The Internet: A US-owned and Controlled Asset

A stunning claim, yet that is what is proposed in an incredible new Senate bill announced by Jew Lieberman, I mean Joe Lieberman, formerly a Democrat, then Independent Senator from Connecticut, now a National Socialist Senator from Tel Aviv.

The bill breathtakingly declares the entire Internet all over the world to be a US asset, and would give the President the right to seize it and shut it down in a national emergency. The purpose of the bill is supposedly to prevent a Cyber 9-11, but it looks like the cure is the same as as the disease it claims to prevent.

When Reactionaries Attack

It used to be that the average person was sane on most things. I will take my mother as your average person. Despite being a Republican for many years, she knew a few truths that were not friendly to capitalists.

That workers and owners are enemies under capitalism. That Communist regimes made great strides in health care, education, feeding and housing the people, and giving everyone a job. That unions are good for workers. That primitive people lived under a communist style culture. That the fencing of the Commons was a horrific nightmare for the average resident of the Britain and Ireland. That the US government gave away tons of free land to the railroads to keep workers from getting it and to proletarianize them and force them to sell their labor.

What we are seeing now is the horror that has resulted from the collapse of Communism. The rightwing has been radically emboldened by this failure, and they are pushing the craziest revisionist madness everywhere. The capitalists never give up, never say uncle, never concede an argument, never use logic and always and everywhere hate the truth. Information and theory is not a search for truth for the capitalist but only a sport or a form of warfare, one that will go on forever as long as they are capitalists alive to keep lying.

Did you know land reform always fails? Did you know that primitive man was actually a capitalist “free agent” negotiating his labor with his equals, like you now, chiefs and kings?

Did you know Mao killed 70 million? Did you know Stalin killed 60-110 million and the USSR period was one entirely of starvation, mass ruin and poverty? Did you know that Stalin and Mao were the biggest murderers of all time, much worse than the rightwingers’ hero, the far rightwing ultimate anti-Commie, Hitler? Did you know that Nazism was a leftwing movement? Did you know that Hitler was a socialist? Did you know that Stalin and Hitler were allies having a lovefest?

Did you know that mass budget cuts during a recession or Depression actually help the economy grow out of the downtown and do not worsen the economic crisis? Did you know that Roosevelt actually worsened the Depression with his massive spending and that Hooverism was actually the cure for the Depression?

Did you know that government health care and education always fail, and that private education and health care is the way to go? Did you know that privatization is the best thing for society in all cases, including especially the workers? Did you know that socialism is bad for workers? Did you know that unions actually harm workers? Did you know that deregulation is best for everyone? Did you know that tariffs and trade protectionism has been proven to be a failure, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary?

Did you know that the more socialist a government, the murderous the state is (RJ Rummel)? Did you know that libertarianism is the savior of the working class, the consumers, the environment, Hell, everything under the sun? Did you know that global warming is a fraud?

It’s really unfortunate that the Right has gotten so emboldened, because now the sane people have to spend all of our time refuting rightwing cant that was buried long ago, and has only been resurrected, zombie-like, from the dead, with the capitalist intellectual rally since 1989.

"Who Owns the Restaurant?" by Alpha Unit

Go into almost any business, particularly a restaurant, and you might see a posting that reads, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” This is perfectly lawful. But you can’t refuse service for just any old reason. The government said so. You can’t refuse to serve someone because he’s Black. Or Jewish. Or White. Or because she’s a woman. Or disabled. Or Muslim. The federal government says that you can’t refuse service on the basis of:

  1. race
  2. color
  3. religion
  4. national origin
  5. age
  6. sex
  7. familial status
  8. disability status
  9. veteran status

You can’t. That’s all there is to it. “Well, I own the restaurant!” you declare. “Why can’t I decide who I will and won’t serve, however I want to?” You own the restaurant, but the government lets you own it, you see. The government decides what you have to do to be able to own it and to keep owning it. Government-created infrastructure and government-mandated regulation of commerce make it possible for you to be in business. The government’s got its hands all over and all into your restaurant. (It’s got its hand in the till, too.) It gets to tell you how you can run your restaurant. That includes laying down the rules for refusing service. “This is government going too far!” you and Rand Paul might insist. Maybe. Government has a way of doing that. Somebody is always thinking that the government’s gone too far. And somebody is always thinking that it hasn’t gone far enough. One act of government can create both criticisms! No matter what it does, somebody’s not going to like it. Guaranteed.

“Who Owns the Restaurant?” by Alpha Unit

Go into almost any business, particularly a restaurant, and you might see a posting that reads, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” This is perfectly lawful.

But you can’t refuse service for just any old reason. The government said so. You can’t refuse to serve someone because he’s Black. Or Jewish. Or White. Or because she’s a woman. Or disabled. Or Muslim.

The federal government says that you can’t refuse service on the basis of:

  1. race
  2. color
  3. religion
  4. national origin
  5. age
  6. sex
  7. familial status
  8. disability status
  9. veteran status

You can’t. That’s all there is to it.

“Well, I own the restaurant!” you declare. “Why can’t I decide who I will and won’t serve, however I want to?”

You own the restaurant, but the government lets you own it, you see. The government decides what you have to do to be able to own it and to keep owning it. Government-created infrastructure and government-mandated regulation of commerce make it possible for you to be in business.

The government’s got its hands all over and all into your restaurant. (It’s got its hand in the till, too.)

It gets to tell you how you can run your restaurant. That includes laying down the rules for refusing service.

“This is government going too far!” you and Rand Paul might insist. Maybe. Government has a way of doing that.

Somebody is always thinking that the government’s gone too far. And somebody is always thinking that it hasn’t gone far enough. One act of government can create both criticisms!

No matter what it does, somebody’s not going to like it. Guaranteed.

Financial Reform: Fail

Financial reform has just passed both houses, but now it goes into reconciliation. This is worse than the health care bill, but it’s similar. Neither one is going to solve the problem, but the consequences for not solving the financial time bomb are worse than for not dealing adequately with health care. This bill was supposed to do two things, at a minimum:

  1. Make sure this doesn’t happen again.
  2. Restore Glass-Steagall, the bill repealed in 1998 by both parties and signed by Bill Clinton. Phil Graham and his wife Wendy Graham are the principal authors of the decades long assault on the Depression-era bill. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall, perhaps more than anything else, caused this latest crash.

It does neither.

There are a number of good things in the bill, but if you don’t do those two things above, it didn’t solve the problem. Worse, just as with health care, Obama will now say we dealt with it and let’s move on and not go back to that again.

The bill is in conference right now. The Republicans want the anti-derivatives language in the bill to be stripped. Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke all support the Republicans in this. Unbelievable.

If this makes anything clear, it’s that the Tea Partiers’ accusations of Obama being a socialist carry no weight at all. No socialist or even social democrat work his salt would ever do something like that. It’s also clear that Obama is still backing his bankster buddies who helped put him in office with those record campaign contributions from Wall Street.

New Anti-Illegal Immigration Bill in Arizona

Arizona just passed a new anti-illegal immigration bill which has people freaked out all over the country.

There is really a lot less to it than either side recognizes. All it does is make Arizona law the same as federal law, so it ought to be immune to court challenges. It also stipulates that cops can only check for immigration status after they stop someone for a legitimate reason, for example, for a traffic stop or if they are a suspect in some other crime. So there are not going to be any roundups or stops on the basis of someone looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish.

The Left has gone nuts over this bill, and the Obama Administration has registered their disapproval. That bills like this are being passed at all reveals frustration over the Feds’ refusal to enforce immigration law. So the solution, says everyone, is some crap called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Every time you see that word “comprehensive” with regard to immigration, start running away. That word is code for “amnesty.” Comprehensive = amnesty. It’s that simple.

It’s actually much worse than that.

The pro-illegal crowd not only wants amnesty for 12 million illegals, they also want to end “the militarization of the border.” What that means is that they want the Border Patrol pulled off the border.

They also want “an end to the raids.” What that means is that after we do amnesty, all of the new illegals will get a free pass into the country.

There won’t be any Border Patrol at the border, so the illegals will just walk across. Once the illegals are in the country, there won’t be any more raids, so they will get to stay here as long as they like. Until the next amnesty, that is. In other words, Open Borders.

The Democrats are trying to sell this “comprehensive immigration reform” stink bomb on this basis: We will legalize the 12 million already here, and then we won’t let one more illegal stay in this country. After we give them all amnesty, we are going to massively beef up border security and finally get control over the borders. They we will bust all the employers hiring the illegals, and we will make constant raids on any new illegals. The line is, “Sure, we are doing this amnesty once, but after that, there will never be another one.”

Forget it. Ain’t gonna happen. The US is never going to get control over its border because it doesn’t want to. The Republicans want the illegals to flood over for cheap labor, and the Democrats want them pouring over because that’s what their traitor Hispanic constituency wants.

The US is never going to bust all the employers. Ain’t gonna happen. There is already a workable program called E-Verify that can easily determine if any employee is an illegal or not. The Democrats have killed mandatory E-Verify and will continue to kill it forever.

The raids necessary to remove all of the illegals are never going to happen either.

Keep in mind that this was how they sold us that last treasonous amnesty in 1986 under Reagan. First it was only supposed to be for 500,000 illegals. It ended up legalizing 3 million of them. Back then, they said the same thing. We will give them amnesty this once, then we will get control over the border, crack down on the employers and remove all the illegals already here. None of these things happened because the powers that be want these millions of illegals here.

Furthermore, there will not just be 12 million illegals legalized. There will be another 30-40 million of their relatives coming in subsequent decades under family reunification, a much abused immigration law that needs a serious working over.

Let’s get this straight. Comprehensive immigration reform means not just amnesty for 12 million illegals and adding their 40 million relatives. It also means Open Borders. Because the pro-amnesty stance is essentially an Open Borders stance. Comprehensive immigration reform = amnesty = Open Borders.

I am going to tentatively support this law until we see how it actually works out. Supposedly, this makes me a fascist and a conservative. Fine, I’m a conservative and a fascist then, no problem.

Arizona has also done two other cool things.

They passed a law banning all ethnic studies programs at K-12 schools. There are Chicano Studies programs in many Arizona high schools, and they’re terrible. They are all being taught by Reconquista Aztlan MECHA and La Raza Hispanic traitors. This curriculum is furiously anti-White and openly treasonous. It has no place in US K-12 schools.

It’s lamentable that it exists at universities too, but all sorts of nonsense is taught at university level, and you can’t much get rid of it without running the risk of censoring higher education, which I don’t want to do.

Arizona also passed a law mandating that all English teachers in Arizona K-12 schools must be fluent in English and speak without a strong accent.

One wonders why such a law was needed.

Here is what happened. A while back, Arizona had bilingual education, which I actually support, since I have a Masters in Linguistics, and I know bilingual ed works for those who need it. Opposition to bilingual ed is not pedagogically sound or proper.

Eight years ago, Arizona got rid of all bilingual ed, a very bad idea. The schools had hired all these Hispanic bilingual ed teachers for their bilingual program, many of them from Latin America. Many of these folks spoke English only as a 2nd language and were not native English speakers.

After the state got rid of bilingual ed, the schools shifted the bilingual ed teachers to other subjects, mostly to teaching English. This bill is an attempt to deal with that problem. The bill is pedagogically sound. Indeed, only native English speakers should be teaching English in the US, where English is the de facto national language.

More states are going to pass such laws. Utah and Texas have introduced copies of Arizona’s bill. This will be nice because the more states that pass these bills, the harder it’s going to be for the pro-illegals to pull off their, “We are going to boycott this state!” threat. It’s fairly easy to boycott one state, but when it gets to two, three and more states, it’s going to be harder and harder to boycott so many states.

Elena Kagan’s Performance in Citizens United vs. The United States

From The Pen, or The People’s Email Network, a great site run by the left wing of the Democratic Party, an analysis of Elena Kagan, who is on Obama’s short list to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. According to this piece, Kagan looks like a bad choice. She seems to have badly bungled the government’s case in the outrageous Citizens United case. Let’s hope he picks someone else.

This post is a little hard to understand since it deals with legal theory, but I think most of you ought to be able to get through it. The main thing is that the Supremes were not allowed to write new law in this case. All they can rule on is findings of law, findings by the lower courts. Apparently the argument that the Supremes used to make their decision was dumped by all the lower courts. Even the plaintiffs apparently dumped it.

In these cases, they are supposed to remand to the lower court and ask to them to consider the new finding that the Supremes wish to pull out of their ass. This should have been Kagan’s main argument, but she hardly used it at all.

I’m not sure anything could have been done to stop this court from ruling this way though. They seem to have been dead set on it.

But she does seem to be an inferior legal mind to either Roberts or Alito, and possibly even to Clarence Thomas, which is pretty bad.

In a moment the 9th of our series of analyses cutting up the Supreme Court’s dreadful corporate personhood decision, as it relates specifically to the worst choice that could be made, current Solicitor General Elena Kagan.

Even with the tens of thousands we have distributed already, we are still just starting to plaster “Corporations Are NOT The People” stickers on bumpers all over the country. So do please consider being the key activist in your own local neighborhood by picking up one of the 25 bulk packs for a modest cost, just enough for use to keep all this going.

Bulk Bumper Stickers

Free Bumper Stickers

We were not sure if we should address the embarrassingly pathetic performance by Solicitor General Elena Kagan in this analysis series of the multitude of unconscionable and premeditated errors foisted on the American people, when the Supreme Court held that corporations were the true rulers of all us. But since Kagan’s name is again being tossed about as a replacement for retiring Justice Stevens, we have no choice.

So we will confront this now, and will pick up the last thread we were discussing (the Supreme Court’s contortion of the First Amendment) again in the next installment after this.

Even we would have to admit that the government’s (Kagan’s) argument in this case did not even rise to the level of lameness. Because her performance was so muddle headed, Kennedy claimed license to say that the people must therefore lose. It is a specious excuse of course, because the Supreme Court has an independent obligation to respect precedent regardless of how poorly cited by the party for the people, as the justices being so wrongfully overturned no doubt argued behind the scenes (Stevens opinion pp. 7-8).

And moreover, Seth P. Waxman (who also argued the people’s side in oral argument) made the points that needed to be made, even if they flew right by Kagan herself.

And the first and most important of those points was that the Supreme Court was rushing into this decision in the stark absence of any record of testimony in the Court below to develop findings of fact on the issue they themselves wanted to resurrect (having previously been abandoned in the court below and not preserved for appeal by the corporations’ advocate).

For those who have not been following this series from the beginning, in the second installment we talked about what a “finding of fact” was, and how the review power of appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, is supposed to be limited to making rulings of law, based on a record of testimony on the facts developed by the original trial court. If you like and it would be helpful, you can go back and read the second part on OpedNews.com.

So the complaint that the Supreme Court was barging ahead without even a factual record to support their decision was one of the first points we made in this series, and it should have been the first words out of Kagan’s mouth.

While Kagan in her written filings kind of made the procedural point that the Supreme Court should not revive the issue waived in the court below (Supplemental brief of appellee Federal Election Commission, pp. 3-5), at NO time did she argue that even if the Court were inclined to do so, it still could not do so fairly without returning the case back to the lower court for further proceedings there (what is called a “remand”).

What a remand would do is preclude an immediate (and in this case ill-advisedly hasty) decision by the Supreme Court, but allowing that it could be reviewed again after those necessary findings of fact were conducted, presuming one of the parties wanted to again appeal the subsequent decision by the lower court.

For her part, Justice Sotomayor did as valiant a job as she could to hand Kagan the ball, raising this issue herself when questioning attorney Olson (Oral argument, p. 25, lines 16-22.) Attorney Seth Waxman himself did indeed put up a glove to try to catch this ball by the end of his own presentation (Oral argument, p. 75, line 10 – p. 77, line 2). But it should have been the government’s first bulwark. Kagan did more than drop the ball, she did not even notice that there was a ball.

And the reason is, Kagan was so self-absorbed with the sound of her own voice, wandering miles away from any point persuasive on the case actually before the court, she did not even have a coherent presentation in mind stepping into that chamber. Kennedy ridiculed her in the opinion, describing the “litigating position of the Government” with the word “uncertainty” (Opinion, p. 23).

Roberts was even more pointed in his concurring opinion mocking her for discarding the original reasoning (the only righteous basis for stare decisis in the first place) which supported the cases they were unilaterally determined to reverse (Roberts opinion, pp. 12-13).

Here we remind you (part 5 of this series) that the only thing binding as precedent about a previous Supreme Court decision is the reasoning by which it was reached on the point of law critical to the decision, what is called its “essential holding”. But instead of making a strong defense of the Austin case based on its essential holding, Kagan walked in with a grab bag of alternative theories, including a vague one of her own, namely “something related to the shareholder interest that is in truth my view of Austin” (Oral argument, p 48, lines 14-15).

Hey, Kagan, who gives a flying fig what your view of the case is? Your job as Solicitor General was to argue what the view was of the Supreme Court justices who wrote the opinion you were there to preserve, to reinforce their reasoning, the basis of the precedent, not egotistically invent fatuous new theories on the spot in oral argument to show off what a brilliant legal mind you have. Nothing could demonstrate more that Kagan hasn’t got the slightest clue what our entire legal system, let alone the Supreme Court, is supposed to be about.

So utterly disconnected was Kagan from what was actually going on in that oral argument that Justice Stevens himself had to correct her for getting wrong the point that he was trying to help her with (Oral argument, p. 43, lines 3-5).

Oh, but it gets so much worse. Behold this black pearl of oral argument advocacy out of Kagan’s mouth.

“If you asking me, Mr. Chief Justice, as to whether the government has a preference as to the way in which it loses, if it has to lose, the answer is yes,” (Oral argument, p. 40, lines 4-7).

Yes, that’s the ticket, let’s go to the Supreme Court so we can tell them how they can rule against us. Let’s walk in with the attitude that we want to give them a road map about how we want to lose. Good grief!!

The most important quality of Justice Stevens, and why his replacement is so important, was his ability to build consensus in persuading other judges to join him, were they to be fair minded at all. In Kagan we would have the exact opposite, a self-indulgent self-marginalizer, who doesn’t even possess the listening skills to even hear what those who would be her fellow justices, were she unfortunately to be appointed, are saying.

She not only hasn’t got the legal mental weight to stand up to Kennedy or Roberts, she couldn’t even stand toe to toe with Thomas. He didn’t even have to open his mouth for her to make a fool of herself.

There is a sophomoric tradition in the Supreme Court that when a new justice is appointed they become the designated coffee fetcher for the rest when they conference together. Based on her abysmal performance in this case, we can predict with certainly that if we are stuck with Kagan as the next appointee she will never (without massive clerking help) rise above the level of legal coffee fetcher. We say anybody but Kagan. Enabling by her fumbling incompetence the worst Supreme Court decision of the last century is enough damage for one legal career.

Anarcho-Capitalism? We Already Have It

The previous post dealt with the sheer madness of something called anarcho-capitalism, a baffling philosophy with roots in anarchism, capitalism and especially libertarianism. Because anarchism is typically a Leftist philosophy, one wonders whether anarcho-capitalism is right or leftwing. Anarcho-capitalists are quite coy, like Libertardians, and often refuse to admit that they are extreme rightwingers. Instead, they say they are “neither right nor left.”

This has ended up conning a lot of fools, mostly young, single, moneyed, male fools, usually White but disturbingly sometimes also Black and Hispanic, into lining up with Libertardianism as some sort of weird progressive vision.

It’s nothing of the kind.

True, many anarchists are Leftists, but searching through the Wikipedia article on anarcho-capitalism, I found few if any Leftists. I did find tons of rightwingers, mostly extreme rightwingers, often Libertardians, but also in many cases White racists such as White Separatists, neo-Confederates, paleocons, etc.

There can’t possibly be anything progressive about anarcho-capitalism, not in any possible universe. Most of us on the Left are dubious at best about capitalism. Capitalism may be a necessary evil, but so what? So is death, disease, all sorts of shitty things. Big deal. I should as much cheer for capitalism as I cheer for aging and death. Three cheers!

Anarcho-capitalism is everything fucked about capitalism balled into one horrific, nightmarish mass, compressed into a solid and toxic cannonball with the density of a Black Hole hurling right at your face, and no ducking allowed. Lie back and enjoy it, suckers.

Let us be clear. We Leftists are Big Staters. We like taxation to a degree, government services that benefit the people, redistribution of wealth to a degree, Big Government programs, etc. We don’t need a classless society; I have no objections to a physician making eight times more than a ditch-digger. But at some point extremes of wealth call for intense government redistribution of wealth.

The capitalist or “successful person” has generally “earned” his right to untold multiples of average wealth only in the most dubious in senses.

Capitalism, such that we allow this necessary evil beast to exist at all, needs to be caged, like all wild and dangerous animals. Capitalism must be regulated. Not strangled, but regulated.

As this article makes clear, we’ve already got something like anarcho-capitalism. It’s called the Republican Party. Or the teabaggers. Or the conservatives. It isn’t really the pure, real deal anarcho-capitalism, but it’s heading there.

The Bush Administration was a quasi-anarcho-capitalist administration. The insanity of anarcho-capitalism is shown by the theory that the best society is one in which business regulates itself. The Bush Administration relied on “voluntary regulation” more times than I can count.

The problem with voluntary regulation is that it’s no regulation at all. Business sectors under a regime of voluntary regulation generally refuse to regulate themselves in any way whatsoever. This has been proven so many times, there’s no use testing it anymore.

According to this theory, the good businesses regulate themselves and  win out in the context with the evil businesses who refuse to regulate themselves, and the capitalists get rich and everyone lives happily ever after.

This is the most cruel of fantasy worlds.

In capitalism, bad is much more like to drive out good than the other way around, the prerogatives of capital being what they are.

Looking around the world, capitalists aren’t exactly regulating themselves just to be nice and get workers, society, environmentalists and liberals to love their company and buy their shit instead of Evil Co’s shit. When all the successful corporations are spawns and clones of Evil Co., you either go evil yourself or you’re in Chapter 13.

The main thing is that all the nice stuff that business is supposed to do – not abuse workers or consumers, not pollute, not destroy the environment, pay their taxes, not destroy society and the economy – all of these business ethics are bad for the bottom line.

Abuse your workers and customers and refuse to regulate yourself? Your bottom line goes up.

Destroy the environment, society and the economy? Your stock’s rising.

Do the right thing, treat your workers and consumers well, regulate yourself, be kind to the environment, be a good corporate citizen? Watch your competitors, Mafia Co. and Evil Scum, Ltd. make mincemeat out of you.

From the article:

If you are an anarcho-capitalist, you believe that the force of the market will have companies do the right thing. The problem with this idea is that what is right for a nation is not the same as what is right for a profit making enterprise…

This is what corporations are for, the pursuit of profit. If they are not limited, then they become rapacious entities which will cut any corner, bend any rule to make more and more money. Corporations are prone to this kind of behavior even when they are limited by regulation, which is why there must be strong enforcement as well.

As you can see, anarcho-capitalism is utopia!

It is time to stop calling the Republicans capitalists, they are no longer that benign, we need to start pointing out the fact they would be happiest with no regulation. This is a powerful meme, if we are willing to use it.

No regulation means a return to acid rain. No regulation means not knowing if your medicines are safe. It means that our drinking water could have lead and PCP’s and other contaminants. It means that we would be unable to have an confidence in the safety of our cars or washing machines or ovens. It would take us to a society where the only motto is Caveat Emptor, buyer beware.

Yeah right. Some utopia.

Noam Chomsky, an anarcho-syndicalist Leftist, on anarcho-capitalism:

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn’t the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error.

The idea of “free contract” between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Anarcho-capitalism? We’ve already got it, or we’re heading there anyway.

I Never Knew Hayek Was a Socialist

But there are two kinds of security: the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all and the security of a given standard of life, of the relative position which one person or group enjoys compared with others.

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

It is planning for security of the second kind which has such an insidious effect on liberty. It is planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their incomes.

Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that all claims for a privileged security of particular classes must lapse

[T]here is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.

There can be no question that adequate security against severe privation will have to be one of our main goals of policy (Hayek 1944).

Friedrich Hayek is the God of the “Austrian” Libertarians, the nuttiest of all, and The Road to Serfdom is his Bible. But if you actually read this monster book, it turns out that Hayek would be called a Communist by the teabaggers, Republicans, elites and corporations of today, since, anyone insisting on any minimum safety net is automatically a Communist. At the very least some kind of social democrat. Hayek was to the Left of Bill Clinton, who got rid of welfare. He’s to the Left of Barack Obama, who is busy trying to destroy Social Security.

It’s a sad day when they Hayeks are so reasonable that they’re nearly social democrats because the center has moved to the right of Hayek himself.

Of all of the Libertarian thinkers, the Austrians are considered the craziest and most dangerous of them all. Those lined up with the Austrians include the wildest of the Libertarians, including the fake anarchists known as anarcho-capitalists (I thought we had anarcho-capitalism already).

These people move beyond gutting all social spending and all normal government functions, selling off all roads, parks, forests, beaches, marine reserves, grasslands, etc. Supposedly, the gap in social spending will be taken up by charities, who will compete to see who can serve the poor better. LOL! Why would anyone get into the “business” of being a charity? For God’s sake, there’s no money to be made. It’s all just a money-loser. That right there just shows you how deranged Libertarians are.

Anyway, the Austrians go beyond. The want to get rid of state cops, fire departments and even courts. They will replace them with private cops and private firefighters. How these guys bill I will never figure out. Supposedly they will compete on how best they serve the public.

I guess the nice White suburbs can hardass Crack Down on Crime cops for their money, while the ghetto folks (How will they have the money to buy any cops?) will purchase the laid-back, Go Easy on the Criminals Cops, perfect for a criminal society. I assume at some point the private cop forces (Really warlordism) will inevitably shoot it out as private warlord cop armies and paramilitaries do all over the 3rd World. I suppose that’s all part of the anarcho-capitalism fun and games, dodging the bullets and all.

Fire departments? Competition once again? And how do they get paid? The perfect Republican way. Your house burns down, you not only over fork over for everything else you lost and buying everything new but you dish out another $20K for the bastards who fought your fire.

Of course, the longer the fire goes on, the more they make, so firefighters will drag out their battles with the flames. Since they get paid per fire fought, at some point, firefighters or the paramilitary gangs allied with them will go around torching places so they can get paid to fight the fires.

Courts? Why, we will have competition in the court system! Criminals will prefer the Get Out of Jail Free Court, while victims will prefer the Hang Em High Court. How they will sort this all out no one knows.

You buy and sell your leaders too. Kind like most capitalist societies already do, you know?

The environment will take care of itself, as it’s the evil state that wrecks the environment, not the naturophilic capitalist John Muir-Rachel Carson types.

Some advocate getting rid of all laws, which leaves it an open question why you would need cops. Some guy just shot your family? Take the bastard to court, dammit! Ruin his credit forever!

Others want laws to be bought and sold on the free market, but they already are anyway here in anarcho-capitalist US, so I don’t see how this is a reform.

I guess the military gets replaced by private militias, contractors and mercenaries, but there’s nothing new about that. It already operates that way in Russia and the 3rd World, where the rich and businesses have their own private armies, frequently assassinating their competitors.

The defense of those who could not afford cops or armies. Why, wonderful charity armies would spring up to lay it all on the line for your sorry impoverished ass for free. Yeah right.

Clearly, corporations would buy their own armies and would not only attack workers, communities, etc. like say the Colombian death squads of today, but they would even go further and in the US, where the private armies had the latest military hardware, surely they would attack other nations to drive out competitors, overthrow regimes bad for business, force open new markets, etc. All the stuff that imperialist militaries already do, but with the sociopathic ethics of capitalism to make it all even more shitty and evil than it already is.

A lot of racists, especially White Southern racists, support anarcho-capitalism because, well, Southern caste society has always been pretty anarcho-capitalistic anyway. What was the KKK but a private militia? Also, in the glorious anarcho-capitalist world, everyone can discriminate their asses off against anyone they want to, and that prospect makes racists go all google-eyed.

As you can see, the Austrians even distort the findings of their leader, Hayek.

They lie, like most neoliberals do.

Just like how the neoliberals lie about Adam Smith, who was adamant that the state had to manage the free market. The neoliberals just pick and choose the crap they want to believe even from the Biblical tomes of their Gods. Like rabbis arguing over the Talmud, it’s all a matter of interpretation to them.

References

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1944. The Road To Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, pp. 120-122

“The Truth About ‘Indian Socialism’,” by Peter Tobin

Via my colleague Peter Tobin, an explication of Indian socialism. I told him that commenters were saying that India had already tried socialism and it had failed, so Maoism was doomed from the start and had already been tried anyway. I doubted this and asked him for an explication of Indian socialism, how it differed from Maoism and why it failed, particularly even in a socialist sense.

Peter is very smart, and he’s also a very good writer.

Regarding the notion about India having already tried socialism – it depends on what you call ‘socialism.’

Congress India was a progressive nationalist party which had an, admittedly, sizable socialist faction. During the twenties and thirties it became dominant and at Independence could claim the adherence of the two leading figures in CI, Nehru and Menon.

Their socialism, however, was that of the Second International, which from the beginning of the 20th century became an openly reformist option, which accepted the constitutional niceties of bourgeois democracy.

It specifically rejected the path of Communist revolution in favour of Fabian strategy, which envisaged socialism coming through an evolutionary process, in which the free market dissolved before the logic of more intense collective measures brought about by the tendencies of all markets to monopolize and all industrial processes to become more collective.

This process would be aided by socialist/social democratic parties enacting progressive legislation through a parliamentary system, in which it would compete in the ‘market place of democracy’ with openly bourgeois parties.

The parties who successfully operated within these parameters were initially the Scandinavian countries before the second world war and fairly spectacularly by the post-war Labour party in Britain, which nationalized the commanding heights of the economy, rail, steel, coal, etc and initiated the Welfare State. Other European countries, to a greater or lesser degree, followed this path, among whom the most outstanding was West Germany.

These developments were made possible by Marshall Aid, granted by America, as a means of competing with the Soviet bloc at on level and containing it at another, (Viz Harriman, Kennan).

It is also a hard fact that large sections of the economy were left in private hands, and the principle of the mixed economy was accepted, with the proviso – and certainty – that they would inevitably wither (see above).

The SI came from Marxism (especially that of the German Social Democrats) but it abandoned Marx’s revolutionary side (vide; Kautsky) because it claimed that socialism was economically determined, as against Lenin and the Third International who argued for revolutionary political intervention and the involvement of the masses, under the leadership of a vanguard Communist party.

The progressive left of Congress India emerged under the influence of, and eventually joined, the SI. Mao, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, etc. followed the path of Lenin and the TI.

It is true that Congress India did try to follow a Western type of parliamentary democratic socialism in the post-Independence spirit of optimism, and a diluted form of socialism was promoted which stressed economic planning and welfare. There were also state investments where there were no private interests. There was a State Commission in 1950 which saw the first 5 year plan launched in 1951, which while nationalizing some of new, but still insignificant, modern industrial sectors, e.g, steel, mainly concentrated on raising agricultural output.

Initially there were some good GDP growth rates, but there was almost complete failure to provide decent, comprehensive welfare and to alleviate the plight of the overwhelming rural majority. But this socialism was a half dead thing in a half dead world because in did not involve a land to the tiller or cooperative element, leaving the landlords and the zamindars in ownership and control.

Crucially, while the Ambedkar Constitution outlawed casteism in theory, in practice it remained a decisive social and cultural force. How can expect to build socialism without the involvement, based on equality, of the broad masses?

Capitalist, Brahminical corruption remained and grew in strength, and with India’s humiliating defeat by the Chinese in 1962, Nehru’s attempt to, as he said in 1955 to establish “a socialist pattern of society,” was effectively over and India started the march towards Anglo-Saxon style capitalism.

The Chinese Communist Party did not fuck around; they seized all the commanding heights of the economy, especially agriculture, freed the peasants from the grip of the landlords and began their long march based upon collectivization, mass participation and cultural revolution. Ultimately, wherever they are at the moment, it was much more successful than the feeble Indian attempt.

It is Mao’s type of socialism that the Indian masses need, not Nehru’s (who was only picked by Gandhi to divert radicalism from Communism). That is what the comrades in the CPI (Maoist) are fighting for.

Please point to these people that therefore, socialism is not homogeneous, but takes different forms given different objective historical and ideological conditions. Also there are some who wave the red flag in order to oppose it.

India tried a form of democratic socialism that has since failed in the developed countries to a greater or lesser extent, as most of these SI parties are now more or less on board with the neoliberal form of free market capitalism that has dominated the last thirty years.

India gained its Independence in heroic circumstances and after bitter struggle, but it did not follow through with a thoroughgoing revolution that emancipated and unlocked the creativity and potential of its peoples.

But it is never too late, so let the corrupt, gangster, Brahminical, comprador class tremble. There is a broom moving that will sweep them in to the dustbin of history. They know this and that is why they have launched Operation Green Hunt, with American and Israeli aid – and generally replaced the ‘world’s biggest democracy’ with the world biggest fascist state.

Inquilab Zindabad!

Republican Attorney Generals File Legal Challenges to Health Care Reform

As soon as health care reform passed, just about every single Republican Attorney General said they were going to appeal the bill as unconstitutional and fight it all the way to the Supreme Court of Reactionary Dunces.

They are going to use two different modes of attack.

1. State’s rights. An argument that state’s rights trumps the ability of the federal government to legislate in this area and that in this area, if not in all others, state law trumps federal law.

2. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

Problems:

1. Reactionaries all down through American history, most spectacularly White Southern racists, have rallied behind the phantom of state’s rights. State’s rights is the fetish of the rightwing, typically racist and often Southern Right. That’s it’s now a fetish of the entire Republican Party indicates how neo-Confederatism and the ideology of White Southern racism now frankly define the GOP as a whole.

The states’ rights thing is a red herring. Segregationists brought it up all through the civil rights struggle, and they lost every time. To be honest, this issue was settled with the signing of the Constitution itself, where it was flatly written out that federal law in general trumps state law. This battle is over before it’s started.

2. The Commerce Clause. The problem is that the 9th Amendment, I believe, crucially assigns the Feds the right to regulate interstate commerce. Luckily for Big Statists like me, the Feds have used this legalism endless times to regulate everything under the sun and override state laws.

The crucial battle was fought in the 1830’s under Andrew Jackson. The details elude me, but the Commerce Clause state’s righters went down, and ability of the Feds to regulate interstate commerce with an expansive definition thereof was enshrined forever after. The Right has been bringing up “Commerce Clause!” endlessly ever since, and they get spanked down every time.

So, one battle was lost in 1789 and the other around 1834. This fight looks like a real loser. On the other hand, this Supreme Court is just reactionary nutty enough that I’m a bit worried. They’d be quite willing to toss a century of in stare decisis on its head if they so chose. But something tells me that they won’t.

As an example of how nuts this Republican Party is, I believe that every single Republican legislator, even the most liberal ones on the Northeast, is on record for repeal of this meager health reform bill.

Here in California, the only Republicans who get anywhere are quite liberal. Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell are two classic California liberal Silicon Valley Republicans. I was shocked to hear that this year both of them were at Tea Party gatherings cheering the loons on, and both screeched the day after Health Care Reform was signed that they were going to repeal it or die trying.

This isn’t your father’s GOP.

Even I grew up under Nixon, Ford and Rockefeller Republicans. There’s something seriously unhinged about the Republican Party, and America, these days. Fully 1/3 Americans say they are Tea Party supporters. For the past 30 years, the GOP has been getting more and more wack with each passing year.

When I was a kid in California in the 1960’s, your everyday, average 2010 Republican was known at that time as a “rightwing nut.” They were the Goldwaterites and the John Birchers. They were treated with a mix of outrage, derision and contempt. Now the Goldwaterites and the Birchers own the party, and everyone else has long gone home. Even worse, 2010 Republicans almost make Barry Goldwater look like a moderate in some ways.

Things are getting really weird.

Does Dumb Population = Dumb Government?

A new commenter, Portland Bus Driver, suggests that the IQ of a general population is reflected in the IQ of its top state officials. I beg to disagree. He also points to some behavioral differences between his Hispanic and Black passengers and suggests that it’s not all IQ. In fact he’s correct. Illegals probably have lower IQ’s than Blacks. Race realists typically bandy about the “Blacks act bad because they’re stupid” thing. In the case of US and UK Blacks anyway, I’d just as soon chuck this theory.

There is most definitely a causal relationship between higher IQ and a potential economic situation. Look at predominately East Asian and white countries compared to any black country, and South Africa does not count. Brazil is 5

The point is that the commanding heights of the economy and government must be in the hands of higher IQ people. Once the lower IQ masses take over –See: Haiti, Rhodesia, the US after George Bush 🙂 — the country declines.

That being said, environment and culture and all of that can still play a role.

In my experience Hispanics ride the bus to work early in the morning with lunchboxes, they show me respect and pay their fare (or have counterfeit fare). Blacks start getting on later in the afternoon in comfy workout style clothes to go “chill”. Then the Hispanics come home from work.

Later that night the blacks get back on in expensive clothes and jewelry and watches and flash their bus pass which is right next to their food stamp card, they give me a dirty look and use obscene language right next to children. I could go on, my point is that it is not just IQ, Hispanics may have some other trait that predisposes them to work. Every black run society, with a few exceptions that are easily explained, is economically “disadvantaged.”

I would say it is the IQ of the population that matters. Yet South Africa was able to work pretty well as long as the high-IQ Whites were running the state. S. African White IQ = 94.

But I bet that in the present South African government, at the highest positions, you have folks with high IQ’s. Same in Latin America, South Asia, SE Asia, Arabia, North Africa, the Caribbean. Even though the general population may be dumb as rocks, the folks at the top of government are typically well-educated and bright.

So I don’t think low IQ country = low IQ idiots in government. I just don’t buy it. Besides, past a certain point, IQ just does not matter. It’s “high enough.”

More than the state, it is the IQ of the general population that matters in terms of how the society functions. Let’s not place too much emphasis on government here! In Haiti, I imagine that those at the stop of the state are bright folks. I have met some of the Haitian elite, and they were not stupid at all. I’ve also met some of the African elite, and they were not dumb either. I have met very bright Africans from all over Sub-Saharan Africa. Surely there are enough bright folks to form a competent state at the highest levels.

You may start running into problems at the local levels, but I still say that it’s the composition of society, not the state, that matters. If your society has an IQ of 67 or 72, I am sorry, but chances are you are going to have lots of problems functioning in the modern world no matter how bright your officials are. This is what is really going on here when we compare say Africa with East Asia and the US.

The “Obama is in charge so dumb Blacks rule” thing is a fallacy. I don’t know Obama’s IQ, but it has to be higher than George Bush’s. Obama’s administration is full of bright folks of all different races. They are certainly intelligent enough to run a modern state well. He is conflating a relatively lower Black IQ with “Obama” and his admin. But Obama is very smart, and so is his Cabinet and his aides.

The IQ of Mexican immigrants is probably ~85. The IQ of US Blacks is 86.8. The illegals are less intelligent than the Blacks. But look at the behavioral difference. Let us not place too much weight on IQ.

Also, let us not conflate US and UK Black IQ = 86.8 and 86, with African IQ = 67. The IQ’s of US and UK Blacks are about 20 points higher. That alone almost makes them a separate race.

There are many societies that function quite well and have IQ’s of 86-87. US and UK Black IQ is certainly adequate to function in modern society. That they don’t seem to do too well has its reasons I’m sure, but IQ can’t possibly be one of them.

He suggests that every Black society is economically disadvantaged. However, there are some Black nations in the Caribbean and even in Africa that are doing quite well.  Equatorial Guinea and Gabon have per capita incomes of ~$20,000/yr.

Opposition to Health Care Reform Has Nothing To Do With Race

Video here .

Oh, of course not. In fact, this video really sums up what the whole Republican Party has been all about for a good 30 years now. Why do only

We have lots of Republican commenters on this site who insist that the party has nothing to do with race. Well, maybe for them it doesn’t. A lot of White Republicans don’t necessarily seem like very racist people. I’ve known some of them. On the other hand, they aren’t very anti-racist people either. And almost all Republicans are running interference for the racists in the party. I don’t know if that’s racism, but it’s almost getting there. I sure don’t want to be apologizing for racist jerks on here. My clean soul doesn’t need to be smudged with that grunge.

The calculus is simple. White America is a racist politic. Not that all Whites are racist, but if you want to get the White vote, the racists are such a huge block that you need to play to them. If you don’t play to the racists, you lose the White vote. The Democrats last carried Whites in 1964. That year mean anything to you?

1964.

That’s the year Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. With what I imagine was his classic haunted expression, Johnson presciently noted, “Well, we just lost the South for a generation.” It was longer than that, and it was worse than that. It wasn’t just the South, it was the White body politic. And it’s been more than one generation now.

I’m not even sure how racist your average Republican pol is. These guys are cynical like human snakes. Republicans get elected by mining White racist bullshit, so that’s the game plan, morality be damned.

Why don’t the Dems do the same? Well, there are no votes in it for us. If we imply, “Condi’s a nigger!” snigger, snigger, well, there are no votes in that. We can’t get the votes of White racist voters by playing to their racist bullshit. Our base won’t stand for it. If we make that Condi remark above, our base goes ballistic.

And anyway, the Republicans can always out-racist a racist White Democrat. Some conservative White Dems to try to run by appealing to White racism, but the Republican opponent can always out-KKK them, so the Dem always loses. When they have to choose between a real Republican and a fake one (A Democrat pretending to be a Republican), the voters always pick the real deal.

However, the Dems are not stupid. One way to play to the White racist vote is to run rednecks for President. So we get Southern good ol’ boys like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, with some implied racism to go along with it.

One thing for sure though, for a Democrat to win, he must carry through with one ritual: “Stick it to the Blacks!” At least once in the campaign, the Dem must “stick it to the niggers” to show the White rednecks that he’s not with the Black enemy, that he’s on their side in the race war.

Hence Bill Clinton’s ritual denunciation of Sista Soulja in one of his campaigns.

In another Clinton campaign, Bill ran home to Arkansas right before the election to pull the trigger and fry some retarded Black guy in the electric chair. He killed the poor Black guy, then ran back to Washington to campaign. He won the election.

One thing that was interesting about Obama’s election was that this was the first time in many years that a Dem has not had to ritually “stick it to the Blacks” in the campaign. Obama ran an openly pro-Black campaign all through the election, and he somehow won anyway. In America, that’s called a watershed. Predictably, crossing this racial Rubicon threatens to herald a giant step forward in US race relations. Alarmed, and frequently armed, the militias and Teabaggers are lining up in formation to combat the realignment.

“Limited Government” in Action

It is a standard trope of the Right, at least here in the US, that one of the things that they hold dearest is something called “limited government.”

In the rest of the world, that’s pretty much what the Right wants too, though in the rest of the world, they can’t say that, because the people don’t want “limited government.” So they say other things. In much of the rest of the world, the Right usually has to pledge to battle poverty. In the 3rd World, everyone from all ends of the spectrum usually pledges to battle poverty.

But only the Left ever does anything about it. That’s because in the 3rd World, the Right stands for neoliberalism or unbridled capitalism and mimimal government. Neoliberalism, unbridled capitalism and minimal government are usually not capable of battling poverty. And why should they be? Truth is there’s no money in fighting poverty. In fact, from a capitalist POV, fighting poverty is usually a gigantic money-loser.

Hence, anti-poverty measures are typically undertaken by the state, since the state doesn’t care whether it loses money or not.

Neoliberals often tout economic growth as a poverty fighter, but it doesn’t work very well. Decades of experience with neoliberalism has shown us that neoliberalism usually benefits only the top 2

The neoliberal liars noticed this early on, and said, “Just wait! Neoliberalism takes time to filter down to the masses.” So people waited and waited, and the trickling down never happened. After decades, people not being stupid, they got gave it up and said, “Chuck the neoliberalism.” This is what is happening in Latin America.

Of course, the US, the World Bank, the IMF, most of the Western media still push neoliberalism since it’s great for corporations and the top 2

If you’re a big business or have lots of money, neoliberalism tastes pretty good. But for the vast majority of humanity, it’s nothing but a shit sandwich.

In the US, the Republican Party only works for the top 2

The Asian tigers are held up by neoliberal liars as exemplary examples of the glories of neoliberalism. True, they’ve had great economic growth. But they sure as Hell didn’t do it with neoliberalism.

First of all, they all put into place a comprehensive land reform. This is essential to wipe out feudal relations in the countryside and get rid of rural poverty and hence take out revolutionary sentiment in the rural areas. In addition, after land reform, the nation can often grow much of its own food, and it doesn’t need to import so much food.

Most countries that have not undertaken land reforms are still seriously fucked up.

Any Latin American nation that undertakes a land reform is immediately threatened by the US with aid cutoffs, and the US, via the CIA, usually tries to take out the government in various ways, usually via a coup or assassinations. In this way, US imperialism has prevented development in Latin America. Local elites are traitors who care nothing about the long-term development of their national economies. They live like royalty via feudal land relations, so they always oppose necessary land reforms, and hence, the nation stays backwards and fucked up.

In addition to land reform, the tigers all undertook heavily state-dependent development. Their development was characterized by intense economic nationalism, state-guided development, often social democratic features either provided by the state or corporations themselves as in Japan, and intense economic protectionism until fledgling industries could finally compete internationally. The tigers didn’t use neoliberalism at all. They used the opposite!

Neoliberalism will never develop one country on Earth. It works, in a way, in an already developed country, but everywhere, even there, it has a Third-Worldization effect on the public space.

The best place to look at the effects of limited government is where it’s been tried since Day One: The Third World! If there’s anything that characterizes the Third World, it’s limited government. It’s almost libertarian in that respect. You can see the shithole that has resulted, quite logically, from a gelded public sector in the Third World. Limited government creates shitholes.

Sure, rich people don’t mind living in a shithole. They just create nice little rich people enclaves where they live it up and say the Hell with the rest of the country.

You can actually live pretty well in a shithole with tons of money, cheap hired help, armed guards or a private army, gates or walls around your residence or property, a septic tank, bottled water, a 4X4 all wheel drive and a generator. There are always private schools for the kids, private clinics if you get sick and nice upscale shopping areas where you can buy whatever you want.

You usually pay no taxes either, which is pretty cool. The state, to the extent that it exists at all, is controlled by you and your buddies, and the military and cops are at your beck and call to solve any issues you might have with the hoi-polloi.

Even limited government is not enough for quite a few typically young and moneyed American naifs. They desire the Super Deluxe limited government – full-blown Libertarianism.

Libertardianism is so insane that fortunately it’s never really been tried, except we seem to have a lab experiment going on in Somalia right now. There’s been no state at all there for over a decade now, so it’s full-blown anarcho-capitalism or super-radical libertarianism.

There aren’t even any cops or army. In their stead, obviously, private cops and private armies have sprung up. They even “compete” anarcho-capitalist style, but having continuous shooting wars with each other, the logical consequence anywhere on Earth you have private cops and armies (in effect, warlords). Nothing works, and Somalia’s even more of a shithole than it’s ever been.

There are even some wonderful insurgencies running amok. The insurgents get a lot of support with their calls to “restore order and rule of law.” So much for popular support for Libertardianism.

On most standard scales of fuckedupedness, Somalia is either #1 or in the Top 5.

Way to go, Libertardians, way to fuckin’ go.

“They’ve Come Undone,” by Alpha Unit

A lot of right-wing Americans are boiling over with fear and loathing over this “health care” bill that just got signed into law. I hear they’re smashing windows, making death threats against legislators and their kids, urging one another to lock and load (Why aren’t some of these people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?). Listening to them, you’d think this is the first time in American history that “government” ever became synonymous with “tyranny.” It’s going to start making people do things against their will and everything.

They can’t be serious, can they?

Is this new law what it took to slap some sense into them? It seems they’ve never heard of government imposing itself on “the people” before. Or forcing you to do something – or buy something – against your will. That’s what governments do best, right wingers – force people to do stuff. You of all people should know that. Some of you have been telling us for years that government is force. And you are right. The only difference is what things you’re being forced to do by which governments.”

“Well, the government’s gonna force me to buy health insurance!” you protest. Is this the first time the government ever made you buy anything? The government makes people buy all kinds of things – infant car seats, low-flow toilets, car insurance, you name it. I don’t like it, either. But you didn’t notice until now that the government can order you to buy something? For your own good? (It’s always for your own good.)

The government insists on being notified if you want to add on to your house, for goodness’ sake. Your very own house that you own free and clear, that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with. You’ve got to notify them and you’ve got to make sure they approve of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Thinking of taking in a renter? There are laws about that. There are laws about how to get rid of him, too.

Were you consulted before you were forced to recycle? My local government makes me do it – which isn’t the worst thing it makes people do, okay – but it won’t do anything about the people who go through my bins confiscating whatever they want, making all kinds of racket and leaving stuff lying around for me (that is, for my husband) to pick up.

In fact, the government is very good at keeping honest, law-abiding types on a leash. It can’t do a damned thing with the others. Lawless types don’t care if the government says they can’t do something, but you’ve noticed that. And government doesn’t care. People who submit will always outnumber those who won’t. Right wingers submit as much as anyone else.

The government can order you to serve on a jury. It tells you that you must pay a minimum wage. It can order you to join the military. It would take forever to enumerate all the things the government makes you do, or forbids you to do. These people who are all up in arms about “government tyranny” are like someone who has been kidnapped and almost completely tied up – but suddenly complaining that his captor wants to handcuff him.

I don’t care what kind of government you live under. The question is, are you on a short leash or a long one? Is there a choke chain? Is your collar standard issue, or is it jewel-encrusted and really pretty?

"They've Come Undone," by Alpha Unit

A lot of right-wing Americans are boiling over with fear and loathing over this “health care” bill that just got signed into law. I hear they’re smashing windows, making death threats against legislators and their kids, urging one another to lock and load (Why aren’t some of these people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?). Listening to them, you’d think this is the first time in American history that “government” ever became synonymous with “tyranny.” It’s going to start making people do things against their will and everything. They can’t be serious, can they? Is this new law what it took to slap some sense into them? It seems they’ve never heard of government imposing itself on “the people” before. Or forcing you to do something – or buy something – against your will. That’s what governments do best, right wingers – force people to do stuff. You of all people should know that. Some of you have been telling us for years that government is force. And you are right. The only difference is what things you’re being forced to do by which governments.” “Well, the government’s gonna force me to buy health insurance!” you protest. Is this the first time the government ever made you buy anything? The government makes people buy all kinds of things – infant car seats, low-flow toilets, car insurance, you name it. I don’t like it, either. But you didn’t notice until now that the government can order you to buy something? For your own good? (It’s always for your own good.) The government insists on being notified if you want to add on to your house, for goodness’ sake. Your very own house that you own free and clear, that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with. You’ve got to notify them and you’ve got to make sure they approve of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Thinking of taking in a renter? There are laws about that. There are laws about how to get rid of him, too. Were you consulted before you were forced to recycle? My local government makes me do it – which isn’t the worst thing it makes people do, okay – but it won’t do anything about the people who go through my bins confiscating whatever they want, making all kinds of racket and leaving stuff lying around for me (that is, for my husband) to pick up. In fact, the government is very good at keeping honest, law-abiding types on a leash. It can’t do a damned thing with the others. Lawless types don’t care if the government says they can’t do something, but you’ve noticed that. And government doesn’t care. People who submit will always outnumber those who won’t. Right wingers submit as much as anyone else. The government can order you to serve on a jury. It tells you that you must pay a minimum wage. It can order you to join the military. It would take forever to enumerate all the things the government makes you do, or forbids you to do. These people who are all up in arms about “government tyranny” are like someone who has been kidnapped and almost completely tied up – but suddenly complaining that his captor wants to handcuff him. I don’t care what kind of government you live under. The question is, are you on a short leash or a long one? Is there a choke chain? Is your collar standard issue, or is it jewel-encrusted and really pretty?

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SCs6pSE8_I]

Charming, charming.

The Congressional Black Caucus is ferociously booed on their way into Congress. The booers are teapartiers, and for some very odd reason, 10

At around the same time, the tea partiers yelled, “Faggot!” at Barney Frank.

A White Republican lunatic screamed “Baby killer!” at a White Democratic lunatic, Bart Stupak, on the floor of Congress. Why? Because Stupak is going along with some less restrictive anti-abortion language than the crap he originally put in, and he was supporting the bill.

Seriously, this shit is pitiful. White people are going stark raving nuts in this country. I’m embarrassed of my lack of melanin.

It’s times like this that I must reluctantly agree that the declining White population of America is a good thing in a certain way. 9

They lost this one, and this is just the beginning of the end. The days of Reactionary White America are waning. As Whites decline and non-Whites increase, there will be problems, but we will finally get some good socialist programs here in these benighted United States.

I’ve changed my mind on the health care bill. It sucks, but it’s better than nothing. It’s a progressive change. You figure that anything that every Republican and most of the Blue Dogs in Congress is against has got to be a good thing. 10

So this is the beginning of the Republicans’ Waterloo. They had to kill this. It’s all about ideology. The particulars of the bill are unimportant. In fact! This is nearly a carbon copy of the alternative bill that the Congress Republicans proposed in 1993 during the fight over Clinton Care. Now they’re all lined up against it, over my dead body! What the fuck, Republicans?

But it’s really about what this bill represents. It represents, yes, socialism. It’s a repudiation of neoliberal metaphysics that says that everything of any value in society must come from the market, not from the state. It’s a body blow to neoliberalism and their whole unbridled capitalism, smash the state ideology.

As William Kristol noted in 1993, Clinton Care had to be opposed because it might work, and people would probably like it. And we can’t have people deciding that government programs have good mouth feel. No. Government programs are evil. Government must not be allowed to do anything good. Once people start deciding that government programs are actually fun rides for the average Joe, the Free Market game is up.

Look at how furious the Republicans are! They’re hopping up and down like they’ve got bumblebees up their asses! There’s got to be a reason for that. Screw the specifics, this was all about ideology. And with this defeat, their ideology suffered a devastating blow.

They’re going to run on overturning it in the next election, but I doubt if that will work. But they’re sure to have the entire corporate MSM media behind them all the way. I’d be surprised if one outlet comes out for ObamaCare.

Several state attorney generals are filing suit against the bill, claiming it is unconstitutional. On what basis might this bill be unconstitutional? I can’t see how that’s going to go anywhere.

Worse, there is talk about appealing the bill to the Supreme Assholes of the SCOTUS. Judging from some of their latest rulings, including the corporate money is free speech outrage, possibly the worst ruling since Dred Scott, my heart sinks. These Supremes are just insane enough that they might decide on the usual fraudulent, conjured out of thin air grounds, to overturn the bill. It’s a frightening prospect.

Tea party rallies area about 9

But the White nationalists have made it completely clear on their websites. They are saying what few others will dare to say. Jared Taylor and the Occidental Dissent folks are explicit that ObamaCare is a transfer of wealth from Whites to Blacks and Hispanics. And this is why they oppose it.

Well, of course. .

As with so many things in our society, opposition to ObamaCare is so about race.

“Keeping America Safe,” by Alpha Unit

The First World War had its last gasp in 1971.

At least that’s one way to look at it, from the perspective of those whose job it is to defend and protect the United States from those who would aid the enemy in wartime. People like leftists, radicals, Communists, Socialists, and other subversives.

When the United States decided to enter World War I, President Wilson knew that he had to have the American people on his side. In fact, he insisted on it. So on April 13, 1917, with the stroke of a pen, he created the U.S. Committee on Public Information, for the express purpose of getting the people’s sentiment in line with their government’s.

George Creel, the newspaperman enlisted to head this operation, set about propagandizing. He was aided, among others, by journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann and by “the father of public relations” in America, Edward Bernays – the man who saw his job of shaping public opinion as “the engineering of consent.”

To say that this effort achieved its purpose would be an understatement.

This was during the same period that revolution and civil war swept Russia, producing a corollary fear in this country that some of those socialistic, communistic spores could drift across land mass and ocean to become embedded on American soil. It wasn’t a great time to be a Leftist in America. (Is wartime ever?)

Two groups stood above the rest – the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, the latter also known as the “Wobblies.” Both groups came out strongly against U.S. involvement in World War I and were targeted almost at once by the government. And any activity that might even have the whiff of their involvement became suspect.

The Wobblies had been one of the first labor unions to admit women, Blacks, and immigrants – this was subversive enough in early twentieth-century America. During the war it was led by “Big Bill” Haywood, one of its original organizers. Eugene Debs, who ran for President several times as a Socialist, had also been one of its founders, as well as Mary Harris “Mother” Jones.

In spite of Haywood’s attempts to lower their profile in light of the group’s anti-war stance, the organization was targeted and made an example of under the recently enacted Espionage Act. Laws against espionage were not at all new, but this law expanded the definition of espionage to include openly expressing political opinions that could be construed as “helping” the enemy. Over 150 of the Wobblies’ leaders were rounded up, tried, and convicted. Haywood was among them.

A series of amendments to the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States, its flag, or armed forces during wartime. Included was any language that caused anyone to view the United States with contempt.

Both the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch were absolutely serious about shutting down dissent.

A series of strikes in the period right after the war continued to stoke fears of revolution and anarchy in various quarters. The first major strike took place in the shipyards of Seattle in 1919.

After two years of wage controls during the war, workers launched a strike in an attempt to get pay increases. The shipyard workers were joined by other unions, including the Wobblies. It wasn’t long before some in the press connected this incident to the Russian Revolution, since some of the union workers evidently supported it. A pamphlet entitled “Russia Did It” was being distributed during the strike. It read in part:

The Russians have shown you the way. What are you going to do about it? You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up, realize that you and the boss have nothing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take control of your jobs and through them, the control of your lives instead of offering yourself up to the master as a sacrifice six days a week, so that they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil.

The Seattle shipyard strike didn’t even last a week. There was no violence. But it was seen as the work of “Bolsheviks,” so there were reprisals. The Wobblies were targeted, predictably, as ringleaders; several dozen were arrested.

Subsequent strikes were blamed on “Reds,” including a strike by Boston police and a nationwide steelworkers strike.

The federal government was on a mission to unearth the Bolshevik menace in America. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer appointed J. Edgar Hoover as head of a new radical-hunting division in the Bureau of Investigation. Thousands of “radicals” were arrested; some were imprisoned and others were deported. At the same time, numerous state legislatures were smitten with anti-radical fever. Famously, the New York legislature expelled five Socialist members from its ranks.

Anti-radical sentiment was at its peak.

But by the spring of 1920 a pushback was underway in the country. As one writer summarized events:

In May twelve prominent attorneys (including Harvard professor Dean Pound, Zachariah Chaffee, and Felix Frankfurter, who later became a Supreme Court justice and a proponent of Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence) issued a report detailing the Justice Department’s violations of civil liberties.

The New York Assembly’s decision to bar its Socialist members was met with disgust by national newspapers and leaders such as then-Senator Warren G. Harding, former Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes and even Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer who felt it unfair to put Socialists and Communists in the same category.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes criticized proposed anti-sedition bills possibly because the proposed bills were viewed as censorship; most newspapers came out against the anti-sedition bills. Industry leaders, who were early proponents of anti-Communism, began to realize that deporting immigrants (as many of the Communists were alleged to be) drained a major source of labor, which would result in higher wages and decreased profits.

But what really made this Red Scare come undone was The Plot That Never Was.

J. Edgar Hoover’s agents told the Attorney General that radicals were planning an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government on May Day 1920. Palmer and Hoover tried to brace the nation for the terror to come. All kinds of preparations were made to thwart this overthrow.

May Day came. And nothing happened.

Newspapers across the country ridiculed the Attorney General. This was the beginning of the end of what is now known as the First Red Scare of America.

In December of 1920 the Sedition Act was repealed.

The Espionage Act, its parent, has never been repealed. One of its first victims was Eugene Debs, who was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison; after about 3 years he was pardoned by President Harding. Another famous victim was the poet e. e. cummings, who got in trouble while serving in an ambulance corps in France during the war. Supposedly he had been guilty of not being sufficiently hateful in discussing the Germans. He actually spent three and a half months in a military detention camp.

The last time the government applied the Espionage Act was in the case of New York Times Co. v. United States, otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers case. The government lost in its attempt to keep this information from going public, but the Espionage Act was not specifically ruled to be unconstitutional.

As I said at the outset, it was the final whimper of President Wilson’s quest to keep the world safe for democracy.

Starve The Beast Game Plan, 2010

So much of what you read, hear and see in the MSM Lie Machine really needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The debt/deficit hysteria – what’s it all about anyway. The bottom line in the “centrist media” is that we need to start making massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security right now or experience Financial Armageddon 10 years down the road. So Obama is setting up a sickening “Gut the Entitlements” commission which thankfully will get nothing done due to Republican intransigence. None of this really makes much sense.

What’s behind all of this? Turns out that Republican Game Plan since Reagan has been “starve the beast.” This was reiterated by Reagan, Bush, Allan Greenspan (the economic hero of both political parties) and Irving Kristol. Since spending cuts would not be popular, the Game Plan was to push through massive tax cuts, which would be.

Starving the beast means depriving the government of spending. Faced with drying revenue inflows, spending cuts would be sold as necessity. That, or the Republicans would just run up wild deficits and explode the public debt while they were in office, with the obvious though unstated agenda of causing state financial ruin at a later day.

The entire MSM, across the board, from “liberal” to “centrist” to right, would be utterly silent while this financial time bomb was being set off. The tax cuts of Reagan and Bush were greeted with glorious accolades, while the wild deficits were blown off with statements like, “Deficits don’t matter.” Huge armies of columnists and think tank whores were enlisted in this “deficits don’t matter” lie. Just about every Republican asshole you met in real life, if they had an opinion at all, repeated the same insanity.

When a Republican was in, it was all “deficits don’t matter,” but as soon as Bill Clinton came in, everything changed. Once again, the entire “democratic” and “diverse” US MSM was bombarded with a torrent of propaganda about how we needed to “balance the budget,” control the “deficit” and then hopefully start “paying down the federal debt.”

Your average Republican dipshit on the street, if they had an opinion, was repeating the same stuff like a Goddamned Myna Bird. I’d tell them how a few years back they were all, “deficits don’t matter” and they’d either get pissed or act like I was speaking Swahili.

Turns out Bill Clinton was the most fiscally responsible US President in decades, but he got no credit for it. Instead, bizarrely, he was tarred as a “tax and spend” profligate.

Turns out Clinton left office with the US government massively in the black. That was only 2000, ten years ago. The Republicans were freaked, and they were in office. Suddenly there was a “debate” about what to do with “extra money.” Like save it for a rainy day? Hell no.

There was no debate. Once again, the entire “left to right” spectrum of the US media decided that, “It’s your money, so you need it back.” The entire surplus was immediately blown on dumbfuck tax cuts and within a year, the state was badly in the red again. About this, once again, there was silence from the MSN and cheers from the Republican on the street.

Soon Bush beat all previous Presidents in financial irresponsiibility, but there was not a pipsqueak to be heard about that from the “democratic and diverse” MSM media in the US, nor from the Republican on the street. I’d bring it up, and all I got was, “deficits don’t matter” again.

Does any of that make sense? Of course not. Why should deficits be irrelevant and government act like a drunken gambler on a bender with a credit card and when Republicans are in office, but then as soon as a Democrat comes in, it’s all financial responsibility again.

Well, now we have a new Democratic President, and the shit’s started all over again. Remember: as soon as a Democrat comes in, the entire MSM and the Corporate Ruling Class turn into deficit hawks, quick as a chameleon. Your average dumbass on the street, including “liberal Democrats” my late father (and he was a good, solid liberal Democrat too), fall for the con one more time.

Since Obama came in, it’s all debt and deficits and spending freezes, all the time. Furthermore, now the big boys, the Big Three, are on the block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They could never cut those before, because they are too popular. But the entire US media, from “left to right” has been itching to destroy these programs for over 30 years.

Paul Krugman makes sense of all of it here. It was all just a sinister plot from Day One. And now the Republicans are doubling down: They are deliberately trying to provoke a financial catastrophe so that “emergency measures” will be needed to deal with the Big Three and slash the state to bits once and for all.

A few things are clear. Just as Marx said, you never really have democracy in capitalism. You have in effect a class dictatorship of the ruling class. We know it is a dictatorship because they will steal elections if need to, kill, jail and harass opponents, and if there is ever a threat to their rule, the result is typically either a military coup or a Contra insurgency. A true democracy would allow the Ruling Class state to be replaced by a popular one. Since generally this is not possible, you typically never have democracy under capitalism.

Part of the way that Ruling Class Rule is enforced is by capturing the entirety of private sector media. The Ruling Class then sets up fake “left,” “center” and “right” factions of the Ruling Class media which more or less all say the same thing, with a few variations. Bottom line is they are all part of a project to perpetuate Ruling Class Rule. In fact, all of these outfits, from “left to right” are all run by Ruling Class members themselves, who use the outlets to aggressively propagandize for their class interests.

The Ruling Class then sets up or infiltrates various political parties, once again, “from left to right,” but once again, all of these parties are simply factions of the Ruling Class. Members of society then align with the media outlets and parties somewhere along this spectrum. Some become “liberals,” some “centrists,” some “conservatives.” Most of them don’t realize that these positions are almost meaningless and they are all, liberals to conservatives, simply supporting one faction or the other of the Ruling Class and its mouthpieces.

So you don’t really have much in the way of political freedom under capitalism since all or certainly most of electorate is under the sway of one faction of the Ruling Class or other. Sure, you can form some little popular party, but with no money, you will probably never get elected.

So you don’t have much in the way of freedom of the press under capitalism. Sure, you can say whatever you want, but unless you have a zillion bucks, no one can hear you. You have freedom of the press for those who own one, and everyone else is effectively silenced.

You don’t even have much freedom of thought under capitalism, because due to the fact that the entire media and all of the parties are typically just factionized elements of the Ruling Class, the overwhelming majority of society is effectively brainwashed into becoming a “supporter” of one faction of the other of the Ruling Class.

Through clever use of media and political ideological monopoly (washed together into what Gramsci called “culture”), you have a society that, at the end of the day, is nearly as brainwashed as Maoist China’s. Yeah, you have freedom of thought, but almost everyone is too brainwashed to exercise it. There’s no need for gulags or bullets in the head, as there are few dissenters and their political power is zilch anyway, so they can be ignored.

If through some miracle, a popular regime is ever somehow elected through the fog of Ruling Class Propaganda and Politics (“culture”) there are always contras, military coups, imperialist sanctions and death squads to reverse the progress.

Deficit/Debt Hysteria

It’s hard to check out the latest edition of the MSM shitrags (daily newspapers and newsmagazines) or lying megaphones (radio and TV) without seeing or hearing some screaming stuff about deficits and debts. The stuff is quite dire. In 10 years, debt payments will constitute 8

However, being fed a steady diet of MSM shit sandwiches my whole life before I finally figured out what the Hell I was eating anyway, I figured these capitalist corporate POS scumbags were lying to me once again.

If a capitalist’s mouth is open, he’s probably lying. And so all capitalist societies are fanciful places where all the world’s a lie, and all of us are liars. We lie to go along with the liars, because everyone else is lying, and because we’re too brainwashed or confused to figure out we are being lied to. Such is the Gramscian dynamic when the capitalists obtain cultural hegemony, as they nearly always do under capitalism.

It is curious that defenders of capitalism, including regular commenters on this blog, never face this World O’ Lies head-on. So is it ok or what?  I mean that living in a capitalist society is about as fanciful an experience as living in a state controlled by Communist propaganda. Capitalist versions of Pravda are replicated every minute across countless TV and radio stations and every corporate shitrag (daily paper and newsweekly) in the land. To say that they were “brainwashed” while we are free is the grossest of delusions, but it is essential to all capitalist societies.

Getting back to the deficit/debt hysteria, I had to search around to find some sane capitalists on the question. One of the evil things about capitalism is that under capitalism, the honest capitalists are rara avis. You really have to look around, as the capitalists try to lock out all the sane and decent voices. You know, just like those evil Commies do? So we spelunked the samizdats of Internet’s honeycombed caverns and came up with a couple of sane capitalists on the debt/deficit question.

Exhibit A: Paul Krugman.

Exhibit B: Martin Wolf.

Yeah, they’re both Jews. Liberal, capitalist Jews at that (No, wait! They must be Bolsheviks in disguise!).

Chew on that bone a bit, anti-Semites.

The depressing thing was that both of the sane people had dire messages. Those evil entitlement thingies, you know, like health care for the old and the poor and pensions for the retired, are gonna have to be slashed to the bone, their recipients cast to the desert winds so the vultures of capitalist society may pick clean their bones.

When even the sane people are channeling Edgar Allen Poe, you know that the horrorshow is the world outside your window, and the droogies are your fellow men.

So much for the end of history.

Setting The Record Straight On California's Proposition 13

Proposition 13 was passed by California’s White, mostly homeowning voters in 1978. Since then, property taxes have been frozen at 1978 levels. It’s been a complete disaster for schools and local governments all over California, but California’s White homeowners are so selfish that the initiative is still popular. One silver lining in the decline of White California is that we can probably finally get rid of this monstrous albatross on the neck of our state. I was born in California in 1957. I lived here for 21 years before Prop 13 and I’ve lived here for 30 years afterward. The difference is night and day. Local government has been screwed all over the state, worse and worse every year, for 30 years now. The situation is dealt with in truly wealthy areas like Beverly Hills, where I taught school for a while (Beverly Hills High School) by the rich parents simply pouring cash into a fund and giving it to the school. Tom, a commenter, has it all wrong in this comment:

In part Prop 13 was basically white California saying we don’t want to pay public services (public schooling) for all these poor Mexicans and their big families. This was the late 70s when the amount of Mexicans in CA wasn’t even that high.

Not true, that had nothing to do with it whatsoever. There weren’t even all that many Mexicans in California back then, and there were not that many illegals. We had a very liberal government back then headed up by Jerry Brown, and they raided places for illegals all the time, and no one cared. Everyone supported it, even liberals. Property taxes only pay for local schools. This is the part the Toms of the world just don’t get. So White people, in gutting their property taxes, just fucked their own kids’ schools, that’s all. I think they also pay for local services. Every White person in California knows that local governments all over California have been wrecked ever since Prop 13. So the dumbshit Whites who voted for that, all they did was ruin public services in the cities where they lived, which were mostly White. California Whites don’t care. They don’t care that the public services their White areas are shot. Fuck it, they say, ask me if I care. They just don’t want to pay taxes. What happened was that property values were rising rapidly here in California at the time of Prop 13. The state was still about 7 People kept screaming for the state to do something about it, but no one would. The Right wanted extreme solutions, and Jerry Brown would not budge and ease the burden. Howard Jarvis, author of Prop 13, represented the renters’ association! He was a Goddamn landlord! The landlord lying scum went around telling all their dumbshit tenants that they were going to lower their rents after Prop 13 passed. I personally know a bunch of White tenants who told me that they voted for Prop 13 for that very reason! Also, business interests were behind Prop 13 in a huge way. Businesses can obviously pay their property taxes; it’s no problem, they do it everywhere. But property taxes on landlord rental properties and businesses have been flat since 1978! The people who really cleaned up in California after Prop 13 were the landlord-scum and the business capitalists. Inequality has been skyrocketing in the state ever since. I have no problem easing the burden on homeowners, but no way do landlords and business owners get a break. Landlords are the biggest crybabies on Earth. Most small landlords here in CA are just out and out slumlords. They’re always crying poverty and raising rents, but they never fix a damned thing, and they make tons of money anyway. I have a lot more respect for apartment complexes owned by corporations, because at least they fix stuff a lot more often than your 2-bit Joe White Suburban Slumlord. The landlords own most of the county officials in the state, and they’ve always owned the legislature. Landlords have big bucks, so they buy their own power in our capitalist “democracy” here. Renters have no power, so no one listens to them, and they have no power in our capitalist “democracy” in California. Oh, by the way, I’m not aware of one tenant who got his rent lowered after Prop 13. There’s one born every minute.

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