Another Neoclassical Lie: Neoliberal Economics is the Best Way To Help the Poor

Also, the poor are poor for a reason. If you follow your liberation theology and gather resources for the poor through redistribution you’re shrinking the area of the pie from which everyone draws resources. Capitalists lose, some of the poor who become powerful in the new redistribution (i.e. community organizers and feminists) gain power, the majority of the masses lose as well because they aren’t smart enough to create jobs for themselves or make their own way without someone providing a job and capital for them to work with. You want egalitarianism, but that comes at the expense of quality of life. So that everyone is equal you are willing to accept that everyone is equally poor. This becomes an epistemological battle in that we are pitting the idea of socialism or social democracy against a relatively free economic model. People can choose for themselves what they want, and it seems that they usually choose economic freedom over egalitarianism.

In many social democracies, people are certainly not equally poor, and most Communist countries wiped out poverty, even if they only were able to provide a relatively low standard of living and the model bogs down and collapses over a period of some decades. Surveys the world over show that most people want some kind of socialism. There are few exceptions, though the US may be one of them. Socialist, populist, progressive or Left parties rule almost the entire globe. Rightwing parties are in the minority or out of power in most places. The few places where they have power (the US, Chile, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand, the Baltics) they are busy destroying the country, just like they always do. That’s one of your neoclassical lies. I just showed earlier how 12 of the 13 richest countries on Earth are all social democracies. Also many wealthy countries have low to very low Gini coefficients. Go to a place like Sweden, and you will be amazed at how many small businesses there are. Literally one on every corner. The masses don’t lose. When you redistribute wealth, as long as you do not do so too radically, the masses gain tremendously in wealth, power, resources, benefits and rights. All neoclassical economics ever does is shift wealth from the bottom 70-8 The economies that are really kicking ass now are heavily socialist economies like Russia and China (state capitalist, corporatist or mixed economies). The economies that weathered the latest Capitalist Depression best used stimulus spending to come out of it and had heavy state intervention in the banking system. The ones that got fucked worst of all had followed neoclassical economics in their banks to the greatest extent (Iceland) or following neoclassical economics, used austerity instead of stimulus to deal with the slump (Baltics and Ireland) got fucked worst of all. Laissez faire is refuted. Neoclassical economics doesn’t work. It causes wild booms and busts and leads to regular economic recessions and depressions. It’s only good for rich people because the purpose of it is class war and wealth transfer.

The Polls Are All Wrong

First of all, AP is a hard rightwing organization run by millionaire fundamentalist Christian Texans, some of whom are Christian Reconstructionists, with deep ties to corporate America. AP has a deep Republican bias, and based on their articles, especially by Liz Sidotti, they are pulling out all the stops for the Republicans with their biased reporting. Much is being made of a New York Times – CBS TV poll on October 27. It showed Republicans with a 6 point lead in the generic Congress race. Other recent polls come up with similar numbers. However, as I noted earlier, all of these polls leave out “cell phone only” voters. Many of these are young people. So far, the two polls that included cell phone only voters gave Democrats a 6 point lead in the generic Congress poll. That means that the recent NYT-CBS poll is wrong by a margin of 12 points. I’d like some more information on the cell phone only voters polls. Did they poll registered voters or likely voters? All projections of huge Republican gains in the House and Senate are based on these flawed polls, which are off by a full 12 points. Now, it’s possible that even with a 6 point lead in the generic poll, Democrats will lose the House. I don’t understand the polling well enough to comment on that. But they won’t lose the Senate. At the very least, I am quite certain this is not going to be the wipeout everyone says it will be. Many races are very close: Democrat Barbara Boxer is beating Republican zillionaire Carly Fiorina by 5 points. Boxer will win in a close race. Democrat Harry Reid is tied with Republican Sharron Angle. Toss up! Democrat Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey are tied in Pennsylvania. Toomey should have been walking away with this one. Toss up! Democrat Patty Murphy is up by 2 points over Republican Dino Rossi in Washington. She’s going to win, but it will be very close. In early voting, more Democrats have voted than Republicans in North Carolina! This means super-nut Republican Richard Burr may lose to Democrat Elaine Marshall! Republican Ron Johnson is up by 2 points over Democrat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. He may well win a cliffhanger race. Democrat Scott McAdams is now leading the crazy 3-way race in Alaska with Republican Joe Miller and Libertarian Lisa Murkowski! The Democrat may win, but it will be close and crazy! Republican Rob Portman will probably defeat Democrat Lee Fisher in Ohio but it will be a close race. In a 3-way race in crazy Florida, Republican mental patient Marco Rubio will defeat both closet gay Independent Charlie Christ and Democrat Kendrick Meek. Republican Mike Lee will surely defeat Democrat Sam Granato in Utah. Republican Don Hoeven faces Democrat Tracy Potter in North Dakota. I haven’t the faintest idea who will win. Team Crazy Republican Ken Buck ought to be walking away with the race in Colorado. Instead, he’s tied with Democrat Micheal Bennet! Republican lunatic Cristine O’Donnell will lose badly to Democrat Chris Coons in Delaware. Democrat Ron Wyden will easily defeat Republican Jim Huffman in Oregon. Democrat Barbara Mikulski will easily defeat zillionarie Republican Eric Wargotz in Maryland. Republican Tom Coburn will handily beat Democrat Jim Rogers in Oklahoma. Democrats Kristin Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer will destroy the Republicans in New York. Democrat Daniel Inouye will destroy Republican Cam Cavasso in Hawaii. Republican Johnny Isakson will defeat Democrat Mike Thurmond in Georgia. Democrat Pat Leahy will easily defeat Republican Len Britton in Vermont. Republican Jim DeMint, lunatic, will handily defeat Democrat Alvin Greene in South Carolina. Republican Jerry Moran will easily beat Democrat Lisa Johnston in Kansas. Republican nut Rand Paul is tied with Democrat Jack Conway in Kentucky. Toss-up! Democrat Richard Blumenthal will beat wrestling mogul Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut. Republican kook Roy Blunt will defeat Democrat Robin Carnahan in Missouri, but it will be a close race. Democrat Blanche Lincoln will lose to Republican John Boozman in Arkansas in a close race. Republican Mike Crapo will easily defeat Democrat Tom Sullivan in Idaho. Republican Chuck Grassley will defeat Democrat Roxanne Conlin in Iowa. Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is beating Republican Mark Kirk in Illinois. He will win, but it will be close. Republican Kelly Ayotte will defeat Democrat Paul Hode in New Hampshire in a close race. Democrat Joe Manchin is starting to pull away from Republican John Raese in West Virginia. Republican Dan Coats will easily defeat Democrat Brad Ellsworth in Indiana. Republican John McCain will easily defeat Democrat Rodney Glassman in Arizona. Republican David Vitter will defeat Democrat Charlie Melancon in Louisiana, but incredibly enough, it will be very close.

Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

Have you noticed that practically all these neoclassical types do is lie? There’s a reason for that. Their theory is good for the rich and the upper middle class only, and it’s crap for everyone else. They can’t come out and say that, so they have to lie to the 8 This is similar to the modus operandi of conservatism. As conservatism is always and everywhere a philosophy of the plutocrats that benefits them and some upper middle class folks and hurts everyone else, they can’t very well be honest about the nature of their class war project. This is why conservatives, everywhere and Earth and all down through the past, have always lied. Conservatism is dishonest because it must be. A philosophy that benefits the top 2 Analyses of neoliberalism in the past few decades around the world showed that it tended to benefit about the top 2 Even major ruling class organs like Time Magazine admitted that decades of neoliberalism in recent years in Latin America had largely failed. Neoclassical economics killed 15 million people in Russia alone in the 1990’s. Neoclassical economics has failed to lift people out of poverty. Peru and India have implemented neoliberal policies in recent years. After years of high growth in Peru, the poverty rate remained flat at 5 The neoclassicals caused the recent financial crisis that took out the US economy and nearly took down the world’s economy with it. Neoclassical economics destroyed Latvia, leading to a 2 Hoover’s neoclassical economics only deepened and worsened the Great Depression in the US. Neoclassical economics caused a depression in Ireland with 1 The top neoclassical economists, including Hayek and Friedman, went down to Chile and advised Pinochet on how to run his economy. They implemented the most radical experiment in neoclassical economics that has ever been tried. The result was one of the worst economic depressions in modern history. However, at the end of Pinochet’s term, workers had lost 1/3 of their wages, and there was a massive wealth transfer from the bottom 2/3 to the top 1/3. Hayek and Friedman both said that neoclassical economics was so bad for workers and ordinary people that the only way to put it in was via a dictatorship. This is why both Hayek and Friedman were huge cheerleaders for the murderous Pinochet. The countries that got creamed worst in the financial crisis were those that had followed neoclassical theories in their financial system. Iceland underwent possibly one of the most radical experiments in neoclassical restructuring of its financial sector. The result was that when Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Americas, Asia, Capitalism, Chile, Conservatism, Economics, Education, Eurasia, Europe, Health, History, India, Ireland, Latin America, Modern, Neoliberalism, North America, Peru, Political Science, Public Health, Regional, Russia, South America, South Asia, The Americas, US, USALeave a comment on Some Recent Failures of Neoclassical Economics

Neoclassical Silliness on the Minimum Wage Again

Chuck is the latest proponent of neoclassical nonsense to grace our blog:

How much worse off would people in those countries be if their children couldn’t work? You can’t apply U.S. ideals to countries that aren’t as far along the economic life cycle as the U.S.

His first paragraph attempts to justify the total failure of the lack of minimum wage laws in the 3rd World to deal with the problems of unemployment or poor pay. He deals with this by not answering the question. Meanwhile, Cuba has a minimum wage law and has full employment. In the US, there are indeed states in the US South that have no minimum wage laws. I’m not sure what the means in terms of what employers can do, but those states have the worst pay and working conditions in the US. In fact, you will see an excellent correlation in the US and around the world: Everywhere there is no minimum wage law, you have terrible pay and working conditions, and in many places, you also have mass unemployment. The working man is getting fucked. Countries that have minimum wage laws, on average, tend to have better treatment of workers and better pay. Lack of minimum wage laws is bad for workers! Once again, we see the enemies of the workers, the neoclassicals, claiming that they are out to help their worker buddies. It’s a lie. Why would our enemies want to help us? The neoclassicals are the agents of Capital and the rich. They want to get rid of minimum wage laws because that’s good for capitalists. It’s good for capitalists and bad for workers. Workers in the developed world won’t work at a shit job that doesn’t even pay enough to survive. Indeed, the minimum wage itself is barely even enough to survive on. Some say it’s low that you can’t survive on it. I’m not sure if that’s true, but if you can barely survive on a minimum wage, how could you survive on a sub-minimum wage? Thomas Sowell, a Black neoclassical economist, says that we should get rid of minimum wage laws so ghetto Blacks could have jobs. But the jobs did not leave the ghettos because of minimum wage laws! They left because the ghetto Blacks destroyed the neighborhood, mostly through crime, and all of the businesses fled. There are jobs in those areas, but many young Blacks do not want to work for them. They barely want to work for minimum wage. They consider that chump change. They make a Hell of a lot more money selling dope, which is why they do it.

Voter Guide for California

Here are my picks for California: Governor: Jerry Brown (D) Lieutenant Governor: Gavin Newsom (D) Secretary of State: Debra Bowen (D) Controller: John Chiang (D) Treasurer: Bill Lockyer (D) Attorney General: Kamala Harris (D) Insurance Commissioner: Dave Jones (D) Superintendent of Schools: Tom Torlakson (D) State Senator: Barbara  Boxer (D) I am voting straight Democrat down the line this time, even though Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are complete idiots, San Francisco liberals gone nuts. The Republicans running against them could not possibly be better, but I don’t know anything about them. Meg Whitman is a ridiculous candidate, and Jerry Brown has always been one of my favorite politicians. Bill Lockyer is another of my favorite politicians. Debra Bowen has done a good job. Barbara Boxer is an excellent liberal Senator in the tightest race of her life. Carly Fiorina is a Tea Party crazy who is way too rightwing for California. Most of the Republicans seem to be unheard of, except Mike Villenes, who is running for insurance commissioner. He used to be my Congressman. He was an asshole as a Congressman, and he’d be just as bad as Insurance Commissioner. I usually vote straight D, except when I am mad and the Democrat has the race wrapped up, in which case, I throw my vote away with Peace and Freedom or Green. Proposition 19: Yes Proposition 20: No Proposition 21: Yes Proposition 22: No Proposition 23: No Proposition 24: Yes Proposition 25: Yes Proposition 26: No Proposition 27: No Judges Supreme Court Tani Cantil-Sakauye: Yes Ming Chin: No Carlos Moreno: Yes Appellate Courts Brad Hill: No Bert Levy: No Jennifer Detjen: No Chuck Poochigian: No Tani Cantil-Sakauye is a good, moderate Republican appointed by Schwarzenegger to the Court. She deserves a yes vote. Ming Chin is a rightwinger appointed by Deukmejian. Voted against legalizing gay marriage. Vote no! Carlos Moreno is a good, solid liberal on the court. Keep him there. Brad Hill, Bert Levy, Jennifer Detjen and Chuck Poochigian are all conservative Republicans. Vote no!

Boxer is Way Up Against Fiorina

I can’t believe the Republicans were so stupid as to run this woman. She ruined Hewlett-Packard, ran it into the ground and was fired. She’s pro-life and doesn’t believe in global warming. No way would California elect a pro-life, anti-global warming Senator. Ain’t going to happen. Boxer is now beating her by 8 points. Fiorina has had breast cancer, and she recently had to go back into the hospital with an infection a few days before the election. Previously, she was down by only 2 points. I think going in the hospital is what nailed her.  

Libertarian Nonsense on the Minimum Wage

John Stossel and other libertarians would argue that if a minimum wage is good for workers, why not raise it even more? why not 20, 50, or $100 per hour?

That POS Jew is officially a Libertarian now? He was the favorite journalist on ABC’s 48 Hours for many years. First of all, neither John Stossel, nor any Libertarian alive, cares what is good for workers, so why should he even talk. Libertarians are the enemies of all the workers of the world, why are they talking to us about what is good for workers and what is not? There is a limit to how high you can raise the minimum wage. I’m sure these Libertarian assholes know that. If you raise it too high, firms just won’t hire more workers. They will figure out other ways to deal with the problem instead. You can only raise the minimum wage so high. Plus you run into inflationary risks. This is Economics 101. The nonsense these guys spout is so silly that you think that either they must know they are lying and they don’t care, or else they’re so brainwashed, they actually believe this BS. There are crappy countries all over the 3rd World with no minimum wage. They not only have shit wages, contrary to Libertarian theory that no minimum wage is worker paradise, but they also often have very high rates of unemployment, contrary again to Libertarian crap that no minimum wage gets rid of unemployment (As if they care about unemployment!). We really need to be careful when the enemies of the workers (the Libertarians and other shills for the capitalists) tell the workers that they know what’s good and what’s bad for them. I mean, your enemy is telling you what to do and what not to do. Forget that! My enemies would probably give me some poisoned food and tell me it’s caviar. If I was offered a job making $100K/yr, they would try to convince me not to take it. Libertarians, as the agents of the capitalists, are trying to convince workers that what is good for workers is actually bad for them, and what is bad for workers is actually good for them. I generally feel the minimum wage should be at a level equivalent to the wage in 1968. Or it should be a given percentage of the average wage (usually 5

More Debt and Deficit Sophistry

Japan’s is one of the highest on Earth – it is ~21 Mass capital flight can occur when you have external investors (unlike the US) Japan has almost none. (And as with the US their debt is payable in their own currency…) There are three very big differences between Japan and the US in regards to debt…around 5 The US has incentive to eventually renege on it’s debt either by outright default or by de facto default by printing money. US debt held by foreigners Total US debt Note usually when we speak of US debt we speak of Debt Held by the Public as opposed to total US Public Debt which includes intergovernmental holdings. If we were to compare total US debt to GDP, then the US would hit more than 10 There’s another option to massive deficit spending…raise taxes on fuel (7

Uncle Milton, a deficit hawk, repeats common falsehoods about the US debt. First of all, Japan had little to external investment before it ran up all that debt, and it has none now. So there was no loss of external investment with debt run-up. True, Japan’s debt is held internally. The US debt is the 3rd lowest in the developed world. Hardly anything to get exercised about. Uncle Milton plays the game of comparing debt held by the public (the only meaningful measure) with total debt, which includes intergovernmental debt, which is meaningless. Intergovernmental debt is where the government borrows from itself, for instance dipping into the Social Security trust fund. It’s not an important debt measure and it’s never used when comparing comparative debt burdens between states. Why do deficit hawks constantly bring up the meaningless intergovernmental debt? Because it produces a nice big fat number that scares people and makes them want to make the budget cuts that the deficit hawks slaver over. A phony number, but a big number. Another phony game they play is to add up all US federal debt, all state and local debt, and all consumer debt. Then they come up with some number that says that the US has more debt that any other country on Earth. But that’s not a meaningful or important measure last time I checked. It’s just another phony game they use to scare people into making cuts. A number that is typically tossed about is 10

More Neoliberal Insanity

Another rightwing Libertarian who also happens to be part of the race realist and PUA/men’s rights communities (Who would have guessed?) has ventured into our comments section pushing insane neoliberal snake oil:

By the way, I’m in agreement with your argument as posed to Robert Lindsay. There is no concept of “evil capitalist” because if they were evil they would become uncompetitive as less evil capitalists took their productive workers from them. In short, the free market would beat the evil right out of these employers.Eventually, as economist Gary Becker has pointed out, these inefficient employers will shoot themselves in the foot. Tangentially, that’s the reason this legislation for the Paycheck Fairness Act – which hopes to eradicate discrimination against women by closing the mythical 23 cent pay gap between men and women – is illogical. Businesses and ultimately consumers don’t care who has jobs and makes goods and adds value. If a woman of equal education and equal ability made 77 cents to a man’s $1, a smart firm would come along and pay that woman 78 cents. This would continue until that gap was effectively closed.

More neoclassical insanity. This stuff works in theory, but not in the real world. In fact, I am amazed that you guys act like you actually believe this nonsense. You’re lying, right? You know this is all crap, right, and you’re saying it to sell the proles a good line that works great for the rich and screws everyone else? Because if you actually believe this nonsense, you are deluded. The real world simply does not work this way. With mass unemployment, firms do not compete for workers by offering higher wages. They don’t do this in the 3rd World either. They hardly do this anywhere. The general trend is for capitalists to pay less for labor. The capitalist always try to pay the least for his labor as he can possibly get away with. Let’s look at the construction industry. This used to be a high-paying industry with good jobs paying what would now be $33-40/hour. The work was all unionized. The capitalists, in order to pay less, broke all the unions, at least here in California. They went through the sectors breaking the unions one by one. Then the capitalists flooded the US with illegal alien labor. The capitalists started using the illegal alien labor to outcompete each other. This is still going on in California as I speak. Eventually, most of the unions were broken, the wages had fallen from $37 to ~$10/hour, and the field was flooded with cheap labor, legal and illegal. There are still some places around that pay good wages. There are painters paying $25/hour, but they are always in danger of being taken out by the illegals making $10/hour. My friends work for local White construction companies who treat their workers like shit and are always threatening to replace them with “Mexicans” = illegal aliens. I believe that construction workers are generally treated much more poorly here in California now than they were in the era of unionized construction work. There are zero, I mean zero, construction firms here in California in the past 20 years who are competing with other firms to pay workers more or treat them better in order to drive all the others out of business. It doesn’t happen. Let’s look at the meatpacking industry. These used to be high-paying jobs that paid around $17-25/hour. It was mostly working class Whites working at them. The unions were all broken and the jobs were filled with illegal aliens working minimum wage. Working conditions crashed and workers are seriously treated like shit. Not one meatpacking firm has opened up to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms. Let us look at the IT industry. This used to be a place where you could make a good wage. However, the industry was mad about workers being paid so well, so they started importing Hindu 1-B guest workers from overseas to drive down wages in order to maximize their profits. This crashed wages in the field to the point where no sane White American would go into this field. I’m not sure about working conditions, but I am told that many workers now work in Hindu IT “sweatshops,” for their Hindu scum bosses who treat them abysmally in the time-honored Indian way that the working man has always been treated in that blighted land. So apparently working conditions have taken a dive too. One would think that some enterprising firms would have sprung up to pay workers well and hire all the workers away from the firms hiring the Hindu 1-B invader-thieves, but this has not occurred. Why not? Taxi driver used to be a good job. For some reason, it’s not anymore. The field has been taken over by fly by night firms, mostly run by shady immigrants, who hire downtrodden immigrants to work very long hours for terrible pay, sometimes possibly below the minimum wage. The field has been nuked, worker-wise. Not one taxi company has sprung up to pay workers better and drive all the other firms out of business. Not one. Short-haul truck driver (not big rigs) used to be a great job. My working class White friends used to work in these jobs. The field is gone. It’s all Mexicans, mostly illegals. The firms are all run by criminals. The workers lease out the trucks, but they make so little (really below minimum wage) that they can’t keep the trucks up, so the trucks are always falling apart. This damages our roads and is a safety problem. The workers are overworked, downtrodden and poorly paid. Not one trucking firm has stepped in to drive the others out of business by offering the workers better wages or working conditions. Not one. All over the US, firms head to US South, where wages are lower and unions are scarce. Many states have anti-union right to work laws. Suppose I am in Ohio. I wish to compete with firms who moved to the South in search of non-union cheap labor. I open up my firm and say everyone come work for me as I will pay you and treat you better. How many workers are going to leave South Carolina to come up to Georgia and work for me? None. So this doesn’t happen. Firms don’t compete with firms who moved to the South by offering better wages. If companies competed on wages to hire workers, they would be happier with unions. Unions only want the best for their workers in terms of wages and working conditions. Most reasonable unions are not trying to drive the firm out of business in a suicidal gesture. Yet firms hate unions and do anything to keep them out because the union will try to force the firm to raise wages and improve working conditions. In the 3rd World, unionists are regularly murdered, to the cheers of the capitalist world, its media and its militaries. In fact, one of the main strategies of US imperialism in the 3rd World has been to encourage a “kill the unionists” campaign. US imperialism teaches this philosophy via its imperialist military, CIA and their institutions such as police and military training programs and the School of the Americas in Georgia. If firms were happy to compete on wages, they would embrace unions rather than kill their members. Most of the 3rd World is characterized by crap wages far below what the capitalists could easily afford to pay and abysmal working conditions. One would think that firms in the 3rd World would be competing by raising wages and bettering working conditions to drive each other out of business. Yet it simply does not occur. Why not? Nowadays, things have moved away from the field of the nation to the supranational playing field. So firms in the US compete by closing US plants and moving them overseas where labor is cheaper. Now suppose I have a firm in the US. I want to compete with these firms moving jobs overseas in search of cheap labor. I set up a plant here in the US to be the good guy and tell all the workers to come work for me because I have the best wages and whatnot. I will still be driven out of business because the worker pool I am competing with is physically overseas! The workers can’t exactly leave China to come work in my New York firm, now can they? In Europe, in the US, in the Developed World in general, what we see is firms competing by trying to drive wages and working conditions down as low as they can get them. In the US, unions and strikes are broken, illegals and Hindu 1-B and other guest worker job thieves are imported from overseas and hired, jobs are moved overseas and workers are always told to take pay and benefit cuts. One would think that some firms could open up to hire only American workers and refuse to hire illegals, and to pay workers and treat them better to outcompete the other firms. Yet this is not occurring. Why not? I am thinking of my town here. I can’t think of any firms in this town who are competing for workers with other firms by trying to pay them better or treat them better to drive the competition out of business. If anyone knows of any, could you please let me know? It’s really amazing how this nonsense has taken over the world of Economics. The truth is that if you want a job in Economics nowadays, all jobs (or 9 As you can see from the nonsense and insanity that the resident Libertarians in our comments section regularly, spout, neoclassical, Austrian or Libertarian economics is mostly a bunch of nonsense. It’s  more of a religion than anything else. Unfortunately, most economic schools are religions, because in general, economics only works on a small scale (microeconomics) and tends to fall apart when it moves towards a larger view (macroeconomics). Most of them just publish a bunch of crap that their audience or school wants to hear, and this is how the school builds itself on and on. Based on the blatherings of our neoclassical friends in the comments, we can see there’s little empirical basis for most of it. Adam Smith wrote some fine texts, but most of it seems to be nonsense. He was correct in one way in that he was writing against the Mercantile School of Economics. Most nations ran Mercantile economics, where most of the trade was run by the state – sort of a state capitalism. It doesn’t work very well, but it worked well enough for a long time. Mercantilism is monopoly economics. The state runs everything. It regulates the prices of the capitalists, etc., because the state is competing against other nations. When England is competing with France, it needs its capitalists to be in line with its competitive strategy vis a vis the French, not secretly working with the French against England. You can’t allow French firms to come in to England and set up shop and run all of the British producers of some industry out of business. However, Smith was writing in opposition to Mercantilism in favor of a free market. So Smith was anti-monopoly. Now all neoclassical economists are in favor of monopolies, although they usually don’t come right out and say so. This is because monopoly is the natural end result of capitalism. David Ricardo is the king of the neoclassical scholars. He was some Jew who didn’t even have much of an education. He went into the family business and got stinking rich, and then wrote up a great economic theory that told the rich everything they wanted to hear. It’s mostly a bunch of nonsense and crap, but it’s still taking the world by storm, because it’s what the elites want to hear, and in capitalist society, as Gramsci notes, elites make culture – the dominant culture or bourgeois culture is that of the rich. In other words, under capitalism, everyone, the rich and the upper middle class (who need no schooling), the middle class, the working class and the poor all adopt the ways of thinking of the rich. The rich replicate their culture across all of society. There used to be how many Mom and Pop stores in the US? Now there’s Walmart. There’s how many OS and major software makers? One, Microsoft. There used to be countless firms. There used to be countless media firms across the US. Now there are only a few. Less than 10 media firms, all rightwing, control almost all US newspaper, newsmagazine and TV news. There are how many firms making microprocessors? Intel and who else? There are how many car firms in the US? And how many in the world? As you can see, capitalism tends more and more towards monopoly. It’s a natural tendency in a free market, and it’s only arrested via government intervention. In a monopoloy market, most of the silly economic notions of the neoclassicals go out the window. There’s no competition, so firms charge the highest price they can, abuse their workers the most and make the crappiest products that they can possibly get away with. Sure, there’s no law forcing them to do so, the neoclassicals would say, I suppose. Sure you could have a monopolist that charged low prices, made great products, and treated their workers great. But it never works that way, and anyway, nowadays, any monopolist who tried to do that would be fired by his stockholders. Over the past 100 years, we have built up a huge amount of evidence that shows that monopolies are bad for consumers, workers and the industry itself. They treat workers poorly, abuse consumers, charge high prices, and make crappy products. They harm the industry by retarding its development. This scholarship is excellent and is beyond challenge. In the 1970’s, the late Jewish economist Milton Friedman developed his theory of neoliberal economics around an eager group of acolytes at the University of Chicago. He has since become a demigod in the field (most economists now are Friedmanites) and the mass media adores him. His school spent many years writing a cavalcade of books, journal articles, etc. overturning 100 years of scholarship on monopolies that proved all of what we discussed in the last paragraph. The Friedmanites “proved” via long tomes, complex mathematical models and a sea of “evidence” that monopolies to do not raise prices, abuse consumers and workers or produce crap products. In fact, they don’t even hinder competition. All laws against monopolies must therefore be overthrown. Exactly what the capitalists wanted to hear. It’s all crazy, and it’s a pack of lies as high as the day is long; there’s no truth in any of it. But his theories (LOL) about monopolies have since gained huge currency not only in the Republican Party (Oh really?) but in large sectors of the Democratic Party, including liberals (huh?). It’s very popular with journalists, including many liberal journalists. And it’s about as reasonable as believing in a flat Earth. Gary Becker is quoted by the Libertarian commenter above saying some nonsense about firms that try to lower wage costs as being “inefficient” (LOL). Gary Becker is an idiot who has somehow been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (LOL) for his stupid crap. He’s a Friedmanite, and much of what he writes is nonsense and crap, like all of them. But this guy won the Nobel Prize in Economics and is considered to be one of the world’s top economics scholars (LOL). That shows you what a joke this field is. Yet most economists nowadays are Beckerians. So are most capitalists (duh). More frightening, most journalists all over the world are Beckerians, as are the politicians running most of the countries on Earth. The world has gone insane.

What Has the Latin American New Left Accomplished?

Tulio wonders what good the Latin American Left has done down there. How bout we shoot the question back at him and ask what good the Latin American Right did for 190 years for the majorities? Answer: Zero.

But what have the results been? Has there been any meaningful progress that’s happened because of the rise of the left in Latin America that can be solely attributed to leftist economics and politics? I’m not here to attack the Latin left per se. I don’t mind them much so long as they aren’t on this hate America tip and blaming the United States for all their home grown problems e.g. Chavez. I’ve never heard any anti-American hate speech from Brazil, Argentina or Chile under Bachelet.The bottom line though is what have these left wing leaders actually done? Everything is still horribly corrupt, there’s still massive inequality, still no universal health coverage, millions still live in favelas, there’s still lots of crime in a place like Venezuela. So what is so great about these left-wing leaders? Great, so we will live in a country like Cuba where there’s socialism yet everyone is still poor. Whoopie do. And that’s the best latin socialism has to offer.

Not really. Chile and Costa Rica both have socialism (social democracy) and they have some pretty good figures on life expectancy, infant mortality and whatnot. Comparable to the US or even better, with much lower per capita income too. All Latin America has national health care last time I checked. Public hospitals are free, assuming they exist. There’s a lack of hospitals, doctors, medicine, etc, but in some places like Chile, Costa Rica or Trinidad and Tobago, public health care is pretty good. I doubt there is one country in Latin America that lacks free public health care. The US is pretty bizarre on world scale in lacking this. As far as favelas, I know Chavez has been on massive spree building public housing and renovating other housing, fixing streets, wiring up areas for electricity and running plumbing lines. And he’s done a lot of land reforms, breaking up large estates and giving them to small farmers and co-ops. He has opened a tremendous number of new hospitals and clinics, often staffed with Cuban doctors. He’s opened up new state markets where the poor can buy subsidized food for affordable prices instead of practically starving like they were 20 years ago, when 8 Crime is a long-term problem in Venezuela and the region, and it’s not Chavez’ fault. Corruption is a long-term problem in the region, due to Latino culture, and it will be there no matter what kind of regime is in. Chavez has reduced income inequality and poverty more than anyone else in the region. It’s great what Chavez is doing down there! Incredible! We don’t need Cuban socialism. Canadian socialism would be fine. Correa in Ecuador has done well, but he’s hampered by the oligarchy in what he can do. He threw the US out of the their Manta Military Base, he wrote a new Constitution and doubled health care spending. Ortega just got in, and he’s not pushing a strong program, plus the oligarchy is against him. Honduras had a coup. The FMLN just got in in El Salvador and is unfortunately pursuing a moderate agenda. However, the Civil War Accords already broke up the big land estates and distributed land to small farmers and co-ops, similar to the Mexican Revolution. Whatever other problems you have down there, at least you can grow enough food to eat. Brazil’s Lula reduced poverty dramatically there. Morales has done some good things for Bolivia, for one thing nationalizing the gas and oil reserves. He also wrote a new Constitution. Kirchener did a good job in Argentina. She blew off the debt. Her efforts at further reform have been hampered by the oligarchy. Lately, she’s been trying to break up the media oligopoly, but she’s running into a lot of static on that. Bachelet in Chile did not do much. She was not pushing a very Left agenda. The guy in Uruguay just got in and he’s a moderate. Lugos in in Paraguay is new too, and he’s pushing a moderate line. People pushing a moderate line are not likely to get much done, and in most cases, really good reforms to benefit the people have been hampered by the oligarchs. But these are the best changes your average person in Latin America has ever seen. What’s failed has been more or less 180 years of rightwing authoritarian oligarchic rule in the vast majority of Latin America. That’s what in general has never done the slightest damned thing for the people from Day One. People have had it with it, so they are starting to vote in some pro-people governments, in many places for the first time in history.

How Does the Republican Party REALLY Feel About Immigration?

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

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

Californian Racial Neurotics

Repost from the old site. As usual, this blog has been accused of being incoherent on race, and furthermore, I’ve been accused of being a racist myself, as usual. The person doing the accusing is apparently himself a White racist of the White Nationalist variety. He says that any anti-racist would never call a Black man a “nigger” (Yes, I did this once about 15 years ago or so), and an anti-racist would not care anything about his neighborhood, city, county, metropolitan area or state being turned from 8 That’s a pretty strange definition of anti-racism. I suppose that the typical anti-racist crazies would not care about such a thing, but your average White Californian is not too happy about replaced and displaced and turned into a minority in his state. At the same time, he’s usually not that racist himself, and he will often say that he opposes racism. He gets uncomfortable to irritated at any kind of overtly racist talk. He hates White nationalism, not to mention White Power Nazis. He hates segregation, the Indian Wars and apartheid in Africa. He’s not too happy about colonialism. He’s in favor of interracial marriage and relationships often has friends or family who are in one. At the same time, he thinks that the standard PC anti-racism of the activist variety is completely insane, and he regards people who push this as radical nutcases. He has a low opinion of illegal aliens, but he may want to legalize them because he thinks it’s cruel to send them all home. He hates racial slurs. He supports all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws but is often dubious about affirmative action. He’s typically pretty much indifferent to the whole topic of race and racism and finds the whole subject unpleasant and distasteful and doesn’t want to talk about it. He thinks xenophobes who dislike all foreigners and want to stop all immigration are Know-Nothing Idiots. He believes that there IQ differences between the races, but doesn’t necessarily want to talk about it too much, though he regards the topic as fascinating. He will often defend Amerindians, Filipinos, Aborigines, East Indians, Africans, Negritos, Gypsies, Blacks, Hispanics, Papuans, Melanesians, Polynesians, Micronesians and just about any other minority group that is often the subject of scorn. He will regard them as interesting people who are being oppressed and he wants to defend them. At the same time, some of these people are racists, but only about certain people. I know some White Californians who are racist against Hispanics, especially illegal aliens. At the same time, these same people have Hispanic and even illegal alien friends and acquaintances because they believe in treating everyone as individuals. White nationalists paint a bizarre picture of anti-racism that fails to describe how people really are. Either you’re a crazed PC anti-racist radical, or else you’re a racist White nationalist. You’re one or the other. But people are complicated and most California Whites don’t fit into either category. I suspect that many people of other races and ethnicities have similar conflicting views. When it comes to race, as with many things, people are complicated, conflicted and all over the place. It’s not just race. Humans are like this about all sorts of subjects. That’s just the way people are. People don’t necessarily have coherent views about many things, or about much of anything. I admit to writing about race and racism all the time and even being obsessed with it. I’m also very interested in White nationalism for some reason, but the movement is repellent. If you go to antifa forums, you also find a lot of folks who are pretty obsessed with race. On sites like Humanbiodiversity , you find much the same thing. I doubt if this makes me a racist, but maybe it makes me a nut. Oh well. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine was over there the other day. Older White woman. I was showing her the website of Erectus Walks Among Us, and she thought the guy was a complete idiot. She said, “Why does he care? Why did he spend all this time writing a book on differences between the races?” I said, “He’s a White nationalist. That’s all they think about all day long. That’s all they care about. Black people are destroying America and the world and this is the most important issue of our time.” She shook her head and said, “Well! He’s a nut!” Then I asked her if she thought there were differences between the races of the type the guy is describing. She said I’m sure they exist. I asked her if she thought that most Whites thought there were differences between the races, and she said I think they do. I then said that a lot of these people move to try to get away from Blacks and Hispanics. She said, “Sure? Of course they do. So? What’s wrong with that?” I asked her if that’s racist and she said, “Of course not!” Later she was reading the paper and pointed to some morons who keep crashing cars into canals and drowning around here. These idiots drive with full carloads along the edges of canals and then fall in the canal and drown. I said, “They’re all Hispanics.” She laughed and said, “Of course they are! No one else is that stupid!” But this woman totally hates White nationalism and all overtly White racist movements, supports all civil rights laws, supports interracial marriage (her son is married to an Asian), and hates segregationists, neo-Confederates, apartheid-lovers and supporters of the Indian Wars. She even defends illegals and wants to make them all into citizens. She loves Obama and worries that the opposition to him is racist and that a lot of Whites voting against him are racists. She also harbors no illusions about other races. She thinks there are IQ differences by race and regards this as a fascinating though forbidden topic. This is pretty much your average older White Californian. Let’s describe another fellow. He’s 45 years old and White. This guy will defend Blacks and the whole Black agenda, and he’s voting for Obama too. He’s been known to use the word “nigger” but usually as humor. He saw Cynthia McKinney once on TV and started making monkey noises and laughing. We were talking about South Central LA once and he described it as “land of the silverbacks”. On the other hand, he thinks Whites who hate Blacks are idiots, and he’s turned off by anti-Black racism. He supports reparations for Blacks, but he also says that a lot of Blacks are rapists and thieves, and Whites should be careful about getting involved with them. He often uses typical pro-Black rhetoric when describing Blacks and talks about how horribly we have treated them. At the same time, when I was dating Black women 25 years ago, he said, “You’re sick! How could you date a Black woman! You’re a nigger lover!” And then he laughed. He describes himself as a racist, but only towards Jews, Hispanics and South Indians. He thinks Whites, especially Northern European Whites, are superior to all other groups. The guy’s basically a Nordicist and he’s been known to read proto-Nazi literature by German authors. He has no amimosity towards anyone else. He’s furious about being made a minority in his home state and he blames Hispanics. He’s mad at South Indians for “taking over all the 7-11’s and gas stations.” He’s dated Amerindian and Japanese women. At the same time, he has Hispanic and even illegal alien friends. Nevertheless, he also openly states that Hispanics are an inferior race and that Amerindians are stupid. Let’s look at one more guy. He’s 48 years old and White. This guy who used to go on and on about the need for White people to procreate, as they are going extinct. He’s also very racist against Blacks, as he used to work as a security guard and then a prison guard, and has lots of White cop friends, and White cops in California are extremely racist against Blacks, even if most others aren’t. He loves to quote statistics about Blacks and crime, and once, when I had bad experiences dating some Black women, he chided me and that’s what you get for associating with Black people. At the same time, this guy dated a Black woman a while back (!) and he married a Vietnamese woman a few years ago and just fathered a Hapa kid (!). Does any of this make sense? Not really. I’m sorry if people find these folks “incoherent on race”, but that’s just the way a lot of people are out here. Race is a complicated subject and it twists minds in some pretty interesting ways. That’s what makes humans and life so interesting.

California Truth

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

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

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

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

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

White Men Raping Black Women in the South

A commenter, apparently a militant Black, has left some comments in the Fake White Slavemaster Black Slave Rape Epidemic post. They point out that White men continued raping Black women after Liberation in 1865 all the way up to the Second Liberation in 1964. A good summary here:

The sexual exploitation of black women by white men had its roots in slavery, but continued, often unpunished, through the better part of the twentieth century. As Reconstruction collapsed and Jim Crow arose, white men abducted and assaulted black women with alarming regularity.

White men lured black women and girls away from home with promises of steady work and better wages; attacked them on the job; abducted them at gun-point while traveling to or from home, work or church; raped them as a form of retribution or to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy; sexually humiliated and assaulted them on streetcars and buses, in taxi cabs and trains, and other public spaces.

I am sure this sort of thing went on. I am curious, though, was there any justice in these cases? What was the resolution? If the Black victim went to the police, would there be any arrests, charges, trials, convictions? At any rate, White men don’t seem to be raping Black women much these days, though the figures about the extent of this are controversial. I am quite sure that most of the rapes committed against Black women in the South during this period were Black men raping Black women, as is always the case. Which makes this comment suspect:

100 yrs after the Emancipation, black women were treated with disrespect by white men.

Given that most rapes of Black women were by Black men, why don’t we say that 100 years after Emancipation, black women were treated with disrespect by Black men? I have problems with indicting entire races with various offenses. Militant Blacks get all hung up on White men raping Black women, first as slaves, then afterward. Certainly there was some of this, but not as much as the Blacks make it out to be. The comments threads at Abagond are full of enraged militant Black women ranting on and on about how White men raped Black women. They essentially make us out to be a race of rapists. It’s all a bit strange, considering that Black men rape women at a rate 6X that of White men. And contrary to White nationalists, the vast majority of their victims are Black women. A Black woman is 4-5X more likely to be raped by a Black man as a White woman is. Which makes you wonder, why aren’t these radical Black women ranting about their own men when they go on and on about rape.

Quote From Sarah Palin, Republiscum Hero

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

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

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

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

So I Caught This Fish…

I gutted it, dried it in the sun for a few days, then I soaked in a vat of lye for several days…why, I dunno, because I’m insane I guess…and then I ate it, like an idiot. And I must say, it tasted…weird, but…it was…edible…I guess. But why would anyone… Eat such a thing?

US Drug Companies Abuse US Consumers

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

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

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

Black and White IQ's in the West in Childhood and Adulthood

In the comments section, there is a discussion going on about when IQ stabilizes in humans.

David: I may be wrong, but I think that IQ scoring as early as the age of 5 or 6 remains fairly constant over the duration of an individual’s lifetime.Robert Lindsay: For non-Blacks, it’s pretty stable from age 7. For US and UK Blacks, it declines from age 5 until age 18-24, then it levels off. We don’t understand what’s going on. David: That seems kind of weird biologically speaking. Maybe there is some sort of massive underclass cultural dumbing-down effect at work here?

This is truly a bizarre phenomenon. Young Black kids are quite intelligent. I babysat for some young Black boys recently for an hour so, and I did not get the impression that they were stupid at all. In fact, I thought they were smarter than their mother! Their minds were working very quickly, almost like little pinball machines. If their IQ’s were average, then they were around 93-95. That’s not a low IQ at all. I suspect it is only occurring in the West, but I can’t prove it. I know it is happening in both the US and the UK. The Black IQ starts to decline at age 5 and continues crashing down about 10 points all the way to 18-24, when it levels off for the rest of life. Young Black kids are not dumb at all, so there seems no justification for them to do poorly in school or screw off a lot. Whatever is going on, it cannot be related to IQ. I believe that Black and White scores in school start diverging quite a bit around 5th grade or age 10. There are different ways to look at this data. James Flynn says he knows of no genetic reason why Black IQ’s would decline from age 5 to age 21. In fact, I do not believe that they do so in Africa, so it’s not genetic, and you wonder why genetics would select for something so weird anyway. The explanation here is that Black culture dumbs down Blacks intellectually, and this is why they fall as they move though childhood and young adulthood. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s not proven yet. The hereditarian response is much more frightening, and I hope it is not true. They say that the IQ’s of Blacks in the US and UK are being artificially heightened beyond their genetic set by the massively intellectually complex culture of the US and the UK. However, this effect is most pronounced in childhood, when environmental effects hit hardest, and declines as one hits adulthood, when genetic effects tend to predominate and environmental effects wear off. Anyway, this is not proven yet either. Even adult Black IQ seems to be possibly being artificially stimulated by the intellectually complex culture of the modern West. Logically speaking, on a pure hereditarian basis, the Black IQ in the US and UK should be 72.5 in the US and 71 in the UK. Instead, it is 87.8 in the US and 86 in the UK. There is a gain of 15.3 points in the US and 15 points in the UK that seems to be completely unaccountable for by a hereditarian perspective. I suggest that that 15 point boost may be due to the heightened environment in the West, including diet. Nevertheless, the 10 point drop in Black Western IQ remains unexplained and perplexing. Any theoretical comments on this mysterious matter are welcome.

More on the "Failing Public Schools"

On the previous post about the public schools, a commenter says:

What conservatives SAY they hate about teachers is the unions (they’re always careful to say “teachers’ unions”). What they actually hate is that they used to be able to pay teachers nothing, because they were almost all women, against whom it was legal and universal to discriminate in the rest of the labor force. 50 years ago, becoming a teacher was the epitome of professional accomplishment for half the working-age population. Now that those people are becoming doctors and lawyers, the quality of teaching talent pool available at the price has plummeted, even though the price has gone up.

I agree with most of this comment, but there’s nothing wrong with the pool of teachers. Most of them weren’t as smart as I was, but who is? The kids themselves used to tell me this. They would tell me I was the smartest teacher of them all, or maybe had one competitor. I didn’t feel that my fellow teachers were idiots at all. And some of them were quite intelligent, especially some White male teachers at the White suburban high schools. The SAT and achievement test scores are going down because so many more Blacks and Hispanics are taking the tests. Also, a lot of Whites who have no business going to college are taking those tests too. In those international competitions, multiracial USA is pitted against all White European and all NE Asian NE Asian countries. Yeah, they “beat” us. So what? What do you expect? This international competition thing is insane anyway. It’s like a foot race. Get 250 great runners and make them race. One will come in first. One will come in 250th. No matter how many times you do the race, it will always end up the same, some people at the forefront, others at the rear. Same with all “international competitions.” Why is the US “failing” if we don’t come in first on every single international achievement test competition? This whole “we are falling behind” crap about the international competitions is coming from the Right and it’s part of a plot to destroy the public schools, which, as I noted earlier, they have always hated. The White Right hates the public schools even more now, because the moneyed ones send their kids to private schools, but they are taxed to pay for public schools. Especially public schools for “niggers and beaners” = non-Whites. Really pisses them off! That’s a major factor driving this whole rightwing jihad against the public schools. The average 18 year old today does better on math, reading and knowledge that any 18 year old at any time prior to 1960. We are better educated than ever. As I mentioned, those “failing schools” all happen to be full of Blacks and Hispanics. This is a race realism problem, not a failure of teachers, administrators or schools problem. How are you going to fix that problem, “failing schools” clowns? Send the Blacks back to Africa? Send the Hispanics back to Latin America? That’s the only realistic solution, and it’s undoable for many reasons. So in the interim, we will be stuck with “failing schools.” Private schools do not do a better job of educating kids. They have a better pool, and they throw out all the bad ones. Public schools have to take everyone of all abilities, even retarded and learning disabled. We can hardly throw out anyone, even for bad behavior. When we do, the Blacks scream racism because way more Blacks get suspended. I don’t think there’s any racism going on at all in suspensions like Jesse Jackson says. I taught in the schools for years. The only injustice is way more Blacks need to be suspended! That’s right. Not nearly enough Blacks are being suspended! The jihad against the public schools started with Reagan, and it’s all about rich Whites wanting to defund public schools because they don’t go to them. Also it’s a way to attack the Left and especially the teachers unions, which the Right despises. My father taught at a private school for a while. The owners cared nothing about the kids. They underpaid the teachers, overworked them, and scrimped on all supplies. My father had provide his own paper, pencils, chalk, erasers, you name it. The books were way out of date. The classroom was out of everything. The owners didn’t even care how well the kids did, but there was a lot of pressure on teachers to pass the idiot kids of the White parents who were paying the salaries of the owners. My father got in trouble for giving some of these dunces bad grades, and the owners ordered him to give them good grades or get fired. The owners could care less whether anything was learned or not and spent their time flying around in Lear Jets (I am not making this up). The idea that such a school does a better job than a public school is ridiculous. Let’s see now. The way to make better schools is:

  • Pay teachers much less money. That way they will work so much harder!
  • Defund the schools. Don’t provide any materials and use only out of date texts. Make teachers and students provide all materials out of their pockets.
  • Force teachers to pass failing students and make them give A’s when they deserve C’s.
  • Care absolutely nothing about whether any student is learning anything. Just focus on making a profit for the school so you can fly around in your Lear Jet.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! The “charter schools” thing is also a mess. Teachers’ unions are banned at private schools, so this means what? Teachers make less money? Let’s see. Get rid of the workers’ union, and then the workers will work so much harder and better! Why would they do that? Unionized workers don’t work less or less well than nonunionized workers. Charter schools get to pick and choose who enrolls, and they get to throw out any dumb or bad acting kids. So their scores look better. Sure. They cherry pick.

A Theory About the Self-Sabotage of Working Whites

From commenter Patrick:

Basically the stupidity of whites all comes down to the way race has historically played out in America. Most nations have always been very class conscious where in America people have been so race conscious that even though they are victims of class warfare they don’t identify with their class.Working class whites identify with their white oppressors more than they do with non-white peoples in their own class.

And also the white working class never aligns itself with working class movements because they don’t want to be associated with being black… they want to retain their whiteness. And in America we have a biracial system where even if you have a drop of black blood you are black…and that principle applies to class.

A working class white can have whiteness as long as he or she never aligns him or herself with working class interests because the second he or she does that they will seem colored and hence black. IN fact the white working class actively sabotages their own class interests.

There is definitely a relation between the one drop rule and the self destructive class oriented behavior of the working class white. In Latin America there is no one drop rule and they accept that there is a racial spectrum.

This is sort of a Critical Race Theory type argument a la Noel Ignatiev and Tim Wise, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, I think he is onto something.

I am going to consider anyone who works for someone else to be a working person in this analysis. This lets us include all the idiot white collar types who insist that they are not workers or working class people because they wear a suit and a tie and sit at a desk in an office.

Since they are not workers or working class people, white collar workers, whatever their salaries, tend to vote rightwing. They also generally do not have a union in back of them. In fact, they hate unions and unionized workers because these bourgeois office collar types think they are superior to them. Workers are dirty, grubby, dumb, and drink beer and watch football. They wear overalls and work boots and carry lunch pails.

Another problem is that most Whites don’t identify as working class or working people. Instead, they say they are middle class. Middle class means you’re not a worker. It means you’re something better, a bourgeois person who does not have to grovel with his hands. In the parts of California that I have lived in, Whites who call themselves middle class vote overwhelmingly Republican. I would even say that White middle class = Republican. This doesn’t make much sense in a class sense, as in Europe, middle class Whites usually vote for socialist parties.

I think Patrick is onto something. In the towns I have lived in, if you’re White and you aren’t a conservative Republican, there is something terribly wrong with you. First of all, there is a lot of social pressure to be just that. If you’re White, you’re a conservative Republican. Especially if you’re a man.

Why would any White man vote Democrat? Maybe if he’s a fag, a pussy or a loser. Voting Republican is an expression of masculinity in these parts. The Democratic Party is the party of the fags and the women. It’s worse if you’re working class. In the places I lived, all young working class men were conservatives and almost all voted Republican.

If you voted Democrat, there was something wrong with you. If people found out about it, you were somewhat ostracized. Even if they did hang around with you, they would tear into you from time to time. Conservatives here really do think that liberals are evil, and we are the enemy.

They hate us way more than we hate them – we don’t really hate conservatives here – if we did, we wouldn’t be able to hang around with any White people or date any White women. The only way a liberal can survive in White California is by adopting a “so what” attitude towards everyone’s conservative politics.

A friend of mine worked construction. All of the young men working there were conservative Republicans. Upon finding out he was a Democrat, they were outraged. “But you’re White!” they said. He was told this on a number of other occasions by other White Republicans in the area.

If you’re a young White man in these places, you’re a Republican. If you’re not, you’re basically a nigger or a Mexican. If you’re White and you vote Democrat, you’re a white person who is acting like a nigger or a Mexican. You’re almost denied Whiteness, as Patrick suggests. So one way to affirm your Whiteness in these places is by voting Republican and adopting conservatism. Conservatism, in these parts of California, is frankly, up the Whites and fuck the niggers and Mexicans. No one ever says it that way, but a cursory look around makes it quite clear.

Why America Sucks

All the voters are White. Of course the country is a reactionary nightmare.

As you can see, the overwhelming majority of US voters are White. It is US White voters and only US White voters who have sent America down the conservative and reactionary sewer pipe in the last 30 years. An operation that is yet ongoing, and that seems to be gaining quite a bit of steam. In the 2006 election, it was even worse. 7

The electorate also is overwhelmingly White.

The voter pool is also overwhelmingly White. So the argument that Blacks and Hispanics don’t turn out to vote is washed up. Even if they all turned out to vote, it wouldn’t matter much. It would only shift the electorate maybe -

As long as America is overwhelmingly White, it will be a terrifyingly reactionary and backwards place, the laughingstock of the Western World. There is nothing inherently reactionary about White people. In Europe, they are reliably socialist. Someone show me a reactionary and non-socialist country in Europe please? In New Zealand and Australia, Whites are quite socialist, whatever their limitations in recent days with the horror specter of Mr. Howard.

In Latin America, it is true, Whites are reactionary, extremely so. Even in Uruguay and Argentina, they are reactionary. But these countries also have a revolutionary White Left that in the past has given the White elites the bullets and bombs they so richly deserve.

Argentina today, though a reactionary and Third World mess like the rest of the continent, at least has a Leftist President. A real Leftist, not an Obama rightwinger. The Argentine elite is alarmed about the Communist takeover of Argentina, Commies being coded as “fascists,” and are openly calling for the return of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist Argentines bashing Left opponents as fascists while calling for the return of Argentine fascism. Typical fascist obfuscation and mind-warping.

They claim that Kirchner had Commie “brownshirts” in the streets who have taken over entire zones. The Commie Kirchner is supposedly trying to “censor the media” by breaking up the reactionary media monopolies that own nearly the entire media of the land. But why should the Right own 9

Media should be delineated democratically according to predilection. If 3

Uruguay elected a former Left wing guerrilla, but I’m not sure how much will change, as he is dedicated to following the neoliberal suicide model. Is Uruguay a more socialist state than the USA? An interesting question.

Costa Rica is a pretty socialist place, which is interesting since anti-Communist fools and liars always uphold Costa Rica on their social figures, comparing it to Cuba on the grounds that Cuba is not so hot. What these congenital liars don’t realize (Or maybe they do!) is that all of Costa Rica’s great figures are attributable to Costa Rican social democracy.

Those are the countries in which Whites are a majority.

In the rest of Latin America, Whites are a minority, and they are frighteningly conservative to reactionary. They have generally stayed in power through repression, fraud, imprisoning, assaulting, kidnapping, torturing and murdering the opposition. White elites have done this in most countries in the region: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico.

The implication is that Whites will only support any kind of socialism where they are a good, solid majority. They are only 6

The entire rightwing movement in the US for the last 30 years has been coming from Whites. Has it been coming from Hispanics? Of course not. Has it been coming from Blacks? Please. Has it been coming from Jews? Pull the other one. Has it been coming from Asians? Forget it.

So when you read that “the voters” are furious with Obama and support all sorts of reactionary monstrosities in opposition to him, it’s US Whites, and only US Whites, who are leading this Tea Party opposition wave to Obama. And much of it is undoubtedly racist, no matter how much they scream that it’s not.

US Whites, as a

The other day, my mother (smartest women on Earth) told me that in the lifetime of my brother and I, we will live to see the US become a more progressive country. If all goes according to plan, I will take off around 2035 or so. The reason for this, she said, is the decline of Whites.

White nationalists have told me that a declining White America will lead to a more progressive place. Their reasoning for this is curious, and doesn’t make much sense. One guy told me that as Whites decline further and further, they will get more and more radical. As they dip below 4

Will Hispanics, Blacks, Jews and Asians continue to be reliably progressive into the future? It’s an interesting question. Majority-Indian, mulatto and mestizo places like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama are quite backwards and rightwing. A White minority in all places continues to rule to the detriment of everyone else. Usually they enforce their rule at gunpoint and often with deadly force. But they get the votes of mestizos, Indians and mulattos to do this.

In the Caribbean, Black and mulatto elites have treated their own people horribly. This is particularly the case in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most of the Black Caribbean is not very socialist, with the exception of Cuba. But Dominica is an equitable country, and Trinidad and Tobago has a decent amount of socialism. Socialism was arrested in Jamaica with the US assault on Manley, a White socialist.

The record in Black Africa is not good in terms of socialism. North African Arab states are much more socialist than Black Africa. True, there is not much to divide in the first place, but still. Even Black African countries that have fallen into some money are still horribly rightwing. Gabon, a wealthy African country, has nightmarish levels of poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, child and infant mortality. Apparently, as has always been the case in Africa, a tiny Black elite has grabbed control over the economy for themselves and possibly their tribe and is locking out everyone else.

Given that mestizos, mulattos and Blacks have a poor record of setting up socialist systems in their own lands, one wonders just how socialist they will be here in the US as they grow in numbers. So far, they have been realiably socialist, but what will the future bring.

The model in mulatto, mestizo and Black countries is typically astounding gaps between the rich and the poor, horrifying levels of poverty, and often an enraged, militant and sometimes armed but cash-starved Left minority battling the elite for power. In these countries, poverty is a big deal, the opposite of the US. So there, all parties, from Right to Left, run on reducing poverty and fighting for the poor, with a few overtly fascist exceptions in Guatemala, El Salvador, (Honduras?) and Colombia and a strange overtly rightwing government in Chile, increasingly a US model state in Latin America.

The Right has the entire media spectrum. In Honduras, a 9

The ignorant mestizo, mulatto and Black electorate tends to vote for parties that often have progressive sounding names. In many cases, these parties are said to be overtly socialist parties. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, where almost every party has a socialist-sounding name. So down there, the Right calls themselves socialists, progressives and populists fighting for the poor while they implement reaction.

A similar dynamic is seen in Africa, where most parties have socialist-sounding names.

In other words, the US model of reactionary parties having open reactionary images, programs and politics is nonexistent in most of Latin America and Africa. No one would vote for it. In fact, it’s anathema in most of the world! It’s nearly nonexistent also in Arabia, South Asia, Europe, SE Asia and NE Asia. Turkey does have an overtly rightwing government.

Other than Turkey, show me one overtly reactionary party along the lines of the US Republican Party in power in any of these places.

One wonders if the model of the US reactionaries will change in the future with White decline. Will we see the rise of a backwards mestizo, mulatto or Black elite looking for votes possibly on an ethnic basis. Will we see the rise of fake populism and fake socialism, where the Right will operate rightwing parties with socialist and progressive sounding names campaigning on poverty reduction and helping the have-nots, to get the non-White vote? Will the Republican Party model of an openly and brazenly reactionary party become nonviable as non-Whites refuse to support it, according the model in the rest of the world?

The Sierra Nevada Red Fox

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountain Lion Killed at Gourmet Ghetto

An eccentric hippie mountain lion descended from the Oakland Hills to the Gourmet Ghetto District of Berkeley, California, looking for some bong hits, tie dye lion shits and mostly a bite to eat. Human killjoys saw her in the human populated area, tracked her to a yard, and shot the bitch dead.

Unfortunately, these lions need to be killed, but, honestly, they really are no danger. A cornered lion like that won’t attack a human unless you charge at it when it’s cornered. All it will do is run away. There could have been 500 humans roaming around watching the lion, cheering for it or cheering the humans (May the best team win!), and no humans one would have been hurt by the lion.

I know a lot about mountain lions, but I’ve never seen one. My friends and relatives have. In the Sierra foothills, they live around you all the time, yet you never see one. It’s amazing since it’s such a huge animal. A mountain lion is not a natural man-killer, and it’s not all that smart. It’s a creature of instinct. It attacks:

  1. Little kids, like toddlers, in wild areas.
  2. Adults who are running or jogging in wild areas.
  3. Adults who are riding mountain bikes in wild areas.

Lions are not that smart. It’s not a whole lot smarter than your housecat, and housecats are pretty stupid. Mostly, they are creatures of instinct like Kitty. In general, a lion will not attack you because it is not programmed to.

Toddlers are attacked because they are the size of much of its small prey.

Adult humans running or riding bikes in the wild are attacked, because when you run or ride in the wilderness, you look like a deer! A deer running away, to be specific. It sees you running or riding, thinks, “Running deer!” and attacks.

Lions are not deep thinkers. Look, see, act. As long as you are not a kid or running or riding in the woods, you’re ok.

Just to be safe, I used to carry a huge stick with me when hiking. If you get charged by a lion, just attack the fucker with the stick. If it holds its ground, scream at it and charge it, waving your arms and yelling. If you have the stick, swing at it with a stick. Super Pussy is still a pussy at heart. When attacked by humans, it runs away, like all pussies do when attacked by badass humans.

“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.

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.

Filipino Spree Killer, Efren Valdemoro, Kills 4 People, Shot Dead

Weird story. I am having a hard time making sense of all of these crimes and putting together a timeline of what this guy did. I don’t know what’s wrong with him either. Apparently he went off the deep end in recent days.

Victims are mostly women, Filipinas or Vietnamese. Two older Filipinas were killed and an older man, possibly also a Filipino, was also killed. The older man was beaten to death. The two women went missing a week ago.

In addition, he killed his middle aged Vietnamese girlfriend with a meat cleaver after taking her prisoner in his car. He kidnapped her from her hair salon, took her prisoner in her car, and, incredibly, strangled her to death in the vehicle with a rope at some point during a high-speed chase. He was driving with her dead in his car when he was shot dead by Highway Patrol in a strip mall in Richmond, California, not far from where the matter started in Vallejo. He had attacked cops with a meat cleaver.

Bomb-making materials were found in his storage shed. The son of the murdered elderly man is also missing and probably dead, which would up his total to 5 killed. The killer was 38 years old.

The “Screw the South” Amendment

Repost from the old site.

I knew that this amendment was the “equal protection under the law” amendment, but I never realized that this part of the overall “screw the South” Reconstruction thing, which I frankly think was a good idea. It’s interesting that it led the way not only to Brown vs the Board of Education, Roe vs Wade, pro-privacy decisions, and all sorts of cool and progressive things.

Section 2 never got enforced too much, so we needed a Voting Rights Act. Section 1 has come back into the news, since it is this section that has permitted the mass insanity of tens of millions of “anchor babies” of illegal Mesoamerican immigrants.

Sections 3 and 4 are not relevant anymore, but they were clearly intended to screw the South bigtime. I never realized that Robert E. Lee had his citizenship revoked. This section is obviously the source of the conservative “giving aid and comfort to our enemies” bullshit during the Vietnam War.

Section 4 is of historical interest because the South claimed that the human property that they owned was capital and they said they needed to be compensated for it. Freeing their human property without paying the slavemasters off was a “taking”. Yes, Americans actually had great big arguments about bullshit like this. Hard to believe, huh?

Neo-confederates, Republicans and other nefarious characters have advanced arguments against the 14th Amendment. One was that the Southern states only ratified as they were occupied by Northern troops with Northern-installed Reconstruction regimes in office, hence the votes were fraudulent.

Samuel Alito, a frighteningly reactionary man who was treacherously allowed onto our Supreme Court by wimpy Democrats, hates the 14th Amendment and has called for its repeal. The 14th Amendment is the boogieman of the Southern-dominated Federalist Movement that came out of the Reagan years.

On the more literate White nationalist sites, the Amendment comes in for regular excoriation. It’s always been a voodoo doll for the neo-Confederates.

It’s nice to understand why.

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.

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