DFG produced some excellent volumes – Reptiles and Amphibians of Special Concern in California by Mark Jennings, Fish of Special Concern in California by Peter Moyne and Threatened and Endangered Species of California.

The reports by Jennings and Moyne listed numerous species that should be listed as species of special concern, threatened or endangered. To my knowledge, 15 years later, not a single one has been listed. A prime example is that the Sierra Nevada red fox, which the DFG even admitted in 2004 was critically endangered, is still listed as “threatened” instead of “endangered”.

Even a petition to uplist it will surely be denied. The game here has been to devastate the DFG with budget cuts, even during times when the state is flush with cash. Then the DFG gets to say that they don’t have any money to list any new species. Cool game, huh?

It seems every year, the DFG gets hammered with new budget cuts, and in lush years, the money never gets reinstated. Any environmentalist who is a fiscal conservative needs to have their head examined.

The FS complains of budget cuts too, but in contrast they are actively hostile to the environment. When I was monitoring them, their whole agenda was to let grazing and logging go on to the greatest extent possible and to deny all negative impacts on the environment of such.

Go into a local FS office and the whole place, even the wildlife biologists, is avidly listening to Rush Limbaugh! Most of them, including once again wildlife biologists who supposedly believe in evolution, are members of fundamentalist churches! Go figure.

Such is the state of things in the supposedly pro-environment US. Large majorities support the environmentalist agenda, but of course the Republicans and incredibly even the Clintonista triangulating Democrats are both very hostile to the environment. There is no logical reason for either party, especially the Democrats, to take this stance.

The only explanation is that both parties are dedicated to the corporate and pro-business agenda, and the entire rest of the population, even if that means 55-9

References

CDFG. 1987. Sierra Nevada Red Fox: Five-year Status Report. California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento, California, USA.

Grinnell, Joseph. 1924. Animal Life in the Yosemite. Berkeley: University of California Press, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Kucera, T. E. 1995. Recent Photograph of a Sierra Nevada Red Fox. California Fish and Game 81:43-44.

Merriam, Clinton Hart. 1899. Results of a Biological Survey of Mount Shasta, California. Washington D.C.: U. S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Biological Survey.

Perrine, J. D., J. P. Pollinger, B. N. Sacks, R. H. Barrett, and R. K. Wayne. 2007. Genetic Evidence for the Persistence of the Critically Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox in Northern California. Conservation Genetics 8:1083-1095.

Southern California Edison Company. 2001. Final Technical Study Plan Package (FTSPP) for the Big Creek Hydroelectric Projects (FERC Project Nos. 67, 120, 2085, and 2175). Terrestrial Resources – Chapter 13 – Mesocarnivores. Rosemead, CA.

Wildlife Conservation Board. 2002. Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Animals, California, Canids, Carnivores, Corruption, Cows, Democrats, Domestic, Endangered Species, Environmentalism, Fish, Foxes, Government, Law, Local, Mammals, North America, Politics, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Reptiles, Republicans, Sierra Nevada Red Fox, US Politics, USA, West, Wild3 Comments on The Sierra Nevada Red Fox

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)