The Roots of Fascism in Pakistan and Sri Lanka

Great article from one of my favorite websites, The Left Coaster. It’s basically the left wing of the Democratic Party in the US. They sure don’t agree with the idiot 5

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. The conflicts in Pakistan and Sri Lanka have their roots in the fascist language policies of the state. India,on the other hand, for all its faults, has had a good language policy from the very start. English was chosen as the national language, and each state chose its own majority language as the language of the state. To communicate with the central governments, the states would use English. Much ethnic tension and violence was actually defused in India by this very progressive policy.

Pakistan, insanely, chose the language of only

Sri Lanka was worse. Sinhalese, the language of 7

The genocide reached a peak this spring when the state wiped out the remains of the Tamil Tigers, and slaughtered 100,000 Tamil civilians at the same time. The media in the West and India did nothing but stand up and cheer during the whole Tamil Holocaust. Sickening. Now the war’s over, but tens of thousands of Tamils are in concentration camps.

Sinhalese settler-colonists, like the Jews of Israel, have invaded Tamil lands to throw the Tamils off, steal their land and confiscate it for Sinhalese settlers. Not one word of this in the filthy Western media, who apparently have never met a fascist they didn’t like. Both political parties support the fascist Sri Lankan state.

On a worldwide scale, only the Left has managed to peep in protest over the Sri Lankan fascist genocide. This is one reason I’m a Leftist. We’re the only honorable people left on the globe.

FARC Attacks Eliminate 17 Colombian Security Forces

A FARC roadside bomb and automatic weapons fire ambush in Caqueta killed 14 Colombian police in Caqueta. A number of cops were trapped inside a burning vehicle. They were hit with roadside bombs, then attacked with automatic weapons, then doused with gasoline and set on fire. Another 7 police were wounded. There is a government offensive going on in Caqueta right now, and the FARC is resisting it.

Those aren’t really cops. They are “state police,” and their mission is counterinsurgency.

Earlier, there were two other FARC attacks near the borders with Venezuela and Ecuador that left 3 soldiers dead, 7 more wounded and 1 missing.

Altogether, 17 security forces were killed in three attacks, 14 more were wounded and 1 is missing in two days of fighting

In Colombia, anyone having any opinions whatsoever on the Left is fair game to be killed by the state. The military, state or death squads will often denounce you as a “FARC member” or a “FARC supporter.” The first case is almost never true, as the FARC usually wear uniforms. Anyway, FARC members can easily be arrested if there is any evidence against them.

Most people so named are just trade unions, people on the Left, members of political parties, community workers, organizers, etc., members of campesino and human rights organizations, on and on. The second charge is much harder to prove. What in the Hell is a “FARC supporter” anyway, and how does one go about proving such a thing? Most folks so named are probably not even vocal FARC supporters, but even if they were, is that illegal? If it’s ok to kill “FARC supporters,” then why doesn’t the FARC have the right to exterminate every single “government supporter.” Fair’s fair, right?

In addition, there is a long-term process going on of removing peasants from their land by the military, death squads and the state. The land is often taken by force. The military or death squads come out and order you off your land. If you say no, they threaten to kill you. If you don’t leave, they attack you. If you leave, they steal your land. This process of theft of peasant and Indian land for large landowners has been going on for at least 200 years in Colombia. It’s very similar to the fencing of the commons in England which some commenters on this site waxed ecstatic about.

Isn’t it clear that capitalism requires the removal of small farmers from their land, by deadly force if necessary? This has been the process of consolidation of capitalism in most nations in the world, including the US. Why is this something to support?

Notice that the entire world press supports the fascist Colombian state in their war against the people. In the latest election, the Defense Minister was elected President. He’s a true fascist and a mass murderer. The US government, public and the world media can’t get enough of him.

The world fascist press (if it supports fascists, it’s fascist, right?) has been saying that a massive offensive under the genocidal Uribe has reduced the FARC’s strength by 5

The haters of the FARC on this site are asked exactly what it is that the FARC are supposed to do. You don’t support them, so what do you think this organization should do? You have no answers, do you?

“Facing the Next Fifty Years: Global Warming,” by Abiezer Coppe

Climate change is killing 150,000 people a year now. That is the estimate of the World Health Organization for the year 2000, and now it is ten years out of date. So let us double that:

The once in a thousand year 2010 Moscow Heatwave caused an estimated 15,000 deaths.

For the “we have nothing to do with it” global warming deniers, here is a little primer on the current state of the science.

The science is already in.

There are metacommentaries on Russia’s heatwave here and here.

Climate records are being broken all over the world this year.

This is the actuality. It does matter. We can, all of us as individuals, do something.

Stopping global warming is actually a dream from which some of us still have to awake: it is more realistic to prepare ourselves and our society for the shocks that will inevitably come by practicing bioresilience. Our extraordinary adaptability as a species will be tested to the utmost in the next one hundred years. We have never had a challenge like it in the history of mankind.

Slowing the rate of growth of human carbon emissions (the global economic recession did so last year, although I see no real evidence at the level of political leaderships to cut carbon emissions) is one goal for the political elites, with eventual cuts at some unspecified date in the future, but a reduction of carbon emissions by 9

We shall still move to a hotter world, but one that we shall survive, with far more modest and local lifestyles. We/I will also make the spiritual shift in our/my consciousness, and create new ways for ourselves/myself and our/my children to connect with and appreciate the beauties of nature in our over-informatized and mediatized world. Spiritual shift has now become a categorical imperative. Be the change you want to see. May I be the change I want to see…in me and in my world.

We have the luxury, in the privileged West, of having a little bit of potential space in our lives to accomplish this. If you are starving, drowning (as in Bangladesh and Pakistan), living at the edge of subsistence (Mali, Niger and Southern Sudan) and walking 12 miles a day simply to fetch water, there is much less space.

And the very poor are not producing the carbon emissions. It is us, in the developed world. I am not asking for guilt or a hair shirt: I am asking for awareness. And action. From myself, and from you!

Too much information, especially about such an explosive topic, actually creates anxiety and depression: have you noticed? I did in 2006, when I studied global warming nonstop for months. Too much (usually poor quality) information is actually the curse of our world: paying it too much attention creates a state of no peace.

Therefore we/I need to learn new ways to care for ourselves/myself, as we/I reconnect with the warp and weft of our ineffably beautiful and breathtaking living planet.

In time, perhaps, too, biodiversity will start to return to a planet currently in the sixth great extinction crisis of its long geological history. We need not be a plague on the planet. It is not our purpose here.

Once we come from a place of deeper peace and connection in ourselves, we rule out fear and chase it from our bodily abode: we then inspire others to seek that as well. Our activism has a more transformational quality on all around us. I have much to learn, much to heal, and much to change in myself.

Most campaigners, and part of the scientific community (James Hansen in particular), think that emissions cuts should begin at the latest by 2015. With the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition in power until then, we certainly have our work cut out.

“Business as usual” = civilizational collapse, sooner or later. And unimaginable human suffering. The suffering of Pakistan at the moment, but multiplied a million fold…

If you do not care, do not have children. They may not forgive you. Consciousness is rising about the scale of the challenge we face.

If you wish to be up to date on the subject of global warming, read the scientists! I suggest here and the NOAA, plus the climate progress website mentioned above.

I read them, and I am not a scientist.

The human race currently emits 29 billion tons (29 gigatons – more here) of carbon a year. And we do not do it by breathing or farting alone!

We have multiplied our biological carbon emissions as a species many fold through the development of technology, which required the burning of fossil fuels, the ancient sunlight of antiquity. Thus we become our own Nemesis.

It is difficult to point to any aspect of our current material lives that is not dependent on fossil fuels in some way, from plastic bags to cheap food.

We are changing the climate, and without global carbon emission reductions there is a point of no return, where positive feedbacks kick in and carbon emissions from natural processes such as the melting of the subarctic tundra, the loss of arctic sea ice in summer, and the burning of the world’s forests, start to render annual human emissions almost insignificant, kicking global warming into high gear.

We have – perhaps – a little window of opportunity now. It is human to hope. Nobody knows how long we have. It seems, from my many years of reading on the subject of global warming, that the window will certainly close by 2030.

And that date is based on the most optimistic of all projections.

When the climate “tipping points” are passed (the scientific consensus – but no one really knows – is that this starts to happen at 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade above preindustrial global temperatures: we are currently 0.8 degrees Centigrade above), we are in for a very rough ride indeed.

That article is from yesterday’s UK newspaper, The Independent.

Given the current levels of urgency regarding this issue on the part of the global elites, runaway global warming is currently more likely than not.

Anthropogenic global warming has the potential to be the new global genocide. A genocide of the poor by the richest countries, with the highest per capita output of carbon emissions. Ask a Pakistani farmer in Sindh province how he is doing at the moment, and what his prospects are for 2011.

With runaway climate change, civilization will collapse, and there will – at some point after 2050 – be a catastrophic collapse in the global human population in the “business as usual” scenario (I do not like James Lovelock’s politics at all, but in that sense he is hard to contradict). For more on this, see Anatoly Karlin’s review of Six Degrees, by Mark Lynas.

It is a very graphic and a very detailed description, degree by degree of global warming above pre-industrial levels, of how human-induced global warming is changing the world we live in. And the précis saves you reading the book.

By 2020, at the current 0.2 degrees Centigrade of global warming per decade, we shall have passed the threshold of 1 degree of global warming globally since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Here is Anatoly Karlin’s summary of one degree of global warming.

One Degree

Though the Great Plains are one of the world’s great agricultural breadbaskets, a desert slumbers underneath. Increased dessication and pummeling storms will erode away the thin topsoil, recreating the Dust Bowl on a giant scale and re-awakening the sand dunes. More irrigation will only postpone the inevitable. There will be large-scale migration to the wetter Mid-West and Great Lakes regions. AK: actually called the Great American Desert during the 19th century!, and is now dependent on depleting Oglalla Aquifer.

Higher rainfall, glacial melt and strengthening Siberian rivers may interrupt the Gulf Stream (part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system), drying western Europe and cooling it by as much as 2 C – recreating the conditions of the Little Ice Age during the worst winters. However, most models predict this will be a slow death. AK: If not, expect increased European dependency on Russian gas during the 2010′s and 2020′s.

In Africa, Kilimanjaro will lose its remaining ice by 2020 – causing wildfires, fish stock declines and problems with hydroelectricity production. Based on paleoclimate, in the long term, there will be a greening of the Sahara (into a savanna) and an enlarged Lake Chad…however, models say that there will only be a short interlude of heavier rains in the Sahel and on the West African coast, followed by even fiercer drought.

Coral reefs around the world will be increasingly bleached and taken over by seaweed; polar bears are pushed off the top of the world and creatures like pikas are shoved off the planet, accelerating the Anthropocene Mass Extinction event. Hurricanes will become stronger and more ubiquitous, spreading to the South Atlantic. More rockfalls in the Alps. Increased incidence of drought in the Amazon, pushing it to the brink. Atolls become doomed worlds, fated to submerge amidst the rising waves.

It will have taken around 250 years for a one degree rise in the mean global temperature to occur. However, climate dynamics are like a slumbering beast. There is a great deal of inertia locked into the system. First, there is very good evidence that the level of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere is itself rising. Secondly, the rate of global warming has been speeding up. Therefore we can, optimistically, expect the second degree of global warming after 2050, even with a concerted scaleback in emissions. That is within my children’s lifetime.

Now read Karlin’s summary of two degrees. Many of us will live to see this. At 0.3 degrees centigrade of increase in the global mean temperature per decade, two degrees arrives in 2053. A “climatic flip” is also possible: a sudden, dramatic acceleration, leading to climate collapse, from our perspective. The British Meteorological Office considers four degrees of global warming a possibility by 2060:

Now read Karlin on four degrees of global change. Are we not living through a planetary emergency?

Please read Anatoly Karlin’s review of Lynas if you read nothing else I reference. It is a glimpse into the uncertain future toward which we are headed, with no stars to steer by.

Global capitalism requires

Not sustainable, and not a good outlook for the species. “No future, no future, no future for me,” as the Sex Pistols once sang.

I suspect, therefore, that the answer to human survival in this century and the next, and a civilizational level higher than that described in the visionary and beautiful written novel of our potential future in a much warmer world, Far North by Marcel Theroux, lies in a re-visioning and implementation of communism.

Read it and see what you think; then comment.

Despite the 20th century deviation of Communism from its original envisioning by Marx and Engels and the ecological disasters of the Eastern Bloc, Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, Marx’s vision of post-scarcity communism was profoundly ecological.

Cuba is the only country in the world today that lives within its ecological limits (page 14).

I find it very heartening that there remains one country in the world that has, largely by default, found a sustainable way to live, and that it is, with all its human rights and politico-economic flaws, a non-capitalist country.

Cuba is a glimmer of hope in a world ruled by the mantras of greed and growth. But not the only one by any means. People are waking up all over the world. Morales’ Bolivia, one of poorest countries in the world, and heavily dependent on extractive mining, has produced one of the most visionary ecological statements of the last year (to find it go to the Climate and Capitalism website).

Hope was the last thing left in the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, which we have, in the course of industrial civilization, unknowingly thrown open wide.

May we not let hope fly away altogether: this is my prayer for my children and yours, their children and your grandchildren.

“Oh Brother Ed, Where Art Thou?,” by Abzier Coppe

I hope my intro makes Johann Hari’s article more interesting to Americans. I’m sure British politics seems just as arcane and incomprehensible in its finer details to you as American politics does to me! The biggest mystery to me in the US Presidential election was how did McCain wind up with a total idiot like Sarah Palin as his running mate? Every time I saw her speak on Youtube, I would start laughing in disbelief.

The gal hadn’t got a clue, but McCain hadn’t much either from what I saw. Had he been elected, he could well have died in office because of his history of heart problems. In any case history was made: Obama is the first intelligent president since Clinton, and less flawed personally than his predecessor. He’s hamstrung by the Republican filibustering minority in the Senate, and I don’t know if there is anything he can do about that. I still want to read Obama’s first book, Dreams About My Father. I’m told it’s a good read. Man, I was celebrating over here when he won, but it seems many Obama supporters are feeling less enthusiastic now.

We had a similar experience in the UK with the election of Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister in 1997 after 18 years of rule by the Conservatives. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”…or so we we thought. But I never had any illusions about that slimeball Blair.

The British Labour Party will elect a new leader on September 25th, 2010. The contest seems to have narrowed to the two brothers Miliband, sons of the Marxist writer and academic Ralph Miliband, whose last study was entitled Parliamentary Socialism (his most well known book was The State in Capitalist Society). The brothers are secular Jews, but neither has any particular attachment to Israel (neither brother is a member of the pro-Zionist pressure group Labour Friends of Israel). Ed, the younger brother, is 40, and David is 45.

David is the continuity candidate and will give us all that was rotten about Blairism redux. If he cannot put any political distance between himself and Tony Blair, he will probably be unelectable in 2015, as the electorate decisively rejected in 2010 all that he stands for – rising social inequality at home, further privatization of the economy, kowtowing to the banks, fawning over the very rich and the expensive and disastrous foreign wars abroad.

The Labour vote has been falling continuously since they were elected in 1997. In 2005 Labour got 35.

Of course Labour no longer had their spinmeister leader Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, who took the Labour leadership unopposed in 2008 and then failed to hold an election to give himself a mandate, didn’t handle the all-powerful media as well as Blair. There was no decisive outcome of the 2010 election, and certainly many of the 2

I see Blairism as a deviation to the Right in relation to postwar Social Democracy up to the end of the 1970s, and as a direct heir of Margaret Thatcher, the ardent monetarist and disciple of Milton Friedman.

Ed Miliband is more of a traditional social democrat. He also has a real personal warmth not shared by elder brother, and that is a great asset in politics. Ed has a better record than David on climate change, and that is crucial to me.

If the leadership contest is now between David and Ed Miliband, like Johann Hari, I hope Ed wins, but it is David who has all the big financial backers and campaign money, more than the other four candidates put together. No democracy there…

My first choice for Labour on Left policy, her anti-war record, her personality and and her long political experience (member of Parliament since 1987) would have been Diane Abbott, but she hardly has any support from the Trades Unions, so she hasn’t got a chance. As a 57 year old Black woman with no serious money behind her and a campaign team of 2 volunteers (compare David Miliband’s campaign team of 90 fulltime paid staff), she was always going to be real outsider. Andy Burnham and Ed Balls are also running for the Labour leadership.

Johann Hari: And The Next Leader Of The Labour Party Should Be…

At Its Core the Disagreement Between the Brothers Is an Argument About Whether Blairism Is the Best a Labour Government Can Ever Aim For.

Friday, 3 September 2010

The Labour Party is infuriated that the climax of its leadership race has been overshadowed by Tony Blair’s brief break from taking millions off the economy-crashing bank JPMorgan Chase, fawning over his “good friend” and murderous tyrant Colonel Gaddafi, and agitating for the bombing of Iran. But they’re wrong. At its core, the disagreement between David and Ed Miliband is an argument about whether Blairism is the best a Labour government can ever aim for. The entry of the gurning ghost of Tony Blair is a clarifying third act.

Now that it’s effectively a race between the Milibands, it’s easy to ask: how different can two nasal policy wonks who emerged from the same womb really be? Yet this campaign has shown that they want to lead very different Britains.

David Miliband is being funded by exactly the same interests as Blair. To pluck just one, David Claydon, a senior figure at the investment bank UBS, has handed him £50,000, as part of a gaggle of bankers who made it possible for him to outspend every other candidate combined. He is backed by all the senior Blairites because, like Dr Who regenerating in a bright white light, he is the same politics with a less lined face. At the hustings, it has become clear that with David you will get all that was good about New Labour – much higher spending on public services than under the Tories, for example – and all that is bad.

Whenever other candidates pointed out, in the spirit of trying to figure out how to do better next time, that at the end of the New Labour years, inequality was higher than under Thatcher, our emissions of warming gases were up, and there are now 20,000 unidentified corpses in Baghdad morgue alone, he snapped that it’s wrong to “dump on the record”.

It’s not enough to say the debate should be solely “future oriented.” The next Labour leader will face similar decisions. What he did in the past will shape what he does in the future. And David Miliband’s record in government suggests he will always ask: what would Tony do?

As foreign secretary, he aggressively and unrepentantly defended the Bush administration’s actions. He told the BBC’s Hardtalk: “Divide and rule is rightly a maxim one applies.” Perhaps most shockingly, he made extensive and expensive efforts to cover up the British security services’ earlier complicity in the torture of British people abroad.

He went to court to prevent us from being told how judges had laid out in detail how British resident Binyam Mohamed was rendered by the CIA to Morocco where he was subject to medieval torture, including the taking of a scalpel to his genitals, with MI5 feeding questions to the torturers. He says he “abhors” torture – but why then cover up MI5’s role in it? Do Labour members want to see their leader forced to testify on all this before the new torture inquiry?

Ed Miliband is different. At every hustings he said – to tics and tuts from his brother – he’s glad he was against the invasion of Iraq from the start, and when US foreign policy is in future heading in the wrong direction, “Britain should get off the train”. His record in government suggests that this is true.

While his brother was defending the Bush administration’s atrocities, Ed was traveling the world as climate secretary, pleading governments to go much further and faster than the US allowed. At Copenhagen, I saw how he was one of the few politicians who grasped the scale of the climate crisis and sincerely tried to get a deal.

They also differ closer to home. Blair said this week that Labour lost because “it stopped being New Labour” – the argument that David Miliband’s team are echoing. He named two policies that he says lost the party support. The first is the decision to increase taxes on the richest 1 per cent from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Yet in reality, according to YouGov, some 62 per cent of Brits want to go further and introduce the higher rate at £100k. Only 25 per cent are against.

The second deadly policy, he says, is that Gordon Brown started “identifying banks as the malfeasants” after the crash. Yes: Tony Blair thinks people didn’t vote Labour because the party was too critical of bankers. In truth, again, 76 per cent say Brown was too soft on the banks. Remember: these are Blair’s own examples, not mine.

This is a perfect illustration of the argument that Ed Miliband has been making throughout the leadership debate. He has claimed that New Labour’s initial instincts from 1994 have hardened into “ideological dogmas” that would leave the party “beached by history” in this decade. The more New Labour hardened into a rightwing caucus, the more it shed votes: by 2005, on Blair’s watch, it was down to 35 per cent, and only “won” because of an undemocratic electoral system that may not be there next time.

So what’s Ed Miliband’s alternative? Peter Mandelson and others have offered up a silly straw man, claiming he believes Labour should “abandon the middle classes”. In fact, he has a more subtle point. If you want to appeal to the middle class in Britain, you have to know what it is – and people like Mandelson seem to have forgotten in a blur of yachts and guacamole dips. The median wage in this country is £20,831. Only 10 per cent earn more than £40,000. So Ed Miliband wants policies that help the real middle – not the top 1 per cent that Blair, Cameron and company bizarrely class as “ordinary voters.”

This, the real middle class in Britain, has been stressed for a long time as their share of national income has been steadily transferred to the rich. Over the past 30 years, the proportion of GDP paid in wages has fallen from 67 per cent to 54 per cent, while the proportion going to the rich as income from dividends has skyrocketed. They work the longest hours in Europe, but their wages are, relatively, shrinking. There’s a real redistributive will out there, waiting to be tapped.

Labour has lost 5 million voters since 1997. One million went to the Tories. Four million went to the Lib Dems and smaller parties, or to disgusted abstension. Three million were manual or unskilled workers. So it is basic electoral arithmetic that there are four times more votes to be won back there in winning back liberals and low-income workers than in becoming a Cameron clone. As Ed Miliband put it: “We can neither win an election with the working-class vote [alone], nor can we take it for granted.”

Of course, the Blairites say this can’t win. Yet the polls show it was their totems – Iraq, the deregulation of high finance that made the crunch inevitable and the bank bailouts necessary, and on – that were the last government’s most unpopular policies.

By contrast Ed Miliband’s agenda – to appeal to Britain’s true middle and the lost low-income workers by arguing that they should have a greater share of the wealth they generate, while not killing a million people abroad – polls well. To suggest this is “Bennite”, or a return to 1983, is bizarre: it’s mild European social democracy, of the kind that is pulling Germany out of recession faster than the US.

So yes, we should thank the Ghost of Tony Past. He has reminded us that if you want more of the same, vote for the candidate he calls “my Wayne Rooney.” But if you think this country could do better, brother, there’s an alternative.

Sick, Evil Republicans Are Child Molesters!

Repost from the old site. Another famous old post too. This one also got reposted around a lot.

Yeah, I know, check out the inflammatory headline. Keep in mind, though, that this post is just kind of tongue in cheek. I’m not really trying to make any points except a lousy, dirty, lowball, scuzzy, slimy cheap shot at Republicans. Just the sort of cheap shots they do at us. Fire with fire.

I don’t care. I really dislike what the US Republican Party has become. The philosophy of the Republican Party has become abhorrent, malignant, cancerous, poisonous and vile. It is now virtually an Organized Crime Racket like the Mafia or the Crips and Bloods.

More and more, it just looks like the ultraright authoritarianism so common in banana republics in Latin America, Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal and India. It’s not even the party of democracy anymore; it’s the party of the reactionary semi-feudalism and quasi-fascist authoritarianism of your average Third World rathole.

It’s the party of corporate fascism, virulent White racism, a feudalist and Medieval warlord mindset, witch-burning Christian fundamentalist pseudo-fascist lunacy and ultraright philosophical poison.

It belongs in a trashcan, along with all the rest of the banana Republicans. Since the US Republican Party is made up of such a bunch of reactionary throwbacks, I feel that cheap shots are absolutely called for. For all I know, we could assemble a similar list of Democrat perverts, but I don’t care. If Republicans can fight dirty, than so can we.

It is rather interesting, though, that so many family-values, anti-gay, Christian fundamentalist and anti-abortion reactionaries are committing sexual crimes.

Republican County Constable Larry Dale Floyd was arrested on suspicion of soliciting sex with an 8-year-old girl. Floyd has repeatedly won elections for Denton County, Texas, constable.

Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year-old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.

Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year-old girls.

Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.

Republican Committeeman John R. Curtain was charged with having sex with a teenage boy and unlawful sexual contact with a minor.

Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.

Republican zoning supervisor, Boy Scout leader and Lutheran church President Dennis L. Rader pleaded guilty to performing a sexual act on an 11-year-old girl he murdered.

Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.

Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year-old girl.

Republican racist United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year-old black girl, which produced a child.

Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.

Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.

Republican advertising consultant Carey Lee Cramer was charged with molesting his 9-year-old stepdaughter after including her in an anti-Gore television commercial.

Republican activist Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

Republican Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.

Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.

Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child.

Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.

Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his stepdaughter.

Republican Judge Ronald C. Kline was placed under house arrest for child molestation and possession of child pornography.

Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.

Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.

Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. “Republican Marty”), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.

Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year-old boy and possession of child pornography.

Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.

Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11-year-old girl.

Republican anti-gay activist Earl “Butch” Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year-old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.

Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.

Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year-old girl.

Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year-old boy.

Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).

Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was found guilty of having sex with a 15-year-old girl.

Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.

Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.

Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.

Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year-old girl.

Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.

Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15-year-old girl and served 6 months in prison.

Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.

Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.

Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.

Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.

Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.

Republican president of the New York City Housing Development Corp. Russell Harding pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer.

Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was found guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.

Republican Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the rape of children in Iraqi prisons in order to humiliate their parents into providing information about the anti-American insurgency.

Racial Holy Wars, Real and Phantom

Repost from the old site. This is another famous old post, widely reposted all over.

Due to the recent abuse of the comments section, mostly by rightwingers (and a few Zionist) commenters, I have had to formulate a Rules Policy on commenting. I never really had any problems with comments until I wrote what was pretty much a harmless, factual article dealing with a group of humans called “Jews”.

This group of humans is apparently so special, so great, so awesome, so incredible, so protected and possibly so powerful that a strange situation has arisen in the Western World.

We non-Jewish humans can write about most any other group of humans, but we cannot write about this group called “Jews” without a creating a firestorm. There are exceptions. We can write about “Jews” if we adopt a slavish, worshipful tone that emphasizes how wonderful, special, perfect and totally awesome this group is.

I suppose this quite insane reaction has something to do with recent history, notably the Holocaust. At any rate, the policy of “non-Jews must not say or write the word Jew” due to Holocaust guilt or whatever is just not going to work and is likely to backfire.

Western crusaders against racism, sexism and anti-Semitism need to focus on real racism, sexism and anti-Semitism and not get lost in PC-insanity of focusing on the fake racism, sexism and anti-Semitism of silly little words, phrases, sentences and jokes.

For instance, we just had a government under Bush that practiced some of the most blatant anti-Black electoral racism since Jim Crow in a recent US Presidential election.

This was done by deliberately denying many US Blacks the right to vote in a variety of very clever ways, too widespread to be coincidental. The Bush Administration also gutted civil rights enforcement and appointed a number of blatantly racist white judges.

At the same time, it indulged in an attack on the welfare state that had definite white racist overtones. Yet not one word of any of that from the useless, whored, corrupt, depraved US media or either of the two worthless major political parties here. Not even one peep either, usually, from the many House Negroes and silly Toms populating our TV screens.

Instead our society focuses (through the insidious US media) on whether some prominent American used some “anti-Black” or “anti-Jewish” word, phrase, sentence or joke on some occasion when they opened their mouth.

Once the horrible word-crime is reported by the media with bated breath, a wild goose chase called “racist hunt” ensues while Americans, glued to the TV, watch mesmerized as The PC Cops chase these heinous “racist” words, phrases, sentences or jokes across our TV screens.

9

Meanwhile, holding down “Fort Sexism,” the completely useless US feminist movement obsesses over “anti-woman” and “sexist” words, phrases, sentences and jokes, while much of female humanity outside of the US cringes under the terror boot of a vicious patriarchal dictatorship.

Some idiot spray-paints a US synagogue with nasty words, evil little symbols or malevolent sentences and the US media pants hyperactively for weeks about some “anti-Semitism wave sweeping the globe.” While at the same time, the US military wages a blatantly racist war against the “inferior” Iraqi people to either media silence or outright cheerleading.

This is a racist war that has already killed 1,100,000 dark-skinned Arab “untermenschen” at the altar of American Supremacy. Not far away in Palestine, grinning Israeli stormtroopers, smiling with sadistic glee, practice their own Racial Holy War, lording it over the “lowly, inferior”, dark-skinned Palestinians in a Levantine Kristallnact re-run that seems to never end.

Let’s shoot back to the year 1990 for a moment. In the alternate universe called the US media, media hypesters are going insane because President George H. Bush said a horrific phrase, “Jewish power,” before a fundraising speech to a Jewish group.

Never mind that Jewish power, monetary, media and political, was a fact of American life in 1990, and is even more of a fact today. But some facts may not be stated, so say the solemn Word Police.

Why? Because truth is irrelevant in Alice in Wonderland Zionized America. All that matters is that a foul crime has been committed, a crime called “anti-Semitism.” A bestial crime with no legal definition, a repulsive felony with no legal code number, a horrifying violation with no penalties legally proscribed, but a horrendous crime nonetheless.

For this particular “anti-Semitic” crime, the President of the United States himself was forced to get on his knees and abjectly kiss the shoes of the offended group as they towered arrogantly above his debased figure. Ironically, with this act, the naked lie that this group had no power was revealed as the howler that it was. This group had no power, yet they forced the President of the US to kiss their toes! Ha!

A year later, International Zionism and its US imperialist partner hatched a racist genocidal plot to draw Saddam Hussein’s military into Kuwait, trap them there and forbid them from leaving, purely in order to destroy his military and slaughter 265,000 of Iraq’s “racially inferior” soldiers and civilians, mainly because they were considered to be racial enemies of the Jewish state.

Later the same year, after the initial slaughter of 265,000 “sand niggers,” the killers were not yet sated. They lusted for more blood – Arab blood. And so another diabolical, genocidal, racist plot was hatched, this time by America and Britain – a plot to murder 1 million Iraqi baby racial enemies of the Anglo people over the next decade.

This conspiracy was called the Iraqi Sanctions Pogrom. Yet, for the next 12 years, Americans heard not one peep about the slaughter of these “lowly, inferior” dark-skinned Arabs by their “racially superior” Anglo mass murderers.

As the bodies stacked up like cordwood, both the Jewish state and its multitude of US agents, along with the paid hacks for Anglo imperialism, cheered from the sidelines.

They demanded that the mass murder go on, threatening anyone who tried to stop it or slow it down, all the while either denying that there was any mass murder occurring, or acknowledging the slaughter, but blaming the Iraqis – the victims – for killing themselves.

Through the 90’s, while the Iraqi Sanctions Charnel House burned, the devious US media was busy distracting the shallow American people. The media browbeat and deluged gullible Americans with reports about a phantom threat coming from White people in the US, people called “White racists,” “skinheads,” “Nazis” and “White Power fascists”.

This “White threat” was said to be running amok across our land, swarming our streets, arming themselves for war. The nation was portrayed as being on the verge of a White fascist takeover.

Over the whole decade of the 90’s, these “horrible US White Supremacist Nazis” killed a mere handful of Americans in their Racial Holy War, while the Anglo-Israeli Racial Holy War, described above, continued in reeling Iraq and Palestine, killing 230 Arabs a day, day in, day out, no end.

From 1991 to 2010, Anglo and Anglo-Zionist racist pogroms, combined, killed 2.46 million “racially inferior” dark-skinned Iraqi Arabs, yet not one peep of outrage was heard from the media. The only sounds heard from the US media were outbreaks of cheering the slaughter of our racial enemies, the Arabs, during the hot wars.

During this period, the media’s splenetic outrage was instead reserved for the rare White skinhead murder of one Black man, or maybe the murders or three or four Black men. Surely the deaths of this handful of US Blacks were terrible crimes, but look once more at the figures above. You do the math. Where’s the real racism anyway? Where’s the real menace? To paraphrase O.J. Simpson, who are the real killers?

America’s discourse about racism, sexism and anti-Semitism has become seriously disturbed. We obsess and wax hysterically over silly little “racist” words, phrases, sentences and jokes, while at the same time, our nation and its racial allies commit racist massacres of millions of our racial enemies – the Arabs – to either silence or open cheering.

Worries About Starving Pets In New Orleans May be Exaggerated

Repost from the old site. This is a famous post. It got tons of hits on the old site, but it’s an old post.

Some folks asked me why the MSM (mainstream media) doesn’t show these pics, and I said I did not know.

Clearly, the MSM have been carrying water for Bush for much of this disaster, though at the start, segments of the media demonstrated some rarely-seen backbone and stood up to Bush for once, as demonstrated in my previous post, New Orleans Is Gone.

Does the media not like to show disgusting pics like this, out of ethics (sic) or worry over being criticized for pandering (as if they don’t pander enough as it is)?

Not sure what the answer is. Feel free to weigh in.

Pics from Postman Patel, a fine British blog.

One more thing: alligators. Initial posts noted that rumors of alligators in NOLA after Katrina were unfounded. However, we now have verification, via Juan Cole’s blog, that alligators have in fact been lunching on folks in NOLA. Sorry folks, no pics yet. But I’m working on it.

What about other hungry critters? Anderson Cooper on CNN noted here that he observed rats eating corpses in NOLA. Sorry, no photos of that either.

I have received numerous complaints and comments about this post:

  1. The dog (there is only one dog in both pics) is not eating people but is instead a cadaver dog – dogs that work with police to locate corpses.
  2. Those are not corpses, but “dummies“.
  3. These photos and “sensationalistic captions” are a reflection of the “poor journalistic standards” of National Geographic and put it on a par with National Inquirer.
  4. They can’t be stray dogs because strays always operate in packs.
  5. This post is amateur, yellow-journalistic tripe, and its credibility is further weakened by appearing on a “random blog”.
  6. The dog is only interested in hands and feet and therefore must be a cadaver dog and cannot be a stray dog.
  7. I am not honest, and the MSM is objectively more honest than I am. (Now that’s insulting!)

In order to try to resolve these questions, I somehow tracked down the freelance photographer who took the second photo (I still can’t figure out who took the first photo).

Allen Frederickson is a freelance photographer from Milwaukee who was in NOLA after the flood to cover it as a photojournalist. I communicated with Fredrickson via email and phone to try to resolve some of the questions posed above about his photo. Here is his abridged email correspondence:

Robert, you present some interesting questions. I work for Reuters as a contact photographer, and have since August 1990. Faking or manipulating photos is not a smart practice, and something I do not engage in. Corbis [where one of the photos was found on the web] does some of the secondary sales for Reuters .

The photo in question was taken in New Orleans on at 3:39 PM (according to digital info on my camera) on September 5, not September 6, as National Geographic states on their website.

The photo was taken as I flew as an embedded photographer in a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter piloted by National Guard aviators. The Guard was engaged in repair of a levee wall very close to the south side of Lake Pontchartrain.

The dog in the photo appeared to be a stray, and the corpse was about 50 yards from the spot where 16,000 pound bags of sand (actually crushed limestone) were being dropped. On two separate runs, about 15 minutes apart, the dog appeared to be eating this poor man’s leg.

I cannot imagine the dog was simply licking his master, but that’s an outside possibility. The pilot of the Chinook told me he’d seen two dogs, a black one and this brown [or yellow] one, near the cadaver for the past three days, (September 3-5), as he helped drop bags. There were no live persons on the ground in the area, and no indications that either of the two dogs near this man would be cadaver dogs.

In his phone conversation with me, Allen basically reiterated these points. He said that cadaver dogs operate with police close by, and there were no police or any live humans period anywhere near this site for days on end. Furthermore, the dogs in question had been running wild and hanging around the corpses for three days prior, once again under no human supervision.

I think we can put this matter to rest and assume that this yellow dog was actually eating a human corpse in NOLA at 3:39 PM on September 5, 2005 on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain. Further, we can suspect that the same dog may have eaten another corpse around the same time frame (note the first pic from an unknown source).

We can also assume that the yellow dog and a black dog had possibly been eating at least the body in the second pic above for the prior three days.

Let us deal with the questions above. The dog in the pics is a stray dog, not a cadaver dog. The bodies were real bodies, not dummies. The fact that the what may be the same dog is eating two bodies is not relevant and does not prove he is a cadaver dog.

Dogs who eat people eat extremities, not just central areas, and cadaver dogs are not the only dogs who investigate extremities of corpses. Stray dogs do not always operate in packs, maybe especially after major disasters like this one.

Based on Fredrickson’s statements, National Geographic is not exercising poor, National Enquirer-style judgment in its photos or captions, nor am I dishonest.

The notion that blogs are an inherently dishonest medium is a common prejudice against us poor unpaid bloggers, and it seems to be without substance. Some bloggers are principled and fact-check (ahem), well while others are pretty atrocious and don’t check sources.

In contrast, the MSM has been demonstrably dishonest for a long time, as Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and other works make clear.

The second photo above (Fredrickson’s photo) has appeared in a number of other places on the Net. The original National Geographic site where the photo appeared is here. It also appeared on the Corbis site, where some posters nabbed it.

The first photo mysteriously appeared only on this strange site here. The site is accessible only through it’s uploads folder; the main page is blank. In the past, this odd page has been used to upload controversial photos to the web. Fredrickson says he did not take that shot, and he knows nothing about it. The page with the photo may be affiliated with the Indymedia Pittsburgh site here, based on its partial web address.

Another Oil Rig Explodes in Gulf of Mexico

Here.

They are rescuing 13 workers as you read this.

That does it. Time to pull the plug on this. No more licenses for new offshore drilling until these idiots can figure out how to keep from spilling so much. Existing offshore wells can continue to operate.

P.S. about 70-8

Nazis Were Socialists

Yeah right. What a bunch of crap that is. That’s why Big Business fell all over themselves to support the Nazis, because they were pro-worker socialists. Get real. The Nazis assured business that labor would be under the firm control of the state, and business was free to manage their enterprises as they saw fit. The first to go the concentration camps were Communists, then socialists, then trade unions. Jews were fourth! Those first three groups were sent because Nazis were pro-worker socialists! C’mon. From William Shirer’s, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

Goebbels was jubilant. “Now it will be easy,” he wrote in his diary on February 3, “to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.”

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up.

This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering’s Reichstag President’s Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany’s leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. “Private enterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist.”

He promised the businessmen that he would “eliminate” the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). “Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.”

If he did not win, he would stay in power “by other means . . . with other weapons.” Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.”

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the “gratitude” of the businessmen “for having given us such a clear picture.” Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. “I collected three million marks,” he recalled at Nuremberg.

As long as businesses produced what the state told them to, they were assured of good profits and a compliant workforce. Strikes and unions were outlawed.

Workers had to obey management. Management threatened disobedient workers with being sent to concentration camps. At first, the Nazis forced businesses to build gyms for their overworked workers to work out in when they were not slaving away. Later, the Nazis got rid of this when business complained that it was costing them too much money.

True, the Nazis built the Autobahn, and that was a public transportation improvement, but improved driving conditions for the masses was secondary. Mostly, those big highways were built to drive tanks and other military vehicles on. To the Nazis, war was everything. Everything was sublimated to the war machine.

When the war really got going, workers were horribly exploited, often forced to work 18 hours a day under miserable conditions all for the Fatherland. Many died of overwork during this period. This is why slave labor was imported from the conquered areas. That was the dominant theme of Nazism: slave labor. Some pro-worker socialists!

References

Shirer, William. 1960. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Shuster.

Belarus: Dictatorship or Democracy? A Review of Stewart Parker’s: “The Last Soviet Republic”

Belarus: Dictatorship or Democracy? A Review of Stewart Parker’s Book: The Last Soviet Republic. Originally Published on Globalresearch.ca

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

August 24, 2010

Since the pronouncement of former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice in 2008 calling the democratically elected president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator”, the image and reputation of this noble country has been fanatically tarnished by the mainstream media.

The irony here is that Belarus is indeed deeply familiar with the iniquities of dictatorship. They, more than any other country, suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during World War 11.

Belarus has always been a multicultural country with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today. Yet the European Union, Israel and the United States, never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the Republic of Belarus.

Belarus has generally received scant coverage from alternative and left-wing media, which is rather surprising considering the fact that Fidel Castro has awarded Alexander Lukashenko with the order of Jose Marti, the highest honour bestowed upon friends of the Cuban people. In a recent visit to Belarus, the president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez praised Belarus as a model of socialist development, one which Venezuela should emulate.

Yet there is a paucity of books and articles about this country and its “controversial” leader. One notable exception to this hiatus comes from Stewart Parker who published a clear and revealing book on Belarus and the policies of Alexander Lukashenko in particular.

For readers seeking an insight into this fascinating country, Parker’s The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (2007) is a brilliant exposé of the lies and distortions emanating from the European Union and the US concerning “human rights” violations in Belarus and the absence of “democracy.” What follows is an attempt to summarize and evaluate the findings of this valuable study.

Alexander Lukashenko came to power after a landslide victory in 1994. A former director in a collective farm during the USSR era, Lukashenko was one of the few Belarusian politicians to oppose the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990. Although the Belarusian leader had always been an outspoken critic of the USSR’s corruption, he remained committed to Marxism-Leninism, and opposed the rampant privatization proposed by Boris Yeltsin and his followers.

In the final years of the Soviet regime, Lukashenko, then a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, formed a group called “Communists for Democracy.” Lukashenko argued that the real problem in the USSR was the decline in democratic participation and the parasitism and corruption of the ruling bureaucracy. He also advocated more autonomy for the USSR’s constituent Republics.

Belarus had always been the most advanced Soviet Republics, with high achievements in education and science. In spite of economic stagnation and increasing corruption in other republics of the USSR, Belarus’s state planning had continued to yield impressive results, with economic growth continuing throughout the Brezhnev era. In 1993 Lukashenko was appointed head of an “anti-corruption committee.”

One of the numerous myths repeatedly circulated since the fall of the USSR is that a majority of the Soviet people wanted free market capitalism. This was certainly not the case in Soviet Republic of Belarus. It was Alexander Lukashenko’s defence of Soviet values, together with his outspoken criticisms of the Communist Party of the USSR and the apparatchiks of the soviet regime that earned him the respect and confidence of the Belarusian people. In 1994 Lukashenko was elected President of Belarus with over 80 percent of the votes.

Finding a place for Belarus in the post-Soviet chaos was a difficult task for the young president. One of the first issues concerned the national flag. The BPF, a nationalist party, wanted to restore the white, red and white flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been the national flag under the puppet regime of the German empire in 1918. It was also used by the collaborators with the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War II. The people finally settled for maintaining the Soviet flag minus the hammer and sickle. Radio Free Europe later lamented the dropping of the Nazi collaboration flag as a “heavy blow to democratic forces.”

In the intervening years since the fall of the USSR and the rise of Lukashenko, over 15 billion dollars had been siphoned out of the country. Privatization and the lifting of price controls had caused inflation to soar, with prices rising 432 times. The Soviet economy was being replaced by mafia gangsters. Western “freedom” and “democracy” was taking its toll!

Through a series of referenda Lukashenko was able to set in motion a democratic social program which has made Belarus one of the most prosperous and least corrupt countries in Eastern Europe. Just like Venezuela, a clause in the constitution decided by a referendum permits the indefinite re-election of the president should the Belarusian people wish to do so.

Over 80 percent of industry in Belarus remains in public ownership. In 1996 the unemployment figure in the country amounted to 4 percent. Lukashenko’s administration has since reduced this figure to little over 1 percent, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world. Industrial output rose by 9.7 percent in 2004. Wages have been increasing significantly every year since Lukashenko’s accession to power.

Economic growth in Socialist Belarus has been so impressive that even the World Bank and the IMF have had to acknowledge this incontrovertible fact. In June 2005, the World Bank published a report titled Belarus: Window of Opportunity, which admitted that the Belarusian economy was growing steadily, while the IMF admitted that Belarus had significant wage increases coupled with low government debt. Good news for Belarus, bad news for the World Bank and IMF, whom Lukashenko, speaking before the Russian Duma in 1999, had called “a pack of swindlers.”

In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, Belarus offers real hope that economics does not have to function that way.

According to the system developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, known as the Gini coefficient, Belarus ranks as the most equal country on earth. The Gini coefficient for Belarus in 2005 was 0.217, the lowest out of 113 countries. In Belarus, the lowest income is only five times lower than the highest income. This means that the notion of “corporate greed” one hears about in the United States and Europe is virtually nonexistent in the Republic of Belarus.

Belarus also comes out on top in education. Adult literacy in Belarus is the highest in the CIS nations at 99.

In contrast to Western “democracies” where social security is being systematically destroyed to sustain the financial oligarchies, male workers in Belarus retire at 60, while women retire at 55 with full pension entitlements.

Needless to say, the attitude of the EU and the United States nomenclatura, that is to say, the self-proclaimed “international community,” is that Belarus is not a “democracy.” Media disinformation has backed this hostility of European and US elites to Belarus by publishing an impressive quantity of lies. At the 60th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, President Lukashenko put the US “human rights” obsession thus:

If there are no pretexts for intervention – imaginary ones are created. To this end a very convenient banner was chosen, democracy and human rights, and not in the original sense of the rule of people and personal dignity, but solely and exclusively in the interpretation of the US leadership.

In order to promote the US “interpretation” of human rights, President Clinton sent Michael Kozak to Belarus in 2000. Kozak distinguished himself during the 1970s in the Iran/contra scandal where he was instrumental in organising the sale of arms to the contra terrorists in Nicaragua in exchange for cocaine, which the CIA sold to poor Americans on the streets of Los Angeles, the same poor people who would subsequently be incarcerated for “possession of narcotics.”

While poor people were forced to make military uniforms in US prisons for their drug convictions, Kozak was one of Washington’s key handlers of Daniel Noriega, a CIA narcotrafficker and dictator of Panama. Clinton had deep confidence in Kozak’s democratic credentials, as he himself was governor of Arkansas, where the CIA operation was conducted from. The US-funded terrorist campaign in Nicaragua cost the lives of over 30,000 people, most of them civilians. Kozak had the perfect credentials for spreading “democracy” American style in socialist Belarus.

Upon his arrival in Minsk, US ambassador Micheal Kozak, Clinton’s former CIA gun-for-drugs terrorist handler, now US “pro-democracy” diplomat, was quick to make contact with his European counterparts. Representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was Hans Georg Wieck. Wieck worked closely with Kozak to groom “opposition” candidates in Belarus suitable to Washington and Brussels.

When Lukashenko won another landslide victory in the presidential elections of 2001, the OSCE condemned the elections as unfair without producing a shred of evidence to corroborate their claims.

After the 9-11 attacks in New York, the US showed the real motives behind the “global war on terror” when Senator John McCain declared:

Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us…September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.

McCain was referring to the sale of arms by Belarus to the CIA’s disobedient puppet dictator Saddam Hussein, a claim denied by President Lukashenko. Here we see the US accusing other countries of crimes which it itself committed for years when it sold arms to the Iraqi dictator. But the real crime committed by Lukashenko was his progressive social policies, which were setting a bad example for other countries strangled by the financial interests of the US global oligarchy; US “national security” meaning the security of the financial elite, and “global war on terror” meaning global war on freedom.

But the US was determined to launch its global terror campaign against any state that dared to resist casino capitalism. Belarus and Lukashenko himself would pay a heavy price for standing up to the IMF and the World Bank. In 2004 the United States proceeded to take action with the passing of the Belarus Democracy Act, calling for sanctions against Belarus and funding for “pro-democracy” groups.

Most opposition groups in Belarus today receive funding from the United States government, paid for by cash-strapped US tax payers. This funding almost culminated in the so-called “Denim Revolution” in 2006, a CIA-funded attempt to arouse popular opposition to the Lukashenko government in order to replace it with a pro-US regime. However, unlike their neighbours in other Eastern European countries, the Belarusians did not take the US bait, and Lukashenko stayed in power.

After the failure of the “Denim Revolution,” the EU imposed a travel ban on Lukashenko and 30 ministers, preventing them from traveling to any part of the EU. This shows the extent of the anxiety among the EU elite in the face of Belarus’s popular democracy.

Stewart Parker sites a number of poignant examples in his book which reveal the extent of systematic anti-democratic interference in Belarusian affairs by the United States and their vassal states in Europe. What is particularly “totalitarian” about socialist Belarus is not the Belarusian state, but rather the way in which that state is portrayed by the so-called democratic authorities of the EU and the US.

The absurdities promoted by the mainstream media come from all sides. Lukashenko has been accused of anti-Semitism, in spite of the fact that the thriving Jewish community in the country seem to be unaware of this fact. In fact, the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the Belarussian president for his support of the Jewish community, yet the EU, the US and Israel insist that Lukashenko is “anti-Semitic” and also opposes “free media.”

The Belarus government has been accused of internet censorship and media control. More lies! The Open Net Initiative carried out a study after the “disputed” elections of 2006 to see if the claims about Internet censorship were true. They “found no evidence of systematic and comprehensive interference with the Net. Any regime-directed tampering that may have taken place was fairly subtle, causing disruptions to access, but never turning off the alternative information tap.”

Another slander against the Belarusian president came from Russia’s “free media.” In 1995, Dr. Marcus Zeiner interviewed Lukashenko for the German newspaper Handelsblatt. The interview with Dr. Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated to include positive references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself who subsequently said “a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered.”

The BBC continues to propagate this lie about Lukashenko, which only serves to prove the desperation of the corporate media in the face of popular leaders whose policies threaten their empire of lies.

Stewart Parker’s book The Last Soviet Republic is an indispensable guide to a country and leader the bourgeois media does not want you to know about. It is, to my knowledge, the only comprehensive study of a country that only receives attention when vicious opportunities for anti-socialist propaganda present themselves.

We have much to learn from this brave little country that sacrificed so much to defeat the forces of fascism of Europe’s past and is now menaced by those same fascist forces which have resurfaced today in the name of “human rights,” “democracy” and “freedom.” In a world dominated by the ideology of the financial elite, those who stand for the common man and woman are beaten down ruthlessly. Alexander Lukashenko stands for democracy, human rights and freedom, which is why the corporate media call him a “dictator.”

Are Private Roads Safer?

In the comments section, Robert Taylor argues in favor of getting rid of all public roads and replacing them all with private roads. He says this will make the roads safer.

I’d say the number of accidents caused by shitty roads is just about zero.

First of all, yes, there are roads that needs some work. In fact, there is a huge backlog of such work in the US. The reason for the backlog is that the the agents of the capitalists (Republicans) in US government refuse to fund government spending for public roads. It’s quite rich when capitalists create a road crisis in the US, then claim that pubic roads don’t work, so we need to privatize them. But this is the way that the capitalist agents work in the US: Starve the government of funds so it can’t do its job. Then call the state incompetent when it can’t function because you starved it of funds. Then argue that the state needs to be dismantled or privatized because it can’t do its job.

One problem with privatized roads everywhere is that it would be horribly expensive. Most of us probably could not afford to drive very much as there would be tolls everywhere. The well to do could easily afford the tolls and would drive just as much s before. The tolls of the well-heeled would probably be plenty enough to keep the system running.

The notion that capitalist-run roads would not hurt any motorists is curious.

Capitalist firms cause the death of 47,000 workers a year in the US and the wounding of many, many more. They are almost never sued over these deaths and injuries and even more rarely are they sent to jail or even fined. Capitalist companies get to kill and injure as many workers as they wish.

Sure, we consumers get to sue capitalist firms that kill and injure us, but capitalists are lobbying their agents in government to limit our ability to do just that.

The record of capitalism’s treatment of workers, consumers and just plain citizens the world over is just flat out mass murder and mass maiming, for the most part in the 3rd World. They usually control the state (as if usually the case under capitalism) and therefore, nothing is done about these killers. If it’s good for the bottom line to kill and maim workers, consumers and citizens, then capitalists will do just that.

Right now, capitalists are destroying the very climate of our world, and this destruction is killing and hurting countless people worldwide.

Air pollution alone of various causes kills possibly 50,000 Americans a year and maybe many more. It injures far more than that. Almost all air pollution in the US is caused by capitalist firms.

In the Sierra Nevada mountains and in the Central Valley, most public roads are pretty darned good. After heavy rain, there are potholes, but these are fixed very quickly.

On the contrary, there are quite a few private roads around here, especially in the mountains. One thing you notice about private roads is that they are terrible almost 10

Also, I was placed under citizen’s arrest once by a hillbilly for “walking on his road.” I was convicted by the crooked DA and the conviction is still on my record. I wasn’t even breaking the law. The road must be marked as private, otherwise you can walk or drive on it all you want to, and the road was not marked.

I seriously doubt if 3

I have not seen a lot of evidence for the contention that Caltrans and county road crews are not capable of maintaining our roads. On the contrary, they seem to do a bangup job.

Hurricane Neoliberal Wrecked Iceland

Repost from the old site.

Iceland is bankrupt. Moral to the story: the more a nation swallowed the neoliberal poison, the more fucked the are. The more sensible and socialist they were, the safer they are.

As I said before, if anything comes out of this world economic collapse we are presently experiencing, it is that neoliberalism should be buried for once and forever with a stake through its heart. That’s not going to happen, but it should.

Since 1980, the entire world has been a swoon with something called neoliberalism. Started by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, it quickly become championed by both US political parties, almost the entire US corporate media – newspapers, magazines, TV and radio – and almost every single economics department at every US university. An entire generation of economists was graduated with a sole idea in his head.

Neoliberalism was tried for decades in Latin America. Or, actually, it was forced down their throats at gunpoint. It failed in Latin America as it failed everywhere. Death rates went up, life expectancy went down, infant mortality went up, access to medical care went down, wages went down, unemployment went up, schooling figures declined.

There was economic growth, but almost everywhere on Earth, it went only to the top 2

For over a decade now, I have been reading increasingly shrill and paranoid screeching in The Nation, Counterpunch and other sane places that the march to neoliberalism could lead to economic catastrophes, recessions, depressions, market crashes.

The folks saying this are called Leftists. In the modern Zeitgeist, Leftists are insane people, losers promoting a failed ideology, persons to be mocked who lack a single coherent idea.

Who tells the truth? Why, the entire politico-media world blaring FREE MARKET in my head day and night. I, the cynic, wondered dubiously if this Chicken Little stuff would come true.

Sadly, the Leftists, intellectual losers on the wrong side of history, were right all along. They predicted this whole damn mess. As I said, neoliberalism is predictable. The entire media-political intellectual class, the entirety of US thinking, wisdom and expertise, was wrong, wrong, wrong, a million times wrong.

Shitheads.

Now the shitstorm is slamming into their faces, and yours and mine, with hurricane gale force.

Iceland, otherwise sensible Nordics, become the worst neoliberal crackheads in Europe. No one deregulated their financial sector like the Icelandics. They were Milton’s test-tube baby. They’re now his Frankenstein.

The same way Friedmanites blew up Chile and raped Russia, leaving her beaten and bloodied, they have left a scorched Earth in frozen Iceland. The most free market in Europe has been wrecked worst of all.

Other states in Europe, accustomed to heavy state intervention in economic affairs, are probably going to ride this out a lot easier. Their financial sectors were already pretty well-regulated, and they are nationalizing like mad.

Interestingly, in Africa, the financial sector is still heavily under state control and there has been almost no financial deregulation. Africa, along with Cuba and some other places, is expected to be able to ride out this crisis quite well.

I never thought in my lifetime I would see socialism vindicated like this. Here in America, we nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the world’s largest insurance company. Now we are on our way to nationalizing the banks.

Would ever thought that George Bush was a secret Marxist-Leninist?

Anything on the Right Worth Supporting? Well, Yeah

A commenter notes that the Far Right and Far Left advocate similar things, at least in the US. But that’s not the case at all.

Rob, what’s wrong with taking the good out of the left and the right and mixing it up? Perhaps the far left and far right are realizing that their real enemies are not each other, but the corrupt, plutocratic ruling class?

Far Right is Tea Parties, Libertardian Party and the Republitard Party as a whole. They most certainly do not support an attack on the plutocrats!

I support the Right on some things.

  • I’m for a hard crackdown on illegals.
  • I’m also for amending the 14th amendment to get rid of the anchor baby phenomenon.
  • I want to get rid of treacherous ethnic studies programs in high schools like the ones in Arizona.
  • I’m for a judicial decision amending the Civil Rights Act on “disparate impact.” This has gone too far, and it’s just nuts.
  • I want to end the Hindu 1-B program.
  • I advocate marriage licenses for parents, though it’s not happening.
  • I agree that there are intelligence difference between the races, at the moment anyway. Maybe not forever.
  • I want IQ tests for prospective immigrants from lands that are producing large numbers of problem immigrants to the US.
  • I think that PC anti-racism has gone seriously too far to the point of insanity, and that’s it’s now little more than anti-White racism.
  • I think there are hate crimes against Whites, job discrimination against Whites and hate propaganda racism against Whites, hence Whites are at some times and places anyway a persecuted race on account of their ethnicity.
  • I think the racial makeup of a city, more than income level, explains more in terms of its crime rate and desirability as a living space.
  • I believe the high Black crime rate may be in part genetically based, but is by no means inevitable at any rate, as culture modifies genes.
  • I believe that Gypsies are a criminal race.

I’ve been told that these are all a rightwing positions. So be it.

You know what the weird thing is though? Among White liberals here in California (and I spent my whole life with these people) if you get them behind closed doors when no one is listening, they will agree with me on a large number of these “rightwing” ideas. But it’s not something they will talk about in public. And they all voted for Obama anyway.

100% of Hardcore US Racists Vote Republican

Repost from the old site.

If you go to White nationalist sites, you will be damned if you ever find even one Democrat on those boards. You will find some ex-Democrats. Nor will you even find one person who votes Democrat, except some now voting Obama for racist reasons*.

I’ve made the rounds of many of these sites. The truth is that 10

The White racists are simply a subset of US Whites. On the White racist sites, they make it completely clear that the Republican Party is the party to vote for if you are White, and especially if you are a racist White.

In looking at how White racists in the US vote overwhelmingly Republican, we can begin to understand why US Whites vote so overwhelmingly Republican. I suggest that the hardcore racists and the rest of the Whites are voting Republican for some pretty similar reasons.

James Schipper in the comments points out that the Republican Party has hardly given US Whites a damned thing for their racist votes. At the very least, he argues, it could have come down hard on illegal immigration, reduced legal immigration and ended affirmative action.

Instead, the Republican Party is 10

The Republican Party has been winking at White racism for decades now. In 1981, Reagan went to the site in the South where the bodies of the two murdered civil rights workers were found and spoke before a crowd of hollering, hooting White peckerwood crackers, saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a horrible mistake. Bush’s appointees to the Supreme Court apparently oppose civil rights, but little has come of that.

The Republicans, a plutocratic political party, have used the racist Whites in the same way they used the culture warriors, the Christian Right and the rest. Your average plutocrat is probably not very racist, not very religious and cares nothing about holy roller Christians.

Wealthy young women have abortions in very high numbers. The wealthy drink, use drugs, have promiscuous sex, have homosexual sex, and do all sorts of depraved things at a greater rate than the middle classes – they always have in most every society. At the same time, they cynically use the culture wars stuff to get the fools and suckers to vote for the plutocratic party.

Like the rich who supported the Nazis, they hope to use them for the ride and hopefully never implement any of the projects of the racists or holy rollers. When it finally gets to the point where the rich need to implement racist or holy roller policies in order to stay in power, things get awfully dicey. It’s a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty game the rich play.

*There is a fascinating movement within White nationalism called White Nationalists For Obama. The idea here is to “heighten the contradictions” in Marxist terms. Electing a Black president will be so horrible that it will “wake up the sleeping Whites” to the White racist cause.

The resulting tumult will be so great that a vast race war will break in the US. In the course of this race war, the Whites will win. The upshot will be either the removal of all non-Whites from the US, or their sequestration to a few states of their own.

I used to think that the race war thing was only a dream of the real hardcore White power types, but even if you go to the more moderate sites, you will find huge numbers of commenters who are all for race war in the US to “shake things out”. I was appalled. I really don’t think it’s ever going to happen, but in analyzing White nationalism, we ought to conclude that many, perhaps most, of them long for a race war in the US.

Split Emerging Between CA Liberals and Left on Illegals

Repost from the old site.

Here in California (Ground Zero of America’s Mass/Illegal Immigration Nightmare) there is getting to be a serious split between some California liberals and the PC California Leftists over the issues of illegal immigration, Sanctuary Cities and other symptoms of major mental illness.

Take San Fransisco. You can’t get much more insane than Sanctuary Cities, but SF did just that. Not only do they hide illegal alien criminals from the law, they used to hide illegal alien felons, so long as they were underage! Turns out almost all of them ran away from the silly group homes they were dumped in, as we might expect.

Turns out some of them afterward went out and murdered people, as we might expect. Turns out a lot of others were really adults who lied and said they were minors, as we might expect. With blood on the sidewalk, three Italian native San Fransiscans, a father and two sons, dead, the mayor and his Leftist colleagues are incredibly holding their ground.

If you go to the comments on the SF Chronicle page dealing with these issues, you will see that there is an emerging split between SF liberals and SF Leftists. Probably 9

Well, over and over on those pages, you see these SF liberals saying, “Hey! I’m a liberal San Franciscan, but this Sanctuary City crap has gone too far! Count me out! Up with liberals, down with PC Leftists!” And a lot of them are also saying, “And by the way, down with illegal aliens! Get the Hell out of my country!”

Keep in mind California is Ground Zero for Mass/Illegal Immigration madness. If that reality doesn’t turn any native Californian sensible on this issue, nothing will.

Being liberal was never supposed to be about being nuts or being stupid. From any logical point of view, a pro-illegal immigration (defending an invading army of lawbreakers), Sanctuary City (shielding the invader army from the law trying to arrest the criminals), viewpoint is both dumb and nuts.

Is The Political Spectrum Linear or Circular?

Repost from the old site.

If you want to take the time, can someone please tell me where this guy is coming from? A lot of it looks like good Left progressive stuff, but then there seems to be this kind of Far Right Ron Paul populism too. I don’t get it. What is it? Some kind of marriage between Far Right and Far Left? I’m seeing more and more of this crap nowadays on progressive and Left sites and I must say, I don’t really like it.

While we are at it, where the Hell is Jeff Rense coming from anyway? Same place as this guy? He can write about Bigfoot and UFO’s all he wants, and there are usually lots of good articles on the site, but his politics seriously creeps me out. For one thing, he’s leaking anti-Semitism out of his pores.

My Mom has been telling my whole life, “Well, you know. It’s like a circle. When you go so far to the Left and so far to the Right, you don’t have two polar opposite ends of a huge ruler. The ruler starts bending and becomes circular. It’s a circle. Far Right and Far Left meet, and you just have a nut, a fanatic.” I always figured that was just Left-trashing, but now I’m starting to wonder.

There were some people marching against the war in Oakhurst the other day and my brother went to talk to them. Some of them handed some really weird brochures full of all this conspiratorial shit. I went to the site and it was the same thing. Anti-CIA, anti-militarism, anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War, ok, that’s good.

Then it starts taking off into all this weird conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, the New World Order, Ron Paul, black helicopters, chemtrails, bla bla bla. Kind of like this guy.

Hard economic times really brings this stuff out bigtime.

Is this what the new radical US populism is going to look like? Some Far Right – Far Left mix? I don’t mind the Far Left part, but whenever anyone starts talking about “marrying Left and Right”, I get the creeps. I hate to say it, but that tends to end up in some weird kind of fascism of one species or other. One of the favorite fascist lines was about “getting rid of Left and Right”.

Yuck.

Color me perturbed.

Global Warming Doesn’t Exist

As you can see, there is no such thing as global warming. It's all a great big like dreamed up by Al Gore.

It’s simply incredible the number of dickhead Americans, almost all White by the way, who say that either there’s no such thing as global warming or it hasn’t been proven yet. In 2008, the figure of Americans who did not believe in global warming was

These days, since Obama’s election, a relentless rightwing campaign run by the Republitard Party, Fox News and the Teabaggers (Yes, Teabaggers to a man don’t believe in global warming) has raised the number who don’t believe from

For some assfucked reason, White nationalists have decided that global warming is a White issue. In other words, the pro-White view is that there’s no such thing as global warming. I don’t get it. Pro-White means acting like a retard then? Is that it? American Renaissance, Occidental Dissent, Stormfront, every dipshit WN site out there lines up with the 70 IQ crowd and says there’s no such thing as global warming. But isn’t their argument that White people are the smartest humans on Earth?

This just shows how shitty and evil capitalism is. What do people who don’t believe in global warming all have in common? They are reactionary capitalists and pro-capitalists, strong supporters of the capitalist mode of production. This is what capitalism does to your brain. It fries it to a crisp worse than any drug known to mankind.

Capitalists oppose the idea of global warming because they fear that efforts to deal with global warming by curbing global carbon emissions will result in serious losses to their the profits. Bourgeois White Americans refuse to believe in global warming because they believe that efforts to deal with it will cause a lowering of their standard of living. These idiots would rather blowup the whole fuckin’ planet than take a hit to their profits or their living standard. Capitalism more and more looks like mass suicide a la Jonestown or lemmings plunging off a cliff.

Wow! People would rather die and see others be killed than take a profit loss or a living standard hit? Damn. That sounds like drug addiction or alcoholism. The addict keeps on hitting the bottle, pipe or needle until he drops. He’d rather be dead than sober. He’d rather be high than alive. Same with a capitalist. He’d rather be dead than socialist. He’d rather be a capitalist than be alive.

I hang out on a site called 2Care. It’s a liberal site, full of middle class+ SWPL Whites. But it’s also full of insane rightwing Whites. The rightwing Whites are there because they often have some weird “Left” pet cause, like animal rights, religion, or even environmentalism.

The rightwingers have been getting more and more scarce lately for some weird reason (That’s because the US is swinging Right, eh Fox News?), but they are still out in droves on the global warming stuff. 2Care is a good view into the mind of middle class and upper middle class Whites. A Hell of lot of them, even White “liberals,” still don’t believe in global warming.

Unbelievable.

Rats running off the cliff.

Americans Are Pro-life!

Repost from the old site.

Yeah. Like Hell they are.

That’s why fully 91-9

This is where all those silly abortion polls mess up. No way are 8

And when it comes right down to brass tacks, a severely retarded or messed up fetus that will become a human child in months, that you will have to raise, painfully, for not just 18 years, but for its whole life, most Americans just swallow the bullet, pull the lever and say bye-bye.

This is why those polls can’t be trusted. A lot of supposed pro-life folks will have an abortion when all the chips are down, and there’s everything to lose.

Niggers* and Beaners* Wrecked the Economy and Other BS

Repost from the old site.

It’s not just White nationalists who are making this racist argument.

The business class has also taken it up. Turns out Bill Clinton blew up the economy by forcing fine upstanding loan sharks to loan to stupid, low IQ, morally depraved, irresponsible Blacks and Hispanics.

I do not agree with this argument, “Blacks and Browns ruined our economy” one bit. For one thing, there is not the tiniest bit of evidence that this is true. Social scientists and journalists, liberal or not, often tell the truth. If Blacks and Hispanics ruined our economy, that’s unpleasant to hear to most liberals, but it’s going to come out sooner or later, because a lot liberals (like me) would write about it whether it’s PC or not.

First of all, the “pressure to loan to Blacks and Browns” thing came in under Clinton around 1992 or so. There was a problem, because entire Black and Brown neighborhoods were redlined as bad credit risk. There were all sorts of creditworthy folks living there, but they could not get a loan because of where they lived.

This was back in the American Middle Ages, 15 years ago, when lenders actually cared whether or not you could repay a loan.

The economy blew up due to subprimes in 2008. There is a horrible time lag there that just does not make sense.

This argument portrays lenders as the good guys who were forced to loan to scummy non-White ghetto types who never intended to pay back their loans.

First of all, the banks were never really involved in any of this from what I can tell. One of the drivers of this whole crazy mess was the farming out of home loans to home loan institutions like Countrywide which were basically run by criminals. The banks washed their hands of the debt because it wasn’t getting paid back to them anyway.

The Countrywide folks deliberately made bad debts to noncreditworthy folks because the debt wasn’t going to be paid back to them either. Why? They were going to package it and fraudulently sell it to a bunch of sucker victims. Criminal accounting agencies gave the crap mortgage securities AAA ratings so they sold better.

Suckers all over bought the stuff, including I guess a bunch of banks?! Surely, brokerages went up to their necks in buying crap mortgage securities. Then insurance companies like AIG insured the buyers of this crap debt in case it went bad. The whole fraudulent mess blew up, as anyone with any sense knew it would. But when do scammers and fraudsters ever care about the damage they do?

This argument attempts to portray the Countrywide criminals as fine upstanding citizens, forced by Evil Big Government into making loans to deadbeat niggers* and beaners* who anyone knew would never pay back the loans.

That’s not true. These guys were deliberately making shit loans because they make ~$5,000 commission on each one. They sold the debt, so they didn’t give a damn if it went bad. The more loans the better. Standards were lowered, and subprime bullshit was invented to get noncreditworthy folks in the door and put their John Hancock on the loan they could never pay back.

Suckers were fooled about the homeowners’ real ability to pay back the loans – they were told that the home buyers would be able to pay back the loans easily, and the suckers fell for it. Hey, scammers and fraudsters are good. They fool all sorts of people, even smart people, all the time. It’s not the victim’s fault when he’s taken by a sociopathic con artist.

Furthermore, it is not up to me to decide whether or not I can pay back a loan.

Me? I’m basically insolvent.

I’d love to have a loan for $20,000, $50K, $100K or however much your fool ass is willing to loan to me.

Of course I can’t pay it back.

My credit rating will get wrecked, but if I need the cash, I won’t care, and anyway, you will be left holding the bag, and out for $100K or whatever. It’s up to you, the lender, to decide if I am a good credit risk or not. One look at my bottom line should send any lender into paroxysms of laughter.

Anyone who makes an extravagant loan to me is an idiot, deserves what they get, and odds are they are going to lose big. Lending institutions used to be sane. Borrowers were examined with a fine tooth comb and run through the gauntlet. Few loans went bad.

When the loan isn’t coming back to you anyway, there’s zero motive to care about repayability.

That’s a recipe for disaster.

Here a smart commenter, turkey, offers a modified theory that offers bits of both theories and seems to make sense. Clintonite neoliberal hucksters used anti-racism as a ruse to allow (Not force, since they wanted to do it anyway!) lenders to lower standards. They tossed in the clincher of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac backing of the crap loans.

This was an era in which both Republicans and Democrats were in on the increasing privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some Clintonite Dem criminals like Franklin Raines made millions off this fraud. Republicans were basically along for the ride. Black and Brown proles were used as suckers and conned into credit-wrecking loans that they could not pay back so huckster-criminals could make a fast buck.

RL: “There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites, and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was.”

turkey: Actually, the VDare top guy (Brimelow) pointed out in a ’93 Forbes article that the default rate in the early ’90s was the same for blacks and whites, i.e. the mortgage lenders were using correct terms and the market was sane. If blacks were held to unreasonably high standards they’d have had lower default rates than whites.

Instead during the ’90s the neoliberal Democrats used race crusading as a ruse to let lenders make quick money off marginal loans often implicitly backed by the government (which they were all champing at the bit to do – this does not excuse them), while seeming to stay on the side of the angels, and Republicans saw the angle and got down in the trough, too.

The default rate differential between whites and black ballooned under the irrational regime. I’m not familiar with the “Hispanic” analogs but there’s been so much immigration that it’s probably hard to follow.

There’s actually a PDF on the net of a response from Fannie Mae propagandists in the early ’90s trying to get Brimelow to shut up about their gravy train that you can download. The bullshitting is obvious in hindsight.

So the higher quality of white nationalists are laying some blame on the exploitation of the religion of anti-racism, not on lumpen whites and blacks and mestizos and Amerinds themselves, who shouldn’t be blamed for trusting a smiling fixer that said they could have a nice house.

*Used sardonically

On the Naderists

Nader says there is a not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties, that they are both wholly owned corporate parties.

Well he’s right in a sense, but we liberals never I mean never vote Republican. I’d almost rather die than vote Republican, and I’ve been that way for most of my life. I’m a liberal! Hell, why would I vote Republican? Give it up.

There’s a reason for that. Dems are way more pro worker and pro working family than the Republicans. It’s not true at all that they both the same. That’s a bunch of crap, and it makes me mad to hear it.

Truth is, if the Dems were more pro worker = Left/liberal than they already are, they would simply lose, because the electorate is that reactionary. The Dems are just as conservative as they need to be to win. Still, I think they suck up to corporations too much, but apparently this is due to campaign contributions.

The Reps’ whole line is that the Dems are not pro-corporate enough, that they are anti-corporate. They have been beating Obama with that since he came in. The Teabaggers are simply a Brownshirt type army for the corporations, the rich and the upper middle class.

For being as anti-corporate as they have been under Obama, the Dems are going to lose 6-7 Senate seats and maybe 20 House seats. So it doesn’t pay to be pro-worker. The Electorate is wildly pro-corporate, pro-rich and pro-upper middle class, and they punish you if you try to help working families even just a bit.

Republicans and Democrats: Pepsi and Coke?

In the comments section, Bay Area Guy tosses out the typical American argument that Republicans and Democrats are just Pepsi and Coke. If the Pepsi tastes bad, go buy a Coke instead. If the Dems can’t fix the economy, then vote Republicans. Surely they will fix it! Morons.

Besides, Democrats are hardly better when it comes to elites. Although at least from an economic standpoint, they’re not as bad as Republicans.

That’s a pretty horrible argument. Most Democrats I know certainly don’t vote for them because they are voting for the party of elites. Are you kidding?

The Dems suck up to elite politics because if they don’t, they will lose.

Newsflash: A majority of Americans arguably support pro-elite politics. If you go against the elite and upper middle class (the ruling capitalist classes) you get creamed in the bourgeois media, and you lose elections, then Republicans come in, and they are even worse. I haven’t met a Dem yet who said that the Repugs and Dems are the same, both parties of the elites, so this time I’m voting Repug.

Unless you are in the top 2

It’s a plutocratic political party.

I have a lot of respect for folks who make over $80,000/yr and vote Republican out of their economic interests. Or really anyone who votes Republican out of economic interests for whatever logical reason. If you acknowledge that voting Right is bad for your bottom line, but vote Right anyway due to cultural stuff or some other crap, then I respect you.

When voting Republican or supporting them hurts you in the pocketbook, but you think it doesn’t, is where I lose all respect for you. So I have no respect at all for a good 70 million American adult-tards.

Of course it’s the scum Lamestream Media that promotes all of this ignorance by telling people that the two parties are just two different flavors of Baskin Robbins.

Clinton got creamed when he pursued anti-ruling class politics on health care reform. Same with Obama. The Lamestream media keeps Americans ignorant and moronic.

The Communists actually make sense when they advocate nationalizing all the media, since all the rightwing media ever does is lie and confuse people anyway.

Keep in mind that all conservative parties on Earth are liars, and all conservative politics on Earth all history has been based on a Grand Canyon filled in with lies. Conservative politics is plutocratic politics. It only benefits the ruling class of society and their hanger on’s, at most the top 2

More from Wyatt Jewell on Tom Metzger’s Show

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4pEXDtsPfs]

Part 2 of Tom Metzger’s interview for Wyatt Jewell. It’s clear that Jewell puts primacy of the class war over his racist beliefs. We do see a bit of his racist beliefs here unfortunately, but they seem to be somewhat subdued.

He went over to Vietnam because he had been brainwashed into thinking he was fighting the Chinese enemies of the Whites. When he got there, he realized he was fighting for the Vietnamese, who were not his people. He said, “Fuck it, I’m not fighting for these people,” and got a honorable discharge. Then he went back home and was involved in street protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. Good for him!

Metzger admits that, like almost all racist Whites, he supported the US state in the Vietnam War.

Then Jewell went over to Europe where he participated in the Paris 1968 Uprising. He then hitchhiked and rode buses through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

He makes some racist statements here. He says The Alamo is surrounded by a very low class Latino slum that is downright dangerous, full of criminals, pimps and whores. This isn’t so much racism as White disgust at Latino ghetto trash. There’s a bit of other racist stuff here and there, but it’s clear put on the back shelf to class.

Metzger’s agenda is clear. Metzger says little to nothing about the class war, and he keeps trying to steer Jewell back from class war to race war. Whatever you think of it, race war is just bullshit. It’ll never happen anyway, and it never liberates anyone. All it does is divide the workers, which is another plot the capitalists are always cooking up.

I really like this Jewell guy on class though, with his 1980’s Wobbly Speak.

I’ll take him over 1,000 “non-racist” corporate Republiscums and “anti-racist” bourgeois corporate Democratic National Committee Barack Obama Democraps.

So the guy’s a racist? So what. The only thing that matters to me anymore is class. I’ll ally with this guy in a New York minute. Anti-racist and non-racist bourgeois neoliberals of either party are not my allies!

Why Anti-Semitism Is Almost Always Rightwing

That’s true that US conservatives associated with the Republican Party are profoundly philosemitic. However, this is a fairly new thing. There is also the anti-Semitic Pat Buchanan wing of the party too, you know?

And if you took 100 anti-Semites in the US, 95 of them would be conservatives, either Republicans or Libertarians.

Leftwing anti-Semites are not that common. Nowadays a lot of Zionist shits are trying to say that there is all this liberal or Left anti-Semitism (the “new anti-Semitism”), but it’s mostly garbage. These folks are simply anti-Israel to out and out anti-Zionists. Most Left and liberal Israel-critics or even anti-Zionists are not anti-Semites.

A few liberal to Left anti-Zionist types do get into anti-Semitism, but when they do, they seem to gradually drift towards the rightwing! In particular, they start being sympathetic to either fascism or Islamism or both. Especially they tend to be pro-Nazi.

It’s really strange the way that works.

This makes me think that there is something intrinsically rightwing about anti-Semitism and something organically anti-anti-Semitic about liberalism or Leftism.*

With some exceptions.

Is White Nationalism Pro-Working Class?

A commenter disagrees with me when I said White nationalism is not exactly pro-working class.

And since Stormfront is representative of white nationalism, I don’t see these neoliberal white nationalists you keep bringing up. All major WN leaders are opposed to free trade and financial usury.

If they are against financial usury, it’s news to me. I’m not even aware they are anti-free trade. They never seem to talk about it.

White nationalism is a hard rightwing movement in every sense of the word. They never talk about the C word – class. All they ever talk about is race. There’s a reason for that!

Hence it serves the purposes of the rich and upper middle class to divide the workers on the basis of race. WN is just a continuation of the Southern Strategy. WN’s have been voting for Republicans forever in this country. As a rule, they almost never vote Democrat. What kind of pro-worker voting is that?

Go to Occidental Dissent, Guy White , Silver’s site, Jewamongyou, American Renaissance, Majority Rights, VNN, they’re mostly libertarians, and they support rightwing economics. They all want small government, as small as possible, and they all hate socialism and especially Communism. Though there are a few pro-worker commenters on Occidental Dissent and Amren these days.

The whole WN community declared war on Obamacare.

The whole WN community got behind Libertardian Ron Paul last time around.

The Stormfront and Tom Metzger types are not exactly the norm.

Jared Taylor is a very rightwing Republican corporate type. Frankly, he’s typical.

Most WN’s seem to have money, often a lot of it. That’s what White racism is all about in the US.

The Whites work and make the money, often good money, and the nigger and beaner layabout criminal leeches want to steal all of our money.

That’s why they hate the Democrats so much and why they always vote Republican.

WN is not exactly worker-friendly. Quite the opposite!

Anyway, Stormfront is not pro-worker. They take no stand at all, but they did support Libertarian Ron Paul last time. But a lot of the commenters are working class Whites, and a lot of those are openly socialist.

A Primer on Mark to Market

Repost from the old site.

Some conservatives, of course, are blaming the current economic chaos on too much regulation instead of the obvious cause of it that any moron can figure out, lack of regulation. This is especially popular on White Nationalist websites, where the line is that all regulation of business is evil for White people.

I would like to point that although the conservatives are reeling from this latest economic meltdown and their philosophy is in tatters (rejected by the media elite who used to support them to the hilt more than anyone else), some conservatives are starting to fight back.

The market meltdown was not caused by the lack of regulation that everyone knows caused it; instead, it was caused by the conservative bogeyman of too much regulation. But this is not going over very well. Outside of the Fanatics’ Bullpen and the Republican Party, no one is buying. Even the US rightwing media is not so stupid as to buy into this one.

The “mark to market rule”* controversy is an interesting one.

But nevertheless, mark to market is being put forward as one of the stupider regulations that supposedly either helped bring this mess on or is making it worse. So says Paul Craig Roberts (unapologetic Reaganite incredibly featured on Counterpunch) here, here and here, and Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek columnist and apologist for neoliberal globalism and US imperialism disguised as reasonable and thoughtful analyst.

Mark to market was put in to keep these corporate rats from lying about their assets and their bottom lines. Amid the catastrophes caused by the rampant accounting fraud and crime accompanying Enron and the other messes, the mark to market rule was instituted. What it means is simple: corporations have to list assets and debts as they really are, not as they think they are in their fairy tale fantasies.

What corporations were doing was this: Suppose I have assets that are worth $10X. That looks pretty bad for my bottom line, so I “re-evaluate them” with the help of some friendly local accountant firm criminals, and now automagically they are actually worth $100X. Why?

Because my accountant criminal buddies and I decided that my assets are actually undervalued, and are worth much more than the market says they are worth. So I get to fool investors, inflate my bottom line and pretend that my insolvent company is actually rolling in it.

Seems like an obvious abuse, no? Seems like a reasonable regulation, no?

Turns out after all that mark to market is sheer government evil. Evil big government is forcing angelic corporations to tell the truth about their net worth instead of lying as they always do, even in their sleep, and thus harming the glorified US economy.

Nowadays, banksters and other financial criminals are holding all sorts of assets that are said to be worth, say, $100X. In truth, no one even knows what they are worth, and there is no way to figure it out. Their true value is so low that the banksters act like these assets are toxic waste.

Mark to market means they have to mark them at $30X or $2X or whatever the market says this crap is worth. But what they really want to do is lie and pretend that it’s worth $100X.

Why? Because if the corporations tell the truth about how much their assets are really worth, instead of how much they lie and inflate their worth at, investors will pound their two-bit penny stocks into the ground where they deserve to be pounded.

But that’s bad for the economy. We can’t afford to have the stocks of insolvent companies pounded into the dirt on the basis of honest accounting of assets and debits. Instead, it is necessary to lie, paint a turd to look like a Michelangelo, and keep the sucker/investors marching in the door and laying out the cash. To tell the truth will wreck the economy. To save the economy, we must legalize lying once again.

Does any of this make sense in any rational world? Of course not.

These are the rarefied debates that occupy our ruling elites in these trying times.

*I am not an economist, and I may not have correctly characterized the mark to market rule or the arguments for or against it. If you think I have this wrong, head to the comments or email and let me know.

How the Rightwing Revolution (1975-Ongoing) Was Won

A commenter asked how it came to be that US workers are so rightwing, and why they support rightwing anti-worker economics at home and imperialist foreign policy abroad:

How do you think it became this way?

Over a century of hard rightwing propaganda from the ruling classes, intensifying in the past decades. They have the control over the media, and I would say that that’s all you need. What more do you need than to control the media? Control the media, control the cultural discourse. That’s one reason why Judeopedia, I mean Wikipedia, is so scary, and why the Jews have flocked it it in swarms.

Actually, this country was going in a good direction until the mid 1970’s. We were heading towards a progressive society.

Then a group of the heads of the top corporations of the US got together and held some meetings. They said if we don’t stop this trend, the US “will end up as just another European social democracy” (exact words). They and many of their ultra-rich backers (but mostly corporations) vowed to pour money into think-tanks to change the discourse of America. Hence the birth of the Hoover Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Foundation and the rest of the Stink Tanks.

At the same time, the Left think tanks were starved for money, and they still are. The think tanks control political intellectual discourse in society. When a politician or journalist wants to write about something, AEI or other stink tanks have a paper served right up to you. They will probably even courier deliver it to your office with flowers.

Also, right around this time, a Jewish scumbag named Milton Friedman was really getting going at the Univershitty of Chicago. He gathered  acolytes around him, published books, monograms, journal articles, etc. went on TV, interviewed, and publicized the Chicago School of Economics.

Economics is a dismal enough science as it is, but this stuff was horrible. A lot of it was out and out lies. For instance, they invented a new theory about how Antitrust regulation doesn’t work and how monopoloy corporations are great for business, society, consumers and workers. They coined new theories on all sorts of economic matters that was long ago settled debate. On and on with a lot of areas of economics. Lies, lies, lies and more lies, and more lies piled on top of those lies. This is the base of modern neoliberalism.

At heart it has some truths. Sure, a dollar invested in the private capitalist sector is more productively invested than a dollar invested in a public socialist sector. But so what? So what should we do then? Shut down public roads, housing, medical care, research, schools, dams, parks, canals, trash collection, sewage treatment, water, power and phone delivery, airwaves, airports, highways, refuges, forests, grasslands, oceans, lakes, rivers, beaches, police, fire, courts, regulatory agencies, social programs?

According to these POS’s, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, etc. They don’t believe that much of anything should be public, and they want to shut down most everything public and privatize it. They essentially want to privatize all society and end the public sphere altogether. Friedman was evil, and so are his scum buddies, but right now, Chicago School is all you will learn if you take Economics classes at a university. If you get an Econ degree, you will be a Chicago School economist. All the texts, journals, grads and big names in the field, everyone and everything, are Chicago School.

So the Chicago School staged a Bolshevik like coup against the field of Economics in the US, a coup which is ongoing. At the same time, the entire media, including the “liberal media” the rightwingers whine about, became Chicago School acolytes and defensive linemen. Chicago School become the Bible you swear on when you take the oath to be a journalist in the US.

Chicago School Economics also captured both parties. First it grabbed the Republicans, who had been drifting Left with Nixon and Ford.  They went Chicago School in 1980 with Reagan.

Next it took he Democrats with the Democratic National Committee in the late 1980’s, which held that Democrats were losing elections because they were too liberal in every sense, including economics, and that the only way to beat Republicans was to become a pro-corporate political party, one that lived off the fat donations of corporate backers. They would never beat the Republicans at the corporate money game, but at least they could survive and get enough money to win some elections.

Clinton and Obama are both Chicago School types. Obama even has ties to the institution. The Chicago School Revolution is ongoing as we speak. Tea Parties are Chicago School rallies. All this deficit slashing bullshit is straight up Chicago School.

Hence was the modern reactionary coup of the past 35 years won.

It all boils down to Information Theory. He who controls Information, controls the world.

Are Americans Retarded?

5

Why do they hate Obama? What’s it all about anyway? Is he too liberal? Is that it?

Is it that he hasn’t fixed the economy? True, but how is electing Republicans going to make matters better? Americans don’t make sense. They act like Democrat and Republican is like a choice between Coke or Pepsi. Store’s out of one, you just buy the other, no problem.

If the economy sucks, they throw out whichever party is in, and replace it with the other one. But that’s retarded. Just because one party is presiding over a shitty economy doesn’t mean that throwing them out and putting the other party in is going to fix matters. It only will if the other party has a plan to dig us out of the economic hole.

The Republicans have no such plan. All of their agenda – endless insane tax cuts, slashing and gutting spending in the middle of a Depression, gutting regulation on business, gutting environmental protection, rolling back health care and financial reform, accelerating the mass foreclosure crisis in housing – none of this will improve the economy. Sure it might improve the bottom lines of the wealthy, the corporations and the upper middle class, but the evidence is that it will fuck the overall economy even harder than ever.

Tax cuts: Tax cuts are needed to get the economy going again? No they are not, and they’re tax cuts are all for the rich anyway. Thing is, even if you give businesses tax cuts, in this Depression, they still won’t hire. Banks have been cutting loans to business for 30 years now in favor of speculation, and the credit markets are pretty frozen anyway. It’s consumer demand that’s dead. All the tax cuts on Earth won’t help that.

Truly, the only way to grow jobs these days is via state spending, since business is not hiring and won’t be hiring for a long time. That’s what all those headlines in the New York Times about 1

Spending cuts/deficit hawks: Won’t work. The debt is not a problem at the moment, though it will be in the future, around 2020. There are easy ways out. Eliminating the income tax cap on Social Security will fix Social Security nearly forever. Most of the debt bomb by 2020 will be caused by health care spending, so health care reform should fix that. Getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the rich should fix the rest. Saying America is broke is nonsense. We are one of the richest countries on Earth. How the fuck can we be “broke?”

Anyway, gutting spending in the middle of a recession or depression is  a bad idea. All it does is make the economy worse. We have decades of real world examples to prove that that is so.

Gutting regulation of business: This won’t help anything. Business isn’t hiring, and they won’t hire after you lift the regulations either. Only thing this will do is fuck workers, consumers and society like it always does.

Gutting environmental regulation: With the Gulf Crisis and Global Warming, one wonders why any sane person would want to get rid of environmental laws. But Republicans never met an environmental law they liked. This won’t do anything to help the economy. Ending environmental laws won’t get consumers spending again. The states with the best environmental laws have the highest standard of living. The states with the worst laws have the lowest standard of living.

Rolling back health care reform: Brilliant. In the middle of a Depression, with millions upon millions out of work, end health care for millions of Americans and price millions of others out of the market. This is good for the fuckin’ economy how now? And no, it’s not deficit reduction either. The deficit is caused by capitalist health care = no health care reform. The more health care reform (socialist medicine), the more the deficit goes down.

Roll back financial reform: The banksters blew up the economy, causing the worst Depression since the 1930’s. The criminals’ destruction of the economy reverberated around the globe, causing mass ruin for the entire world economy. Recently, some tepid reforms were enacted that take some baby steps towards stopping the capital S scum from doing it again. The Republicans have pledged to roll all of that back so the financial hucksters and gangsters can blow up the economy all over again. This fixes the economy? WTF?

Accelerating the foreclosure crisis in the housing market: From Day One, charming Republicans have blamed poor, downtrodden homeowners for the crime of losing their houses to Financial Capital Organized Crime. I thought Republicans were all about sympathy for crime victims and slamming it to the criminals? Wait, that’s only street criminals. Get shave, put on a suit and tie, get an office suite with a view, and you can steal like there’s no tomorrow. But don’t shoplift that burrito! Three strikes! 25 years in prison!

I happen to think that these millions of American homeowners do not deserve to lose their homes. Even if they did, letting them walk away is ruining the economy by nuking the housing market. Obama has made some changes that are allowing some homeowners to keep their homes. The Republicans want to do away with all of that and flood the market with foreclosures, all to enrich their Banker Kingpin pals. More disaster for the economy.

Capitalism Hits the Fan, A Marxian View

Repost from the old site.

Great video by Richard Wolff, professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Wolff is a Marxist, and the lecture is from a Marxist POV. However, it is interesting in many ways.

One thing that is clear to most sensible folks with an understanding of economics is that Marx’s analysis of capitalism is one of the greatest ever done by anyone. For a long time, it was taught in all economics departments. With the advent of crazy Friedmanite neoliberalism in the past 30 years or so, Marx may not be being taught so much, but that’s a mistake.

It’s sometimes said that Marx is great for analyzing either what capitalism does well or poorly, but not the opposite. Not true. Marx is great for analyzing capitalism both when it is doing well and when it is doing poorly.

In my opinion, where Marx has problems is in proposing alternatives to capitalism, and history has born this out to some extent. Capitalism, with all of its chaos and problems and horrors and deaths, may just be the only way forward for the time being. Like death, disease and taxes, it may be a necessary evil.

Wolff describes how US workers saw 150 straight years of growth and improvement in their living standards, from 1820 to 1970. This is correct. He doesn’t lay out how this happened, but there are many explanations for this. He also says that this scenario was rare to unheard of in the rest of the capitalist world.

After 1970, things changed. Productivity kept going up, but wages went flat or even went down. A US worker in the late 1970’s made more per hour than a worker working today. As productivity rose and wages went flat, capitalists began raking in incredible profits.

This is what has happened to the US economy over the past 35 years, as neoliberalism took hold and 8

As workers got more and more screwed and the capitalists, the owners, those who lived off the labor of others, saw their incomes skyrocket, confused workers began advancing all sorts of explanations about why this was happening. Anti-Semites, as usual, blamed the Jews. White nationalists and White Supremacists blamed Blacks and Browns. Lots of middle class and working class Whites blamed Big Government.

The truth was that the culprits were the business owners who were reeling in superprofits while workers got the shaft.

As this process continued, capitalists found more ways to keep the cost of labor down. They began importing massive amounts of legal and especially illegal immigrants as labor to drive labor costs down even further. They began moving many enterprises offshore and later, began offshoring work via the Internet.

Confused workers scrambled to keep up their standard of living. Others in the family, often the wife, began taking a job, bringing in a second income. Then one or more persons in the household began to work second and third jobs. Americans worked more and more hours, setting new records for workers in the West.

The despicable US media extolled this fact, and praised US workers for working themselves nearly to death, taking pains to point out how tough and hard and slaving-away Americans are compared to pampered, wussy, “soft” Europeans kicking back under socialism.

It’s true – part of the US war against European social democracy has been to declare that Europeans are soft, wimpy, sissified and wussy. How did they get this way? Socialism turned hard self-reliant European men into soft, pampered girlymen. Americans were hard, tough and macho. They didn’t need no nanny state to help them out. They could do it on their own. The American worker as Marlboro Man.

Wolff points out that that extra workers did not necessarily fix matters, as when the wife started working, it turned out that she needed many things, for instance a vehicle to get to work in.

Working more than one job didn’t seem to work very well, nor did having others in the household go out and work, but it did the trick for a while.

After some time, Americans would have to turn to some new tricks to try to keep up their standard of living. They turned to loans. At first they ran up their credit cards. Americans were setting records for going into debt on credit cards and were among the Western world’s poorest when it came to saving money.

This isn’t really very good personal economics, but the vile media cheered it on nonetheless. Silly, wimpy Europeans and Japanese saved their money for a rainy day, presumably because they were too neurotic to enjoy life. Americans went for the gusto! They spent ever nickel they earned and then went in debt up to their waders! Cheers, cheers, cheers!

After the credit cards were maxed out, there was an explosion in US housing prices. Call it a housing bubble. This came at a propitious moment, for it enabled Americans to use as collateral the biggest asset they owned, their homes. Americans borrowed on their homes, refinancing them, taking out second mortgages and using the money like a credit card to continue to pursue the standard of living to which they had become used.

The capitalists continued to reel in the dough from the leveling of wages, now via outsourcing and use of immigrant labor, and now the capitalists found a new tool – debt.

They loaned money to their own workers! It was like the old days when you lived in a company town, bought at the company store and ate at the company diner, all deducted from your check. Not only will we pay you a crap wage, we will snag every dollar you spend on food, rent and shopping too.

These same capitalists were now swimming in ultraprofits with the money they were making off loaning money to workers and home mortgages (just another type of loan). They had so much money they did not know what to do with it. They threw it into the stock market, and the market for high-end goods of all sorts went through the roof.

Conspicuous consumption came back with a vengeance, and the scummy media once again sang and danced the praises of the most idiotic and obscene ways the rich chose to blow their unneeded and often unearned cash.

A whole new financial industry, a parasitic industry on the economic body of the nation, sprung up, an industry that created no products and no real wealth. It was nothing but a gigantic casino on Wall Street.

All sorts of funky instruments that no one understood were dreamed up – derivatives, CDO’s, mortgage securities and all sorts of other stuff that probably shouldn’t even be legal. Almost no one understood these things and no one seemed to understand what they were worth.

The inevitable bubble came and the party crashed, as it always does when capitalist bubbles go bust.

The root causes were the destruction of the regulations put in in the 1930’s, during the Depression, in order to prevent another Depression. As soon as these regulations were put in, the capitalists began plotting and working to get rid of them.

Over the next 80 years, the capitalists created a Gramscian cultural hegemony that attacked socialism, government and regulation and exalted free market capitalism. Socialism, government and regulation were described as possibly good ideas, but doomed to failure. The only way to avoid the inevitable failures of socialism, government and regulation was to completely deregulate the economy. Anything less was the road to ruin.

With their money, the capitalist interests bought up all the media and most of the politicians. They used this to get rid of the Depression-era regulations and create the manipulate US culture to where your average worker thought that was a great idea, if he understood it at all.

There are various proposals for how to deal with this economic mess. As discussed in a previous post, conservatives, reeling and increasingly discredited, have tried to blame the catastrophe on too much regulation, not too little. Even the slimy media that normally goes along with this crap is finding this too much to buy.

White racists are promoting the racist notion that liberals (via affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws), niggers* and beaners* are the ones that destroyed the US economy. The Republican Party has to some extent bought into this, as has the business press, their amen corner in the mass media, and their academic hacks, but the argument is too slimy and racist for most decent people, plus there isn’t an ounce of truth to it.

Steve Sailer, an excellent writer who is widely read, is the latest to promote this racist travesty, much to his shame. Sailer is looking more and more like a Republican Party hack than a really deep-thinking, independent and empirical author.

Furthermore, Sailer has been skating on the edges of racism for some time now without really going over. More often, he seemed to be giving the racists lots of nice talking points. Now he’s finally pushing an explicitly racist discourse, and it’s not even true. Too bad.

Rate of subprime mortgage defaults by race:

Whites       1
Blacks       1
Hispanics    1

End of discussion!

Liberals, Leftists and social democrats have proposed re-regulation, but the problem here is that we are probably going to re-do the 1930’s experience all over again. We will put in a bunch of great regulations and as soon as we put them in, the capitalists and their mass media machines will start plotting to get rid of them.

Then the capitalists and their media machines will launch a jihad, for as many decades as it takes, to reverse all these regulations and get back to total deregulation again. In time, workers will forget why they put the regulations in in the first place, and they will go along with it.

The capitalists will buy most of the politicians all over again, and the politicians will vote to deregulate again. The capitalists will work to recreate their Gramscian cultural hegemony, and the average worker will once again think deregulation is the smart thing to do. The economy will blow up again and we will be right back to 1929 and 2008.

Wolff suggests that there is a third alternative. He describes a paper done by a colleague that describes Silicon Valley workers who hated their jobs. They had to dress up, sit in a cubicle and take orders and crap all day from a bunch of assholes. Can they pay anyone enough to put up with that? With the destruction of the Silicon Valley workforce, these workers were laid off.

A number of them got together and formed IT worker-run cooperatives, a non-capitalist form of ownership along the lines of anarcho-syndicalism. The study found that these workers said that they had never been happier. They were manufacturing software, selling it to buyers and dividing up the profits among themselves. The workers themselves were the new owners.

Wolff said that as a condition of the bailouts to the financial industry, we should mandate that they staff their board of directors with workers, not management, as a first step towards workers democracy.

Wolff also said that he had been giving speeches like this for 25 years now and he has had more interest in the past five weeks than in the previous 25 years.

That’s ending on a hopeful note for now. Enjoy the video.

*Used sardonically

Was Obama’s Bailout of the Banks Fascism?

Robert Taylor, an extremely radical super-Libertarian or more properly an anarcho-capitalist, suggests that Obama’s bailout of the banks was fascist. As such, he echoes a Tea Party line:

Robert, what would you call Obama bailing out the largest financial institutions if not Classical Fascism?

Under classical fascism, the corporations must work for the state. Otherwise, the state just takes them right out. The corporations don’t wish to be taken out, so they just obey the state. They have to do what the state tells them to. If they do, they are assured good profits.

Obama’s bailout is the opposite, and anyway it started with Bush. In modern America, the corporations control the state, not the other way around. The corporations were bailed out because they control the government. That’s the opposite of fascism. It’s not fascism if the corporations control the state. That’s just typical capitalism.

The bailout was surely necessary, but there should have been more provisions in there to pay us back. Actually, I wanted the state to completely take over many of those banks, at least temporarily. Take them over, make them solvent again, and then give them back. Even more radically, I would like a US National Bank along the lines of China’s.

Without the bailout, the economy would be way more screwed than it already is. However, it was necessary to pair the bailout with a lot of terms and conditions that effectively re-regulated the banks back to where they were in the 1930’s. That meant reinstating Glass-Steagall, the whole nine yards. The banks would have gone along with it or they would have had no choice. Or offer the banks a choice, we either regulate you or we are going to take your asses over. This is what Roosevelt did in the 1930’s. This was not done at all, hence the criminal nature of the bailouts.

The rightwing, as you see in this comment, uses the “fascist” meme to scare people away from any kind of socialism or state involvement in the economy. Yes, fascists had state involvement in the economy, but they were not pro-worker or even pro-middle class. Anyway, many,  many socialist states have had a great deal of state involvement in the economy and yet they were not socialist. They were mostly pro-corporate and especially supported a hyper-nationalist imperialist project abroad and a conservative, ultranationalist and anti-minority project at home.

I don’t necessarily oppose fascist economics though. The type of corporatism practiced in East Asia is actually a good idea. State control over corporations is actually a great idea. Fascists are bad in many ways, but their economic project is not so terrible.

Are the Tea Parties Fascist?

fpy points out that the Tea Parties are not technically fascist in the 1920’s-1940’s sense, but classical fascism is nearly dead anymore anyway, and since 1945, it’s mostly been represented by a sort of Third World Rightwing Authoritarianism like the murderous states in Guatemala, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Iran, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

I don’t think Tea Party idiots can be accurately tagged as fascists, because they tend to support Libertardian economics. Fascists, on the other hand, tend to support centralized, authoritarian state capitalism of some form or another, also known as corporatism.

Yes, technically, they are not fascists, but look at how violent and racist they are. They’re also in deep with all of these armed militia clowns.

They are more like Third World rightwing authoritarianism. That’s very Libertarian economically. The state is gutted, the rich pay no taxes, the state has no money for anything, and the rich and the business class run everything. They even run their own militias and death squads that run around attacking the Left (this is how they resemble fascists). I keep wondering when we are going to start having death squads in the US.

Death squads are present in many places: Sudan, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Philippines, Syria, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Chile.

And those are just the ones that I know about.

Just about everywhere on Earth you have a strong rightwing government, you tend to have death squads. Death squads are part and parcel of rightwing rule, especially in the Third World.

So I’m wondering when they are coming to the US.

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