Communist Shame

Repost from the old site. As the White comedian Gallagher says, “Sometimes White People embarrass me!” I agree. Also, as a Commie, I must say, sometimes Communists embarrass me! Communists are supposedly pro-working class. This is a video of a rally in Los Angeles that was due to be held by Ted Hayes of Choose Black America. Hayes is a radical Black man in many ways, maybe even a pan-Africanist (see the ANC style knit cap). Unfortunately, like so many anti-illegal immigrant activists, he is also a Republican. Voting Republican will never do a damn thing for the vast majority of Black Americans. There is a rational reason why Blacks vote Democratic – the party is more responsive to their needs than the Republicans. Hayes was a lifelong Leftist who just turned Republican the other day. He is a tireless advocate for the homeless and for US Blacks. He supports Malcolm X (but then in some ways so do I) and he also supports reparations for US Blacks (but then I might too, depending on the proposal). Yet he is dead set against illegal immigration, as are many Blacks. There was a counter-rally there against the Choose Black America rally of Communists and Anarchists and Raza types. Notice the disgusting Communists in this video screaming at anti-illegal alien activists (5 Apparently these Communist morons think that 9 The poor sods being abused by these Leftist idiots are simply asking that the US act like almost every other normal country on Earth – that we penalize those who sneak onto our lands and boot them back where they came from. For this simple and strikingly rational request, they are being called RACIST by a bunch of fools. Someone ask these Communist boneheads exactly how the US working class benefits from this illegal alien invasion. The invasion of America by illegal aliens has positively nuked the working class of America, especially in the West and Southwest. Look, I am not so stupid as to think that illegals have been the sole decline of the US working class. A number of factors have been involved, many of them deliberate conspiracies on the part of the US elite and business sector. But to leave illegals out of the equation, as almost all liberal and Left analyses of the decline of the American worker do, is just crazy, like just about everything about this insane issue. It’s not solely a problem of illegal immigration either. Unlimited legal immigration via H-1B visas has devastated the high-paying professional workers in the high tech industry. Why hire an American when you can hire an Indian for 1/2 as much? A US company now imports Indians on H-1B visas to drive big-rigs for 5 Every year, all of the the Democrats and liberals in the US Congress march off and vote for the wage- and job-wrecking H-1B visa program, amidst Bill Gates lunatic screeds that computer programming is a job that Americans just won’t do. WTF! Illegal aliens have driven up the cost of housing via overcrowding and excessive demand on the housing market at the same time they have sent working class wages into the gutter, a deadly combo. Since the poverty and especially the illegal status of illegal aliens means they use far more in social services than they pay in taxes, they have overcrowded and degraded many public services such as hospitals, schools, etc. Go into any school or hospital overrun by illegal immigrants and notice the falling-apart look everything has. There’s no money, no money, everyone says. A flood of users and a dearth of income equals a collapsing infrastructure. Hence, illegal aliens have not only created a low-wage, high cost (housing) economy, but they have devastated social services such as schools and hospitals for working class and poor American citizens of all colors. I’m not saying illegals should be denied medical care or their kids should be thrown out of the K-12 schools. I’m just saying that importing 12 million largely impoverished, uneducated and unskilled 3rd World peasants, is not a particularly rational move for many reasons, economic, cultural, and others. It’s not even a progressive move either. The Communist USSR, China and Cuba worked in overdrive to bring their nations out of underdevelopment and Third-Worldization and towards at least the health and development figures of the First World. Tell me how turning a First World country into a Third World country should be part of any progressive, not to mention Communist, project anywhere on Earth? In particular, the immigrants from Mexico are not a particularly selective class of immigrants. Racial stuff aside, bear me out. 4 Does this mean that Africans and Indians are smarter or even better educated than Mexicans? Surely they are not smarter. As far as education goes, I can’t answer that, but as a group, Indians and Africans are very poorly educated. Let the Leftist mush-brains rant and call me racist. But hear me out. It has nothing to do with race or IQ or even culture. We are simply being very selective about the Indians and Africans we are bringing in, and extremely unselective about the Mexicans we are bringing in. What are the Mexicans with advanced degrees doing? Staying put in Mexico and making lots of money. I usually do not deal with IQ differences between nations, not to mention races on here, but let’s go to that forbidden land for a moment. Looking at IQ, Mexico probably has a higher IQ nationwide than India (about 92 to 81). Although I have a hard time believing such figures, the quoted figures for Africa are around 70 IQ. So IQ-wise, Mexico is superior to both India and Africa. Yet the quality of Mexico’s immigrants, as we see above, is far lower, simply because we are not being selective at all about them. Even culturally, Mexico may have it up on India, where there are almost 3 million excess deaths per year due only to infant mortality and another million excess deaths compared to China (considering that China and India were in the same place in 1949, Indian capitalism causes 4 million excess deaths per year as compared to “communist” China). This was India’s penalty for not following a Chinese economic model. 14 million children starve to death (or die of malnutrition) every year on Earth – most of them in South Asia – in capitalist Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Africa is a slow-motion train wreck, with some of the lowest life expectancies on Earth. We can make the case that Mexico has a higher collective IQ and is more developed culturally than India or Africa. Yet the quality of Indian and African immigrants to the US has been much higher, and neither race nor culture has anything to do with their higher quality. If the vast majority of Mexican immigrants were legal, if 4 The difference is in large part due to selective legal immigration, which is somewhat rational, and utterly unselective illegal immigration, which lacks any rational basis at all.

The Invasion of Oakhurst

Repost from the old site. I lived in Oakhurst, California, off and on for 16 1/2 years. I moved there in December 1990, then moved down to Fresno, California for a few months, then back up to Oakhurst for the next 16 years. About 2-3 years ago, illegal aliens invaded Oakhurst. Why it took them so long to come there, I have no idea. You tell me. During my time in Oakhurst, a friend, who is frankly a racist (he openly admits it) was telling me about the catastrophe called Southern California. My former town, Huntington Beach, is unrecognizable. There were “non-Whites” everywhere. I’m not sure that is a catastrophe. One of the things he pointed out is that illegal aliens, almost all Mexicans, have exploded across Southern California. I believe it. Growing up in Orange County, California, there were always a few Mexicans around. I started learning Spanish at age six, dated Hispanic girls at age 17, and had assimilated Mexican-American and Hispanic friends. In my youth, I worked as a janitor, in factories, in warehouses, as a forklift driver, in housekeeping, as a dishwasher, in landscaping, in construction, driving an ice cream truck, you name it. Almost 10 Landscaping (Yes! We worked in the yards of the White middle class!) was all Whites, except for one illegal alien I met in 1979. Housekeeping was all middle-aged White women. Ice cream truck drivers were Americans and legal immigrants (mostly Iranians) of all ages. In factories, it was mostly White Americans, except in 1979 when I discovered a factory full of illegal aliens. I went to the INS to turn them in and the idiot flat out told me that would not investigate the factory, and gave me some sob story about “trying to feed their families”. There was no labor shortage in Orange County in the 1970’s. All of the jobs that “Americans won’t do” were being done by Americans, often White Americans, and not for much pay either. Hell, I did these damn jobs myself, with pride. This crap about “jobs Americans won’t do” still mystifies me. There were few illegal aliens in Orange County in those days. The INS regularly conducted raids and was continuously deporting illegals. This policy was supported by super liberal Jerry Brown and by Californians across the spectrum. Strange, isn’t it? Enter Ronald Reagan. With Reagan came the devaluation of the American workingman, especially the White worker, and apparently a total devastation of enforcement, raids and deportations of illegals. The illegal population seemed to grow and grow all through the 1980’s, with Reagan’s apparently tacit encouragement. During this time it also became fashionable to try to get rich and to devalue the working class. The notion that American working class workers (especially White workers) were lazy, undependable, “losers” and just plain crappy workers was hoisted as a meme, while the White working class continued to march off and vote for their destroyer, Reagan, due to racial, religious and cultural conservative themes. At the same time, Reagan was promoting a total invasion of Mexican cheap labor into the US, and with it the ruination of the US working class. In the 1990’s, the invasion completely exploded, as first Bush Sr, for cheap labor reasons, and then Clinton, for idiot liberal reasons (Or maybe for elite class reasons?), refused to enforce the labor laws. Whenever the Right and Left agree that something is a great idea, you know it is probably one of the worst ideas on Earth. The Amnesty of 1986, which has utterly failed, comes to mind. The deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals does too. Under Bush in the 2000’s, enforcement and raids plummeted to almost zero, way down from even Clinton’s low level. And the invasion completely exploded and moved all across America. With it has come the rage of Middle America as they experienced the invaders for the first time. Ensconced in Oakhurst, I scarcely saw this invasion. But I went to Orange County in 2004 and was stunned at what I saw. Parts of it were simply a Third World country (Garden Grove) with Hispanics – apparently almost all illegals – as far as the eye could see. In other parts of Garden Grove, it seemed to be all Asians, often Koreans, Vietnamese or Chinese, with a few Filipinos. Many or most of these immigrants seemed to barely speak English. It was a site to see. I hate to say that it simply did not look like America. Not the America I was used to. Not the one I was brought up in. Everywhere in Orange County a radical caste-like class system seemed to have taken hold. There seemed to be two classes, like in any Banana Republic – the rich and upper middle class (staying in my hotel and running it) and this vast, teeming, unwashed, underclass of proletarianized laborers. It could have been San Salvador, Lima, Bogota, Manila, Calcutta or Jakarta in that sense at least. The middle class was either nonexistent or very small. Later, I went to a wedding in Irvine, California. On the way, I drove through Mexico. They told me it was America, but I knew better. I’ve been to Mexico. This was not America. At the wedding, the underclass was nowhere to be seen. The people in the bar and at the restaurant, and to some extent at the wedding, were the nouveau riche, mostly Whites with a few Vietnamese. This elite plus servants with teeming slums on the hillside scene is not the America I grew up in. It looks like 3rd World semi-feudalism…Latin America, the Philippines. Back to Oakhurst. 2 or the 3 years ago, it got invaded. Why? Who knows? I guess California is so flooded with illegals that they are finally worming their way into the mountains. Before, Oakhurst was mostly White with some Indians. The few others assimilated to the White mountain rural culture. Jobs Americans won’t do!? For 14 years I lived in Oakhurst. In that time, there was never any labor shortage. Americans worked in fast food, as janitors, in construction, in landscaping, as handymen, waiters and dishwashers, housekeepers and maids, and roofers and painters, usually for low wages. There was no problem finding Americans to do this work. Got it? No problem! Now, something has changed. My friends in construction tell me that Fresno is mostly illegal aliens in construction. Some illegals are now working construction in the mountains. My former landlord brazenly hired illegals to do construction and roofing work on my apartment. Everyone knew they were illegals, but no one could do a thing. It was audacious and in your face. Who could we call? We seethed. My friend, working construction, clued me in. On more and more jobs, they saw illegals. The capitalist scum boss forced them to do all sorts of illegal work, violated every labor law on the book, forced unsafe work on his workers so some of them got seriously injured, and the whole time, threatened to fire them all and replace them with “Mexicans”. That means illegals. If anyone complained, went to the labor board or was anything but submissive, he would bring in the illegals. My friend also clued me in on more stuff. Illegals in construction generally do not work as hard as Americans, especially White Americans (my brother was not disparaging non-White Americans – he just had not worked with many of them). Furthermore, they do not do better work, in fact, they usually do lousy work. He said it is well known in the construction industry that illegals do lousy work, but the crooked contractors could care less. Landscaping work, formerly all American workers, was now beginning to be replaced by illegals. Fast food restaurants went pretty quickly mostly illegal. Janitorial went just like that, bam. They really flooded the restaurants. Most dishwashing now is all illegals. The housekeeping jobs were quickly gone, all illegals. My friend told me that Class 2 trucking (non big rigs) in Southern California had long since gone all illegals. My American friends worked these jobs when I was younger. Now the bottom has fallen out of the wages, and the illegals are lousy drivers. They are not paid enough to fix their trucks or maintain them. Accidents and broken-down trucks are a major problem. Homeland Security just decided that truck drivers out of the port of LA need to be US citizens, so the industry is going to fire 23,000 illegal aliens. The illegals in Oakhurst kept their heads down for a couple of years, as they often do when they invade a new town. When I left Oakhurst, they were starting to get brazen, as they always do. Car thefts were being reported. Car thefts, in Oakhurst?! Almost unheard of. Now they are quite common. Could it have been the illegals? I asked. Nope, it was the “speed freaks” – the Mexicans had nothing to do with it. Oh really? We’d had speed freaks in Oakhurst since I moved there, with little to no car thefts. The illegals show up, and now there’s car thefts. Hmmm. Gang graffiti appeared for the first time. Where there are illegal Mexican invaders, there is gang graffiti. Despite all the nonsense you hear about “White gangs”, there were never any White gangs, nor any White gang graffiti, or any gang graffiti, in Oakhurst before the illegals invaded. Spanish was now heard everywhere. The new illegals could barely speak a single word of English. Good thing I can speak the invader language – Spanish! Excuse me? You don’t speak a word of English? How do you suppose you are going to support yourself in our society? How many countries let you invade them at will, take any job you want (Steal it from a citizen!), refuse to learn the language, and then defiantly demand citizenship? Almost none! You can’t invade at all – few countries allow it. Very few countries allow most foreigners to work, certainly not those who invaded. If you refuse to learn the language, fine, but most countries won’t bend over backwards to help you, you may have a hard time getting along there unless you learn the language, and you certainly cannot become a citizen until you show some proficiency. Except America, excuse me. So many of the jobs in Oakhurst that were being done by Americans were now being done by the invaders. Gee, what happened to all the Americans who were doing those jobs? Who knows? But I started seeing an awful lot of unemployed and underemployed Whites around, especially young Whites. And I started seeing an awful lot of homeless young Americans, mostly White but a couple of Blacks. They never existed before. Gee, do you think the young homeless and under- and unemployed Americans had anything to do with the invaders? Hmmmm. A friend, who has a house painting business, told me his sad story. The competition is hiring illegals for junk wages and underbidding him. He knows many construction contractors who have been hiring illegal aliens. They openly brag about it at the gym. Most of them are living in fancy houses on huge lots and driving Mercedes Benz’s and BMW’s. That’s the result of illegals in construction – wildly increased profits for corrupt contractors and a Latin American-like society. How much of the much-heralded recent wealth gap is due to invaders driving down wages? My friend recently went out on a construction job in a development just outside Yosemite National Park. The guy who was going to hire him flat out told him that he was not going to hire my friend – that he was going to hire “Mexicans” instead. In California, that means illegals. Forget Republicans and Democrats. This new immigration amnesty is a war of elites and their servants against American workers. The goal – cheap labor. You know, it really ticks off that $300 an hour attorney – Republican or Democrat – that he has to hire that American plumber for $50 an hour. You know he’d love to have an illegal invader do it for $10 an hour. How many people on Ted Kennedy‘s street have lost jobs to illegal aliens? How many in his neighborhood? Zero. The elites want to replace the entire US working class with immigrant, preferably illegal alien invader, labor. After that they are going to go to work on professionals and skilled labor. Already illegals work in Class 1 trucking (big rigs), where they buy licenses from crooked licensors for $1,500 (don’t worry about passing the tests). The accident rate is starting to go up with big rigs and all these corrupt immigrant scammer-drivers. A US company just announced that they are bringing in huge numbers of truckers from India to drive big rigs. Why? It’s a job Americans won’t do, that’s why, right? I must admit a secretive glee when I found out that the jobs of schoolteachers are being replaced by immigrants from Mexico (!?) while others are being outsourced to “tutors” from India who “teach” classes to rooms full of students over the Internet. Schoolteacher had always been one of those middle class home-owning occupations that was pretty much pro-illegal. Why? As long as your job is not being replaced by illegals, you tend to support them. Now the immigrants are replacing them. Haha! And all over America, perfectly qualified Americans say they can’t find a teaching job. White collar workers better quit grinning. They’re being replaced by immigrants too. The California Republican Party recently hired two high ranking officials. Obviously, no one in the US was capable of doing these jobs, so they had to hire immigrants from Australia and Canada. Who were willing to work for less money, no doubt. It is beyond me why the Left and the unions are supporting the invaders, seeing as how they have devastated the wage structure for working class Americans while taking their jobs. Now the elites and their immigrant buddies are going to work on professional Americans. Where will it end? I thought the Left and the Democratic Party was pro-worker, pro-average guy? Most of the Democratic bigwigs in the party are wealthy elitists, let’s face it. I guess they want servants too? Or do they cynically want to legalize 11 million illegals just to grow the party? Can someone clue me in? It’s pretty sad when the only voices supporting the working class against the invaders are on the Right. Where is the Left? Why is it siding with the invaders and against US workers? What’s going on? Anyone?

Mexicans Belong in Mexico

The illegal ones, anyway. The legal resident alien green card holders can stay. The Mexican-Americans obviously can stay. Is that radical, arrogant or racist? Fine, call me names. Scream and yell. Let’s look at some other arguments: Argentinians belong in Argentina. Haitians belong in Haiti. Russians belong in Russia. Chinese belong in China. Indians belong in India. The illegal ones, anyway. If they want to jump through the hoops and become resident aliens and from there citizens, all the power to them. It may take 15 years. Presidente Jorge Boosh wants to give illegals one day to automagically turn into some kind of Z-card legal citizens. What a slap in the face to all the green card holders, legal immigrants and others who spent so much money, filled out so many forms, and waited so long to secure their dream. Why would anyone do it the legal way ever again when they can just go illegal and do it on the easy and cheap? Suppose we had 12 million Argentines, or Chileans, or Indonesians, or Costa Ricans, or Uruguayans, or Dominicans, or Albanians, or Egyptians, or Angolans, or Bangladeshis, or Nepalis, or Laotians, or New Guineans, all illegals, invading our shores? Would it make any difference? Regardless of their plights, they belong in their own countries. If their reactionary, nightmare, third world rat holes suck, well, then, they need to make revolution there, hopefully peaceful revolution. In some cases, maybe with the gun. That’s the Leftist in me talking. Name one Communist country that insanely opened its borders to anyone who wanted to invade in order to crush the working class of their own land. There never was one. Marxist rulers were not stupid. They defended their borders and their workers. Why do their lunatic acolytes believe in the insanity of “open borders”, with its massive security risks and attendant ruination of the American working class? “But people are so desperate in Mexico”…Wa wa wa. Yes! People are desperate, starving and living in horrible conditions the world over. Why single out Mexicans? If desperate Mexicans get a free get out of jail pass to invade America, why not open up our borders to the miserable of the entire Third World, many of whom are far worse off than the average Mexican? “But the Mexicans have children!” Hell, everyone has children. All over the world, people have kids. No kidding! So everyone who has kids, and I guess is desperate too, gets to invade America and drive our wages into the gutter forever. Surveys show that about 1/2 to 1/3 of the population would come to the US if they had the chance. That is 2-3 billion human beings. This is what the lunatic Left and cheap labor Right in the open borders Lobby wants. Can you imagine? After that 2 billion man march on America occurs, America will be Calcutta writ large. And we can sign the death warrant on our republic, too. The vast majority of nations in the world do not allow visiting or residing Americans, or anyone else I guess, to work, as long as you are living in or visiting the country. Why? They are leaving those positions open for their own people. The Open Borders loons would say that virtually every country on Earth, then, is racist, for not letting foreigners work in the land. Even if that is racist (let is play games for a moment) is that really such a bad thing? And if the vast majority of nations are viciously racist, does the word mean anything anymore? Many nations make it quite hard to become a citizen. The Arab World is notorious for this. The Koreans and Japanese have decided that the future residents of their land should be overwhelmingly Koreans and Japanese. And they are not the only ones. This is very common the world over. Where is the Open Borders crowd? Why are they not screaming at the Arabs, Koreans and Japanese for being horrible racists? How dare these nations exercise sovereignty over the question of citizenship in their lands! After all, the only way to be nonracist is to open your borders to any army of invaders that wants to invade, to grant the invaders citizenship on demand when they arrogantly demand it, and to let them steal every job they can from your citizens. Now that we know hat it takes to be a “racist” and a “nonracist”, “racism” is starting to look like sanity, eh? (Being sarcastic here).

Blacks and Hispanics Against Invasion

Repost from the old site. Racists, are we? Bigots? Let’s listen to some Blacks and Hispanics talk about illegal immigration. Certainly they are not bigots, are they? Or should we borrow the language of tribalistic Jews and call the Hispanics “self-haters”? If you or me, as American citizens, goes to any country, anywhere on this planet, we need a visa. We need permission of the US government to leave and go visit or live in that country. We need the permission of that country to visit or live there. In the overwhelming majority of cases (with some exceptions) you and me would not be allowed to work if we lived in a foreign country. Why? Because the vast majority of countries on Earth feel that jobs are for natives, not for immigrants just visiting or staying a while. This is not some sick “racist” aberration. It’s the norm all over the world, for Chrissake. If I want to learn the language and do quite a few other things and spend some money, maybe I can become a citizen of my new land and then I would be able to work there. Many countries (especially Arab and Muslim countries) will not let me, as a non-Muslim or as someone not born in the land, ever become a citizen, no matter how long I live there. Guess what? That is their right ! Each and every country has a right to decide its own immigration and citizenship laws. That’s what national sovereignty is all about. If Saudi Arabia wants to grant citizenship only to Muslims, so be it. If Jordan wants to ban Jews from becoming citizens, that is not very nice, but that is their right. The Palestinians wished to put a stop to Jewish immigration to their land in the early part of the last century. Shouldn’t we, as supporters of the Palestinians, have respected their right to decide the fate of their land? Look what unrestricted immigration against the will of the natives did to Palestine. What a mess! If you or me, as Americans, decides to sneak into any country on Earth without going through the legal processes, and we get caught in some foreign land with no legal right to be there, most foreign countries will boot us out pronto. That’s normal. It’s not sick, it’s not racist or bigoted, it’s just normal. Want to visit or immigrate? Get in line and do it legally. Against the norms of the vast majority of the world stands an aberration called America. Just about anyone who wants to gets to cruise right into America, legally or not. If you don’t have the legal right to be here, Hell, just invade. America actually encourages those here illegally to work, against the norms of most of the planet. In the competition between natives and foreigners for jobs, America bizarrely sides with the foreigners against its own workers. How perverse! Even worse, so does the mad, supposedly pro-working class US Left! In most of the world, if you sneak in, you get booted out unceremoniously on your ass. That’s not bigotry; it’s normal. Here again, the aberration called America stands alone. Most who sneak in here just get to stay. Only very meager efforts are made to deport those who sneak in. In many cases, law enforcement will not even respond to complaints. This video clip shows Blacks and Hispanics, including Hispanic legal immigrants who waited in line for years, spent money, filled out countless forms and learned English to become US citizens, railing against illegal immigration to the US. Where do the illegal immigrants of the US belong? In their home countries, of course. And what if their home countries are Third World disaster zones? Well, that is what revolutions are for. If your country can’t guarantee your right to survive and feed your family, as a Leftist, I say you need to make revolution. I prefer the peaceful route, but in some cases where that’s not possible, there is always the last resort of the gun. In those Third World countries where the voters continue to march off and vote for governments that don’t let people survive or feed their families, those people have essentially created their own mess and need to live in it until they can figure out how to vote their own interests. That’s what national revolutionary movements are for, peaceful and otherwise, to convince people of their interests and get the masses to vote for them. Revolution starts at home. What a cop-out to throw up your hands, blow off your national revolutionary or progressive project, and just tell the masses to go invade America! Is that what Marx had in mind?

Invasion of America

Repost from the old site. Are we being invaded? Sure we are. Let’s look at some photos of the invasion. The sheer outrage of this situation is enough to make you throw up your hands.

Here is a photo of members of an American group that gives water to water stations in the desert for illegal aliens to use. I support this. Although invading America is a crime, it’s not one severe enough to put a person in jail, much less give them the death penalty. Here is a group on the Mexican side doing the same thing – distributing water to water stations for illegal aliens to drink before they cross the border. That’s ok. They are going to cross anyway, and they don’t deserve to die for the crime of crossing the border, for Chrissake. Charming illegal aliens displaying some of their vaunted social skills. “Day labor” sites are utterly outrageous! These are sites where illegal alien criminals gather in public to get hired illegally (a felony!) by anyone who wants to pick them up. To do what? To do anything. To do jobs that Americans should be doing and are perfectly capable of doing. More charming day laborers at an illegal site set up by a New York town in order to facilitate the felonious hiring of illegal aliens. Day labor sites are arguably illegal and the cities who set them up are arguably guilty of breaking the law. More wonderful folks at a day labor site. Illegal alien Mexicans at illegal (IMO) day labor sites cause many problems. They urinate in the bushes and in public, sleep in the area, and just cause a general nuisance and a lowering of property values. As a Black resident noted, “Would the cops let a group of Black men hang out on the corner in such numbers. Of course not. But illegal aliens as a source of exploited cheap labor are supported by business and the elite of both the Right and Left. Illegal alien invaders outrageously rushing across our border in plain daylight. What’s stopping radical Islamic terrorists from sprinting across the border themselves. These guys just made it through a fence dubbed as “Israeli-strength”. Guess not. More insanity. ICE agents actually raid a construction site in Sierra Vista, Arizona earlier this year. It is probably full of illegal aliens. In 1976, my friends were making $15 an hour hanging drywall (that is $40/hour plus in 2007 dollars). That profession is now 1/3 illegal alien (!) and the bottom has fallen out of the wages. Union construction jobs pay about $22-33 an hour. Illegal aliens in construction make about $10 an hour. Illegals have nuked American construction workers in the West. The Left supports this insanity! More charming “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande” folks engaging in illegal activities and soliciting for employers to commit crimes by hiring them. The US border with Mexico. That idiotic fence there is actually broken, so it would not stop anyone who wanted to drive through. I’m laughing as I write this. How pitiful! Another comical picture of the US “border” with Mexico with yet another ineffectual fence on the border. Those footprints in the sand are from the countless invaders invading our country illegally. In most any other land, they would be booted out right away. Here they are welcomed with open arms since they are being used as a brown-skilled nuclear weapon by capitalists to nuke the American working class. This van was driven by a criminal alien smuggler who sneaked across the border and then led Border Patrol heroes on a chase across Southern Arizona. This maniac passed three school buses filled with kids. While he was doing that, he was apparently missing both front tires! Go figure. Patriotic Americans from Arizona report that this kind of insanity happens all the time down there and they are regular car crashes and police chases involving aliens and their smugglers. IOW, a situation that is so out of control it is almost Kafkaesque. The fence ends here. What a joke. You call that a fence at the border? This is how we “secure” our border. I’m still laughing.

Anti-Immigrant Movement Faces Serious Obstacles

Repost from the old site. The movement for immigration sanity (IS) in the US faces serious obstacles, one of which is many of the people in the movement are a bunch of idiots, as far as I can tell. I just spent some time on anti-immigrant blog, and I was flat out told that I was not welcome in their movement! I suggested that they needed to extend their movement beyond its narrow rightwing base to include Centrists, liberals and even Leftists, and I was told in no uncertain terms to get lost. Incredible or what? Who is welcome? Hard rightwingers only, I guess. As it stands, the IS movement looks like a terrifyingly rightwing movement to most politically reasonable people. Hatred for Centrists, liberals, Democrats, civil liberties types, secularists, not to mention the Left, is rife. Your average IS blog reads like a combination of the militia/patriot movement, the Christian Right the White Nationalist movement and the John Birch Society. A few minutes on one of their sites is enough to send most any Centrist, liberal, Democrat or Leftist running away screaming. There is not enough effort at all being made to expand the movement beyond its narrow, ultra rightwing, hillbilly, ignoramus, Yahoo and racist base. Extremist Christian kookiness abounds. The few Democrats who are involved are very rightwing Democrats, more or less like the Southern Democrats of old. You’ve read the polls. 7 The movement also seems to be populated heavily by very ignorant White Americans, the sort of stereotypical American Yahoo who hasn’t read a book since high school, can’t spell, can’t use proper syntax, and can’t write a coherent sentence. Great! A movement full of bigoted, fundamentalist idiots! Wonderful! There are many possibilities for this movement. Any sane progressive who advocates for the workers ought to get behind this IS movement. I went to a California liberal Democrat website the other day and saw a forum on illegal immigration. I was astonished that about 8 There are some logistical problems in growing this movement. How do we tone down the racist boneheads so they don’t scare off the non-rightwingers? How do we get sane non-rightwingers and non-racists into a movement that is shot through with anti-Hispanic racism and White Supremacism from top to bottom? How do we talk about the racist Yahoos and still manage to get sane people to join a movement that is swimming with them like fish at a trout farm? How to deal with touchy questions of race, IQ, crime rates and the like? Say we get an IS forum going. Quickly the rightwing crazies will pile on there and start belting away at liberalism and everything it stands for. If there are any liberals on the forum, they are either going to run bug-eyed for the hills, or they will stay and fight the rightwingers. Pretty soon a forum which should be focusing on the common enemy degenerates into idiotic infighting. Just what La Raza wants! So what do we do? Institute some rules about no liberal-bashing and no conservative-bashing? Set up different fora for liberals and conservatives? The last may be the best plan. What about class? Though most IS folks are working class, some are upper middle class. How do we deal with the inevitable blue versus white collar tensions that arise when each group pursues its self-interests? As it stands, this is a movement that in some respects deserves to be defeated. What’s the solution? Grow the movement. Liberals, Centrists and even Leftists need to be made to feel that they can be part of this movement too.

Is the Anti-Illegal Immigrant Movement Racist?

Repost from the old site. It’s actually a trick question. Some of members of the anti-immigration movement are racists. Racists always join any movement critical of immigration. So what? This entire argument rests on a fallacious assumption. That the presence of one group in a movement means that all of the other members of the movement share the feelings of that one group. It’s a well-known logical fallacy called guilt by association. It’s very important to become aware of all of the logical fallacies out there, because people are always using these BS arguments to try to convince you of this or that. Fact is, if you change your mind due to a logical fallacy, you are being fooled. If you do so knowingly, you are a fool. If you use logical fallacies in your arguments, you are either ignorant or a knowing liar. “Guilt by association” is widely used and manages to convince hundreds of millions of fools of this or that every year the world over. Yet, just because I associate with someone, or anyone, does not mean that I share any, all or some of their views. Some of the kids in my apartment complex I associate with claim to be Hispanic gang members. A Black guy I know here wears a stocking over his head, gangster-style. One of the Chicano guys I was drinking with at the bar the other night looked like he just got out of prison and had a shirt on with an apparent gang logo. I’m also friends with a guy who is a White Supremacist racist, with the usual Nazi sympathies. He pretty much refuses to speak with anyone who is not White, especially Blacks and Browns. I don’t agree with him, but I’m not going to dissociate with him. I have friends who are rightwing Republicans and others who are leftwing Democrats and a few who are Communists. To say that I agree with all of these people would be impossible, as they all hold contradictory views. Militant Jews are some of the world’s leading experts in devious argumentation, including logical fallacy, lawyerese, sophistry, prevarication and basically the art of verbal BS. I guess that is why there are so many Jewish lawyers? I learned this while doing combat with them in the Mideast groups on Usenet. One of the Jews’ favorite tactics was guilt by association. If one voiced any sympathy for any Palestinian or Arab group, some obscure terroristic or anti-Semitic incident done by that group was dredged up and you were immediately associated with it and accused of homicidal anti-Semitism. There were also fascist White Supremacists in those groups, and a lot of us were cordial with them. Why not? The Jews were smashing us right and left, so why make more enemies? The Jews deviously used our cordiality with these bad guys as prima facie evidence that we agreed with Nazism, and therefore were Nazis. As usual, no amount of our protestations of innocence were accepted. I wonder whether these Jews believed their fallacies or if they were deliberately lying about us. The tactics that these Jews used were, of course, not particular to Jews, but Jews do seem to do this better than anyone else. That’s not necessarily a slam. There is an art to verbal sparring, even the blatantly dishonest kind. After all, sleazy politics makes the world go round, the sleaziest pol wins the cake, and “attorney” is the name of a well-paid profession. I have seen other groups use these same tactics. Logical fallacies are favorites of other nationalists, not just Jewish nationalists. Turkish nationalists are getting pretty good at aping their Jewish cohorts. Arab nationalists, who mostly hate Jews, act a lot like them in these regards. After a while, you realize that all nationalists and ultranationalists are speaking the same language, even though most of them hate each others’ guts. Logical fallacies are also commonly used by conservatives, especially the more hardline types, and I have seen them used by some Marxists. If we call ultranationalism and the Far Left and Right species of fanaticism, we can start to see sleazy argumentation and reliance on logical fallacy as simply markers of general fanaticism and emotional argumentation, and, frankly, the argument of the man who lacks one. Which leads us to the anti-illegal immigration movement. The fact is, a large majority of Americans are opposed to illegal immigration, often ferociously so. Surveys show that 75-8 In other words, opposing illegal immigration is normal, reasonable American politics. It’s not fanatical or racist or anything like that, unless one wants to make the crazy claim that 8 This gives the lie to the open borders crazies’ notion that the anti-illegal immigration movement represents only a small “anti-immigrant” minority. According to them, the rest of us are supposedly open borders nuts like them. The issue is complicated by polling questions and the actual views of Americans. Polls show that up to 6 On the other hand, Americans in these same polls think it is important to lock down the border. The open borders loons want a completely open border, not just in the South but apparently everywhere. In their insane plan, every single “immigrant”, or now, “migrant” (the words keep changing as they become stigmatized) who strolls across the border gets automatic US citizenship, apparently without any background checks or anything unpleasant like that. Surely only a small minority of Americans favor such an insane program. The open borders liars conflate Americans’ cynicism about the possibility of deporting 20 million illegals (hence some sort of “legalize them” solution) with implied support for illegal immigrants and open borders, ignoring the nation’s fervent desire to lock down the Southern border as much as possible. Sure the movement has racists in it, but any rational person knows that the vast majority of those opposing illegal immigration are not profoundly racist people, and if one is opposed to illegal immigration, one is keeping company with 75-8

Tulio on Black Crime and Feminism and What to Do About Them

Tulio, a Black man in his 30’s, is a regular commenter on the site. It was nice to see him move out defensive mode on the subject and write a deep and heartfelt post about these matters which are so painfully dear to his heart. He said that he thinks about this stuff constantly, as he is a young Black man. That’s sad, but if you care, it’s understandable. Tulio notes that the problem is now so entrenched that it seems to be intractable. He also notes the corrosive effect of a lot of the new Black music. Even White prison gang members have remarked on how detrimental they feel this music has been to White youth in recent years. They say young White man come to prison after listening to hip hop for years and think they are tough badass gangsters going to live it up in paradise in a maximum security prison. And boy do they have another thing coming! I would like to thank Tulio for this post. Even if these problems seem intractable, we should at least be discussing them, as the human and societal damage is of epic proportions.

Black Crime

As for Black crime, it’s a confluence of a lot of different things and not an easy problem to solve. Single motherhood. You have a lot of fatherless homes and single mothers. While not all single mothers raise bad sons (I personally know great guys raised by single moms), most guys in prison never had a strong father in their life. Women’s role is nurture; men’s role is discipline. Boys aren’t afraid of their moms. They’re afraid of their dads. Boys need fathers first and foremost. I don’t know what the high cause of single motherhood is in the Black underclass. I truly have no idea, and I think about this stuff all the time since I’m a Black man. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time that Blacks were known for having strong families. The explosion seems to have happened in the 60s. I don’t think there’s anything genetic about it. This doesn’t seem to be the case in Africa, especially traditional African society. It seems to be something unique to Black Americans. I don’t know what it looks like amongst Black Latins or Caribbeans. But family in Africa seems pretty strong, so I know it’s not genetic. Dead zones. Secondly you have a large cultural vacuum in certain parts of the country. Do you ever read about how there are dead zones in the ocean? Certain areas where there is not enough oxygen and that part of the ocean is devoid of life? The inner cities of America are dead zones. They are islands of misery, hopelessness, broken schools, high unemployment, drugs, urban decay. There’s very little there to give people inspiration and hope. The church is often the only thing. The people living there have just enough so as not to revolt, yet not enough for them to be functional players in the economy. The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out. So what can be done about it? I don’t know. The problem seems almost intractable. So I guess the only real solution here would be some sort of gentrification. Concentrated poverty is a very dangerous thing. As I’ve shown before, it can turn White people violent as well like it did in NYC tenements or as it currently does in Glasgow. Spreading the poor out a bit should help. And it should also make their behavior better through cultural osmosis. I can imagine no worse situation than being a Black kid raised by a poor single mother where the only male role models are thuggish rappers and drug dealers. They need to see other things and get out of that box. They need something positive to aspire to. High unemployment. When unemployment is high, it makes working in the dark side of the economy more seductive. I’m sure many of these kids coming up would like to be able to make a decent living and not have to worry about ending up in jail or getting gunned down. But the fewer jobs there are, the more it makes the risk of selling drugs seem worth it. Even fairly decent people will start acting shady if that’s the only way they have to survive. Well one major problem is that many blue collar jobs that Blacks used to do for a living wage either went to China or went to illegal aliens. It wasn’t uncommon to see Black carpenters, drywallers, construction workers, meatpackers, etc. Now these jobs are almost all entirely done by Mexicans illegally in the country. This was a huge issue in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina. There were a lot of Blacks out of work that wanted those construction jobs, and they were livid that they were going to Mexicans who aren’t even citizens and don’t even have any roots in the city. How can anyone not feel their pain? The gutting of solid blue collar work has had a huge effect on Rust Belt White America but it has been an utter disaster for Black America. I see no easy solution here either. Music. I also thing the music is a problem. Now maybe it’s an issue of art imitating life, or it’s the other way around, I don’t know. But I do think it has something of a feedback loop effect. A lot or rap music, even if not explicitly advocating violence, tends to reinforce a lot of selfish attitudes, hyper-materialism, fast money, fast women, party hard, a lot of Machiavellianism. It’s pervasive, even in the more lukewarm hiphop music. Sometimes it’s just the attitude. The anger. One rarely sees rappers smiling or seeming happy unless surrounded by money, bling and sexy women. This stuff has to stop, and if I had a kid, I’d be very careful about what they listen to. That said, not all rap music is like that, a lot of it is positive and life affirming. Some of it is great to dance too or just enjoy in the background if you have the smarts to not get caught up in the Machiavellian stuff. It should also be noted that not all “Black music” is like this. The majority of Black music is not rap and does not contain violent lyrics. Unfortunately though, most of the music young Black males of the inner city listen to will be rap and often with terrible messages. What can anyone do about this? Not much, as long as there’s a first amendment, rappers can pretty much talk about whatever they want sell their music to whomever they want, most of which is bought by Whites anyway. Sorry I don’t have any easy solutions, but these are just a few things that contribute to the issue.

Feminism

As for feminism, and I assume we’re talking about feminism of the more militant variety, the Pandora’s Box is open on that one. I wish things had stayed with equity feminism, and we could’ve left it there. But it then evolved into an assault on gender roles and gender as some sort of social construct rather than biological reality. That’s what happens when people with PhD’s take over the movement. I know it’s not realistic for every American man to find a foreign woman, but for those that can, I think that’s the best solution. Foreign women are much more enjoyable to be around.

Question

Repost from the old site. How many White Nationalists are not racists, at least against Black people? One thing that is weird about WN’s is that their real obsession is with Blacks. It’s Blacks that they hate more than anything else in the whole country. They don’t much care about Hispanics or Muslims all that much. As commenters on Amren say, “Blacks are our enemy.” I told this to some smart Blacks and they said, “Oh, we know.” They knew it all along. I guess I am some kind of an idiot. I am dubious, to say the least, about the Hispanicization of the US and I hate illegal immigration. I’d prefer not to live around lots of Hispanics. Here in California, we do not have to deal with Blacks all that much. You can always choose not to live around them. As such, Blacks have not done a whole lot to me in my life and they just don’t effect me. Hence, arguments about Black evil and perfidy, Black crime and Black crime against Whites just leave me cold. It doesn’t effect me at all. Further, Blacks are not going anywhere. They are not leaving and they have even more right to be here than most Whites. It’s understandable that they are a bit pissed off. This blog is even officially Black-friendly, just to encourage them to come around. The Hispanics can take off, at least the illegal ones. Then we can put up some sensible barriers to try to make sure that Hispanic immigrants who come here are likely to be beneficial and not drains or detriments to society. There is nothing to do with Blacks. They don’t immigrate here and can’t be sent packing. The future shows no significant increase in the Black percentage of the US. They are not a looming problem for the future. The fact that the WN movement is basically just a Hate Movement against Black people is something that needs to be publicized in a rational, non-name-calling manner. These guys mostly hate Blacks and we can prove it. Let them try to justify their racist bullshit rather than hiding behind fake rationales and subterfuges. Just come out and admit it, White nationalists! You don’t like Blacks!

Can't Make It Without Immigrant Scabs? Just Go!

Repost from the old site. We hear over and over again about all these businesses that supposedly are going to go out business if they can’t hire immigrant scabs. And that’s what every single illegal alien is in this country – a scab. Let’s make that loud and clear here. And H-1B “non-immigrant guest workers” that have totally destroyed the computer industry for US engineers and programmers are nothing but scabs too. Indian nationalists tell me that without H-1B’s, all US computer corporations will have to go out of business. Well, first of all, that is complete nonsense. It’s not going to happen. This is all based on the premise that there is such horrible competition from those great computer corporations in INDIA that are, you know, going to put Microsoft and Intel out of business. I’ve also heard it from a fish processing plant in New England that now hires all illegal aliens. Back in the 1980’s, this was a union shop paying high wages. Bottom line is they broke the union. Now they pay crap wages and the only people dumb or desperate enough to work there are illegals. I suppose they are treated just wonderfully too. So they need to hire illegals. As always, Americans will do the horrible, smelly and dirty work, but you need to pay them a good wage. This is what happened to our meat packing plants too, exactly. This is also what happened to the US construction industry. One by one, they broke the constructions unions. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, my friends were working union construction. It paid good money, enough to buy a home and raise a family. That’s all pretty much gone now. The jobs that once paid the equivalent of $30-45/hour in today’s wages are mostly history. There are still union jobs around, but not that many, and they have to wage continuous war against illegals. There’s also a serious problem with legal immigrants from Mesoamerica who we have insanely allowed to flood in here. The result has been a complete glut in unskilled labor, such that many legal Mesoamericans are happy to work construction for $10/hr. These jobs used to pay $30-45/hr. One would think that with a 30-7 I blame the Left in part for all of this. For the destruction of the US middle class and working class, for the crime and gang wave among young Americans in our cities (all the unskilled work goes to illegals, so young men turn to crime, gangs and dope). For the mad increases in inequality, for the decline in wages for US workers, for workers have to work two and three jobs to get by, for the entire rightwing and Republican revolution (created in part by the empowerment of a 2 There were many factors at play in the development of these sorry reactionary and backwards trends over 35 years, but the US Idiot Left cheering on mass legal and illegal immigration into the US, especially in the past 20 years, has played its own sorry and significant role. The American worker doesn’t really have any friends anymore. Both parties are supporting his total and absolute replacement by a never-ending tidal wave of immigrant scabs. There have been some posts lately about a particularly gratuitous, outrageous and in your face abuse of immigration law in a town called Postville, Iowa in a plant that was managed by Orthodox Jews. They came into Postville, took over the plant, got rid of all the Americans, and hired all illegal aliens. They are now polluting the water supply. I doubt they have paid much taxes either. Apparently they were also allowing the plant to be used to manufacture methamphetamine! How low can you go? This incident has been written up a lot, including a book by a Jewish author that was quite critical of these Orthodox Jews – Steven Bloom – Postville – A Clash of Cultures in the Heartland. They came into the town, would not talk to or be friendly with anyone not Jewish, filled the town with illegal Mesoamericans, and basically created a lot of havoc. This particular Jewish family – the Rubashkins – have been crooks for a very long time. They’ve been not only ripping off the Gentiles in the traditional Orthodox manner, but they have also specialized in ripping off their own people. That’s actually a violation of Jewish dual morality, and it may explain why they got some fellow Jews after them. The Jewish press, as usual, wrote glowing articles about this wonderful situation in this small Iowa town, and Jewish Hollywood made a stupid documentary narrated by Glen Close and sponsored by Hallmark that lied and said how wonderful everything was in Postville, Iowa. Here is Steve Sailer’s excellent article on this situation. The comments are also enlightening. There is a Jewish commenter (apparently) on there defending the Lubavitchers running the slaughterhouse (the Lubavitchers are the very worst of all ultra-Orthodox Jews). His line is that if they shut down the plant, it will be an economic disaster for Postville. I get to the point of my post. So shut it down already! Seriously, just shut down the fucking plant. They aren’t hiring any Americans anyway. Just move it to Mexico and take the 800 Mexican scabs with you. That’s basically my response to all these idiots who say we need to bring in Indian H-1B job thief scabs and illegals to do all this work that supposedly Americans just won’t do. Supposedly it’s going to harm US business too much to get rid of all the immigrant scabs, legal and illegal. Look man, if you can’t make it paying American workers the wages that they want (not too high, actually) just take the fuck off. Go overseas. Offshore. Move your damn business to a foreign country. What good is a business in the US that isn’t even hiring Americans anyway? Who’s making money off that, besides the criminal owner? A bunch of immigrant scabs, that’s who. And they are worthless. They add nothing to this country, they and their jobs can go in a NY minute without a tear to be shed. These businesses are nothing but parasites in our country. If all a business can do in our country is just be a parasite, then just move your damn operation offshore and get the Hell out of the country.

Pat Buchanon As a Covert White Nationalist

A commenter writes:

Pat Buchanan also seems to be a White Nationalist, or at least someone who believes the US should remain a majority White country forever and uses his “Western Civilization” term as a code for White domination constantly. I’m sure his covert White Nationalism (Which I guess is Nixon era moderate ideology isn’t it?) is what got him kicked off liberal MSNBC. Most Black, Latino, Amerindian etc racists by definition are on the Left, aren’t they?

Yes Buchanan is a covert White nationalist in a sense. Buchanan is about as far as any form of WN, no matter how mild, has made it in the mainstream. There is little stomach for even Buchanan’s very mild race realism and White ethnocentrism which is why he is being thrown off venue after venue. Buchanan has few other peers in the mass media, as there is almost no space there for them. Actually, aside from his antisemitism (itself quite mild), Buchanan’s views are quite mild in terms of WN and HBD in general. He’s pretty much saying what a lot of us liberals think but are too frightened to say. But almost all true White nationalists want to split off and form their own state. Few WN’s want to just keep the US a White majority country anymore, as that seems to be hopeless anyway. The definition of WN anymore seems to be one who wants a separate White country. Most WN’s nowadays are split into a few camps: 1. Take back the US by force. Enforce White dominance at the state level and throw out the minorities and send them back to wherever. With the most extreme, this would involve some level of genocide or mass murder against non-Whites and “White traitors,” especially Jews and White race traitors. 2. White separatists. Most WN’s nowadays are White Separatists. They want a separate White state in the US along with separate states for Blacks and Hispanics or possibly a separate mixed race state where anyone could live. This has always been the goal of almost all of the major WN figures. Those who deny this are basically lying. WN for all intents and purposes is White separatism in one form or another. 3. The apartheid crowd. Some want to take back the US, enforce White dominance, but not throw out the minorities. This is a lesser trend. They want to keep the minorities under heel with some form of apartheid or Jim Crow. At the very least, they want to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. 4. Get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. This is the least toxic of the trends, and it’s the fallback position in the even that there is no White state and no White capture of the state and enforced apartheid. All WN’s and I do mean all of them believe that we should eliminate all anti-discrimination laws. Then White towns at least could be set up where there would be massive discrimination against nonwhites on a private level. This ties in very well with the Libertarian position since all Libertarians want to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. People of color support Libertarianism at their own risk. 5. End all immigration, legal and illegal. Some modify this to say that we should allow immigration by Whites. This is a fallback minimal position. Obviously this is never going to happen either. We can’t even limit legal immigration. We can’t stop illegal immigration, and there are continuous calls for amnesty. This will never fly, but it’s supported by all WN’s with vehemence. The 1965 Immigration Act was one of the worst things that ever happened to America in their book. 6. End affirmative action. All WN’s support this, and quite a few regular folks do too. This is another fallback minimal position and ties in well with the positions of the Republican Party. 7. Sing the praises of a White majority US and White dominance, bash minorities, but do nothing to keep a White majority or White dominance in place. This is essentially a rhetorical position, and it’s where Pat Buchanan is coming from. One very smart Black commenter on here wrote a while back that the logical end result of WN could only be genocide, apartheid (or separatism) or expulsion. He was correct of course.

Most Black, Latino, Amerindian etc racists by definition are on the left, aren’t they?

Unfortunately, most Black, Latino and Indian racists are indeed on the Left, often on the Far Left. As there is no space for racism on the Left, this has always bothered me, but on the Left, they say that these folks are not really racists. They’re just fighting back against White racism and only Whites can be racist, bla bla bla.

Alt Left: India: Hell on Earth

Here is an excellent piece about India that I got from an internet site. The author is unknown, but he may be a Dalit or low caste Indian. It sums up why India is such a Hellhole – Indians created it that way.

We had a commenter on here called Dota, an Indian Muslim who hates India way more than I do. He fled to Canada. He recently said that India is Hell, and its people are the scum of humanity. That’s a hard-hitting thing to say, but is it true? He lived there for many years and I did not.

It does appear that Indian society and culture itself is at the core of India’s problems, and I can’t help but think that the religion of Hinduism is a big part of the country’s problems. As Dota says, of all religions, Hinduism cares about people the least. A shocking statement, but is it true?

In another comment, I talked about the hundreds of millions of people starving, diseased, shitting outdoors and living in the streets or fetid slums of India. According to Dota, Indian elites feel that the Indian poor living and dying in Hell that is India deserve everything they get up to and including death. That’s why there’s so little effort to fix up the mess – the poor deserve their fate. They even deserve to die. A frightening remark again, but what if it is true?

And once again, this belief seems to circle back around to Hinduism once again. The Hindu religion seems to be at the very heart and core of India’s Hell on Earth.

Why Do 1 Million Indians Flee India Every Year?

Any crackdowns on illegal immigrants or restricting quotas abroad to Indians are a major concern to India’s politicians. The latest statistics from the US Department of Homeland Security shows that the number of Indian illegal migrants jumped 12

Here are some Indian facts:

Poverty Graph

According to the WFP, India accounts around 5

Around six out of 10 Indians live in the countryside, where abject poverty is widespread. 34.

The Current Account Balance of India

A major area of vulnerability for us is the high consolidated public-debt to GDP ratio of over 7

says the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Mr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the current account balance of India is -$375.1 trillion (minus) while China is the wealthiest country in the world with $426.1 trillion (plus). India listed at 182 and China at 1 [CIA: The World Factbook].

Human Development vs GDP growth

The Human Development Report for 2009 released by the UNDP ranked India 134 out of 182 countries based on measures of life expectancy, education, and income. India has an emigration rate of 0.

Population

According to the Indian census of 2001, the total population was 1.028 billion. Hindus numbered 827 million or 80.

Thus the caste system leaves lower caste Hindus as an oppressed majority in India’s power structure. Going by figures quoted by the Backward Classes Commission, Brahmins alone (

The 2004 World Development Report mentions that more than 2

Living Conditions of Indians

8

According to National Family Health Survey data (2005-06), only 4

Education

India has over 3

About 40 million primary school-age children in India are not in school. More than 9

While Japan has 4,000 universities for its 127 million people, and the US has 3,650 universities for its 301 million, India has only 348 universities for its 1.2 billion people. In the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities by Institute of Higher Education published by Shanghai Jiao Tong, only two Indian Universities are included.

Even the two much-ballyhooed IIT’s in India found only a lower worldwide slot (203 and 304) in the 2007 report. Although Indian universities churn out three million graduates a year, only 1

Health

India today allocates lower than

107,000 leprosy patients live in India. 15.

There are only 585 rural hospitals compared to 985 urban hospitals in the country. Out of the 6,39,729 doctors registered in India, only 67,576 are in the public sector, and the rest are either in the private sector or abroad. According to a survey by NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization), 4

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India. India accounts for one-fifth of the global TB incident cases. Each year about 1.8 million people in India develop TB, of which 0.8 million are infectious cases. It is estimated that  330,000 Indians die from TB every year [WHO India].

Economy under Siege by Elite Hindus

In India, the wealth of 36 families amounts to $191 billion, which is one fourth of India’s GDP. In other words, 35 elite Hindu families own one quarter of India’s GDP by leaving 8

The dominant group of Hindu nationalists come from the three upper castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas) that constitute only 1

India is also one of the most under-banked major markets in the world, with only 6 bank branches per 1,000 sq. kms., according to the World Bank, and less than 3

Corruption

According to TI, 2

Corruption is a large tax on Indian growth; it delays execution, raises costs, and destroys the moral fiber

says Prof. Rama Murthi. Transparency International estimates that Indian truckers pay something in the neighborhood of $5 billion annually in bribes to keep freight flowing. According to Rahul Gandhi, only

Discrimination Against Dalits

Crime against Dalits occur every 20 minutes in India. Every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit houses are burnt down! These figures represent only a fraction of the actual number of incidents, since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper caste Hindus.

Official figures show that there are still 343 million manual scavengers in India from the Dalit community. More than 165 million Dalits in India are abused by their Hindu upper castes due to their birth [HRW Report 2007].

Human Rights

When it comes to human rights issues in India, it has not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and its citizens do not have the opportunity to find recourse in remedies that are available under international law. The victims are trapped in the local Hindu caste system, which in every aspect militates against their rights.

India has a very poor record of protecting the privacy of its citizens, according to the latest report from Privacy International (PI). India scored 1.9 points, which makes it an ‘extensive surveillance society’. A score between 4.1 and 5.0 (the highest score) would mean a country consistently upholds human rights standards. PI is a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations.

Fake encounter killings are rampant in India. These extrajudicial killings are inspired by the theological texts of the Brahmins such as Artha Shastra and Manusmriti which teach espionage and torture methods. Every such killing of an innocent person branded a terrorist has encouraged the killer cops to target socially excluded communities like Dalits, tribals, and minorities.

India’s intelligence agencies like IB, RAW, etc. seem to be thoroughly infiltrated by foreign secret services which support powerful weapon-producing nations. Formed in 1947, IB is engaged in wiretapping, spying on political opponents, and sometimes indicting people on false criminal charges. The IB also has files on numerous authors, bloggers, and media persons.

According to the National Human Rights Commission, as of 30th June 2004, there were 3,320,112 prisoners in Indian jails, out of which 2,390,146 were awaiting trial. More than 7

The bar association in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has refused to represent 13 Muslim suspects accused of bombing courthouses in 2005. A large percentage of Indian police officers, attorneys, and judges appear regularly at events organized by notorious Hindu militant groups.

India is a parliamentary democracy, but nevertheless, it is not exactly a fully free society. The human rights group Freedom House ranks India as a 2 (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 the highest) for political rights and 3 for civil liberties. Elections are generally free, but, notes Freedom House,

Government effectiveness and accountability are also undermined by pervasive criminality in politics, decrepit state institutions, and widespread corruption.

The State Department observes:

There were numerous reports that the government and its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals and insurgents, or staged encounter deaths.

Minorities

About 2

According to Mr. Tahir Mahmood, an Indian Muslim journalist,

The 2.

Discrimination Against Minority Muslims

Recently, Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee report admitted that 138 million Muslims across India are severely underrepresented in government employment, including Public Sector Units. Ironically, West Bengal, a communist-ruled state, reported no Muslims in higher positions in its PSU’s! The share of Muslims in government  and the lower judiciary in any state simply does not come anywhere close to their population share.

The only place where Muslims can claim a share in proportion to their population is in prison! Muslims represent 19.

A Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared to the national average of four years. Less than

There is a need to re-orient official strategies for ensuring better access of Muslim children to schooling outside the madrassas which cater to only

Discrimination in Media

Hindu upper caste men, who constitute just

The Hindu Other Backward Class groups, who are 3

Discrimination in the Judiciary

India’s subordinate courts have a backlog of over 22 million cases, while the 21 high courts and the Supreme Court have 3.5 million and 32,000 pending cases (2006) respectively. In subordinate courts, over 15 million cases are filed and an equal number disposed of annually by about 14,000 judges! Every year a million or more cases are added to the arrears. At the current speed, the lower courts will need 124 years to clear the backlog. There are only 13 judges for every million people.

Recently a parliamentary committee blamed the judiciary for keeping out competent persons of downtrodden communities “through a shrewd process of manipulation.” Between 1950 to 2000, 4

Dalits and Indian aborigines make up less than 20 out of 610 judges working in Supreme Court and state high courts.

This nexus and manipulative judicial appointments have to be broken

the report urged. [Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on Constitutional Review, Sudarshan Nachiappan]. Among 12 states with high Muslim populations, Muslim representation in the judicial sector was limited to 7.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only 3

Discrimination Against Children

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, India has the highest number of street children in the world. There are no exact numbers, but conservative estimates suggest that about 18 million children live and labor in the streets of India’s urban centers. Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta each have an estimated street children population of over 100,000. The total number of child laborers in India is estimated to be 60 million.

The level of child malnutrition in India is among the highest in the world, higher than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, says the report Extent of Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition in India by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. While around 2

A quarter of all neonatal deaths in the world (2.1 million) occurred in India, says the UNICEF Report 2007. More than one in five children in the world who die within four weeks of birth is an Indian. Nearly 5

Discrimination Against Women

According to the 2001 census, female literacy in India is 54.1

There are an estimated 40 million Hindu widows in India, and the least fortunate of them are shunned and stripped of the life they lived when they were married. It’s believed that 15,000 widows live on the streets of Vrindavan, a Hindu holy city of about 55,000 population in northern India.

Many widows – at least 4

Nearly 9 out of 10 pregnant women suffer from malnutrition, about half of all children (4

Nearly 2

On average, one Indian woman commits suicide every four hours over a dowry dispute. In an Indian marriage, the woman should bring jewelry, cash, and even consumer durables as part of dowry to the in-laws. If they fail bring enough valuables, the victims are burnt to death – doused in kerosene and set on fire. The in-laws routinely claim that the death happened due to an accident.

Rape is the fastest growing crime in India. Every hour, Indian women suffer two rapes, two kidnappings, four sexual assaults, and seven incidents of husband- and relative-instigated cruelty [National Crime Records Bureau Report 2006].

Fetus Killing

The female to male birth ratio was feared to reach 20:80 by the year 2020 as female fetus killing is rampant. Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either just before they were born or immediately after, the Indian Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury related to Reuters.

According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys. The availability of ultrasound sex determination tests leads to mass abortions in India.

Around 11 million abortions are carried out in India every year, and nearly 80,000 women die during the process, says a report from the Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI).

Human Trafficking

Out of the 593 districts in India, 378 or 62.

9

Of the total women who are involved in sex work in the country, 6

India has 4 million prostitutes nationwide, and 6

High Crime Rate and Communal Riots

India reported 32,481 murders, 36,617 molestation cases 19,348 rapes, and 7,618 dowry deaths in 2006. NCRB found that Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes (1,940,711), followed by Maharashtra (1,910,788), Andhra Pradesh (1,730,909), Tamil Nadu (1,480,972), and Rajasthan (1,410,992) during 2006. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 1,822,602 riots in 2005 alone [Incidence Of Cognizable Crimes (IPC) Under Different Crime Heads,  Page 2, NCRB website].

On average there are more than 2,000 kidnappings per year in India. Under India’s notorious caste system, upper caste Hindus inherit key positions and control all the governmental branches. Violent crime goes largely goes unpunished due to the support of upper caste crooks.

Economic Crimes

Economic crime continues to be pervasive threat for Indian companies, with 3

* Corruption and bribery continue to be the most common types of fraud, reported by 2 * The average direct financial loss to companies was INR 60 Million (US $1.5 million) during the two year period. In addition, the average cost to deal with economic crime in India is INR 40 Million (US $1 Million), which is close to double that of the global and Asia Pacific average. * In 3 * In 5

Armed Conflicts in India

Almost every state has separatist movements, many of them armed.

A large number of Muslims were killed in the past few years across the country, and the numbers are on a steady rise.

On top of that, India has become a pariah for its neighbors. None of its neighbors appreciate their closeness to India, and they all blame it for meddling in their affairs.

6

According to an Indian official report, 165 of India’s 602 districts – mostly in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh – are badly affected by tribal and Dalit violence, which the government terms “Maoist terror”.

India’s military spending was recorded at US $21.7 billion in 2006, and it planned to spend $26.5 billion during 2008/09 financial year. 8

India experienced a rapid increase in demand for security in the period following the Mumbai attacks, thanks to the world’s weapon industry! India is now one of the world’s most terror-prone countries, with a death toll second only to Iraq, says a report from the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington.

India’s crime rates, already some of the highest in the world, are also rising, as is the incidence of corporate espionage. Approximately 5.5 million private security guards are employed by about 15,000 security companies in India. As an industry, it is now the country’s largest corporate taxpayer [CAPSI report].

In 2005, Business Week reported that India became the largest importer of Israeli weapons, accounting for about half of the $3.6 billion in weapons exported by the Jewish state.

Do remember that 34 years ago, NSG was created by Americans? Hence it has been their onus to convince the group to grant the waiver to India to carry out the multi-billion dollar business as India is a large market,

said former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Mr P. K. Iyengar.

The Booming Industry of Terrorism Experts and Security Research Institutes in India

With the emergence of Hindutva fascist forces and their alliance with neocons and Zionists, India witnessed a sharp increase in the number of research institutes, media houses, and lobbying groups. According to a study by the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, India has 422 think tanks, second only to the US, which has over 2,000 such institutions.

Out of 422 recognized Indian think tanks, around 63 are engaged in security research and foreign policy matters, which are heavily funded by global weapons industry. India’s retired spies, police officers, military personnel, diplomats, and journalists are hired by these national security and foreign policy research institutes which get enormous funds from the global weapons industry.

These institutions in fact have a hidden agenda. Behind the veil, they work as the public relations arm of weapon industry. With the help of their media and intelligence wings, they create fake terror stories and exaggerated crime waves the areas of tribal, Dalit, and minority areas in order to get public acceptance for weapon contracts.

By creating conflicts in this India, Brahmin spin masters get huge commissions from the sale of weapons to government forces. To these corrupt bureaucrats, India’s ‘national interest‘ simply means ‘their self interest’. Their lobbying power bring more wealth to their families via lucrative jobs, citizenship in rich countries, and educational opportunities abroad.

India is one of the world’s largest weapons importers. Between 2000 and 2007, India was ranked the world’s second largest arms importer, accounting for 7.

Over 1,130 companies in 98 countries manufacture arms, ammunition, and components. 9

The Defense Offset Facilitation Agency estimated that India will spend $100 billion importing weapons in the next five years. At least 38 court cases relating to arms agreements are still pending against bureaucrats and military officers. Hindu fascist forces currently enjoy the upper hand in the media, civil service, judiciary, defense, and education of Indian society.

Sooner or later, the 25,000-strong democratic institutions in India will collapse, and the country will be transformed into a limited democracy under the rule of a security regime like Turkey or Israel. The Hindutvas’ security-centric nationalism was never capable of bringing peace and protection to ordinary citizens.

According to Global Peace Index, India is currently ranked near the bottom (122 with 2.422 score). Interestingly, India’s top weapons supplier, Israel, is among the world’s worst performers when it comes to peace ranking (141). It remains a simple fact that peace cannot be attained by a sophisticated security apparatus.

Furthermore, India topped Asian Risk Prospects 2009 with the highest political and social risk, scoring 6.87, mainly because of internal and external instability (PERC).

Suicides of Farmers and the Collapse of the Agricultural Sector

In the last two years, more than 218,000 people across India committed suicide, mainly due to poverty, family feuds, strained relationships with loved ones, dowry harassment, and health problems. In research by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau, there were 118,112 and 100,000+ suicides in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Aside from farmers, women also have a high suicide rate.

Most of those who committed suicide were farmers, and the victims took their lives either by hanging or ingesting poison. Since 1998, about 25,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because they could not repay their debts. These debts, however, have largely accumulated because these farmers were severely overcharged by moneylenders, who demand up to 3

7

7

Unemployment

Retail trade employs

Call centers and other outsourced businesses such as software coding, medical transcription, and back-office tasks employ more than 1.6 million people in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Heart disease is projected to account for 3

Internal Migration and Influx to the Cities

There are 5 million living on the streets of Mumbai every night, covered only in newspaper

says Dr. Werner Fornos, president of the Global Population Education think tank and the former head of the Population Institute in Washington, D.C.

India is spending more than $400 million (£200m) to polish Delhi’s image as a first-rate capital, a difficult task for a city that seems to exist between the First and Third worlds. A third of the capital’s 14 million-plus people live in teeming slums. According to crime statistics, in 2006, Delhi continued to be the undisputed crime capital of the country, a position it held for the previous 5 years in a row. 35 mega-cities in India collectively reported a total of 3,26,363 crimes in 2006, an increase of 3.

For the third year in a row, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore together accounted for more than one-third of all crimes reported in Indian cities of over 1 million population.

India, a Closed Country

India’s share of the world tourism map has hovered between .3

Indian immigration policies do not welcome tourists. On VISA requirement and T&T index scales for how hard it is to visit a country, India ranked 106 while Malaysia ranked 15. VOA facilities are not available to anyone. The easiest entry to India is typically limited to countries with considerable Hindu populations like Mauritius or Nepal.

The Hindu elite leaders of the country are always more concerned about India’s physical boundaries and its holy cows rather than the life of its poor, 8

Indian Embassies are rated as the worst on Earth. They are notorious for red tape and “corruption- friendly service,” a complaint repeatedly made even by Non Resident Indians themselves. 9

Global Warming Effects on India

Water tables are dropping in those regions where farmers are lucky enough to have wells, and rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable. Economic losses due to global warming in India are projected at between 9-2

The frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal will increase. Cases of malaria will increase to the point where it will become endemic in many more states. There will be a 2

India got the most foreign aid for natural disaster relief in two decades, obtaining 43 such loans totaling $8.257 billion from World Bank alone, beating even Bangladesh, and now has the 2nd highest World Bank loan figure in the world.

Transportation

Despite the much-touted economic boom, only .

China has built over 34,000 km of expressways compared to less than 8,000 km in India.

According to Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM), nearly 42 million man-hours are lost every month by the delays from 7 million-odd working population of Delhi and NRC who take the public transport to travel to work because of traffic congestion during the peak morning and evening hours.

Road Safety

India accounts for about 1

An estimated 1,275,000 persons are badly hurt on the road every year. The Government of India’s Planning Commission has estimated there are 15 hospitalized injuries and 70 minor injuries for every road death.

According to NATPAC, the number of accidents per 1,000 vehicles in India is as high as 35, while the figure ranges from 4 to 10 in developed countries. An estimated 270 people die each day from road accidents, and specialists predict that will increase by roughly

According to World Bank forecasts, India’s road death rate will continue to rise until 2042 if no remedial action is taken. In contrast, the number of road accidents in China dropped by an annual average 10.

Doing Business in India

It takes 50 days to register a property in India compared to less than 30 days in China and less than 10 in the United States and Thailand. The average cost of a business start-up is over 6

India has the highest cost of electricity among major industrialized and emerging economies ($.8 per kwh for industry as against $.1 kwh in China), or in other words, a quarter of the gross electricity output, the result being the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world.

Transport costs are very high in India. They account for 2

Foreign Remittance from Non Resident Indians

In 2006, India received $27 million in remittances national overseas workers, the highest amount globally. Around $20 billion of this came from the Gulf expatriate workforce. Together, GCC countries are the largest trading partner of India, and home to 5 million members of India’s overseas workforce.

Nearly three million people in Africa are of Indian ancestry. The top three countries with the largest populations of Indians in that region are South Africa, Mauritius, and the Reunion Islands. Indians also have a sizable presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the East Africa and Nigeria in West Africa.

Foreigners Living in India

Historically, about 7

Under the current scenario, potential migrants or ‘invaders’ to India include a few ‘hired or weird’ Pakistani bombers, villagers from around India’s border with Bangladesh, Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, and prostitutes from Nepal. The 92 year old Indian painter Maqbool Fida Hussain lives in Dubai after receiving death threats from Hindu militants.

According to Hindu extremists, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has passed all the tests for Indian citizenship. On the other hand, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the Christian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, is still considered to be a foreigner, while Pakistan-born Hindu Lal Krishna Advani is ‘legally and morally fit’ to become India’s next Prime Minister.

Leave India!

Sixty years ago Indians asked the British to get out of India. Now they are doing it themselves. To live with dignity and enjoy relative freedom, one has to leave India! With this massive exodus, what will be left behind will be a violently charged and polarized society.

The Hindutvadis’ Fake National Pride in India

A 2006 opinion poll by Outlook-AC Nielsen indicated that 4

Even Parliament members of the Hindutva party are involved in human trafficking from India. Recently, police arrested Babubhai Katara, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, who was part of such a racket. He received $20,000 per person to move his victims to the US.

When Indians are fleeing India to anywhere else in the world just to find a job, how can these Hindutva idiots claim any “National Pride of India”?

India is the World Bank’s largest borrower. In June 2007, it provided $3.7 billion in new loans to India. According to figures provided by Britain’s aid agency, the total aid to India from all sources is only $1.50 a head, compared with an average of $17 per head for low-income countries [Financial Times]. Due to the fake ‘Shining India’ propaganda launched by Hindutva idiots, foreign donors are reluctant to help the poor people in this country.

Gridlocked in corruption, greed, inhumanity, and absolute inequality of class, caste, wealth, and religion: this is the real India. Hindutva idiots, your false pride and antics embarrass us.

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The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation

Repost from the old site.

James Schipper writes in the comments section:

The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.

As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.

It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.

It can’t be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China’s performance with Russia’s in the 1990’s.

The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.

I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I’m a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.

The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn’t taken properly when some patients get worse.

Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.

Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at

It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can’t just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn’t be able to that either if I were privately insured.

There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.

I respond:

I really dislike capitalism, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far – people want stuff too.

My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.

Class war is continuous under capitalism.

Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.

Owners oppose increased

During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.

Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don’t get much of anything.

I’m sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-8

Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.

During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by

This is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that – where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it’s often a deadly fight.

I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn’t seem to work very well.

I don’t have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.

But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by the havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.

It’s true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.

So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.

The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms – the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market – is what finally got the economy going again.

This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.

Finally, by the 1990’s, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.

Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.

This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.

Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.

This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.

Some Choice: Nazi or PC Nutjob

Repost from the old site.

Boy, the Left has really gotten us into a pickle here, haven’t they?

If you are on the Left, support any degree of socialism, or are even a liberal, you are obligated to go along with the whole PC nutjob package: support for the craziest notions of man-hating Western feminism, for White-hating and non-White-worshipping lunatic anti-racism, for the insanity of mass immigration, not to mention illegal immigration of all things, for the idiotic and suicidal notion of Open Borders.

I talk to regular White people all the time. The Western Left has precisely nothing to do with the realities of how most White human beings in the US live their lives. Most of them hate illegal immigration and want cuts in legal immigration. Most of them dislike mass immigration turning the US into a United Nations on every block. Most of them reject White-hatred and non-White-worship.

And fanatical Western feminism is increasingly trivial to the lives of hundreds of millions of non-Western women who labor under the horrors of misogyny and male supremacy vastly worse than what American women endure.

What I have noticed is that Western feminism seems irrelevant to the realities of how heterosexual males and females negotiate sex and relationships in modern times. It is as if Western feminism is broadcasting from some bizarro alternative universe that has nothing to do with the one most of us negotiate on a daily basis.

What I am trying to say is that the Western PC Left, as its constituted, is irrelevant.

It’s hostile to men and Whites, and double so to White men. Any White man who buys into the line of the Western Left must be out of his mind.

It says right on the sidebar that I’m heterodox. You got it. For one thing, I’m a race realist. There are differences between the races and even within the races in terms of minor races and even ethnic groups. These differences are observable on a wide variety of metrics. It is irrelevant whether these differences are due to genetics or culture, since both intertwine anyway.

To see a particularly nasty view of race realism, shot through naturally all the way with racism, check out this book by Ricard Fuerle, a PhD in Economics and a patent attorney. The book is called Erectus Walks Among Us. The premise of the books is that Black people are monkeys, or apes, or Homo Erectus, or a much more primitive type of man. I’m almost done reading it. It’s pretty entertaining, but I’m warning you, this is toxic stuff.

While most of us don’t even want to think about stuff like this, he does marshal an awful lot of data showing that there are significant differences between the races. Philippe Rushton has done something similar lately and has been raked over the coals for it.

I will say right now that Rushton, Fuerle and the rest may be correct in some of what they say: there are more differences in the races than the obvious ones such as skin color. A quick rejoinder to this argument is typically shot from the Left: that in saying so, we are classifying ethnic groups and races in the same way we classify species and subspecies of animals – as having invariable behavior.

Like most Left rejoinders, this is garbage, but many racists sadly do think this way. I’m not much of an artist, but if I was, I would draw a scatter plot for you. That is what differences, particularly behavioral, psychological, intelligence and other such, but also including athletic ability, would look like between the races if you plotted them out on a graph.

On athletic ability, you would find Blacks more likely to plot superior on certain variables. Some Whites and even Asians would be over with the Blacks. Some Blacks would have very poor athletic ability. Racial and ethnic tendencies are only averages, and there will always be all sorts of individuals who will fall outside the stereotypes for their races.

Unless you understand what a scatter plot looks like, or unless you understand averages and statistics, you can’t discuss racial differences at all.

Why discuss racial differences at all?

Because, for one, the Right keeps throwing them in our faces.

And because the Left’s reaction to any racial or ethnic differences in outcome is wrong. The Left says that all races and ethnic groups are equal, and therefore, any differential outcomes must be the result of racism.

This leads the Left into insane, decades- to centuries-long, never-to-be won wars against racism, sexism, homophobia and whatnot. These things will probably always be with us. The insanity of the Left is the folly that they dream they can eradicate these aspects of human nature.

All you can do is reduce or increase things like that. I am certain that when I die, racism, sexism and homophobia will be alive and well, and the Left will be insanely waging war “to rid them from the Earth”.

Scientifically speaking, it is certainly not true that if one race or ethnic group scores worse than another or does worse on any sort of variable, it must be due to racism. Surely there are all sorts of reasons why this might happen. The folly of the Left is its refusal to consider that there may be things other than racism causing this.

Problem is that almost anyone online taking a race realist position is simply a racist. And almost all such folks are Whites who are arguing at least for getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation and and at most for outright White separatism, apartheid, race war, or ethnic cleansing.

Wow. Breathtaking. You mean that if one acknowledges differences between the races on a variety of controversial variables, one must be a racist, a separatist, a fascist or a Nazi? Yes. This is what it means. Any socialist who steps outside of PC idiocy on race will find himself embraced by some other funny socialists. Almost all such persons will be sympathetic towards White racism, White separatism, fascism and Nazism.

Whew. Well, allow me to step out of the box here for a second. This blog will make the outrageous statement that race realism (a recognition that there are non-trivial differences between the races) and anti-racism can go hand and hand. Just because there are average differences between races does not mean we have to turn into a bunch of racist jerks, much less racial separatists.

There are specific, subspecific and racial differences all across the natural world of biology, and none of it necessarily leads to hating this or that brand of organism or critter. For instance, here in California, we have various threatened and endangered species that I know a lot about. We have Tipton Kangaroo Rats and California Red-legged Frogs and Alameda Whipsnakes.

I assure that all of these damned critters act different. I will assure you that a California Red-legged Frog acts a Hell of a lot different than a Foothill Yellow-legged frog, and an Alameda Whipsnake acts a Hell of a lot different than a Pacific Gopher Snake, and a Tipton Kangaroo Rat acts a lot different than a Dusky-Footed Woodrat. I, lover of nature, love all of these critters.

Why be a speciesist, a critter racist, lining up with the Tipton Kangaroo Rats and swearing to drive the California Red-legged Frogs to extinction? I, lover of humans, love all humans. Why should I be a human-critter racist, lining up with the White human critters against this or that non-White human critters? They act different. So? So do all the other critters.

The reason for the Left’s opposition to race realism is quite simple. All we have to do is look at the agenda of those big names promoting hardcore race realism. They’re all White, and almost all, or all, of them are on the Right or the Far Right, and I haven’t found one yet who was not a hardcore racist.

Furthermore, every prominent race realist out there supports getting rid of civil rights and anti-discrimination laws. The reason being that if there are average differences between races, people ought to be able to discriminate racially or ethnically against individuals on the basis of those averages.

But average differences mean nothing when it comes to individuals. Individuals are individuals, and groups are groups. You can’t tally up group stuff and use it to thumbs up or thumbs down on individuals in the group. Forget it. Group differences be damned, one still must treat individuals as individuals.

With such a bunch of ugly creeps running the show, is it any wonder that decent people run away from race realism in droves?

It’s really sad that socialists have to choose between fascists and PC airheads. There’s got to be more space in the room than that. Come on.

"Unions, Illegal Immigration, and You," by Alpha Unit

If you knew there was something exerting a downward pressure on working conditions for Americans, wouldn’t you want to do something about it?

Well, there is. And labor unions have been working hard to fix it.

They have been recruiting and organizing illegal immigrants. It is important that these workers be organized, because if they can be taken advantage of and mistreated, so can you. This is the message labor unions in America have been getting out for years now.

An undocumented workforce that’s too afraid to bargain for better working conditions is a boon to big business in this country, according to Teamsters President James Hoffa. When illegal immigrants can’t organize, all workers face downward pressure on their wages. He urges Congress to create a path for legalization for illegal immigrants.

The AFL-CIO agrees. The organization began formal ties with an association of day laborers several years ago, with hopes of taking pressure off wages paid to local union members. Change to Win, a coalition of unions that splintered off from the AFL-CIO in 2005, organizes illegal immigrants as well.

One of its affiliated unions is the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), which has been organizing construction workers for over a century. The group believes that immigration reform must:

Protect all workers, whether immigrant or not, with the same strong labor laws, including prevailing wage protections, so that employers cannot use a worker’s status as an excuse to drive down wages and working conditions for all workers.

If you think this is going over well with rank-and-file union members, you can forget it. LIUNA spokespeople admit that a lot of their members don’t like the idea of having illegal immigrants in the union. But union leaders say they have to do what’s necessary to keep the wage floor up. That effects everybody working in America.

Last summer AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed this issue. In a speech he gave in Cleveland, he spoke about the history of immigrant labor in America and about some of the complaints lodged against the immigrant forebears of many union members.

And yet today I hear from working people who should know better, some in my own family – that those immigrants are taking our jobs, ruining our country. Haven’t we been here before?

When I hear that kind of talk, I want to say, did an immigrant move your plant overseas? Did an immigrant take away your pension? Or cut your health care? Did an immigrant destroy American workers’ right to organize? Or crash the financial system? Did immigrant workers write the trade laws that have done so much harm to Ohio?

In discussing the need for what people refer to as comprehensive immigration reform, Trumka talks about what lies at the heart of our failed immigration policy.

Too many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration system – a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented – afraid and available.

The current system provides employers with an endless supply of socially and legally powerless cheap labor, he says.

This is what is driving down working conditions and wages for all American workers, the unions are telling us. Until we get some meaningful immigration reform in this country, these people need to be organized.

What the unions seem to be saying, in summary, is: Look, folks, we didn’t create this immigration mess. But like everybody else, we’ve got to address it and deal with it. We’re here to organize and advocate on behalf of workers. All workers. We’ve got to look out for illegal immigrants in the workforce because it’s the only way, under the circumstances, we can look out for you.

Are there any takers?

1825: When the US South Was Not Yet White

Repost from the old site. Most people take it as a given that the USA as a nation and society is and always has been basically White, even mostly British or Northern European White. We have only to look at the authors of the Constitution and signers of the Declaration of Independence to see that all of them where White. And as the Christian fundamentalists love to remind us, they were all “Christians” too. Too bad most of them were actually Deists. It’s true since 1830 or so (see 1830 census figures Excel, pdf ), this has been a majority-White land, and that is the picture most people’s memory and cultural knowledge of this country gives them. But Whites have only been here a short while, and we were immigrants, or actually invaders at first, ourselves. Previously, this land was inhabited 10 In California and the Southwest, we have even had Hispanics (almost all Mexicans) living here before those states were even a part of the US. A Filipino was part of the party that founded Los Angeles before California was even a state. He got sick in Baja and ended up staying there, but he was still present on the voyage. See below where many more Filipinos were already in this country even before 1781. On the eve of the Gold Rush, there were a mere 1,000 Chinese in the US. Only seven of them were in California. But within a year of becoming a state, California was full of East Indians (Hindoos), Samoans/Hawaiians, Mexicans and other Pacific Islanders (Kanakas) and Chinese, all come for the Gold Rush. By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese alone in California. All of these groups stayed on through the whole decades-long Gold Rush and afterwards remained here as residents in the US. So are West Africans, as this is where many of the American slaves came from. There was a Filipino settlement in St. Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, before the US was even formed. The first Chinese immigrants came to the US in 1820, but before the Gold Rush, only 1,000 or so had arrived. Japanese and Filipinos have been present in Hawaii in large numbers since 1890, and Koreans have been present in much smaller numbers there from 1896. Hawaii was only made into a state in 1959. Cubans have also been here a very long time. Hundreds of Cubans came to St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, over 200 years before there was a USA. Similarly, the first Jamaicans (a party of 20) in America were already in Jamestown, the first White British colony in the US, by 1619. Further, many Jamaicans were included in slave shipments to the US since Jamaica was a way station along the way between Africa and the US. Significant numbers – two large ships full of Chilean and Peruvian miners were in California for the Gold Rush as early as 1848. A couple of thousand Brazilian and Caribbean Blacks also came for the Gold Rush. Note that California did not become a state until 1850. Pakistanis (people from what later became Pakistan) were in the US since the 1700’s and continuing into the 1800’s in Oregon and Washington, working in agriculture, logging and mining in California. The first known East Indian Hindu came to the US in 1790, soon after the Declaration of Independence, as a maritime worker. Mexicans, Samoans, Blacks, Cubans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chileans, Peruvians, Filipinos, American Indians, Canadians, Japanese, West Africans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese have been here in significant, not trivial, numbers, from the very start. They are not, as groups, wholly immigrants or foreigners to this land. They are not foreign to American culture – they are part of the very building blocks of it. Perhaps Germany, Russia, Sweden, France and most of Europe can lay claim to being predominantly White countries for centuries or millenia, but the US cannot. On the inside back cover of a recent issue of American Heritage Magazine was a painting of the Antediluvian American South with some text below. The text took me aback. I shook my head and read it again and again and it’s stuck in my head ever since. It said that in 1825, the US South1 was estimated to be 3 Both the US South, and the nation as a whole, were already White-minority as early as 35 years after signing of the Constitution. Take that, “White America” fools! The White America of movies, TV, magazines, books and memories was just a temporary mirage, a ship passing in the night. Now, as the USA moves back to becoming a White-minority land, we are not changing the basic nature, culture and essence of this nation. We just reverting to our roots. I am not arguing for unlimited immigration to this land (In fact, I want to seriously limit it) and I am a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. Nevertheless, it angers me when White Nationalists act like this is some kind of a “White country”. Nothing could be further from the truth. 1I misremembered the text in the issue – it referred to the US South only, not the US as a whole. A look at the US Census Bureau information (Excel file here, pdf here) clears up the mystery. A 3 The 2 Figures for the whole of the US reveal a White majority, however, if we include the Amerindians living in the Louisiana Purchase at that time (recently part of the US in 1825), we can still make a case for a non-White majority in the US. See note 3 below for more on that. 2There were numerically small numbers of Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, pre-Pakistanis (people from the land that would later become Pakistan), East Indians and Cubans here in 1825, but they probably added up to less than 3The American Heritage figures quoted have now been called into question (see comments at the end of this post and the comments at the end of the frankly White racist American Renaissance article that linked this piece); the suggestion is that Blacks made up 1 The mystery is cleared up in note 1, where the magazine text referred to only the US South, not the US as a whole. Indians were not counted in either the 1820 or 1830 censuses, and may have numbered 8 million in the US at the time (recall that the Louisiana Purchase had just been added to the nation). Figure 12 million Indians in the US and Canada pre-contact, with 9 This leaves us with 7 million Indians in the US in 1825. Further, runaway slaves were clearly not counted, probably 1

I See Race-Denying Idiots

Repost from the old site. I see idiots. I see race-denying idiots. I see them everywhere. I see them on the Egyptology Forum, in particular, linking to one of my posts, The Major and Minor Races of Mankind. That post is a massive work undergoing continuous revision that is based largely on Cavalli-Sforza’s groundbreaking work in genetics. It divides humanity into 3 macro races, 8 major races and 90 minor races. Hey! There is a race for everyone! Don’t despair, folks, there is probably a race out there waiting just for you, lonesome you. It seems that post is upsetting everyone. White Nationalists hate it, and now, over on the Egyptology Forum, Black Nationalists or Afrocentrists or whatever those morons are called hate it too. If White Nationalism is dumb, Black Nationalism is dumber still. Many of the things supposedly invented by Blacks have turned out on analysis to not to have been invented by Blacks. I don’t blame Blacks for reacting this way in the face of incessant propaganda from White Supremacists and various other racists, backed up by “science”, that repeats with hammer-like insistence that Blacks are idiots, evil sociopaths and losers who have never amounted to a thing and never will, as is the destiny of their genes. Hence the pitiful migration of Blacks into Egyptology, in a sad and sorry effort to claim the heritage of ancient Egypt for themselves. It’s bizarre that Black Nationalists, while promoting the Black race, also love to claim that race does not exist. They somehow hold both of these opinions simultaneously. Don’t ask me how. In that forum, I am described as a racialist (!) misrepresenting Cavalli-Sforza’s findings. But I did no such thing. I just used his data (and others) to divide humanity into races, based, almost exclusively, on genetic distance. In a few cases, I had to go outside genetics. In North Africa, there were two cases where mostly-White folks were clustering with mostly-Black folks into single races. Instead of lumping Whites and Blacks together into single subraces, which seemed too weird, I had to (arbitrarily) send Whiter folks to Caucasian and darker ones to Black. The cases involved Algerians and the Beja in one case and Nubians and Berbers in the other. Curiously, these cases do add weight to the race-denier’s arguments that race is a slippery concept. When you have Blacks and Whites lumping with each other genetically into singular small groups, what does it all mean? For the record, Berbers are about 1 Photos of Berbers of various types, North African Arabs and dark-skinned Egyptians from the Aswan Dam area (possibly Nubians) are found on this blog in a recent post here. Later on on the Egyptology thread I get called a racist (!) and White Supremacist (!). But my post makes no such claims at all to White Supremacy. It merely chops up humanity into groups based on genetic distance – nothing more, nothing less. These guys are serious idiots. The reason I am called a White Supremacist racist is because I am supposedly saying that their precious Black Nubians were actually White Berbers. But I said no such thing. I merely noted that two disparate groups, one mostly-White (Berbers – though Black Berbers exist) and another 50-50 Black-White (Nubians) cannot be distinguished racially, on even a minor level, in terms of genetics. Berbers are actually somewhat variable – the Moroccan Berbers are That’s it. The reason Black Egyptology idiots hate the notion of race in Egypt so much is because the ancient Egyptians were about On an anarchist blog recently, I was thrown off and banned for making a simple proposal: that Whites should be free to feel pride. I hedged that White pride is ok, as long as you can feel that way without becoming a racist asshole. I base this on my experience with people from various different races, ethnic groups and nations all over the world. Virtually all of them were ethnocentric about their ethnic group or race, and that clearly went beyond mere patriotism for their state and flag in almost all cases. It is only Whites in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand who are ordered to take no pride in themselves whatsoever, and worse, who are ordered to abase themselves as some sort of racial criminals for all of our nefarious acts down through the ages. At the same time, White countries only are ordered to open their borders to anyone and everyone from the rest of the world (in particular, the non-White world) who wishes to flood in here. It interesting that China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are not also ordered to open their borders. Nor are the Gulf Arabs. In fact, many, or even all, of these states have ferociously racist immigration policies, but the Western Cultural Left has nothing to say about this. It is almost as if only Whites can be racist. I realize that unfortunately this sounds like a White Nationalist rant, but it is sad that only the WN’s are making this perfectly reasonable argument, and on this argument, the WN’s at least are right on the mark. There are some negative effects from this. I had a light-skinned Black girlfriend once for about a year. Once I told her I was not attracted to darker Black women, and she got all upset. I was racist! A White guy dating a Black woman, of all things, and he still can’t escape the racism charge . White men have told me that they told people, when asked, that they were not interested in dating Black women because they were not attracted to them, and they were immediately denounced as racists. As might be expected, hyperaggressive young Black males are mass-targeting White females for sex in mixed-race high schools across our land. I don’t really mind, but it is a bit sickening, let’s face it. Are Black women really so horrible or ugly that these guys must mass-pester White girls? In many cases, the White girls say no, and when they do, they are immediately hammered with the racism charge, which typically leads to White guilt, which I guess in some cases leads to the Black kid getting some White pussy. I really need to say something here. Your house, your state, your attractions and your sex life are yours and yours alone. You don’t have to let anyone into your home. You don’t have to make friends with anyone. You don’t have to let any immigrants into your country, or you can let any immigrants in that you want to. You can be attracted to anyone you want to. And certainly, you can have sex with anyone you want to. You may be racist about who you let into your home, who you make friends with, and who you let immigrate into your land. After all, your borders are like the locked door on your home – you’re not really obligated to let a soul in. You can be attracted to anyone you want to – your own race or any combination of others. You can obviously date, have sex with, and marry anyone you want to and you can limit your partners to your own race or any others. There’s nothing racist about these intensely personal decisions, and the implicit demand that Whites are racist unless they are turned on Black booty or big Black guys, invite whole blocks of Black folks into their homes, invite 2 billion mostly Third World people to flood into their lands, or, most offensive of all, have sex with non-Whites, is utterly outrageous. The demand that Whites self-abnegate all positive feelings about themselves and their heritage has had some nasty side effects. 12-20 million illegal Hispanic immigrants have flooded into the US, many into my home state. Immigration are like seasoning on a dish. A little bit of it is nice, but in California it feels like someone dumped the salt shaker and some spice jars into the pan and ruined the casserole. There is a very real and creepy feeling of living in a foreign land here, or of having been invaded, even invaded by a foreign army. Parts of California have reverted, in all intents and purposes, to provinces of Mexico. This is jarring to Native Californians. Our cities and streets have Mexican names. I was taking Spanish lessons at age six, as my mother, in 1963, had already seen the writing on the wall. Growing up, our friends, best friends and girlfriends were Mexican-Americans. We didn’t hate Mexican-Americans then and we don’t hate them now. We went on wild trips to Mexico to fish, chase women or just rampage around blasted out of minds on alcohol, marijuana and LSD. We always returned stunned at the horrible and cruel poverty we saw, and were always glad to drive through the border back to the US. The illegal alien millions are essentially re-creating Mexico here in the US. If you have ever been to Mexico, you won’t think that is a good idea. My point is that the destruction of White ethnic identity in even its most mild form is what allowed this lunatic invasion and de facto annexation of my state to a foreign Third World country to take place. Whites were neutered, so they sat by passively while this outrage occurred, or, even more perversely, cheered it on.

More Illegal Immigration Madness

Repost from the old site. First off, let me start out by saying that I am a Leftist. In fact, I am a Communist. However, unlike 9 In my town, I figure that 8 What’s completely insane about is that in their ethnocentrism, Hispanics are really hurting themselves. You never see a Help Wanted sign in this town. Why would you, when the unemployment rate is 1 My White friend has roofing skills. He goes down to the local hiring hall and tries to get hired, but he does demand $9/hr. That’s $1 over minimum wage. Yet every time, the employers say that some illegal over there will do it for $4-5/hr (that’s far below minimum wage). Also, my friend says that every job he applies for demands bilingual skills in Spanish. As he is not bilingual, he is SOL. I find this ridiculous. It might be slightly sensible if these Spanish speakers were natives who had lived here since 1850 and hence had some right to their native tongue. Instead, almost all of the ones you will need to use Spanish with are illegal aliens who hopped the border in the past 20 years. The notion that one cannot get a job in the US unless one speaks a foreign language is preposterous. I think it ought to be illegal. Bottom line is I know all sorts of young Americans around here who are out of work. Now, they aren’t always the most wonderful citizens, but if there were Help Wanted signs all over town, I think they could work somewhere. Instead, they are unemployed and spend their days involved with gangs, crime, tagging, rolling drunks, fighting with gang rivals, leeching off their stupid girlfriends, engaging in petty thievery, and especially smoking dope. They just in general act highly uncivilized. I would like to point out here that in a manner that is little discussed, illegal immigration has been partly responsible for gangsta culture, drug abuse, laziness, and just general cultural degeneration among young Americans of all races. Studies have shown that as illegal immigration has increased over the past 20 years or so, the number of young Americans who count themselves as “discouraged workers” who have dropped out of the labor force has grown significantly. The two things must be related. Illegals are taking all the low-skilled labor and these were the sort of jobs young Americans cut their working teeth on in their youth. With no work to do, young Americans become discouraged, drop out and culturally degenerate in various ways. In the comments section, commenter Lafayette brings up a highly pro-immigrant Weltanshauung in the UK involving Polish workers. The content is familiar. Britons are told endlessly the society will collapse if not for the immigrants. There are so many jobs that young Britons just will not do. If the immigrants go, the economy will tank. On and on. I don’t know the dynamic of Polish immigrants in the UK, but I assume that they are working for lower wages than Britons work for. Otherwise the entire UK media would not be cheering them on. I also noticed an article recently that said that Polish workers were better workers than British workers. This is part of the pro-immigrant culture that we went through in the West under Reagan. Starting under Reagan, a new culture developed in America whereby rightwingers repeatedly endlessly what crappy workers Americans were, especially blue collar workers. There was no evidence for this whatsoever, but the talk went on. Americans, mostly young Whites, were also told that blue collar jobs were for losers. The only way to be a winner in America was to run a business or work in an office. Good, honest, US working class culture was degraded with an incessant drumbeat. At the same time, the illegals started to pour in. I think that these two things were connected. There was a concerted rightwing project to tell young Americans that working class jobs were for losers and that US working class workers were crappy workers, combined with the beginnings of a total flood of unskilled labor from south of the border. The unstated assumption: the US working class all needed to be replaced by immigrants, especially illegals from Mesoamerica. At the same time, an all-out war was waged on unions, the organizations of the US working class. The notion was also promoted that Americans are some kind of sissy fussbudgets who will not do any kind low-status labor. Therefore, we needed to import millions of illegals to do this work or else the economy would collapse. We were also regularly harangued with stories about phantom labor shortages. After about 15 years or so of mass unskilled illegal immigration, the US Left did an about-face and decided to represent the interests of immigrant scabs over native workers. The nasty and wicked notion that normal, sane and reasonable opposition to illegal immigration was racism (!) was promoted, and soon wormed its way through the whole culture to where it is now widely accepted. After that, the labor unions themselves, the last holdout of the workers, went over to the immigrant scabs, and US workers were finally left completely high and dry. I would like to point out that the entire MSM was complicit in this, and they are to this day. Realize that if the MSM is consistent about any one thing, it is their sheer and utter contempt for labor. There is not one single major US newsmagazine, TV news station or large daily newspaper that is the slightest bit friendly to labor, much less organized labor. As the UK’s lunatic pro-immigrant culture continued, these same nasty memes wormed their way into the culture. One is the notion that there are certain jobs that Britons simply will not do. It’s not stated, but what’s implied is that Britons will not do this work for any amount of money. I don’t know about Britons, but here in the US, that’s manifestly untrue for anything other than field work. A much more pernicious line soon followed, and this is that the foreigners are actually better workers than the natives. The Right will start this line, but soon the ultra-traitors of the Idiot Left will pick up on it. I had an anarchist say straight to my face that US workers are lazy and incompetent, and that’s why we need illegals to replace them (!). Lafayette also points out that in the UK, the entire Left has given up on the working class. Instead, it is supporting immigrant scabs who are being brought in for the sole purpose of driving down the cost of labor for UK native workers. What followed after that is that the labor unions themselves got on board and supported the immigrant scabs over the interests of native workers. Since government and media never support native workers, and as Lafayette notes, the Left completely gave up on them, what this means is that native workers lost their last friend – their very own unions . The Left here in the US and UK will respond with the pleasant-sounding nostrum that what is needed is to organize all of the immigrants, especially the illegals. The problem is that this feel-good fall-back position is utterly doomed to failure. The notion that organizing these illegals is going to help anything is even more idiotic here in the US than it is in the UK. Unionization in the US has been plummeting since the 1950’s and in particular since 1973. Unions are now so weak that it’s ridiculous. That they are suddenly going to organize all of these immigrant scabs and regain all their power and glory is comical. Even if they did organize the immigrants, as Lafayette notes, what good is it with ten or more workers lining up for every unskilled job? All the unions in the world are pretty useless in the face of a tidal wave and resulting massive glut in unskilled labor. Under capitalism, labor is like pricing – it is based on supply and demand. Massive oversupply of low-skilled labor will result in the bottoming out of the price of labor just as massive oversupply in a type of goods will result in the collapse in the price of that particular widget. So with fields like construction totally glutted with low to unskilled workers, the high-paying construction jobs of yesterday are never coming back, whether you organize the immigrant scabs or not. US unions can’t even organize US workers and get them to join unions. How will they organize a bunch of illegals who can’t even speak English? P.S. I am not a xenophobe. I do support limited (200,000 a year?), tightly controlled legal immigration. The immigrants should be rigorously analyzed, and the vast majority of potential immigrants should be rejected. Immigrants should be required to jump through many hoops in order to prove to us exactly how they will be an asset to our nation instead of adding to our nightmarish underclass. Educational, legal and other histories should be reviewed. Those immigrants from whatever land who successfully run this tough gauntlet are likely to be net benefits as opposed to net detractors to our nation. One of the principal problems with illegal immigrants is that it is unscreened, so instead of getting high-quality immigrants, we get the peasantry and urban poor of the Third World. They are unlikely to be net benefits to our land in either the short or long run. Chain migration (family reunification) should be drastically scaled back or ended altogether.

Open Borders is Bad For Workers

Repost from the old site. Commenter James Schipper of Canada points out what any economics student or especially Marxist ought to be able to figure out: that open borders is terrible for workers in high-wage countries. That the Left in high-wage countries supports such an obviously detrimental to workers agenda means that it completely misunderstands the economics of modern capitalism. Nowadays, the Western Left can only be said to be worker-hostile towards native workers. They support immigrant workers, and it is a known fact that immigrant workers in many cases in the West have been shown to actually lower wages for native workers. The Left responds that this is a lie. Even worse, the Left calls any Western Leftist who opposes certain modes of immigration racist. At best, this is a grotesque abuse of the term similar to the way many objectively reactionary groups are overusing this word these days. At worst, it is slander and name-calling. The Left’s objective hostility to native workers in the West has resulted in historic losses in recent days in Belgium, Italy and the UK. It seems that only right-wing nativist parties are appealing to workers in these countries. Much of the vote for the rightwing is due to anger at uncontrolled immigration in these countries. The extent to which these rightwing and often fascist or proto-fascist parties will actually work for the interests of workers is not known, but historically, they have not benefited workers much and have tended to side with capital over workers every time. As the Left grows more and more irrelevant, it continues piping away at the same old losing tune. Things are much different here in the US, where both parties are 10 The election of either Obama or McCain would probably result in a renewed attempt at mass amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens, with resulting chain migration of up to 30 million of their often-hazy and not too cool relatives over the next 20 years or so. Such a monumental mass migration of poorly screened immigrants with a known tendency to form a vast underclass should at least be discussed by American voters. Instead, the entire elite supports this project as do all of their media. Most especially, 10 Studies show that up to 75-8 Anyway, take a look at James’ comments:

Let’s take two swimming pools, one with 6 feet of water and the other with 2 feet. If they are at the same level and connected with an underground pipe, what is going to happen? Obviously, water will flow from the first pool to the second, thereby lower the water level of the first and raising that of the second.Similarly, if there is complete freedom of movement of goods, labor and capital between a high-wage and low-wage country, the wage level in the rich country will fall and that of the poor country will rise. The magnitude of the change will depend on the relative size of the high-wage and low-wage country. If there are completely open borders between India and Australia, then wages in Australia will fall a lot, but they will barely rise in India. Conversely, if there are no barriers to the flow of goods, labor and capital between the US and Nicaragua, wages in the US will hardly go down, but they will rise a lot in Nicaragua. Numbers always matter. Another problem with free international migration is that it creates an open demographic system. Open systems have the advantage that they make the import of solutions possible but they also have the disadvantage that they allow problems to be exported. Suppose that Ruritania stabilizes its population, but that Slobodia’s population keeps growing. If there are open borders between the two countries, Slobodia will export people to Ruritania and Ruritania’s population will grow despite its demographic stabilization. Likewise, if Ruritania succeeds in raising the standard of living of its workers while Slobodia does not, then, if there are open borders, many Slobodians will emigrate to Ruritania, thereby lower the standard of living of Ruritanian workers. What is true of demographic open borders is also true of commercial open borders. If there is completely free trade between Ruritania and Slobodia, then any efforts to conserve non-renewable resources by Ruritania may be nullified by Slobodia. Under free trade, a country whose population remains below its carrying capacity may still experience starvation because a lot of its food will be exported to countries with populations above their carrying capacity. If there is complete freedom of movement of goods, labor and capital between countries, the fast breeders will export their problems to the slow breeders, the slow economic growers will export their problems to the fast growers and the depleters will export their problems to the conservers. Finally, a quote by Wouter Bos, the leader of the Dutch Labor Party: “We have to choose between a generous welfare state and restrictive immigration on the one hand and a stingy welfare state and liberal immigration on the other hand.” Sensible words! if only more leftists saw things that clearly.

Project Middle Class Death

Repost from the old site. There have been quite a few articles lately about meatpacking plants in the US. Through the 1960’s and 1970’s, these were union jobs all filled by hard-working Americans. That’s all gone now, and all of the work is now being done by illegal aliens or more recently refugees from foreign lands. Most of these articles have screamed about how no Americans are willing to do this kind of work. It’s quite interesting how plenty of Americans were willing to do this admittedly unpleasant work in 60’s and 70’s, albeit at union wages that you could buy a house and raise a family on. The unions were broken via a corporate conspiracy. This plot has been unveiled an Atlantic Monthly article, but I have not been able to find it. First of all, the meatpacking companies moved their plants away from the large cities to smaller towns. It happened in LA – they moved to Las Vegas. There was no business reason at all to move to Vegas – it was done for the sole purpose of breaking the union. They hoped to break the unions by having the old employees stuck in Los Angeles and not being willing to move due to family ties. The idea was to get the local rural people around Vegas to work for nothing, along with the few loyal workers who might move to Vegas to follow the company, who would work for less than previously, but not for as little as the new hires. When they couldn’t find workers to be dupes for them (surprise!) they somehow managed to bus in Mexicans. From Mexico? Apparently. This was in the early 80’s, when Ronald Reagan, still champion of so many working class White Americans called Reagan Democrats, was President. The US construction companies pretty much broke the unions, one by one, in the 1970’s and especially in the 1980’s. Somehow, an incredible cultural narrative has been constructed that tells us that only Hispanics, especially illegal aliens, are capable of or expected to do construction work. When my friends worked construction in 1975-76, you could buy a house and raise a family on those wages, which would be the equivalent of $40-45/hour now for union jobs laying drywall. If you go around now looking at construction jobs, look hard, very hard, for the sight of a White man working construction. He barely exists. It’s all Hispanics doing the work. Mostly illegals, but the market is so flooded with low-skilled labor that you even have a lot of legal Hispanic immigrants and even Hispanic Americans doing this work. The business owners scream and fuss and carry on that they can’t get White workers to do this work anymore. That’s because it doesn’t pay crap. I do not really want to diss on any ethnic group. I’m sure back in the union days there were Hispanic-Americans who could cut the high standards of union work, where you cut it or you’re gone. Nowadays, for whatever reason, the private housing built by cheap-labor Hispanics – legal, illegal, whatever, is well-known to be garbage. Everyone knows this, the White workers like my own brother who are constantly browbeaten by their bosses (“You better shut up and knock it off or I’m going to replace all of you with Mexicans!”), the hip Whites tuned in to the construction scene, probably even the businessmen-criminals themselves. The problems often start cropping up within a year or so after the builder’s warranty ended. Sagging roofs, foundations so poorly laid they start cracking and splitting. Pipes so poorly fitted and installed they cause leaks; with the predictable high cost of ripping out wallboard to replace them. That’s the price of that cheap Hispanic labor for you. One would think that after labor costs declined from $42/hour in 1976 to $4-10/hour in 2008 (2008 dollars), the businesses could “pass on a lot of those savings to the home buyer. That’s what the right-wing and business crowd always tells us is so glorious about crap wages – the consumer saves bigtime. In the case of homes, not one nickel got knocked off the price, ever. All those savings just translated into extra profits for the builder. There is a rightwing, classist line that the crushing of the US worker occurred because US union workers had gotten fat and lazy and were demanding too much money! The poor suffering businessmen just could not make a profit anymore! They were in danger of losing their yachts, and their mansions were about to be foreclosed! In the 1970’s, a lot of US businesses started screaming hardship. That’s because our standard of living in this country was as high as it has ever been (1973). Wages were rising right along with productivity, and no capitalist will stand for that for very long. At this time, most unions said that if the companies opened their books to independent auditors of the unions’ choosing, the unions would take the cuts the company was claiming were needed. The whole thing was just a massive lie because none of the companies ever opened their books. Chrysler did, but only because they were forced to. The whole thing was a shell game – a plot to make it look like if they did not offshore, they were going to go out of business. As it turned out, they went ahead and offshored anyway. All of the offshoring happened because at this time, business schools started teaching the profoundly unpatriotic notion that the purpose of a business is to generate vast paper profits for their skyrocketing bonus and stock option plans. Prior to the 80’s, most CEO’s weren’t compensated so lavishly for short term stock actions, and they managed it like a family business. It really was a cultural shift, and it once again coincided with Mr. Reagan, whom 5 On American Renaissance, a worker tells the saga of one of these shlock MBA’s:

The place I worked for just had a president of one of its divisions leave. The man was a complete failure. No product came in at schedule or expected cost. He instituted stupid money wasting policies that could be found in any of the CEO worshipping books around. He walked away with over $40 million for his 5 year stint as a lowly division president – $30 million from stock options.All the stock growth was just from being in the right place at the right time. Now that we can’t grow the top line, because our primary products have completely penetrated the market, we are talking about moving production overseas. There is nothing wrong with our workforce, nor are they greedy and lazy. We just can’t get the stock price up and too may bonuses are dependent on it.

There you have it. All the mergers, all the demands for wage and pension cuts, all the hiring of illegals and refugees and cheap labor this or that, all the breaking of unions, all of this is just to get the stock price up so executives can fatten their wallets on the bonuses. It’s doesn’t have anything to do with international competition or any of that. You think any MSM media source will tell that? Dubious. Lou Dobbs, the sole populist voice in our nation’s mass media? Perhaps. Good luck finding another one.

Unions and Wage – Productivity Increases

Repost from the old site. James Schipper’s comments suggest that productivity naturally leads to increased wages in capitalism due to the laws of capital and labor. I argue that productivity increases during conditions of labor surplus normal in most capitalist states probably come mostly due to the militant actions of Organized Labor. James does aver that the replacement of American workers with illegal alien labor did have an effect on the destruction of wages in the construction industry. I argue that there were two stages to the process. First they broke the unions, then they hired the illegals. Those were the two stages. The exact same thing occurred in many manufacturing plants, especially meat processing. Slaughterhouses, poultry-processing and seafood processing plants all used to be good union jobs with high wages as recently as the 1980’s. First they took out the unions, then they brought in illegals or other immigrants to the work. Many other fields besides construction have been taken out by illegals, including painting and landscaping. My White friends did all of these jobs and made good or decent money doing it. Having your own landscaping business is still a good way for young White men to earn some decent money. So much for Americans won’t mow lawns. This is all gone now as most of this has gone straight on over to illegals. James’ argument operates only in the cases of a labor shortage. With a vast surplus of labor, an “army of labor” as the capitalists call the teeming hordes of unemployed, there is not much need to raise wages to compete with other businesses for top employees, as there are 5 guys waiting to take the place of the guy who quits. The notion that unions are not necessary for workers to have good working conditions is unique to union busters. If unions are superfluous, do nothing but harm workers, and don’t even raise wages or improve conditions, why would anyone join one? Better yet, why would capitalists oppose them so ferociously? The record all over the West seems to be that the more unionized a labor force is or was, the higher wages were. Economic growth used to be spread out among all income classes in the US back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the 1970’s, this started to decline to the point now where, from 1980-1992, only the top 2 I would argue that this is exactly how the capitalists wanted it. This occurred during the pro-business Reagan and Bush Administrations. Furthermore, the decline in US wages and the lack of filtering down of productivity dovetails perfectly with the devastation of US unions. Not only that, but the war on US unions, along with the theft of workers’ productivity growth, was all part of a project by US business. To say that in the US, the businessman is the worker’s friend stretches reality. Unless the worker organizes to get a good wage, a share of economic and especially productivity growth and better conditions, thing look quite bleak. James argues that it is better to work for a big business than a small one in Canada. This is probably true, but I would argue that workers are often treated better by very small businesses, who, around here anyway, often treat workers as if they are part of a family.

Letter from My Neck of the Woods

Out Here in the Sticks, by Bill Hatch. Hatch, who I have never heard of before, lives in Merced, California. He gives you a pretty good feel of this part of California, the severe poverty, the rural nature of the landscape, the severe ignorance of the population, the huge Mexican illegal alien population, the Punjabis who run the local stores and gas stations, the working class Whites barely struggling to get by, the failed real estate boom, and last, the fundamentalist Christian nature of the local White population. If you want to know what it’s like where I live, this gives you a nice little feel.

The Real Reason for the Shining Path

Repost from the old site. Rightwing anti-Communists (and for that matter, Centrist and liberal US anti-Communists also) have some very peculiar attitudes about Communism, shaped by the Cold War. Communism, it appears, is some strange, evil and insane system, a crazy, idiotic and totally failed economic and social system that brought nothing but misery, hunger, starvation and poverty to the world, while bringing nothing good. The alternative was capitalism, which would at some point conquer hunger, poverty, starvation and all that. Capitalism is always supposed to conquer these things at some point in the future. Capitalist polemicists usually say, “Just give it some time…” With the neoliberalism that has been pushed since 1980 and has brought nothing but misery and impoverishment to billions and caused many millions of deaths, we have always been told that it would start working pretty soon now…maybe next year…victory is right around the corner. The truth is that after 25 years of neoliberalism, the verdict is in and a long report has documented it quite well. Nearly everywhere it has been tried, neoliberalism has benefited the top 2 Even in the US, from 1980-1992, the top 2 Neoliberalism, nearly everywhere, resulted in lowered economic growth rates, massive debt, plunging wages and living standards for the majority, reductions in access to health and eduction, and reductions in many health and education metrics like infant mortality, life expectancy and the percentage of children in school at various ages. This is because neo-liberalism mandated massive cuts in all social services, especially education and health care. The outcome was foretold. The truth about neoliberalism is that it has always been a scam in which the West, especially Western banks, corporations and investors, ripped off the rest of the World blind and the people were always left holding the bag. Nevertheless, the ripoff artists keep trying to sell their neoliberal snake oil around the world, but more and more nations are no longer buying. Most of the countries of Latin America have tired of the “checks in the mail” neoliberal snipe hunt, and collectively, they are trying, in their own often-limited ways, to dislodge themselves from the grip of the neoliberal plague. Even mainstream economists admit that Latin America (macroeconomically) did not benefit from the neoliberal fad. Recently, Argentina paid off its foreign debt and said no more. In Venezuela, Chavez is trying to forge a completely new path that is, instead of the Communism his detractors libel him with, in truth nothing more than a reformation of capitalism. President Lula in Brazil has been hampered by the death grip of both investor capital and the markets; he has not been able to do much at all. Uruguay has elected a strident Leftist, but it is not known what he can do given his restraints. Chile, after the utter failure of Pinochet’s radical free market economics (something the free market crazies have never owned up to), has elected a socialist and a woman as President, Bachelet. It is not known what she can do in terms of progress, but Chile still has an education and health sector that is in pretty good shape and sports good metrics to show for it. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa is President, and he has formed an alliance with Chavez. It remains to be seen what he can do in terms of progress, as his options, as usual, are limited. In Bolivia, Evo Morales, an Indian, has won a very close election in a country where a small White elite has always run roughshod over the majority Indian population. His options are also limited, but Morales’ rhetoric has at least been almost as radical as Chavez’. A major problem in Bolivia is the mestizos in the East of the country (Santa Cruz Province) who despise the Indians the West as inferior while they sit on top of Bolivia’s rich natural gas deposits. They are making noises about succession, but they will never try it. In Mexico, AMLO (Lopez-Obrador), a Leftist, actually won the election, but due to the usual fraud, the PAN (a rightwing Catholic party that rose out of the religious hot war in Mexico in the 1920’s that left 70,000 dead) now holds the presidency. Felipe Calderon is the PAN President and he won’t do a damned thing to solve the problems that have caused an incredible 1 As an example of such problems, the family of one man, Carlos Slim, the head of the private Mexican phone monopoly, controls 5 There has been some resistance to this semi-feudal order. A very radical movement has tried to overthrow the corrupt and brutal dictatorial government of Oaxaca state. The Zapatistas* are still alive, and recently a Leftist group, the EPL*, has started to blow stuff up again, after disappearing for three years. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was re-elected, but he appears to have softened his rhetoric to the point where he cannot do much. Still, he has formed an alliance with Chavez. Nicaragua, now the second poorest country in Latin America, lies in corrupt ruins. Support for the considerably neutered Sandinistas is higher than reported in the ruling class media – although Ortega had 3 Under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua went from one of the worst to one of the best in Central America for literacy and health care figures. In 1990, Violeta Chamorro, adored by the whole US political spectrum, including the Cruise Missile liberals of the US Democratic Party, won the election. Right away, she ended free education, requiring students to spend $35 a year on uniforms, a fee that immediately threw large numbers of kids out of school. Most have yet to return. She also got rid of free health care, so most of the population is without health care again. The health and education figures for the nation have shown the expected collapse. It is interesting that Democratic Party liberals are apparently overjoyed about this situation, showing the bankruptcy of their ideology. Most of the rest of the continent is collapsed in the usual ruins. 1 million people die every year from hunger in Latin America, and this has been going on for decades. How come this stuff never makes it to the “Worst Killers in Recent History” contests? The anti-Communist line about Communism divorces it from its concrete realities in the sort of totally rotten social and economic systems that have spawned peasant revolutions for centuries before Karl Marx was even born. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the fall of the Warsaw Pact, rightwingers rejoiced. It was the “end of history”, said Francis Fukuyama. The era of peasant revolts was over. Never again would humanity have to worry about any Marxist, Leftist, worker, peasant, or even populist revolution. Capitalism was here to say, in all of its forms, from most enlightened to most hideous, and no one could do a damn thing about it! Well, that is nonsense. Anti-Communists say that revolutions happen for no reason at all, other than the insane desire of Communist madmen to seize power and impose their failed system on an unwilling population. They say that revolutions do not arise from horrible social and economic systems – they arise from sick Marxist pathology. Get rid of Marxism, they say, and capitalism can run wild on humanity again. Perhaps we can even re-instate feudalism and slavery while we are at it. After all, they were both great for business. Amidst the deafening racket of nonsense, a series of economic figures looms up at us like a ghost from the recent Peruvian past. In back of those figures, 15 years later in 1980, like an Inca God rising up from the grave to slay the Spanish invaders 450 years after they waded ashore, is the frightening shadow of the Peruvian Shining Path*, another “totally insane” Marxist group that arose “for no reason whatsoever other than sheer evil”. Yet the figures below show us why a revolution, even one as insane as Sendero Luminoso, was inevitable: From the Peruvian National Planning Institute in Bejar, Peru, in 1965, we learn that the 24,000 families of the White ruling class in Lima had an income of $62,000/yr*. The entire rest of the country had an average family income of $157. The Indians of the Sierra, who even now have a life expectancy of only 45 years, had an average family income of only $10 a year. *All figures in 1965 US dollars. Most people agree that things have only gotten worse in Peru since then. Look at those figures above and tell that that is not kindling and kerosene for bloody revolution. The match was called Sendero, and someone was going to toss a match sooner or later. There were centuries in Peru before 1965, four of them, and they build on our tale. From 1526 (when the Spaniards came to Peru) to 1630, the Indian population declined from 13 million to 600,000 – a loss of 9 For the next three centuries, the Indians were tied to the land like serfs, bonded in debt peonage in a feudal estate society. This continued until well into the 1970’s. The jungle Indians were enslaved and killed for sport starting in the 1800’s and continuing until 50 years or so ago. It is 1980. The bump and lurch of the dialectic, from Hegel to Marx to This is an example, from the city of Cherboksary, Russia, of the most failed economic system ever known to mankind – Communism. The fountains you see are inferior and worthless – totally failed fountains, if you will. The buildings in the background as are complete failures as buildings, since they are dull and boring. Those buildings are called “socialist housing” and everyone in the West agrees that this type of housing does not work. What works much better are the capitalist slums in the pictures to follow. The river is quite clean and this is another example of complete failure. Much better are the black rivers of capitalist slums, stinking with garbage, animal corpses and raw sewage. Why? Because diseases and smells are exciting! Who wants to be bored, anyway? Even the bright greenery in the foreground in a total failure – it’s much better to have live amidst the mounds of garbage you see below. Capitalist slums, with their thrill a minute and constant search for food, are the only way to go. A slum in Brazil. This is the successful system that works. Much better than that failed, dull socialist housing above, no? When are you moving in, reader? Men pick through a garbage dump, probably in Nairobi. Slums in Nairobi make up Slums of Nairobi. This is the only viable system on Earth, capitalism. All of the alternatives, especially Communism, are failed and don’t work. As you can see, this system works great. Communist housing fails because it is dull, boring and lifeless. It is much better to live in lively, exciting surroundings like this Nairobi slum, where I assure you there is never a dull movement. How dare those evil Commies try to move these people into “failed” Soviet-style high-rises! An excellent example of capitalist education from Africa. Capitalism hates education, everywhere and at all times, because the capitalists can’t make any money off of it, and the capitalists all send their kids to fancy private schools, hence they resent paying for a system they do not even use. So capitalism, under neoliberalism, has predictably devastated education systems around the Third World. Who needs to get educated anyway? The problem of the 3rd World is too many kids! Besides, Black people are so dumb that all attempts to educate them are a waste of time, or so The Bell Curve told me. Slums of Brazil. The problem is these Brazilians have too damn many kids! Yet the evidence shows that Brazil’s birthrate is actually below replacement level. Never matter, in that case, the poor should quit having babies altogether! Somehow, Westerners always find a way to blame the victim. Of course, Brazil having the worst rich-poor gap on Earth could not have anything to do with this situation, now would it? By 2020, 4 The charming slums of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is home to 12 million people – 4 million of them in 800 different favelas, or slums. All of these slums are run by gangs of drug dealers, who engage in continuous battles with each other and the police, that is, when they are not engaging in armed robberies, kidnappings and homicides. Recent articles in the Western press have hailed the dramatic improvements in these slums. As you can see here, they are so much better than they used to be! Residents of a slum in Nairobi trudge through the garbage on their way home. Nairobi has an out of control crime rate, but of course that has nothing to do with the fact that these folks live in slums. It is because the criminals are evil and commit crimes for no reason at all. Furthermore, they are Black, and Black people are genetically natural born criminals. They’re just a race of Bad Seeds, and nothing can be done about them at all. The wonderful slums of Mumbai again! This is the high tech economy that is taking the world by storm, the envy of the planet. Check out that high tech dishwasher this girl is using – I bet it was designed by those IT professionals down in Bangalore! Go, India go! The truth about India is, of course, more tragic than Tom Friedman (see below) can figure out. By 1985, capitalism was killing between between 2.92 and 4 million every year in India, and 1.76 million were being killed in Bangladesh. That is 5.25 million people being killed by capitalism every year in just those two countries alone. But wait a minute! Capitalism doesn’t kill anyone. Stalin and Mao were the worst killers of the 20th century, dontcha know? Since Communism doesn’t work, we have to go with the only alternative, the system that works, capitalism. This photo shows you just how great it works in Mumbai, India. Noam Chomsky reports that, comparing China and India, which had similar developmental figures in 1949, there have been 100 million excess deaths in Indian from 1947-1979. This clearly shows the superiority of Chinese Communism, at least when it comes to saving lives. Note that China’s superior figures even include all of those killed by Maoism, which may number over 20 million people. But Maoism saved far more, and China set a world record with the fastest doubling of life expectancy by any country, going from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1976, surpassing Joseph Stalin’s record set in 1956. Now in China, gone heavily over to capitalism, millions are dying from lack of health care alone. Getting back to India, recent figures show that there are 4 million excess deaths in India every single year. Gideon Polya calculates that excess infant mortality alone, compared to a model of Sri Lanka, kills 2.7 million Indians per year. Slums of Mumbai. 6 million people – 6 Working backwards and forwards from Chomsky’s figures above of 4 million deaths per year in India from capitalism, which he got from Indian economist Amratya Sen, we can guess that capitalism may have killed 170 million Indians since 1949 as compared to the Chinese model. But wait, aren’t Communists the worst killers of them all? Don’t like the way I do figures? Try these instead then. Capitalism kills 14 million people every single year just by starvation, mostly in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

*This blog does not support the project of Sendero Luminoso, as they kill people who are completely innocent. It does support the Zapatistas and the EPL in Mexico.

The Real Difference Between Obama Democrats and Republicans

I met with a couple of friends the other nite for dinner. We talked about the tax cut deal, and the conversation was very heated. Lot of shouting and yelling over dinner. I started the whole fight, but I don’t care. I was livid, and they deserved to hear my rage. They were both liberals, and both supported Obama’s tax plan sellout all the way as some sort of imperfect but acceptable compromise. I let em have it. At some point partway through the conversation, one of them pointed out that Obama and Dems were getting ready to do some good things. What good things? I was laughing. Well, for starters, there was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, which failed. Then there was the Dream Act, which will hopefully also fail. I snorted derisively at both of these bills. “They’re not important!” I huffed. They’re not. I’m an Economic Man. Economics (capital E) and Politics (capital P) are everything. Both are intertwined, one leads into the other and vice versa. They’re actually part of each other. Most of the rest is theater and sideshows. DODT and the Dream Act are Identity Politics BS, sexual orientation and race sideshows. I could care less about either of them, pretty much. They’re both pretty far down on my list of priorities. Later on, something crystallized. We have two neoliberal parties, two parties pursuing trickle-down, neoclassical, beggar the state, smash the workers, eviscerate the middle class, gorge the rich political economics. One pursues a milder version than the other. The milder ones are called Democrats. But the truth is that both parties are pursuing Republican economics, either light or hardcore. And Republican economics is heaping steaming toxic waste stew served to hundreds of millions. It’s as appealing to me as swallowing arsenic – it’s poison. Since both parties are shoving poison down my throat, what’s the difference? The difference was crystallized above. The Democrats offer the groovy race, gender and sexual orientation sideshows. For instance, this week, the Dems offered Republican economics, 190 proof this time instead of the usual near beer. But they did offer faggots and wetbacks for me to munch on while I waited for the arsenic main course. Dream Act is wetbacks, illegal aliens. I don’t think much of illegal aliens. A side dish of Deep Fat Fried Illegal Alien Sopapillas is one of the benefits of dining at Democrat Cafe. Yum! DODT is faggots. Faggots or queers, take your pick. I like fags even less than I like illegals, and I don’t like illegals at all. At Democrat Cafe, you finish your meal of Republican economics with a gigantic helping of Faggot Cheesecake. Delicious! So the Democrats are just Republican economics, plus faggots and illegal aliens. Republicans are Republican economics minus fags and wetbacks. Give me one reason I shouldn’t just vote Republican?

"Latin America’s Twenty First Century Capitalism and the US Empire," by Dr. James Petras

An excellent analysis of the current scene in Latin America by Marxist James Petras. We often wonder what exactly is going on here or there in the world. For the answer in Latin America, Petras answers a number of important questions. What’s amazing is I can’t find one single area in which he’s wrong in his analysis below. Hence, this analysis is immaculate. If any of you can find anywhere below where he is wrong, let us know. A good tutorial on the Latin American politico-economic scene. Warning: Runs 45 pages.

Political Power and the World Market

The twin nemesis of Latin America’s quest for more equitable and dynamic development, US imperial and local oligarchic power have been subject to profound changes over the past decade. New capitalist classes both at home and abroad have redefined Latin America’s relation to world markets, seized opportunities to stimulate growth and forged cross class coalitions linking overseas investors, agro-mineral exporters, national industrialists with a broad array of trade unions, and in some countries peasant and Indian social movements. Parallel to these changes in Latin America, a new militarist and financial political configuration engaged in prolonged wars, colonial occupations and widespread speculation has weakened the structural economic links – dominance – between US imperial economic interests and Latin America’s dynamic socio-economic classes. In the present conjuncture, these basic changes in the respective class structures – in the US and Latin America – define the contours, constraints and ‘reach’ of the imperial classes as well as the potential autonomy of action of Latin America’s leading socio-economic classes. Notions which freeze Latin America in a time warp such as “500 years of exploitation” or which conflate earlier decades of US political-economic dominance with the present, have failed to take account of recent class dynamics, including popular insurrections, mass electoral mobilizations and failed imperial-centered economic models which have redefined the power equation between the US and Latin America. Equally important, fundamental changes in market relations and market competition has lessened US influence in the world market and opened major growth opportunities for new and established sectors of Latin America’s capitalist class, especially its dynamic export sectors. Understanding imperialism, especially the US variant, requires focusing on class relations, within and between countries and regions, the changing balance of power as well as the impact of fundamental changes in world market relations. Equally important the private economic institutions of imperialism (banks, multi-national corporations, investors) are contingent on the composition and policies of the imperial state. Insofar as the state defines its priorities in military and ideological terms and acts accordingly, by channeling resources in prolonged wars, the imperial policymakers weakens their capacity to sustain, finance and promote overseas private economic interests. As we shall analyze and discuss in the following sections, the US has suffered a relative loss of political and economic power over key Latin American regimes and markets as its military commitments have widened and deepened over time. The result is a Latin American political configuration which has changed dramatically over the past two decades.

Latin American Political-Economic Configurations and US Imperialism

The upsurge of social movements, the subsequent ascent of center-left political regimes,the dynamic economic growth of Asian economies and the consequent sharp increase in prices of commodities in the world market has changed the configuration of political power in Latin America and between the latter and the US between 2000-2010. While the US exercised almost absolute hegemony during the period 1980-1999, the rise of a militarist caste promoting prolonged imperial wars in the Middle East and South Asia and the rise of relatively independent national-popular and social-liberal regimes in Latin America has produced a broad spectrum of governments with greater autonomy of action. Depending on the criteria we use, Latin American countries have moved beyond the orbit of US hegemony. For example, if we examine trade and investment, all the major countries, independent of ideology, have to a greater or lesser degree diversified their markets, trading and investment partners. If we examine political alignments, we find that all the major countries have joined UNASUR, a regional political organization that excludes the US. If we examine policy divergences from the US on major regional issues, such as the US embargo on Cuba, its efforts to isolate Venezuela, its proposed military bases in Colombia, Washington remains in splendid isolation, to the point that the new Colombian President Santos, chooses to “postpone” implementation in favor of maximizing billion dollar trade and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. If we focus on ideological divergence between the US and Latin America, particularly on global issues of free trade, military coups and intervention, we find a variety of positions. For example, Brazil opposes US sanctions against Iran and supports the latter’s program of uranium enrichment for peaceful uses. If we focus on joint US-Latin American military exercises and support for the Haitian occupation, most Latin countries – with the exception of Venezuela – participate. If we examine the issue of bilateral trade and regional trade agreements, the US proposals on the latter were voted down, while several countries pursue (so far with little success) the former. On a rather fluid measure of ‘affinity for neo-liberal’ ideology, in which a mixture of elements of statism, deregulated markets and social welfare co-exist in varying degrees, we can draw up a tentative 4 fold division between “left”, “center left”, “center right” and “right”. On the “left” we can include Venezuela and Bolivia which have expanded the public sector, economic regulations and social spending.   On the “center-left” we can include Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador which have increased social spending, public investment and increased employment, wages and reduced poverty, while vastly increasing private national and foreign investment in agro-mineral export sectors. On the center-right we can include Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay, which embrace free market doctrines, with mild poverty programs and an open door to foreign investment. On the right we find Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, all of whom line up with Washington on most ideological issues, even as they may be diversifying trade ties with Asia and Venezuela. Internal shifts in class power within Latin America and the US have spurred divergences. Latin America has witnessed greater policy influence by a more ‘globalist elite’ less tied to the US, and an emerging ‘nationalist bourgeoisie’, and greater pressure from reformist working class and public employees trade union. In contrast within the US industrial capital has lost influence to the financial sector and exerts little influence in shaping economic policy toward Latin America, beyond rearguard ‘protectionist’ measures and state subsidies. The US ruling political elite, highly militarized and Zionized, shows little capacity to engage in launching any major new initiatives toward recapturing markets in Latin America, preferring massive military expenditures on wars and paying tribute to their Israeli mentors. As a result of major socio-political shifts within the US and Latin America and the singular importance of dynamic changes in the world market, there are four axis of power operating in the Western Hemisphere. The emerging economic power of Brazil and the growth of intra-regional trade within and between Latin American economies. The dynamic expansion of Asian trade, investment and markets leading to a long term, large scale shift toward greater economic diversification. The substantial financial flows from the US to Latin America in the form of “hot money” with destabilizing effects, as well as continued substantial investment, trade and military ties. The European Union, Russia and the Middle East as real and potential influences in particular settings, depending on the countries and time frame. Of these 4 ‘vectors of power’, the most significant in recent times in reshaping Latin America’s relation to the US and more importantly in opening up prospects for 21st century capitalist growth, is the boom in commodity prices and demand – the dynamic of the world market. On the ‘negative side’, the prolonged US-EU economic crises has limited trade and investment growth and encouraged greater Latin American integration and expansion of regional markets. A serious threat to Latin America’s growth, autonomy and stability is found in the US currency devaluation and subsequent overvaluing of Latin currencies (especially Brazil) imposing constraints on industrial exports and prejudicing the manufacturing sector. Equally important US and EU manipulation of interest rates – downward – has driven speculative capital toward higher interest rates in Latin America, creating destabilizing “bubbles” which can derail the economies.

US Empire Strikes Back: Protectionism, Devaluation and Unilateralism

By the middle of 2010 it was clear that the US economy was losing the competitive battle for markets around the world and was unable to reduce its trade and fiscal deficit within the existing global free trade regime. The Obama regime, led by Federal Reserve head Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner unilaterally launched a thinly disguised trade war, effectively devaluing the dollar and lowering interest rates on bonds in order to increase exports and in effect ‘overvalue’ the currency of their competitors. In other words the Obama regime resorted to a virile “bugger your neighbor policies”, which outraged world economic leaders, provoking Brazilian economic leaders to speak of a “currency war”. Contrary to Washington’s rhetoric of “greater co-operation”, the Obama regime was resorting to protectionist policies designed to alienate the leading economic powers in the region. No longer in a position to impose non-reciprocal trade agreements to US advantage, Washington is engaged in currency manipulation in order to increase market shares at the expense of the highly competitive emerging economies of Latin America and Asia, as well as Germany. Equally prejudicial to Latin America, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates leads to heavy borrowing in the US in order to speculate in high interest countries like Brazil. The consequences are disastrous, as a flood of “hot money”, speculative funds flow into Latin America, especially Brazil, overvaluing the currency and provoking a speculative bubble in bonds and real estate, while encouraging excess liquidity and public and private consumer debt. Equally damaging the overvalued currencies price industrial and manufacturing out of world market competition, threatening to “de-industrialize” the economies and further their dependency on agro-mineral exports. US resort to unilateral protectionism tells us that the decline in US economic power has reached a point where it struggles to compete with Latin America rather than to reassert its former dominant position. Protectionism is a defense mechanism of an empire in decline. While Washington can pretend otherwise, the weapons it chooses to arrest its loss of competitiveness in the short run, sets in motion a process of growing Latin America integration and increased trade with Asian economies, which will deepen Latin America’s economic independence from US control.

Latin America’s Center-Left and the US: Economic Ties Trump Geopolitical Strategies

The consolidation of Latin America’s center-left regimes has had major consequences for US policy, namely a reconciliation between arch-adversary Venezuela and Washington’s foremost ally, Colombia. The power of the market, in this case over $4 billion in Colombian exports to Venezuela, has trumped the dubious advantage (if any) of being Washington’s military launching pad in Latin America. The election of Lula’s chosen candidate Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil, the likely re-election of Chavez in Venezuela and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, means that Washington has little leverage to reverse the dynamic diversification and greater autonomy of Latin America’s leading economies. Moreover, as the political rapprochement between Venezuela and Colombia, including the mutual extradition of Colombian guerrillas and drug traffickers demonstrates, closer economic relations are accompanied by warmer political relations, including a tacit pact in which Colombia abjures from supporting the rightwing opposition in Venezuela, while the latter does likewise toward the Left opposition to Santos. The larger meaning of this obscuring of ideological boundaries is that Latin America’s economic integration advances at the expense of US prompted ideological divisions. The net result will be the further exclusion and diminution of the US as the dominant actor in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time it should be remembered that we are writing about greater capitalist integration, which means the continued marginalization of class based trade unions and social movements from strategic economic policy making positions. In other words, the decline of US hegemony is not matched by an increase in working class or popular power. As both decline, the big winner is the rising business class, mostly, but not exclusively the agro-mineral, financial and manufacturing elites linked to the Latin American and Asian markets. The prime destabilization danger now includes US currency wars, the growing potentially volatile extractive exports and the high levels of dependence on China’s (and Asian) appetite for raw materials. Imperial Wars, Free Trade and the Lumpen Legacy of 1990’s One of the paradoxes leading to the current eclipse of US hegemony in Latin America is found in the very military and economic successes in the 1990’s. A broad swathe of North and Central American and the Andean countries has witnessed the rise of what we call “lumpen political-economic power” which has devastated the formal economy and legitimate political authority. The concept of “lumpen” is derived from ‘lupus’ or Latin for ‘wolf’ a metaphor for a ‘predatory’ actor, or in our context, the rise of a political and economic class which preys upon the public and private resources and institutions of an economy and society. The lumpen power elites are based on the creation of a dual system of legitimate and illegitimate political authority backed by the instruments of coercion and violence. The emergence and formation of a powerful lumpen class of predatory capitalists and their accompanying military entourage is what we refer to in writing of the “process of lumpenization”. Today “lumpenization” no longer merely entails the overt violent organizers of illicit production, processing and distribution of drugs but an entire array of ‘offspring’ economic activity (kidnapping, immigrant smugglers, etc.) as well as large scale long term interaction with ‘legitimate’ economic institutions and sectors, including banking, real estate, agriculture, retail shopping centers, tourist complexes, to name a few. Money laundering of illicit funds is an important growth sector, especially providing important flows of capital to and from major US and Latin American financial institutions. Today over three-quarters of Mexico’s territory and governance is contested by over 30,000 organized armed lumpen led by centralized political-economic formations. Central America is a major transit point, production center and terrain for bloody lumpen struggles for power and revenue collection. Colombia is the major center for ‘raw material production’of drugs, marketing,and import and export center under the leadership of powerful lumpen capitalists with long standing ties to the governing political, military and economic elite. The lumpen economy has supply chains further south in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay and distribution networks through Venezuela and Brazil as well as multi-billion dollar money laundering and financial links in the Caribbean, the US, Uruguay and Argentina. Several important issues to keep in mind in discussing the lumpen political economy.These include: (1)the growth in size, scope and significance over the past 20 years (2) the increasing economic importance as the ‘legitimate’ economy goes into crises (both cause and consequence) (3) the increasing public cynicism as previously thought of “legitimate” economic and political actors (capitalists) engage in multi-billion dollar financial swindles and are “bailed” out by political leaders. The ‘boom’ in lumpen political-economic growth can be dated to the end of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, coinciding with several major historical events in the region. These include: the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement; the US-oligarchy defeat of the revolutionary movements in Central America and the demobilization but not disarmament of the paramilitary and armed militia; the total militarization and paramilitarization of Colombia especially with the advent of Plan Colombia (2001) and the end of peace negotiations; the deregulation of the US financial system in the mid 1990’s and the growth of a financial bubble economy. What is striking about all the countries and regions experiencing ‘deep lumpenization’, is the profound disarticulation of their economies and smashing of their social fabric due to free trade agreements with the US (Mexico and Central America) and the large scale US military intervention during their civil wars (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia). The US politico-military intervention left millions without work and worse, destroyed the possibility of reformist or revolutionary political alliances coming to power and carrying out meaningful structural changes. The restoration of US backed neo-liberal-militarist collaborator regimes left the young unemployed peasants and workers with three choices: (1)submit to degradation and poverty (2) emigrate to North America or Europe (3) join one or another of the narco-trafficking organizations, as a risky but lucrative route out of poverty. The timing of the rise and dynamic growth of lumpen power coincides with the imposition of US free trade and political victories in the aforementioned regions. From the early 1990’s forward lumpen power spreads across the region fueled by NAFTA decimating the Mexican small producers and the US imposed Central American “peace accords” which effectively destroyed the chances of socio-economic change and dismantled but did not disarm the militias and paramilitary gunmen.

Case Studies of Lumpen Dual Power: Mexico

Mexico, unlike the other major economies of Latin America did not experience any popular upheavals or center-left electoral outcomes during the late 1990’s or early 2000. Unlike Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, in which new center-left regimes came to power imposing regulatory controls on financial speculation, Mexico witnessed electoral fraud and signed off on NAFTA, deepening its ties to Wall Street. As a result it experienced a series of financial shocks, undermining its capacity to launch a more diversified trading and investment model. Unlike Argentina which launched state directed employment generating investment policies, Mexico, under US tutelage, relied on emigration and overseas remittances to compensate for the loss of millions of jobs in agriculture , small and medium manufacturing activity and retail sales. While popular uprisings and mobilization in Latin America led to the rise of center-left regimes capable of securing greater independence in economic policy from the US and the IMF, the Mexican elite literally stole elections in 1988 and 2006, blocking the possibility of an alternative model. It successfully repressed alternative peasant movements in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero unlike the successes in Bolivia and Ecuador. While the center-left regimes captured the economic surplus from the agro-mineral sectors and increased public and private investment in production and social spending, Mexico witnessed massive illegal and legal outflows of investments into speculative ventures in the US: an outflow of over $55 billion between 2006-2010. Regional migration within Latin America fueled by high growth, led to rising income; overseas immigration depleted Mexico of skilled and unskilled labor; in some cases ‘return migration’ from the US of deported gang members, with arms and drug networks fueled the growth of lumpen power . With the severe recession, US immigration policy led to the closing of the border, the massive deportation of Mexican immigrants and the decline of the major source of foreign earnings: remittances. Pervasive and deep corruption throughout the cupula of the Mexican political and economic system, combined with the decline of the legitimate economy, the absence of channels for popular redress and Washington’s insistence that militarization and not social investments was the solution to rising crime, led to the huge influx of young recruits to the growing network of lumpen-capitalist directed narco enterprises. With almost all US and Mexican financial institutions and arms vendors as willing partners and an unlimited pool of young recruits with a ‘lean and hungry look’, Mexico evolved into a fiercely contested terrain between a half dozen rival lumpen organizations,and the Mexican military, with nearly 30,000 deaths between 2006-2010.

Lumpenization: Central America

Drug gangs dominate the streets of the major cities and countryside of all the countries which were militarized during the US backed counter-revolutionary wars between the 1960’s to early 1990’s. US proxy military dictators and their civilian clients, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras decimated civil society and particularly the mass popular organizations. In El Salvador over 75,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were uprooted, driven across borders or into urban shanty towns. In Guatemala over 200,000 mostly Mayan Indians were murdered by the US trained “special forces” and over 450 villages were obliterated in the course of a scorched earth policy. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship and the subsequent US financed and trained counter-revolutionary (“contra”) mercenary army killed and maimed close to 100,000 people and devastated the economy. In Honduras, the US embassy promoted and financed in-country and cross-border counter-insurgency operations which killed, uprooted and forced thousands of Honduran peasants into exile. Highly militarized Central American societies, in which US funded and armed death squads murdered with impunity, in which the economy of small producers was shattered and ‘normal’ market activity was subject to military assaults, led to the growth of illegal crops, drug and people smuggling. With the so-called “peace agreements”, the leaders of the insurgents became “institutionalized”in elite electoral politics,while large numbers of unemployed ex-guerrillas and demobilized death squad militia members found no place in the status quo. The neo-liberal order imposed by the US client rulers with its free market ideology built “fortress neighborhoods”, hired an army of private “security” guards, while the productive bases of small scale agriculture was destroyed. Millions of Central Americans faced the familiar “routes out of poverty”: outmigration, forming or joining criminal gangs, or attempting to find an economic niche in an unpromising environment. Outmigration for semi-educated former members of armed bands led to their early entrée into armed groups, deportation back to Central America, swelling the ranks of narco traffickers in their “home country”. Highly repressive immigration policies implemented in the new millennium closed the escape valve for most Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. Former guerrilla fighters and their families, abandoned by their former leaders embedded in electoral parties, turned their military experience toward carving a new living, as security guards for the rich, or as armed traffickers competing for ‘market shares’ with and against the discharged deathsquad militia members. Between 2000-2010, the annual number of homicides exceeded the number of deaths suffered during the worst period of the civil wars of the 1980s. US imposed peace agreements and the neo-liberal order which resulted, led to the total lumpenization of the economy and polity throughout the region, the practice of electoral politics and even the election of “center-left” politicos in El Salvador and Nicaragua notwithstanding. Lumpenization was a direct consequence of the ‘scorched earth’ and ‘mass uprooting’ counter-insurgency policies which were central to US re-establishing dominance in the region. Economic and personal insecurity and social misery were the price paid by imperial Washington to prevent a popular revolution.

Case Study: Colombia

The ties between the world centers of finance and the most degenerate and blood curdling ruler in the Western Hemisphere were most evident in the slavishly laudatory puff-pieces published in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal in praise of President Alvaro Uribe, while over 3 million Colombians were driven off their lands, several thousands were murdered, over a thousand trade unionists, journalists and human rights activists were killed. Two thirds of his Congressional backers were financed by narco-traffickers. Incarcerated deathsquad leaders identified top military officials as their primary supporters. All of Colombia’s Presidents collaborated closely with US military missions and all were financed and associated with the multi-billion dollar drug cartels, even as the Pentagon claimed to be engaged in a “war against drug trafficking”. Landlords and their financial and real estate backers organized private militias, which terrorized, uprooted and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants, others fled to the urban slums, or across the border to neighboring countries. Others joined the guerrillas, and still others were recruited by the death squads and military. With the advance of the guerrilla armies and then President Pastrana’s opening to peace negotiations, President Clinton launched a $5 billion dollar military scheme, “Plan Colombia” to quadruple Colombia’s air and ground forces and deathsquads. With Washington’s backing, Alvaro Uribe, a notorious narco-deathsquad politico, so identified by US officials, took power and launched a massive scorched earth policy, murdering and displacing millions of peasants and urban slum dwellers in an effort to undermine the vast network of community organizations sympathetic to the agrarian reform, public investment and anti-military program of the guerrilla movements. Mass terror and population flight emptied whole swathes of the countryside; livelihoods were destroyed and landlords in alliance with drug cartel bosses and Generals seized millions of acres of land. For the financial and respectable mass media, the massification of terror mattered not: the insurgents were ‘contained’, driven back, put on the defensive. They trumpeted the killing of key guerrilla leaders: foreign corporate property was secure. Rule by Uribe, the military and the narco-death squads secured US power and influence and created an ideal “jumping off” location for destabilizing the democratically elected Venezuelan President Chavez. The latter was especially important by the mid 2000’s when Washington’s internal assets attempted coup and lockout were resoundingly defeated in 2002-03. Having gained strategic territorial advantage over the guerrillas, Washington in collaboration with Uribe moved to shift the balance of power between the narco-deathsquads and the state: a disarmament and demobilization and amnesty was proclaimed. The result was detailed revelations of the deep structural links between narco-deathsquads and the Uribe police state regime, up to and including family members and cabinet ministers. While ‘nominally’ the cartels are in retreat, in fact, they have become decentralized .Equally important top politicos and military officials continue to collaborate in the production, processing and shipping of billion dollar cocaine exports … with major US banks laundering illicit funds.

Rule of Lumpen-Capitalism in the Imperial System

Drug trafficking has deep roots in the economies of North and South America and has profound ramifications throughout their societies. One cannot understand the tremendous growth of US banking and financial centers if not for the $25 to $50 billion dollar yearly income and transfers from laundering drug funds and double that amount from illegal money transfers by business and political leaders directly and indirectly benefiting from the drug trade. Lumpen capitalists, their collaborators, facilitators paramilitary mercenaries and military partners play a major political role in sustaining the imperial system. Washington’s major influence and principle area of dominance resides in those countries where lumpen power and deathsquad operations are most prevalent, namely Central America, Colombia and Mexico. Both phenomena are derived from US designed ‘scorched earth’ counter-insurgency strategies that prevented alterations, modifications or reforms of the neo-liberal order and blocked the successful emergence of social movements and center-left regimes as took place in most of Latin America. The contemporary imperial system relies on lumpen capitalists, their economic networks and military formations in practically every major area of conflict even as these collaborators are constant areas of friction. As in Afghanistan and Iraq today and in Central America in the recent past and in Latin America under the military dictatorships, the US relies on drug traffickers, military gangsters engaged in extortion, kidnapping, property seizures and the pillage of public property and treasury to destroy popular movements, to divide and conquer communities and above all to terrorize the general public and civil society. The singular growth of the financial sector especially in the US is in part the result of its being the massive recipient of large scale sustained flows of ‘plunder capital’ by lumpen rulers and their economic partners via ‘political crony’ privatizations, foreign loans which never entered the local economy and other such forms of pillage characteristic of ‘predator’ classes. The deep structural affinities between Wall Street speculators and Latin lumpen-capitalists provided the backdrop for the ascendancy of a new class of lumpen financiers in the imperial financial centers: bogus bonds, mortgage swindles, falsified assessments by stock ratings agencies, trillion dollar raids on state treasuries define the heart and soul of contemporary imperialism. If it is true that the promotion and financing of lumpen warlord capitalists was an essential defense mechanism at the periphery of the empire to contain popular insurgencies, it is also true that the growth of lumpen capitalism severely weakened the very core of the imperial economy, namely its productive and export sectors leading to uncontrollable deficits, out of control speculative bubbles and massive and sustained reductions of living standards and incomes. Lumpen classes were both the agencies for consolidating the empire and its undoing: tactical gains at the periphery led to strategic losses in the imperial centers. Imperial policymakers resort to terrorist formations resulted from their incapacity to resolve internal contradictions within a legal, electoral framework. The high domestic political cost of long term warfare led inevitably to the recruitment of mercenary lumpen armies who extracted an economic tribute for questionable loyalty. Lacking any popular constituency, mercenary armies rely on terror to secure circumstantial submission. Having secured control, local warlords preside over the rapid and massive growth of drugs and other lumpen economic practices. The alliance of empire and lumpen capitalists against modern secular and traditional insurgencies, brings together high technology weaponry and primitive clan based religious-ethnic racists in Iraq and Afghanistan and deracinated psychopaths in the case of Colombia, Mexico and Central America. For Washington military and political supremacy and territorial conquests take priority over economic gain. In the case of Colombia the scorched earth policy undermined production and lucrative trade with Venezuela. Imperial ascendancy had similar consequences in Asia, the Middle East and Central America.

When Lumpen Power becomes a Problem for the Imperial State

Lumpen capitalism develops a dynamic of its own, independent of its role as an imperial instrument for destroying popular insurgency. It challenges imperial collaborator regimes. It displaces, threatens, or cajoles foreign and domestic capitalists. In the extreme, it establishes a private army, seizes territorial control, recruits and trains networks of intelligence agents within the armed forces and police, undermining imperial influence. In a word lumpen organized military capitalism threatens the security of imperial hegemony: newly emerging predators threaten the established collaborators. The imperial attempts to use and dispose of lumpen counterinsurgency forces has failed; the demobilized paras become the professional gunmen of a “third force” – neither imperial nor insurgent. The decimation of the reformist center-left option, which took hold in Latin America, precludes a socio-economic alternative capable of integrating the young combative unemployed, stimulating the productive economy, diversifying markets and escaping the pitfalls of a US centered neo-liberal order. The divergence of priorities and strategies between Latin America’s center-left and Washington has as much to do with economic and class interests as it has with ideological agendas. For the US security means defeating the rising power of lumpen military economic formations in their remaining ‘power bases’. For Latin America, security concerns are secondary to diversifying and boosting market shares within Latin America and overseas. Lumpen power is currently under the political control of domestic rulers in Latin America; it is out of control in US clients. The US solution is military; the Latin approach is greater growth; social expenditures and police repression especially in Brazil. The Latin solution has greater attraction, evident in Colombia’s break with the US military base and encirclement strategy toward Venezuela. Colombia’s new President opted for $8 billion dollar trade deals with Venezuela’s Chavez over and against costly million dollar military base agreements with the US. Clearly the US economic decline in Latin America as a direct result of its reliance on military and lumpen power, is in full force. The driving force of accelerated decline is not popular insurgency but the attraction and lucrative opportunities of the economic marketplace within Latin America and beyond for the local ruling classes. Insofar as militarism defines the policies and strategies of the US Empire there is no remedy for the challenges of lumpen power in its ‘backyard’. And Washington has nothing on offer to recapture a dominant presence in Latin America. The world market is defeating the empire. Latin America’s twenty-first century capitalists are leading the way to further decline in imperial power.

Pancho Villa, Presente!

Repost from the old site. In the comments section, Uncle Milton comments that Mexican history shows that Mexican revolutions have quickly turned into kleptocracies. He also says that the Mexican electorate has more sense than we think they do. He also makes a lot of good points about Mexico and decides that it is neither a capitalist nor socialist state, but some sort of a kleptocratic oligarchic state. I argue, first, that the Mexican electorate is ignorant and does not vote in its best interests. Second, that we Americans owe the Mexican revolution a tremendous debt and that the achievements of the revolution are deliberately ignored and downplayed by the US ruling class. Third, that while the revolution did degenerate into a corrupt, fat, lazy, greedy and fake-revolutionary PRI mess, it did make very real and substantial achievements. Fourth, that no socialist on Earth would claim Mexico, one of the most unequal states on Earth. Fifth, that Mexico is actually a fairly wealthy country. If you’re a poor Mexican, like most of them are, you have to vote for the Left and against the oligarchy. It’s the only rational thing to do. Mexicans haven’t voted for the Left and won since Cardenas in the 1930’s. The Rightwing parties, including the fake revolutionary PRI, haven’t done fuck-all for the poor Mexicans since 1920. The PRI was originally a revolutionary party that went corrupt and bad with time, stasis, greed and inertia. It’s true that the Mexicans voted for Cardenas and the Left in 1988 and had the votes stolen from them. In the last election, they voted Left again, for AMLO, and it was stolen again. I think you have to agree that the Left is the party that is going to benefit poor Mexicans the most. They may well be bad to neutral for middle class and rich Mexicans, but they will be good for the poor. As for the rightwing parties, what have they done for Mexicans in the last 80 years? US conservative apologists need to explain why conservative politics has failed the Mexican poor so horribly for most of the last century and all of this one. When is rightwing politics going to start working down there, anyway? I say they had their chance. Milton: Historically rebellions and revolution in Mexico have led to the same old kleptocrats running the show. This is not really completely true if you are arguing that all Mexican revolutions have failed. The Mexican revolution was a great thing. 10-20 million people died, but it had to be done, just like World War 2. You must understand that prior to Pancho Villa, Mexicans lived in a state of feudalism. I am not kidding. Read descriptions of Mexicans in 1910. The revolution broke up the big feudal estates and destroyed the power of the Catholic Church who supported the feudal lords. The reason Americans don’t know this is because we were not taught this. At the time, our government hated the Mexican revolution and supported the feudal lords, and it probably still hates the Mexican revolution, because the American government hates all populist rebellions. They don’t want us to know about a successful populist revolution in Mexico, or anywhere. One thing the revolution did was give land to the average Mexican. It is the case to this day. Most Mexicans have access to land if they wish to farm it, often collectively. These collective farms have been very successful for the last 90 years, at least in terms of warding off starvation and putting food in stomachs. Our government never teaches us this either because they don’t want us to know about a successful experiment in collective agriculture. At least the average Mexican can eat; he need not go hungry. To this day, Mexico has one of the lowest rates of malnutrition in Latin America. The revolution also created public schools and public health care. Most Mexicans do have access to free and public health care. The health care is not the greatest, and you may have to wait ages, but it’s there. In the rural areas, many kids are pulled out of schools to work on farms, but the schools do exist. The US should be indebted to the Mexican revolution. When Central America was in flames in the 1980’s, did you notice that Mexico was quiet? At the time, I asked my Mother why Mexico was not in flames and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “They already had their revolution.” We should throw a shout out to Pancho Villa that he kept Tijuana from becoming San Salvador in 1989. It’s clear that this venal Mexican elite uses the US border as a safety valve to send their poor to the US so the rich don’t have to share with them. I think that rightwingers in the US ought to admit that conservatism in Mexico has failed in that it has caused the illegal immigrant crisis in the US. To call Mexico a socialist country is an insult to socialists everywhere. If it were a decent social democracy, I do not think we would be having all these Mexicans flooding up here. Mexico is not a poor country. It has a PCI of almost $13,000/yr, and that is not bad. Mexico has Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Capitalism, Catholicism, Christianity, Conservatism, Economics, Education, Health, Hispanics, History, Illegal, Immigration, Latin America, Left, Mexicans, Mexico, Nutrition, Political Science, Politics, Public Health, Regional, Religion, Reposts From The Old Site, Socialism, South America, The Americas, VenezuelaLeave a comment on Pancho Villa, Presente!

World O' Crap, Meet World O' Lies

Repost from the old site. Super-commenter James Schipper responds to the Problems of Democracy Under Capitalism post with this insightful comment. My comments follow:

James Schipper: There are two serious restraint on capitalism: competition and the need to make a profit. Competition between capitalists insures that the power of capital over consumers and labor is limited. Capitalists have a common interests in the preservation of the capitalist system, but at the same time, capitalists compete against other for the favors of the consumer and to get the best employees. Always remember that what makes capitalism work is not so much private property but competition. Private property without competition combines the worst of socialism and capitalism. The need to make a profit sets a limit on what the corporate media can do. Newspapers have to find readers and radio and TV stations have to find listeners and viewers. This implies that they can’t be too overtly propagandistic, otherwise the readers, listeners and viewers will stay away. Commentators like Rush Limbaugh have a large following but only because they primarily discuss non-economic issues. If they spent most of their time defending business, their popularity would quickly plummet. Imagine the reaction of Limbaugh’s fan’s if he started to extol CEO’s who make stratospheric incomes while their companies lay off workers. It is far safer to extol the uniformed heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plutocracy is a cause that can’t be truthful about its aims. That’s why the Republicans want ordinary working Americans to worry about college professors who have an elitist lifestyle rather than about executives and capitalists who have an elitist income. It is ridiculous to suppose that latte-drinking, opera-watching, Volvo-driving eggheads who read foreign novels and watch foreign films are somehow a danger to working stiffs. A party that represents the rich has to be deceitful or else condemn itself to insignificance. The Republicans are such a party.

Robert Lindsay: James makes some excellent points above, especially about how “pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t even park their bicycles straight”, as George Wallace famously put it, into a sort of populist enemy by the Republican Party, and also about how conservatism is always, by its very nature and necessarily, dishonest. Here the Republican Party is playing into the anti-intellectual nature of US populism. We have never been a European-style cafe society, and probably never will be. Also Republicans are taking an increasingly popular critique of their own sure elitism into a critique of fake elitists called “limousine liberals”. Problem with limousine liberals being, I guess, that they are hypocrites. Similar diatribes have been launched against something similar called the “Hollywood Left”. This point is superbly made by Philip Agre in a seminal 2004 essay, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? As Agre succinctly and immaculately:

Q: What is conservatism? A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Q: What is wrong with conservatism? A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

Increasingly here we have what are more or less monopolies, James. We have cable and telephone monopolies that were supposed to be regulated, but the government has basically given up regulating them. We have computer monopolies in the form of Intel on chips and Microsoft in apps and OS’s. Starbucks comes into a town, sells at a loss to drive all competition out of town and then jacks up prices. Walmart comes into town, sells at a loss to drive everyone out of business, and then keeps on selling at low cost. However, Walmart mostly sells crap. Here Walmart is violating the monopoly principle of driving up prices while adhering to the monopoly principle of selling crap. We are now having higher-end stores opening up that charge a lot more than Walmart but at least do not sell crap. As long as there is competition in a market, prices and quality are typically relatively good. However, the government now operates in the interest of monopoly capital, and, insanely, “free market” economics is opposed to all antitrust regulation. Traditionally, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation. The new bipartisan opposition to antitrust legislation is one of the legacies of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago School of Lies” free market fundamentalism snake oil that has created a Gramscian cultural hegemony in US economic thought in the past 35 years. The Friedmanites published all sorts of nonsense, lies and BS. They went down to Chile, used it as a testing ground for their insane theories, blew up the economy, and then covered their tracks and lie about it to this very day. They published papers and books on antitrust that overturned nearly 3/4 of a century of perfectly valid economic and legal scholarship that showed unequivocally that prices rise and the quality of services and goods nosedives as markets become more consolidated. These works made up a bunch of fancy-sounding crap that made a dishonest case that all of this proven science was not true. Monopolies do not produce high prices and crap service and goods. Everything we know is wrong. Instead, reality is inverted and monopolies cause low prices, great products and superb services. What we are seeing in the US is the move to more and more consolidated markets and more and more monopoly-type markets. The moves by Yahoo and Google and Microsoft on the Internet foretell an Internet that is increasingly monopolistic. The one good thing about capitalism is competition. Capitalists love to talk about how much they love competition, but the truth is that they hate it. Competition only benefits the consumer. All businessmen secretly want to be monopolists. All of those businesses dishonestly taking Microsoft to court for being a monopoly actually want to be monopolies themselves. There are natural monopolies. In the US, those include phone, cable, power, water and some others. Those natural monopolies must be regulated by the state, other wise they will turn into natural unregulated monopolies, which are disastrous for consumers and society. It’s highly dubious that corporations compete for the best workers anymore in the US, except at the highest levels. Corporations and business are perfectly happy to replace good workers with illegal aliens and H-1B and H-2B guest workers from other lands. Both types of workers are usually much inferior to native US workers, but business no longer cares about quality in the US. Computer companies and homebuilders are perfectly happy to produce crap code and homes that fall apart in a few years. No one really cares about quality anymore in the US, and no one cares about workers either. The whole culture is centered around getting rich, and that usually means being an employer and hiring labor. To be a worker is to be a schmuck, soon to be taken out by illegal aliens, machinery, a computer program or guest workers from India or Ecuador. Fordism is progressive type of capitalism named after Henry Ford. Ford found out his own workers could not even afford to buy his cars, and he was outraged. He resolved to pay his workers enough to buy his cars. This became a progressive strain in capitalism – to pay workers enough so that they would be well-heeled consumers able to buy plenty of products, while at the same time preserving high profits for business. Fordism is done and gone; it’s history. Everything is now globalized, and no one worries about whether or not people can afford to buy your stuff. If labor in one place costs too much, just outsource, move the plant overseas, hire illegals or bring guest worker scabs from India. If workers in one land can’t afford your stuff, ship it to some rich people overseas. As long as enough people somewhere can afford your stuff, there’s no need to pay workers enough to buy your stuff. Furthermore, James misinterprets the degree to which Rush Limbaugh is a reactionary. I believe he does extol high corporate salaries. You now have the phenomenon of the low income, working class or middle class, White, usually younger, male, who will defend plutocracy and the politics of the rich to the hilt, despite the fact that it is against his interest. In this way, the plutocrats have actually been honest about their project and have created a Gramscian cultural hegemony of “plutocracy is good” whereby tens of millions of suckers swallow this crap whole and spout it right back at you without thinking. They did this by saturating the media with pro-plutocrat messages and making it seem reasonable. They also did it by creating a Lottery mindset, which was unfortunately always a part of US culture (see the Horatio Alger books). Your average White male working stiff will tell you that he too is going to become rich one day. Anywhere from 25-5 The problem with James’ media model – that media outlets must compete for readers – is that there is no competition. There is no Left alternative to Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report. On TV, there is the ultraright Fox News and MSNBC and the rightwing CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All of these are corporate-owned and spout one pro-corporate line. It is true that CNN now has Lou Dobbs, who spouts a sort-of progressive populist line. It really is against CNN’s interests to keep Dobbs on there, but I guess he is there because enough folks want to hear the message. What you get instead is a pro-corporate message increasingly draped in fake populist clothing. On Fox News today, they went on and on with a fake populist message about lowering gas prices. Incredibly, they denounced speculation in oil prices, but of course, they did not offer the reasonable thing to do to remedy this – regulation of commodity markets. Instead, they argued for massively increasing domestic oil production – in the ANWR, in the oil shale of the US Rockies and in offshore deposits. They said that the increased production would so glut the oil market (!) with new supply that this would force the commodity market to drive oil prices downwards, and this would “beat the speculators”. What is interesting is that Fox News was forced to admit that the problem in oil prices is almost entirely due to speculation. What they left out is that increased oil supply probably would not do anything to drive down prices, because the price is not being set by supply-demand anyway. So here you see the fake populism of the Republican Party – sell a fake populist but actually wildly pro-corporate message – “Open up the oil fields!” Even if this project passed and we able to drill in all these new deposits, it would not put a dent in oil prices. But the US public is so stupid that they would have forgotten about that long ago. If a bunch of Republicans got into office on this fake promise, this is all that matters. The US public is like a kid with ADD – no attention span. Politicians are never held accountable to promises or projects because no one ever follows promises through for years to see if they come through or not. Politicians get elected on a pile of bull, and then no one is ever there to call them on it later on. Bush has substantially caused these oil prices by failing to regulate commodity markets (and they will never regulate those markets), but the Repubs are going to stick Obama with it. Bush caused the Iraq mess, but Obama will be stuck with that too. And both of those things are catch-22’s with few non-painful ways out.

Prophets Howling in the Wilderness

Repost from the old site. From some responses to a post of mine: More Illegal Immigration Madness. I’m amazed at how apathetic the rest of the country is about this Mesoamerican mass illegal immigration that has swamped us in the Southwest. Some of us, like me, are angry at those who say, “No big deal, let them all in,” while they live in places in which few illegals have yet swarmed. So we do take a bit of schadenfreude enjoyment out of the near future that you all will be experiencing in the next 20 years or sooner, assuming you live that long and still live in the Lower 48. What’s truly sick is that to remark on this idiocy of mass invasion by what amounts to an occupying army of enemy soldiers in any way is considered to be grotesque racism, and an example of White Power, Nazi or White Supremacist tendencies (!). The Mexicans run the show around here and they police things very well. If they think you are a White Power, excuse me, an opponent of illegal Mexican mass invasion, then they will shun you, glare at you, spit at you, threaten you, bang things and make loud noises until you move away, threaten to beat you up, try to ban you from their establishments, on and on. If you mention illegals in public, the Hispanics all start glaring at you and your friends start kicking you and ordering you threateningly to shut up. People are actually scared of the illegals here. They are like a teeming Latin American Underclass in a revolutionary situation south of the border, and one gets the feeling that they could take up guerrilla warfare of some sort of another at any time, just like in a non-US banana republic. In some ways, maybe they already have. Funny thing is Mexicans are pretty damn racist themselves and they are incredibly ethnocentric. You know, those handy little caveman weapons that come in handy during the sort of Hispanic-non-Hispanic ethnic warfare that we currently live under. On the contrary, if one hates being invaded like this, it’s a sign that they still have a bit of sanity left and haven’t drunken too much of the multicultural Koolaid yet. There’s no space at all on the Left or in the Democratic Party for views like those below, and that has to be the biggest tragedy of them all. Way to go, concede more space to the Right. Neither of these posters is the slightest bit racist, I am convinced. Or if they are, I don’t care anymore. There’s really no other sane way to react in this situation. Real America, from Winnetka, California shouts in the wilderness: Wait until you people in states other than California see what it is really like to live in a Mexican city in the former United States. Your co-workers will be speaking Spanish, not English, and receiving food stamps even though they earn as much as you, while you will be called racist for speaking your mind on anything that offends anyone Hispanic. Your children will be sidetracked in school, and the little gang-mentality foreigners will cause you and your children grief and money. When you have a fender bender, you will find that the person that hit you has no insurance and does not speak English (conveniently) and the court will refuse to do anything about it. California is now a horrible place to live, and it won’t be long until all of America is like California. Transplanted Texan, Sun City, CA, howls back, coyote-like: Gee, I believe they are starting to get the picture. The best is yet to come, sorry to say. They will grow accustomed to living in a 3rd World culture. Gangs, Mexican graffiti on all the fences, walls, schools, etc. Oh, and the daily drive-by shootings, murders, thefts and threats to their children at school. Just to name a few treats to come. Whatever it takes, Mexico’s chief export, narcotics, will play a part in their lives. Murdered police officers, drug dealers, wars. Our country is in such trouble, we all need to pray for what is still our county and the generations of Americans to come.

No Hate Crimes?

Repost from the old site. On the more mainstream and moderate White nationalist sites such as American Renaissance, the general tone of the pieces and in the comments is that there really is no such thing as White racism in the US anymore. There are only a pitiful few incidents here and there, and it’s all a big joke. Hanging nooses is just a silly gag. Blacks and Hispanics need to quit being so hypersensitive about everything, and just let it go. Racism, when it refers to Whites, is always in quotes, implying it does not even exist, while other races are constantly accused of racism against Whites that is actually real. So it is as if the only real racism problem in the US is against White people. The usual response is to say that these people are just a bunch of lying racists. I will, however, say that there is a bit of truth to these accusations. Racism by Whites is dramatically exaggerated in the US, and every little comment or scribble is inspected for the horrible crime. Hispanics and Blacks in particular are far too wont to yell racism over every little thing, in many cases over mostly or completely innocent comments. Entire subjects that do not necessarily have anything to do with racism are walled off and forbidden from discussion. On the other hand, non-Whites get to bash away at Whites for all of their racial crimes, past, present and future, while Whites are supposed to sit there and take it, groveling, like guilty supplicants. There is a presumption that non-Whites are incapable of racism and that Whites are automatically filled with it. This is all nonsense, but it’s a product of the Left in the US and the West that started this crazy conversation about 40 years ago. They’ve been quite successful selling this silliness to the public. On the other hand, there surely is racism in the US. I don’t think much of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), but they do have an interesting list of racist incidents in the US for the first three months of 2008. It seems pretty incredible the amount of this stuff that is going on, or is it? One thing for sure – you rarely hear about it in your own town. Considering what a multicultural society we are, it is amazing that there is not much more of this going on in every reasonable-sized city just about every day. Right? Or am I wrong? You will note that simple name-calling is apparently not listed, and is not a crime. Some of the stuff on that list seem a bit of a reach. In the course of a fight, or altercation, racial slurs are uttered. Now we have a hate crime.

Auburn, California (Legal Developments) Published on 03-06-2008 “Lance Clements, 37, was arrested on hate crime related charges after he allegedly made racial slurs against a black student and a Hispanic student during an altercation.” 

This strikes me as an excess. There was an altercation. A fight? A verbal fight, or a physical one? In the course of the altercation, some slurs got uttered. This is a crime? I’d like to know some more facts about this case. Unfortunately, in a free society people get to call each other names, and in the course of fights, people will just call each other any slur that comes to their minds that seems to apply to the person they are fighting. For instance, in the past ten years, I did call a Black man a nigger once. On the other hand, I’m going to say I’m not a racist. He ran a recycling place and I used to take my bottles up there. He got mad at me when I did not separate my browns from my greens from my clears. I forget what happened, but a shouting match ensued. This is not normal behavior for me – I’m a quiet guy and I don’t get into it much with people. In the course of this argument, I called him a nigger. Not once, but a few times. Not because I’m a raving racist; I’ll say I’m not, and you’re welcome to disagree. More because at that moment I hated him, he was Black, and fishing in my bag of tricks for insults, it seemed appropriate. If he was fat or ugly, I would have insulted him on those bases. I’ve since talked to a Black woman I know, and she was quite upset that I did that. I’m going to think about whether I want to do that again. I wonder how often this sort of thing goes on? In the course of fights and shouting matches, angry people will say stuff they would not ordinarily say. Not out of racism or bigotry, but because in a fight, you use any ammo you’ve got. Most of the other stuff on that list is pretty clear-cut and straightforward. I was shocked by the amount of anti-Semitism in the US. I don’t like the ADL, and I think they go nuts about anti-Semitism, but you can see quite a few cases on that list of anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish institutions, vandalism of Jewish graveyards, actual assaults on and threats against Jews, etc. I was appalled by that, and surprised. For the first time in a while, I will throw a shout out to the Jewish groups who are publicizing this, while deploring their efforts to code as anti-Semitic a wide variety of comments and writings that are generally not. The ADL types go overboard, but there’s clearly an anti-Semitism problem. Things are complicated. On the White Nationalist boards, there is a lot of talk about how most assaults by Blacks against Whites are accompanied by racial slurs. Typically, the police deny that a hate crime occurred. The White Nationalists have an interesting point, and if White assaults combined with slurs get hate crime attachments, it’s about time to start slamming a lot of Blacks with the same stuff. I guess the assumption is that the Black criminal victimized the person just to be a criminal, and that racism was secondary, and therefore the attack was not primarily bias-motivated, instead it was primarily dirty criminal-motivated. Perhaps that is so, but fair is fair, and there appears to be a double-standard here. There were 104 incidents over a 93 day period in the first three months of 2008. That’s a little over one a day, and most all of these incidents are pretty serious. A 2005 report by the US government found that there were 191,000 hate crimes in that year. That’s 600 a day! That’s 24 an hour. One every two or three minutes. Does that seem credible? I wonder what standard they were using to judge what is a hate crime? The same as in the SPLC list? If so, there’s still a big problem here in the US. But if they are using everything down to my little argument above, the report is pretty meaningless. Someone might want to get ahold of that report and see what’s really in it. White nationalists say that in a multicultural society, these sort of incidents are to be expected and are in fact normal. Why? Because a certain amount of racial hostility is to be expected in such a society. Are they right? If not, why not? The appropriate response to this issue is the Middle Way, as the Taoists say. Not to overemphasize racism and exaggerate it out of all sanity, and not, on the other hand, to say that it barely even exists anymore. For the record, SPLC does list several anti-immigrant groups that do not strike me as racist in any way, shape or form. SPLC says:

These groups generally attack immigrants as individuals, rather than merely disagreeing with immigration policy. Some have close ties to white supremacist ideas, groups and individuals. 

That statement is just wrong about several of those groups. The groups listed are:

  • American Border Patrol
  • California Coalition for Immigration Reform
  • Save Our State
  • American Patrol/Voice of Citizens Together
  • Rescue Without Borders
  • Federation for American Immigration Reform
  • Social Contract Press
  • Emigration Party of Nevada
  • Border Guardians
  • American Immigration Control Foundation/Americans for Immigration Control

Of those, Save Our State, American Patrol and the Federation for American Immigration Reform are surely not racist at all. I can’t speak of the rest, but I imagine they are the same. True, Social Contract Press is racist, but they are on the moderate end of White nationalism. It seems like any group screaming about the illegal alien invasion of the US is going to get tagged with a racist label. That’s where SPLC is so wrong and does a lot of damage.

The Republican Pledge to America Cannot Possibly Work

I’ve seen the Republican agenda, and I’ve heard them talking tonight on and on about what they are going to do. Trust me, nothing that they are going to do could possibly have a good affect on anything important, much less the economy. Tons of tax cuts. This will blow up the deficit they hate way worse than before. It won’t help the economy because the economy is suffering from lack of demand. Business is already sitting on a record mountain of cash. They don’t need any more of it. Giving them more won’t make them hire one more worker. The problem is lack of customers. More supply side (neoclassical) economics won’t do anything to solve that. The lack of demand is due to the economic crisis. It’s also due to a 35 year war that the Right has waged on working people via outsourcing, union busting, Hindu 1-B and other guest workers, and mass immigration, legal and illegal. They’re crushed the American worker, smashing his wages and income. It’s classical capitalist class war. As Fordists would argue, this is having its predicted effect in that workers can no longer afford to buy the stuff that business is selling. There has also been a mass transfer of income to the well off. The top 1 Cut government spending. This is retarded. In the US, government spending is 2 Pledge to work across the aisle. The Republican Party’s goal in 2008 was to do everything possible to make sure that Obama would not be elected in 2012. They will continue to do this. They will oppose everything that he will try to do. If he tries to do rightwing things, they may go along with him, but that’s dubious. Look forward to 2 years of total gridlock. The Capitalist Shit Market, I mean the Capitalist Stock Market, rallied on the elections not because Republicans were going to win but because a Republican win would mean a gridlocked government that is so paralyzed it can’t do anything. All of you who love the stock market or the US corporate class so much ought to think about that. The US corporate class, via its institution, the stock market, wants a gridlocked state that does as little as possible. So those of you who feel that the government ought to do something (like “create jobs”), ought to rethink your cheering on of the US corporate class or the US stock market. You heard that right. Business wants a government that does nothing. Capitalists are wonderful people! Get rid of regulations on business. Business is regulated, in general, in the interest of consumers, workers, society and the environment. By deregulating, you by definition harm consumers, workers, society and the environment. Because the economic crisis is due the financial mess, not lack of regulation, deregulation will do nothing to help the economy. The economy will not improve until the financial crisis is dealt with. The other aspect of the problem economy is lack of demand. All the deregulation on Earth will not put one more penny in the hands of workers and consumers. It will enrich business, but business is already sitting on an Everest of cash. This will fail to help the economy. Create jobs! The state cannot create jobs except through stimulus spending and deficit spending, which these shitheads oppose for ideological, not economic reasons. As we discussed above, all the tax cuts and deregulation on Earth will not create one job absent a solution to the financial crisis and/or measures to restart demand. The huge spending cuts they are advocating will by definition result in GDP loss and will actually cause loss of jobs, not job gain. Therefore, this will fail. The entire Republican project cannot possibly help the economy because it’s not economics. Or rather, it’s bad economics. Better, it’s politically driven economics. It’s economic policy in pursuit of political goals such as gutting the state for ideological reasons and waging the class war of the top 2

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