Naomi Klein On the Debt Ceiling Charade

Naomi Klein:

Using a trumped up crisis to raid the public purse and attack the basic rights and benefits is a very old trick – but rarely is the shock doctrine tactic wielded as brazenly as in the pseudo debate about the debt ceiling. This is naked class war, waged by the ultra rich against everyone else, and it’s well past time for Americans to draw the line.

This whole thing is fake, a phony crisis, a charade, Kabuki theater. And Klein hits it right on the head when she ties it in with the Shock Doctrine. Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory holds that one of the latest tricks of imperialist capitalism is how it deliberately creates crises or catastrophes, then uses those calamities to push through radical rightwing changes that are beneficial to Global Capital. For instance, Iraq was deliberately destroyed in order that US capitalist mass murderers and vultures could make money off rebuilding the very place that they wrecked!

Greece was deliberately driven into debt by the venal and wicked banksters who control the world so that its public institutions could be sold off and Greece itself could be bought by the rich. Capitalism created a worldwide economic collapse. Whether  it did so deliberately or not is debatable, but students of history know that unregulated capitalism causes periodic horrible economic collapses, recessions and depressions.

They then used this collapse, which they had augmented for decades by a careful policy of massive tax cuts and deliberately running up huge deficits under Republican Presidents with the expressed purpose of create a debt and deficit crisis down the road, to force through radical class war against the vast majority of working Americans and undo the New Deal, the Great Society and all progressive change for the last century in an effort to take us back at least to the 1920’s, or, as Karl Rove put it, to take us back to the 1890’s.

The crisis was created deliberately. The rightwing is simply using the debt issue as an excuse to destroy most of government. Why? Because the modern Right has a deep and profound hatred for the state. They wish to eviscerate the state on all levels in order to create a Third World type Libertarian state characterized by a starved, minimalist and ineffective state ruled by venal elites who wage permanent and savage class war on the poor, the workers and much of the middle class.

The assault on government will not end with this debt ceiling debate. Obama thinks he can fix this debt debate and then move on to other things. But that’s not possible. The Right will not stop hammering away at government and slashing it like a crazed serial killer hacking at his dying rape victim until the state is nearly eviscerated on a 3rd World level.

However, even then, the Class War will be continuous and ongoing. That’s because in almost all human socieites, there is always something still left for the Rich to steal from the rest of us. We are never so poor that they can’t take more stuff from us.

I told you previously that I followed Salvadoran politics for a while. I used to give money to the arms fund of the FMLN guerrillas, so I got daily updates via phone about Salvadoran politics.

I understood Salvadoran politics to be that the population was divided into

But those daily updates about the Salvadoran state were enlightening. Every single day, the fascist ARENA state tried to steal more and more money, land and stuff from the other 9

Another thing that amazed me was that the Salvadoran rich, the

Greed is as instiable as the healthy desire to survive. One never has his fill of it.

Fascism Today in the US and Beyond

Uncle Milton writes:

Bernardio Carpio: I have a gut feel that what you are going through in the USA today is what the Germans were going through during the Weimar Republic in the late 20′s and early 30′s, before Hitler took over. An aggressive, determined, fanatical, irrational right wing. A reactionary middle class.

UM: I doubt it …and this is coming from someone who has several Jewish relatives. If we are sliding towards fascism it is much more likely to be the half-assed Latin American variety wherein the elites are behind walled compounds protected by bodyguards and the masses suffer from mass inflation and economic instability.

Milton is right about most of it except for the inflation. There won’t be any. And I do consider Latin American fascism to be real fascism.

Fascism is simply any far rightwing, anti-democratic movement.

The opposition to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Venezuelan, Bolivian and Ecuadorian opposition, the Honduran ruling elite, all of these are fascists because they hate democracy.

Any violent, murderous, rightwing government is automatically fascist. The Salvadoran right is still fascist. The ruling elite in Haiti is fascist, as is the ruling elite in the Dominican Republic. The Guatemalan and Colombian states are obviously fascist.

Going abroad, the Indonesian and Phillipine states have been fascist forever.

The middle classes in many places are fascist. The “yellow shirt” middle class opposition in Thailand is clearly fascist. The leader of the poor, the “red shirts,” Thakhsin, won the election in 2006, and they refused to accept the results because they boycotted it.

They rioted and demanded another election. Incredibly, he accepted a new election, but then the yellow shirts staged a military coup. The US corporate scum press said he was thrown out because he was corrupt, but all Thai governments are corrupt. The yellow shirt government was just as corrupt as the red shirts or even worse.

The opposition in Belarus is fascist. Lukashenko won the last election fair and square. It was proven by many observers, and exit polls proved it too. He won by a very wide margin. The corporate scum press around the world said he stole the election and that the opposition really won.

Then the opposition, which represents maybe 2

The modern Republican Party in the US is fascist because it is a far rightwing and fiercely anti-democratic party. They refuse to accept the legitimacy of any Democratic President. In that sense, they resemble the middle class yellow shirts of Thailand. It is important to note that it is their hostility to democracy and refusal to recognize the opposition as legitimate that makes the Republicans fascists.

And going by conversations with them, most Republicans are fascists themselves. I realized this when Bush stole the 2000 election. I talked to a lot of Republicans back then. It seemed like most of them recognized that Bush was stealing the election, but they just did not care. At that point, I realized that we were doomed.

The truth is this: the business sector, the capitalists, are almost always fascist when there is a left government in power or threatening to take power. It’s true all over the world. They simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of a left regime.

More on the Sierra Kills and Bigfoot DNA

Regarding the Sierra Kills, in which two Bigfoots were shot and killed in Plumas County, California, in November 2010, new evidence has surfaced casting doubt on the shooter’s story.

The shooter claims that he went back two weeks later and dug through the snow to find a 7 inch long by 4 inch wide by 3 inch deep “Bigfoot steak.”

Many people have suggested that finding such a huge chunk of a dead Bigfoot in the snow two weeks later is dubious.

Bigfoot steak was carved off a body with a knife. We now have information that Dr. Melba Ketchum, who is running the DNA project, said that the Bigfoot steak seemed to have been carved off of a dead body with either a knife or some sort of tool. This suggests that the story about the shooter finding it two weeks later in the snow is not true. Instead, the logical suggestion is that the shooter carved it off the body before he left that day or took one or more of the bodies or parts with him and carved it off later.

Shooter wants amnesty from prosecution. Sources on Taxidermy.net continue to believe that the shooter took one or more of the bodies or parts of them with him that day and that he continues to hold evidence. They say that unless he gets an amnesty for prosecution for shooting the Bigfoots, he will disappear all of the evidence. I support giving the shooter amnesty. In fact, I put an attorney in touch with him for just that reason.

Erickson/Ketchum Project chaos. Ketchum and Adrian Erickson continue to have a huge falling out. For a long time, she was not even returning his phone calls. This is all because he won’t sign one of her  fancy new NDA’s that gives her all the rights and him none. However, she did call him recently because she was upset at all of the leaks and was wondering who was behind them.

Ketchum paper accepted for peer review? According to a comment on Cryptomundo, Ketchum submitted her paper to a journal for peer review in early December 2010 and the journal accepted it early February 2011. That means that the paper meets the required scientific standards for the journal, and that, even if some reviewers have critical comments during the peer review process, it will still be accepted with some sort of changes, ranging from major to minor. If true, this is excellent news.

However, on June 11, 2011, Rich Germeau of the Olympic Project stated on a forum that the paper had not been sent out yet. So the situation is very confused.

However, if the commenter is correct and Germeau is wrong then the Ketchum paper is in much better shape than I thought it was.

Bigfoot steak DNA tests positive for a Bigfoot. On a recent radio show, JC Johnson and Derek Randles suggested obliquely that DNA tests on the Bigfoot steak had tested positive as coming from an actual Bigfoot.

Is the Sierra Kills story a hoax? Some people say that the Sierra Kills story is a hoax. They believe that the shooter hoaxed the story by making it up. He went to Taxidermy.net and made up a big story about killing two Bigfoots. Then he fooled the Olympic Project into believing his story. Then he somehow hoaxed the Bigfoot steak sent to Ketchum’s lab, though in order to do this, he would have had to have cut a slice off of a very hairy human cadaver.

Sources who believe in this say that there could be various reasons why he would do this. For one, they say he is an extreme redneck and an ultra rightwinger who supposedly did not believe in Bigfoot before. They say this is just the sort of person who creates a Bigfoot hoax. They also feel that he is a highly disreputable and unreliable person, and this sheds doubt on his tale.

In addition, according to a thread on Taxidermy.net, two Black bears, a mother and a cub, were reportedly shot dead near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge at the beginning of November 2010. The sources suggest that the shooter shot a female bear and her cub and turned that story into the shooting of two Bigfoots. Adding weight to this, the Nevada Department of Fish and Game, asked about the Sierra Kills story, said that it was two bears that were killed and not two Bigfoots.

As far as the Bigfoot steak, sources say that judging from the shooter’s character, he would not be below slicing a piece off the thigh of a human cadaver.

I don’t believe that this story is a hoax.

Shooter very religious, a polarizing personality. We have more information on the shooter. He moved from Texas to another state, apparently with his family, at at least age 16 and has lived in this state ever since. He is extremely religious – a fundamentalist Christian. I have seen a photo of him at age 16 after killing two bucks. His hair is dyed punk rock flame red and he has a pro-Christian t-shirt on.

I’ve been accused of harping on the shooter’s character. It’s true that I don’t like him, and a lot of others don’t either. However, he has a wife who loves him and a wide circle of friends.

Some people are just bad. Everyone agrees. Not so with this guy.

The shooter instead is more of a polarizing figure, something like his hero George Bush. The very things that those who don’t like him hate about him are what make a lot of others think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. As he says on his webpage: “I’m the type of guy you either love or hate. I’m fine either way.” This is a much better way of looking at his character as opposed to flat out saying he’s a bad guy.

Possible Sierra Kills government coverup. Supposing that the Sierra Kills actually happened, the Nevada wildlife officials’ statements is evidence of the government coverup that I have long said must be happening in the realm of Bigfoot.

Possible government investigation into the Sierra Kills and the Bigfoot steak. A new piece by Loren Coleman reveals some very strange emails he has gotten about the Sierra Kills. He has received some emails from folks claiming to have some sort of government connection. They say that federal investigators are closely watching the Sierra Kills investigation. They are monitoring the web forums and blogs and they know who all the players are and what their roles are. When they feel that laws have been broken, they will act.

What is interesting about all of this is that it suggests that the Sierra Kills may have actually happened and that it was not a hoax. Or at least the government seems to think that it happened, or that something happened anyway, as the emails are confusing.

This all smells of Men in Black stuff, but I have said for a long time that MIB are involved in a coverup of Bigfoot evidence.

A Bigfoot is found dead in a man’s yard in Washington state in 2003. He calls the police, but instead of police showing up, a black helicopter lands in his yard and MIB’s get out armed with automatic weapons. They order the man into his home, load the Bigfoot into the copter and fly away.

A sheriff’s deputy responds to a Bigfoot killed by the side of the road in Ohio. He radios for help, and backup shows up. They rope off the scene. Then state police show up. Then the National Guard shows up. Then a black van pulls up, two US soldiers get out, and they cart the Bigfoot to the van and drive away.

There are many more such stories. MIB’s actually exist, but hardly anyone talks about them. Guys dressed all in black, black helicopters, black vans – that’s all military intelligence, top secret, classified. I understand that a black helicopter was used in the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Here are the emails about the Sierra Kills case and Ketchum’s lab using the Bigfoot steak:

I did hear from one of my retired federal investigator sources who still works for them as a consulting evidence expert. He told me essentially they know what is going on and are watching the situation. They have all the forum reports, know where the supposed samples came from, who is and who is not involved and what roles they’re playing.

I get the feeling from him that national security is somehow involved. I don’t know how except perhaps it might have something to do with release or misuse of technology that’s considered vital (educated guess). This is a new area in advanced research and puts a real dent in the how much anyone working on new technology can say or release in any form.

Beyond this he can tell me nothing in specific except that when and if they decide laws have been broken they will act. I know he holds a Top Secret clearance with compartmentalizations. He has multiple degrees in scientific fields and consults for several agencies on evidentiary issues. My work for him was routine but he’s really an interesting person.

He made no reference to any hoax other than to say they know what’s going on and who’s responsible. They will act if and when they decide the situation warrants it. It isn’t quite as bad as portrayed in the Indiana Jones movies but almost so.

And this, also:

I suspect there’s more beyond this supposed hoax than we’ll ever know. This business with the so called Dr. Ketchum smells like another stinking hoax and you’ve done a good job of reporting like you did in 2008. However, this time I’m not buying into it. I don’t know what’s up but when one of the people I’ve done work for in my past government careers tells me for my own good to stay out of a mess I should take his advice.

It’s an interesting twist with the feds watching the whole deal and I wonder what’s up and why but like I said when a friend says stay out I stay out. I suspect that we’ll never know the whole story. So much information is hidden in the name of national security that it’s ridiculous.

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Update to the “Sierra Kills” Story

Updating the story of the two Bigfoots shot and killed in California in November 2010, we can now report that the shooter appears to have taken one or more of the bodies or parts of them with him on the day that he shot them.

Shooter may have taken bodies with him. Although the shooter has never admitted that he took the bodies that day, the evidence seems to indicate that he did.

There is a rumor flying around Taxidermy.net that the shooter said he cut the bodies into small pieces and hid them in a large number of different places or possibly with different people, scattered all around. They are on ice if this is true. This lines up perfectly with the timeline where the Olympic Project went around to Bigfoot forums soon after the killings saying that they had enough samples to last for years. The reason they said that, presumably, is because they have access to two dead Bigfoot bodies.

The shooter said he went back to the site two weeks later and found a small piece of flesh by digging through the snow, which was then sent in to Dr. Melba Ketchum’s DNA project. However, the piece of flesh sent in was 7 inches long by 4 inches wide by 3 inches deep. That’s as big as a steak!

There is no way that a gunshot would have sawed off that big of a chunk of flesh. There is also no way that a chunk of flesh that big would be left from animals eating the body. Further, Bigfoots bury their dead. If the two Bigfoots were left there, then other Bigfoots would have probably come soon after to carry off the dead and bury them somewhere else. Bottom line is that the story about going back two weeks later and finding the Bigfoot steak in the snow may not be true.

Is it possible that the shooter carved off the steak before he left that day? It’s possible, but I talked to taxidermists, and they told me that that story does not ring true. The shooter is a taxidermist himself. The taxidermists told me that no taxidermist would just saw off a piece of a thigh of an animal. A taxidermist would want to take the whole thing. They told me that he must have taken both bodies with him that day, probably putting them in the back of his truck.

One argument is that if the shooter really did kill two Bigfoots, why didn’t he go to the media with the news and get famous? Or why didn’t the Olympic Project do the same thing? The word from my sources is that everyone is afraid of going to jail, and that’s why they didn’t go to the media. A lot of people say they don’t believe that would stop anyone, but that’s the typical dynamic in these Bigfoot shootings. People shoot these things, then they look at the body and see how much it resembles a man, and they are afraid they are going to go down on homicide.

Friends tried to stop him from shooting the Bigfoot. We can also now report that the other man with him tried to stop the shooter from shooting the first Bigfoot. He yelled, “It’s a man in a monkey suit! Don’t shoot!” But he shot it anyway.

Shooter comes out of hiding. The shooter himself appears to be posting on internet forums lately. Here is one thread that appears to be from the shooter. Compared to writings from the shooter’s Internet pages, the writing style seems quite similar.

The probable area of the "Sierra kill" Bigfoot shootings is circled.

Shooter is a “maniac hunter”. The shooter caused quite a stir on Taxidermy.net in a thread about wolves by showing up and saying he would personally kill very single wolf in North America if he was given a chance to. This statement made a lot of people mad and caused a minor furor on the site. This goes in line with the general line about the hunter that he’s a “maniac hunter,” as we described earlier.

Shooter needs amnesty, or else. Sources also tell me that unless the shooter is offered amnesty for the shootings, whatever dead Bigfoot evidence he has stashed away from the shootings is going to disappear. In that case we will have to wait until another Bigfoot is killed, and it will happen again.

I believe that this is true. The shooter should obtain an attorney and begin negotiations with law enforcement in order to obtain an amnesty for the killings, possibly in the name of science or for whatever other reason they can come up with. I strongly support an amnesty for the shooter, if only in interests of science.

“Bigfoot steak” from the Sierra Kills tested 10

Endless delays in Ketchum DNA Project. We can also report now that as of June 11, 2011, Melba Ketchum’s DNA study had still not been completed. The paper has supposedly been written, but they are waiting for the last few samples to come in. After that, the paper will go out for peer review. Why don’t they close enrollment on the samples and say they won’t accept any more for the study? That would seem to be the reasonable thing to do.

In December, on a radio show, Ketchum said exactly the same thing. That the paper was written, but they were waiting for the last few samples to come in. Here it is 5 1/2 months later and she is still saying the same thing. In the early part of the year, we were told that the paper was already out for peer review. Now, 4 1/2 months later, it hasn’t even gone out yet.

These delays are insane. I really don’t think that Ketchum is ever going to publish her paper. I’ve given up hope.

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Chronology of the Recent Bigfoot Shooting Story

I know most of the players in this story, and I believe that it is true. At least the shooting part. Here is what happened.

1. The shooter shows up on Taxidermy.net and starts a thread saying I just shot 2 Bigfoots, now what do I do? The shooter is well known on the site and is a frequent contributor.

2. Thread quickly spins out of control going to 60 pages. The story is revealed on the thread.

3. Mods get messages that shooter is being harassed and threatened by people as a result of the thread, apparently mad that he killed two BF’s.

4. Thread is shut down.

5. A man named “Bear Hunter” from Taxidermy.net gets involved, calls up the shooter and questions him at length. The story outline results:

The 25 year old shooter, a transplanted Texan who left Texas nine years ago, was a passenger in a truck near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge on the Plumas National Forest west of Frenchman Lake in the Sierra Nevada on the border of California and Nevada. It was mid-November 2010, and they were bear hunting. There was already snow on the ground. They hoped to find a bear just before it went into hibernation.

They came around a bend, and there was a dirty white female Bigfoot in the road 80 yards away. The shooter grabbed his 25.06 rifle and jumped out of his vehicle. As he jumped out, the Bigfoot started running towards him waving her arms. When the Bigfoot saw the gun, she turned as if to start to run away. The shooter’s companion yelled, “Don’t shoot! It’s a man in a monkey suit!” But he shot anyway. The shooter shot her in the side of the chest, and the bullet penetrated her lungs.

The shooter says he shot her because he thought she was a bear, but that’s not true. He knew what she was. The reason he shot her is because he thought she was threatening him.

She went down, then got to her feet. She ran off, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. After a while, she crashed off into the brush and died.

The men went to go look for the female Bigfoot. Suddenly two small, strange creatures appeared, sometimes on two legs, sometimes in four. They looked like a cross between a bear and a gorilla. The creatures had very large heads. They were on either side of the hunters, communicating back and forth.

The shooter raised his gun, fired and shot one of the creatures dead. The other small creature apparently escaped. As the shooter cradled the dying creature in his arms, both men realized that it was a young creature of the same type the shooter had just shot. At this point, they figured out that he had killed two Bigfoots. The juvenile Bigfoot died in his arms.

The shooter says he shot the young Bigfoot because it was threatening him. This is not true. He just shot it for some unknown reason.

The other man with the shooter was so hysterical and upset about the shootings at this point that he took the shooter’s gun away from him and pointed it at him, threatening him. He told the shooter that if he tried to shoot another one of those animals, he would shoot the shooter instead.

The story is that they both were so upset by that point that they left the area. The shooter said that they left the animals in the field and that he was not going back to the area until next fall.

The basic outline of the story is uncontroversial and is acknowledged by everyone who believes the story. The only differences are about the motivations of the shooter and what was or was not left behind.

6. Bear Hunter puts the shooter in contact with the Olympic Project (OP) in Washington State. The OP says, “We’re just trying to keep the shooter out of jail!” The shooter is very frightened of going to jail over the killing of the two Bigfoots. At this point, the story seems to die.

7. Suddenly Bear Hunter realizes that the shooter is deeply involved in the OP. This seems odd. Why is a guy who just shot two Bigfoots suddenly a major part of this organization?

8. Mysteriously, the OP appears on various Bigfoot forums, bragging that they have enough Bigfoot DNA samples to last for years. Bear Hunter regards this as curious and suspects that the shooter may have harvested one or both of the killed Bigfoots or parts of them and is keeping them on ice somewhere and giving the OP access to them.

9. Bizarrely, someone in California, apparently the shooter, submits a very strange sample to Melba Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA project. It resembles a large slice off the thigh of a human cadaver, except that it is very hairy. The slice is about seven inches long by four inches wide by two-three inches deep – it’s a Bigfoot steak. The color of the hair is the same color as that of the killed mother Bigfoot. It appears to have been carved off of a body with a knife or some sort of a tool.

Dr. Ketchum freaks out because she thinks she is in possession of tissue sliced off a dead Bigfoot. She is worried that police will raid her lab to take away the sample and everything else she has, because that’s what the government does with Bigfoot evidence. She tries to get others to hold it for her instead. The others decline to take it off her hands.

11. The Bigfoot steak tests out as “no known mammal.” However, the DNA (probably MtDNA) tests as “human.” Nevertheless, according to a recent radio show, two men associated with Ketchum’s DNA project implied that the Bigfoot steak tested out as coming from a Bigfoot by DNA.

12. I break the story.

13. Pandemonium ensues.

14. The OP appears on forums, agreeing with the basics of the story: that the two Bigfoots were shot in the time and place where they were killed. They differ on the motivations of the shooter and certain other relatively non-important things.

They also reveal that the shooter went back to the site two weeks later, dug through the snow and found a nice chunk of the dead Bigfoot mother. Someone, apparently the shooter, sent the Bigfoot steak to Ketchum’s lab from California.

Credibility:

Adrian Erickson, Melba Ketchum, the Olympic Project, Bear Hunter and the shooter all think that the Bigfoot shooting story is true in its basic facts. They also agree that a chunk of one dead Bigfoot was sent to Ketchum’s lab.

Adrian Erickson, Richard Stubstad and Ketchum agree that Ketchum freaked out when she got the sample because she thought it was from a Bigfoot, and she thought the authorities would raid her lab to seize the Bigfoot steak and the rest of her samples, since this what they do with Bigfoot evidence.

People associated with Taxidermy.net agree that the long thread existed until it was shut down.

Possibility of a hoax: The general conclusion on the Net is that the story itself is fake.

Let us look at that possibility.

We know that the Taxidermy.net thread is real.

What if the shooter just made up the whole story? It’s possible, but I do not think he made up this story. His character is open to debate, but he’s not a faker or a hoaxer. On the other hand, some say that he is a very unreliable person and that at one point at least, he did not believe in Bigfoot. So it’s conceivable he made up the story as a gag, since that is what non-believers do.

What if the OP is making up the story? They don’t make stuff up. They are good researchers with excellent integrity. They don’t hoax. However, it is possible that they were hoaxed by the shooter, although I don’t believe that this happened.

The hunk of flesh adds credibility to the story. The OP says it’s a chunk of Bigfoot flesh from one the killed Bigfoots. Could it have been hoaxed? Possibly.

However, someone would have had to have had access to a human cadaver and then sawed off a chunk of the thigh. How likely is that? Further, this would have had to have been a very strange human cadaver, one covered with hair. And the hair would have had to have been the exact same color of the hair of one of the Bigfoots that got shot. How likely is that? In addition, two men made statements on a radio show implying that the Bigfoot steak tested out as coming from a Bigfoot by DNA.

Conclusion: As you can see, there is a great deal about this incident that seems to point away from a hoax or a lie. In fact, I believe it is neither, and I believe the basis for the story is true.

The two Bigfoots were indeed shot dead in California in November. At least one piece from one of the Bigfoots was sent in by the OP to Ketchum’s DNA lab for testing. The director thought that it was a slice of a killed Bigfoot, and she requested others take it off her hands in case the police raid the lab and seize the sample as they tend to do with Bigfoot evidence.

There you have it.

Breathtaking News from the Erickson Project

The leaks from people close to the Erickson Project continue to come in fast and furious.

Surely the most breathtaking news so far involves the sequencing of Bigfoot DNA. We already reported previously on the sequencing Bigfoot mitochondrial DNA, which is coming out 10

However, we can now report on the sequencing of the nuclear DNA from the male side. The report is that it is absolutely non-human! It is very far away from humans. In the chart below, various hominins are measured according to their distance away from humans in terms of polymorphisms (P* distance).

Hominin spp.   P* Distance   Date of split

Neandertal     9,200         508,000?
Denisova       18,400?       840,000
Bigfoot        68,300?       2.25 M?
Chimpanzee     182,000       6 M

As you can see, Bigfoots are approximately 1/2 way between humans and chimps. More precisely, they are 37.

We only have DNA from three hominids: Homo sapiens, Neandertal and Denisova. We have no DNA from Flores Man, Erectus or any of the rest. One reason for this is that DNA degrades, and it is impossible to get DNA from samples more than 50,000 years old. Flores Man samples were too degraded to get any DNA yet.

Therefore, evidence indicates that Bigfoots are a hybrid species. Some “thing,” some “monster,” some “subhuman,” mated with human females somewhere in Europe possibly ~20-50,000 YBP. Shades of King Kong!

What this “thing” was is completely unknown. It must be a hominid. It quite possibly was Homo erectus. Therefore, Bigfoots may be Erectus-sapiens hybrids.

The closest thing to an Erectus-sapiens hybrid is Heidelberg Man, or Homo heidelbergensis. This was late Homo erectus trending into archaic Homo sapiens. There is suggestive evidence that a heidelbergensis skull was found in China dated 13,000 YBP.

If Bigfoot is part-Erectus, this explains certain things. Erectus still had a midtarsal break in Europe 300,000 YBP. Erectus had a saggital crest.

It is clear by now that the “Bigfoot is an ape” theory lies in the dust. Bigfoot is a man, an ancient man, a blast from our ancient past, a subhuman, a human ancestor. He’s one of us, but he’s not.

In addition, we can report that the Erickson Project Bigfoot DNA study has isolated DNA from 20 separate Bigfoot individuals from around North America. They received hundreds of samples, but many were not useful. Of the 20 separate individuals, Adrian Erickson’s samples represented six individuals.

One of the samples was called “unknown hand.” This was hand of a “something,” but no one knows what. Inside the Project, people were taking bets on what the hand was from. Dr. Melba Ketchum bet that it was a bear. Others bet that it was not a bear. Ketchum never got any money from the bet. Whatever this strange object was, it was not a bear paw. No one knows what it was. Maybe it was a Bigfoot hand.

Don Monroe found the hand in a dump somewhere in Montana or Idaho. A skinned bear paw that has the claws removed and resembles a human hand to a great deal. The hand was a bone with some relict skin remaining on it. All of the hair was gone. It’s not known if Ketchum’s lab even tested the hand for DNA.

One of the samples was a bone from a stream in Oregon. It may have been a femur. The bone looks like a human bone, but it is much too large. It was submitted by David Paulides’ North American Bigfoot Search (NABS).

We also have some updates in the story about the killing of the two Bigfoots near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge in California’s Sierra Nevada in November 2010. There were two other men in the truck with the shooter at the time. At least one of the men was absolutely hysterical that the shooter shot the two Bigfoots. The other man was also not happy about the situation.

We can also report that the section of Bigfoot thigh sent to the Erickson Project DNA test from the shooting was auburn haired, and it also had a lot of grey in it. This slab was from the mother Bigfoot that was shot dead. She was probably a middle aged Bigfoot, ~45 years old in human terms or ~25 years old in Bigfoot terms. Her two offspring, one of which was also shot dead, were ~10 years old in human terms or ~5 years old in Bigfoot terms.

To this date, we do not know what the shooter did after he killed the two Bigfoots.

I know the name of the shooter, but for some reason, I am not releasing it, though I probably should. It will come out later anyway. His name can be found by industrious web sleuths who are intelligent about Internet sleuthing. The shooter has changed his story many times, and is very afraid of going to jail over killing of these two Bigfoots.

He is wise to be afraid of this, because I know some wealthy and connected people who told me that they are dedicated to seeing that the shooter goes to prison over killing the Bigfoots. These people think Bigfoots are humans, so killing one is homicide. So if I were the shooter, I would not be straight up about this matter either. Further, I would retain a good attorney. If the Olympic Project has any sense, they will have also spoken to attorneys too, because their mitts are all over these two killed Bigfoots.

The shooter is a narcissist and a redneck, and I don’t like him. You can tell he’s a narcissist. Look at his photos. Just look at that smug, smarmy look in eyes. I don’t think he’s a good person.

There are different kinds of hunters. Most hunters are good people, but a minority are not. The bad guys have the same mindset about hunting. They basically just like to kill things because they like to kill. You can tell who the bad ones are. You can see it in their eyes. They will shoot just about anything as long as it is not illegal. This guy has that look about him.

This is what kind of a person and hunter the shooter is. He is well known in the hunting and taxidermy community and is not well liked at all. In that community, he is thought of as a “maniac hunter” and an “unethical hunter.”

He could change any time he wants, quit being bad and start being good. His choice. I don’t think he will ever change though, because he is very happy being the smug ex-Texan prick that he is. Most of his friends are the same as he is, and so is the California woman who became his wife two years ago, who is now expecting.

Most narcissists never feel guilt about anything that they do. There are some reports that the shooter feels bad about killing the two Bigfoots. Perhaps he does. He may have some sort of a conscience. I bet he’s more afraid of getting caught though.

The Olympic Project has changed their story about this shooting several times now. I actually do not blame them. If I were in as deep as they are, I would get myself a nice, fancy story too.

For several months after November, their line was that the OP never went out to the shooting site.

Then they said that the OP did go to the shooting site 2 weeks later, and they found a chunk of Bigfoot flesh in the snow.

Now the OP says that only the shooter went back 2 weeks later and found the piece of flesh.

The story about going back later and finding a hunk of flesh strikes me as dubious, but maybe it happened. Who knows, right?

In addition, the OP said for a long time after the shooting, “Let’s make one thing clear! There were no two Bigfoots shot and killed!”

But after I broke the story, they changed their line to saying that a man that the OP knows well did shoot and kill the two Bigfoots.

They say he shot the first one because he thought she was a bear and shot the second one because it was threatening him.

Neither report is true.

The shooter knew she was not a bear. His line is he thought she was threatening him. And the second one wasn’t threatening him either.

The shooter was a passenger in the truck with three bear hunters near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge on the California/Nevada border in November 2010. They came around a bend, and there was a grayish white female Bigfoot in the road on all fours. The shooter grabbed his gun and jumped out of his vehicle. As he jumped out, he saw the Bigfoot get up on two legs and start running towards him waving her arms. When the Bigfoot saw the gun, she turned and started to run away. The shooter shot her in the side of the chest, and the bullet penetrated her lungs.

She crashed off into the brush and died. The three men went down into the brush and saw her there. It was then that they realized that she was not a bear at all. They walked back up onto the road.

When they got to the road, they saw two small, strange creatures running towards them, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four legs. The shooter raised his gun, fired and shot one of the creatures dead. The other small creature apparently escaped. As the shooter cradled the dying creature in his arms, they all three realized that it was a young creature of the same type that had just gotten shot. The juvenile Bigfoot had a huge head, and the shooter said it looked exactly like the Jacobs creature photo.

The shooter did not shoot the young Bigfoot because it was threatening him, which is his story. He just shot it for some unknown reason.

At this point they figured out that they had killed two Bigfoots. The two men with the shooter were so hysterical and upset about the shootings that they took the shooter’s gun away from him and pointed it at him, threatening him. They told him that if he tried to shoot another one of those animals, they would shoot him instead. The story is that everyone was so upset by that point that they left the area. The shooter said that they left the animals in the road, and he was not going back to the area until next fall.

There is a lot of fighting inside the Erickson Project. Adrian Erickson and Melba Ketchum are not getting along well. At least one reason is that Erickson paid Ketchum $70,000 for the sequencing of six Bigfoot samples. To this date, he has not received results from these samples, even though those samples do represent six separate confirmed Bigfoot individuals. He did receive results from one DNA test, the test he had done on himself. Most of the principals had their own DNA tested to avoid contamination.

Erickson had an agreement with Ketchum that if his Bigfoot samples tested out as coming from real Bigfoots, they would then be used in the final writeup. One or more of his samples were from real Bigfoots, but Ketchum is apparently threatening to not include them in her paper due to their falling out. So Erickson is threatening to sue her for violating their agreement.

Erickson has also threatened to sue a couple of other folks, including Dennis Pfohl and Mike Rugg, but I am not sure of the reason. Erickson is well liked, and he is also deeply respected. At the same time, the respect seems tinged with fear. He has sunk $3 million into this project, and he is not going to get it back.

One great thing to come out of the release of the Erickson Project results is that maybe Bigfoot witnesses will not be so persecuted. Roger Patterson was not an honorable man, but he did shoot a real video of a Bigfoot in California in 1967. He was so hounded by skeptics that they may have driven him to an early grave.

Bob Gimlin was so upset at the hounding that he more or less retreated from the public eye for over 20 years after the shooting of the video. He only came out in 1989. Gimlin is a tough man, but all of the attacks have still hurt him. Entire books and countless articles and Internet pieces have been written about how he hoaxed the famous video.

From Canada, word comes that Bigfoots are much more common around Indian communities than around non-Indians. It seems that Bigfoots are more comfortable around Indians than around non-Indians. One may speculate about reasons.

Updating a previous story, a trapper in McBride, British Colombia has told people that he was recently kidnapped by Bigfoots, who took him back to a cave and tried to make him have sex with a female Bigfoot. It’s an updated Albert Ostman story.

Another trapper somewhere in British Colombia is living by himself way out in the woods far away from anyone else. He is reportedly nearly living with a group of Bigfoots. He sees them every single day. This may possibly be the same man who says he was kidnapped by Bigfoots. The stories should be followed up.

A previous post reported on some Canadians who dug up a muskeg and found a Bigfoot hand skeleton in it. It was a Bigfoot burial ground. In northern Canada, Bigfoots use muskegs as burial grounds. This particular muskeg was in northern Saskatchewan.

The Bigfoot shooting and DNA stories are powerful news, maybe the stories of the year. Bigfoot is on the verge of being formally discovered by science.

*******

In 1958, the Russian scientist Dr. Boris Porchnev concluded that relict hominids, cavemen from the Stone Age, continue to live among us to this very day. His prophetic views have been vindicated. The implications are nothing less than breathtaking. It’s nearly the story of the century already, and we’ve only just come round the bend. Hold onto your seats.

Check out Bigfoot Forums for the best Bigfoot discussion on the web.

References

Porchnev, Boris and Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1974. L’homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant (Neanderthal Is Still Alive). Paris: Plon.

Bear Hunter Interview Part 2: More Outrageous Bigfoot Allegations and Revelations

Here is the second part of my interview with a fellow I will call Bear Hunter. The widely read first part is here.

It deals with a wide range of subjects, including why we have a hard time getting good trailcam videos of Bigfoots, Bigfoots burying their dead in peat bogs, Bigfoot gravediggers who dug up a Bigfoot grave and found a skeleton of a Bigfoot hand, a trapper who is more or less living with a group of Bigfoots, an wilderness area with a huge number of disappearances that may be Bigfoot-related, and most outrageously of all, a man who claims that he was kidnapped by Bigfoots and  taken to their lair where they tried to force him to mate with a female Bigfoot a la the famous Albert Ostman story.

I think we ought to send someone up to Canada to try to find the guy who is reporting the Albert Ostman Redux story. At the very least, it deserves to be investigated.

RL: Do you think Bigfoots avoid trailcams? Some people say that they avoid those cameras.

BH: They do avoid them as a matter of fact. They can hear the cams. The cams give off a lot of noise. It’s at a low frequency that humans can’t hear, but the Bigfoots can hear it. Other animals can hear it too, but they are not as wary as Bigfoots. For instance, some of your great big trophy deer won’t go near one. Bigfoots can hear them for quite a ways away, and they just stay away from them. The manufacturers know that the cams give off a lot of noise, and they are working now to reduce the noise that they give off.

RL: What do you think Bigfoots do with their dead? I say they bury them.

BH: They do bury their dead. In Canada, they bury their dead in peat bogs. These bogs are funny places, sort of like swamps, but they are almost like quicksand. You can sink down and get trapped and die in them if you are not careful. I know some guys who dug up a bog and found some Bigfoot bones. They put all the bones together and ended up with a Bigfoot hand skeleton.

RL: Why don’t they go public with it?

BH: You have to understand the way these guys are. These types…they just don’t care. They don’t care about getting famous or going public or anything like that. They are outside of all of that. These guys who found the skeleton have a cabin way back in the woods that they use for recreation. The Bigfoot hand skeleton is there, mounted on a piece of wood. They have a few beers, get drunk, bring this thing out and laugh about it and make jokes. That’s all they want to do with it.

RL: Are you aware of any habituation stories we haven’t heard about yet?

BH: There is a guy in British Colombia, a trapper who lives way out in the woods. He’s supposedly totally habituated some Bigfoots. He’s more or less living with them in a sense. He sees them every single day.

RL: What do you think of the Albert Ostman story? Is it true?

BH: It’s a true story. What’s even more strange is that there is a fellow up in British Colombia, a trapper, who has a similar story. He was talking to a friend of mine, telling him about Bigfoots, and then the trapper mentions that he got kidnapped by Bigfoots once! My friend said that at that point, he stopped listening to the guy, forget it.

The guy said a Bigfoot kidnapped him and took him back to a cave where the Bigfoots were living and tried to force the guy to have sex with a female Bigfoot! Just like the Albert Ostman story, no? So it looks like maybe Bigfoots do kidnap humans sometimes for breeding purposes.

RL: Is this guy who got kidnapped by the Bigfoots for breeding the same as the guy who is living in a habituation situation with the Bigfoots?

BH: He may well be. They are both trappers in British Colombia living way out in the woods.

You know, we also have people in Canada who disappear on a regular basis. There is one area of British Colombia where 21 people have vanished without a trace over many years. It’s also an area with many Bigfoot sightings. A lot of people are scared to go in there. I know a lot of outdoorsmen who refuse to go anywhere near that area. It seems like there is something creepy going on there. I am wondering if the Bigfoots are behind the disappearances, and if any of this involves kidnapping humans for breeding purposes.

Check out Bigfoot Forums for the best Bigfoot discussion on the web.

Types of Libertarian Morons

All Libertarians are morons; there are just different types of stupid.

America is probably one of the only countries in the world where Libertarianism has any kind of sway at all, although I understand that for some reason, it is relatively popular in Costa Rica for some reason, possibly because the country is heavily White. Whites are the only race on Earth who will heavily go in for Libertarianism, because Whites are much more selfish and individualistic than any other race. European, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealander Whites are not prone to selfishness of individualism.

Selfish and individualistic politics is popular among White elites in Latin America, but only in places where Whites are a minority.

In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, where Whites or near-Whites are more or less a majority, selfish and individualistic politics is far less popular, since your average White person there is just an ordinary working class person, not a member of an elite group.

Nevertheless, the Cone nations have been ruled by a particularly vicious White elite for a long time. This elite has spent much of the last 40 years slaughtering the working class Whites of the Cone countries in order to maintain their outrageous and feudal-style wealth. As a consequence, White politics in the Cone is polarized into Hard Left and Hard Right, in a way similar to some Mediterranean countries like Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Small government is popular with White elites, as this philosophy in general is only popular with elites around the world. The German Social Democrats used to have a saying, “Only the rich can afford a poor state.” Of course this is true, and this is why the rich the world over, especially in the 3rd World, tend to favor a minimal state. Hatred of taxation is also typical of elites the world over, particularly in the 3rd World.

In general, ordinary people the world over do not favor small government or hate taxation. In that sense, Americans, particularly White Americans, are very strange. The views of White Americasns are more typical of world elites than the ordinary working class people of the world. It’s as if your ordinary working class White person identifies more with his class enemies, the rich, than with his own class. Working class Whites also see themselves as elites, which is odd, since they are not elites, and in fact they are extremely oppressed by their own elites.

This strange philosophy probably has its roots in the Frontier Ethic, the break from colonialism, and the radical individualism that has long characterized White American culture.

As America becomes increasingly non-White, this view will decline. Asians are not radical individualists, and Asian nations are not characterized by small government and low taxation. Hispanics and Blacks are collectivist peoples who also have no interest in small government and low taxation. Black nations are like Asian nations in that there is no interest in Libertarian-style governance.

These trends show no sign of changing in the future. Even as Asians, Hispanics and Blacks make good money and move up in the world, they retain their collectivist roots.

The future does not look good for Libertarian types in the US in the long term, though they may make some gains in the short term.

The future looks bleak for Libertarianism in the world at large, as most nations have no interest in small government or low taxation.

Seen more properly, the vast majority of the world’s people, and the overwhelming majority of the working class, are collectivist people.

 

Propaganda About Cuba’s Medical Missions

Here.

According to the article, ordinary Cubans are suffering as the regime sends doctors abroad on medical missions, apparently mostly to make money for the state. I think it was a good idea to send the doctors abroad, as it’s making good money for the regime and helping a lot of people in the 3rd World.

I know that Cuba gets a good deal out of the doctors who they send to Venezuela, but I am not sure if they charge or not to send doctors to other countries besides Venezuela. I don’t think that the regime should send doctors to 3rd World countries for free, other than in a crisis situation.

Charity begins at home. The nation is short of cash in a lot of ways, and it shows. Downtown Havana needs renovation, and a lot of the buildings may simply need to be torn down. Quite a few are in danger of collapsing. The sewage system in Havana needs repairs. There is a chronic housing shortage. The nation is often short of electricity in a place where an air conditioner could really come in handy. The hospitals and clinics tend to be short of supplies. Given all of that, why not make money off the doctors? Why give them away for free?

The article says that ordinary Cubans are suffering, but there is nothing to that. Cuba has one of the best doctor-patient ratios on Earth. Before the medical missions, if anything, the island was overdoctored and doctors didn’t have enough to do. That’s not a good use of all of that skill and education.

Americans Love Austerity, But No One Else Does

Let’s get one thing clear now: the policies of the rich and the upper middle class benefit the rich and the upper middle class and only those classes. As a good general rule, they help those classes and hurt everyone else.

Capitalism can be thought of a gigantic pie with all of the classes fighting over slices of the pie. The policies of the upper classes are always and everywhere designed to take money from the poor, the working class and the middle class and give that money to the upper classes. It’s called Class War, and it is continuous and ongoing in most capitalist countries.

In some social democratic states in Europe, a sort of a social peace has been reached via a Social Contract in which the upper classes have been relatively quiet about their demands. But as soon as the last crisis hit, the upper classes began demanding the dismantling of the social contract and the mass transfer of funds from the people to the wealthy, mostly from ordinary workers to the banks.

This is really a reinstatement of feudalism. Workers are being saddled with debt bondage into the forseeable future, their lives trashed to pay for their debts to their ultra-rich feudal banker lords and masters.

All over Europe, humans rose up against this shock therapy. Everywhere austerity has been tried, it has ruined economies and faciliatated mass transfer or money from workers to the ultra-rich, mostly bankers. Austerity has caused millions of deaths all over the 3rd World as the rich of the West raped and wrecked economies.

A major demand has been to open up the people’s properties to the Western rich. This way the Western rich bought the people’s property as pennies on the dollar. This was a transfer of 3rd World national wealth held by the people and the sovereign nation to the Western ultra-rich.

In some cases, there were demands to sell off national properties. There are demands for the Greeks to sell off their islands. This is really financial warfare perpetrated by the feudal ultra-rich on captive nations. It used to be that warfare was used to capture foreign lands. Now, foreign lands, businesses and markets are conquered and captured by the feudal banker elite via financial warfare. No troops are needed. All you need are banks, the new weapons of mass destruction.

It is normal the world over for humans to protest the nation-wrecking austerity measures that the feudal rich impose on them. The rich have demanded the dismantling of national health care and education, rises in taxes and fees on workers and huge cuts in workers wages, all so the captive nations can pay back the extortionate millionaire banker criminals.

It is proper that normal humans would protest this state of affairs. To my knowledge, it is only in America that austerity was met with huge cheers and demands for more. Parties pushing austerity usually go down to defeat in most of the world. Here, the parties that push the most state destruction, the worst feudal class warfare and the most austerity win by huge margins.

Apparently Americans are mentally ill. No where else on Earth do parties campaign on the ludicrous campaign of “small government.” Normal humans the world love big government. They love their social programs and fight to the death to save them. The hatred for “Big government” and desire for minimal or Libertarian style minimal government is relatively unique to the US. Elsewhere in the world, it is typical of the rich, but not of the masses. Only in the US do the masses subscribe to the policies of the rich.

James Petras, “US Working and Middle Class: Solidarity or Competition in the Face of Crisis?”

Another excellent article by Petras. He discusses the obvious, why working class and middle class Americans consistently support the policies of the rich.

US Working and Middle Class: Solidarity or Competition in the Face of Crisis?

James Petras

“I don’t think you realize how hard it is for the oppressed to become united. Their misery unites them (…) But otherwise their misery is liable to cut them off from one another, for they are forced to snatch the wretched crumbs from each other’s mouth”. – Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays Vol. 9 (Pantheon Books, New York, 1972) p. 379

Introduction

There are two incontestable facts about the United States: the economy and the working class are experiencing a prolonged economic crisis which has lasted over three years and shows no signs of ending; there has been no major revolt, mass national resistance or even large scale protests of any consequence. Few writers have attempted to address this seeming paradox and those who do, have provided partial answers which in fact raise more questions than they answer.

Lines of Inquiry

Essentially most writers emphasize one of the two sides of the “paradox”. The ‘crises’ analysts focus on the extent, duration and enduring nature of the economic breakdown, outlining its harsh impact on the working and middle class in terms of losses of employment, benefits, wages, mortgages etc. Others, mostly left progressive, emphasize the local protests, critical responses registered in opinion polls, occasional complaints of trade union bureaucrats and the hopes and intimations of academics and pundits that a ‘revolt’ is on its way some time in the near future.

Among the minority of less sanguine critical analysts, there is despair, or at least a more pessimist view of the ‘paradox’. They point to several deep-seated psychological, organizational and political obstacles which prevent any revolt or mass unrest from taking hold among the United States’ public.

On the whole these critics see the working and middle class as ‘victims’ of the system, acted upon by false leaders, media manipulation, corporate capitalism and the two party system which prevent them from pursuing their class interests.

In this essay, I will pursue an alternative line of analysis which will argue that the “external enemies” blocking working and middle class resistance are aided and abetted by the behavior and perceived interest within the classes. In pursuit of this line of inquiry, I will argue that both the nature and scope of ‘the crises’ has been misunderstood in its impact on the working and middle class and as a consequence the degree of internal contradictions within those classes has not been adequately understood.

Key Concepts: Clarifying ‘Crises’ and its Impact

Economic crises, even severe, prolonged ones, such as is affecting the US today, do not have a uniform impact on all sectors of the working and middle class. The uneven impact has segmented the working and middle class, between those who are adversely affected and those not, or who in certain circumstances have benefited. This segmentation is one key factor accounting for the lack of class solidarity and has resulted in ‘contradictions’ within and between the working and middle class.

Secondly the uneven development of social organization – especially trade unionization – between public and private sector workers, has led to the former securing and retaining greater social benefits and increases and wages, while the former has lost ground. The public sector workers draw on public financing to fund their ‘corporate interests’ while private sector workers are forced to pay increased taxes, because of regressive fiscal legislation.

The result is an apparent or real conflict of interest between well-organized public workers organized around a narrow set of (self) interests and the mass of unorganized private sector workers who, unable to increase their wages via class struggle, side with “fiscal conservatives” (funded by big business) to demand cutbacks from public sector workers.

Political partisanship, especially among middle and working class Democrats, undercuts class solidarity and weakens unified social resistance. This is evident in relation to issues of war and peace, the economic crises and cutbacks in social programs.

When the Democrats hold office, as they do today ad the wars and war spending multiply, the bulk of the peace movement has disappeared, labor protests against budget cutbacks focus on Republican governors, not Democrats, even as the working and middle class (including public sector employees) are adversely affected.

The millionaire top trade union officials (average annual salary over $300,000 plus perks) further the division by prioritizing the security of their position via million dollar contributions to the Democrats, thus buying insurance on income flows from dues payments. Security of officialdom via alignment with Party legislators and governors, mayors and executive leaders contributes to a further division within the working class between ‘secure functionaries’ and their followers on the one hand, and the rest of the middle and working class.

Operating with these key concepts we will now turn to describing the ‘objective conditions of crises’, a critical survey of some explanations for the ‘paradox’, and follow with a detailed examination of the ‘internal contradictions’ and conclude by outlining some points of departure for resolving the paradox.

Economic Crisis is Real, Deep and Sustained

The symptoms and structures of a deep economic crisis are readily visible to any but the most obtuse government apologist or prestigious economist: un- and under-employment has reached between 18 to 20 percent. One out of three US families are directly affected by loss of employment. One out of ten American family homeowners are either behind in the mortgage payments or face foreclosure. Over half of the current unemployed (9.1 percent) have been out of work at least six months.

Massive cutbacks in public expenditures and investments have led to the end of health, educational and welfare programs for tens of millions of low income families, children, the disabled, the elderly pensioners. Private firms have eliminated or reduced payments for health insurance, leaving over 50 million working Americans without health insurance and another 30 million with inadequate medical coverage. Tax exemptions, reduced and regressive taxation have increased tax payments by wage and salaried workers, reducing their net income.

Increases in pension and health payments forced on middle and working class employees have further reduced net income. Increased spending for at least four wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya) preparation for a fifth (Iran) and support for the world’s most militarist state (Israel) and a greatly expanded and costly domestic police state apparatus (Homeland Security alone costs $180 billion) has greatly deteriorated environmental, workplace and leisure space living standards.

Corporate political power and absolute tyrannical control over the workplace has increased fear, insecurity and virtual terror among employees facing increased speed-ups and arbitrary elimination of any say in health and workplace safety, work schedules, over and under time workloads. Low pay service jobs proliferate, high pay jobs are outsourced out of the country; manufacturing plants are relocated abroad; lower paid immigrant professionals and laborers are imported increasing pressure on US workers to compete for lower pay and lesser benefits.

The ‘economic crises’ is embedded in the deep structure of US capitalism and is not a ‘cyclical phenomenon’ subject to a dynamic recovery, restoring lost jobs, homes, living standards and working conditions.

Middle and Working Class Responses to the Economic Crises

The profound, deep seated and pervasive economic crises has not elicited any commensurate revolts, rebellion or even sustained national protest movement. At best local protests by specific segments of the working and middle class have sought to defend narrow organizational and economic interests. The public employees in Wisconsin’s protest movement were as exceptional in its militancy as it was isolated and limited in its overall national impact.

As California Republican and New York Democratic governors eliminate tens of billions of dollars in wages, pension and health benefits for hundreds of thousands of unionized public employees, union officials squawk impotently on the sidelines, incapable of mounting any serious protests let alone popular movements.

Though public opinion polls register high levels of individual concern about the economic crises and dissatisfaction with both political parties the response to the crises has not led to practical activity, nor has any mass ‘movement’’ emerged – it remains private inconsequential discontent.

As much as millions of middle and working classes are deeply preoccupied with the ongoing economic crises there are no significant social or political repercussions past, present or in the foreseeable future.

All the inflated hopes and ‘ominous prognostications’ by liberals and leftists, socialists and progressives, who wrote and predicted a coming ‘revolt of the masses’ have been flat wrong. The crisis continues and the highly dissatisfied middle and working class remain privately suffering, muttering their grievances in isolation, unwilling to engage in any mass collective action.

Even as the mass media, even as the internet, Facebook and Tweeter, present millions demonstrating and striking and even toppling oppressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa; even as news reports filter out of repeated general strikes and mass occupations of public plazas by employees and workers and unemployed in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, the United States workers stand numb, indifferent and impotent to ‘learn the lessons’ and ‘take collective action’ even where the issues of employment and cutbacks are similar.

Explanations for Social Immobility in the Face of the Economic Crises

There is no lack of ‘recognition’ that ‘something is wrong’ in these United States. There is no lack of pundits attempting to grapple with the paradox of economic crises and social immobility.

Several explanatory forays are floating through the media and the internet. Some writers resort to psychological explanations of social passivity pointing to widespread ‘fear’ of employer retaliation, state repression, or a sense of ‘futility’ in the face of political party indifference and hostility. The psychological arguments have some merit as they point to some of the immediate causes of non-involvement but fail to explain what causes ‘fear’ and futility.

In response many critical progressive cite the absence or weakness of social organizations in particular they point to the decline of trade union organizations, leaving 93 percent of the private sector unorganized and the state sector unionized workers with limited bargaining powers. While these critics are right to emphasize the unwillingness of millionaire trade union officials to break new political ground and initiate new organizing efforts, one needs to explain why the unorganized middle and working class have not themselves launched any new initiatives?

Union officials have a long history of “give backs” going back at least two decades and yet those who are directly adversely affected and those who have lost their jobs have not organized an alternative network of solidarity.

Political analysts emphasize the oligarchic and restrictive nature of the electoral system as pre-empting the emergence of new political initiatives. The multi-million dollar cost of running for office, the near monopoly dominance of the mass media by the corporate two-party elite and the legal obstacle to securing a place on the ballot, discourage disenchanted voters from supporting new political party initiatives.

But the deeper question is why mass movements, outside of the party-electoral framework, have not emerged that might eventually challenge the political oligarchy, the corporate monopoly of media and change the legal constraints on effective entry into the electoral arena. Why do mass movements emerge in other even more repressive countries, facing similar constraints on legal access and confronted by entrenched oligarchies?

If similar ‘external constraints’ as those found in the US led to divergent behavioral responses, it raises the question of whether the differences within the middle and working class can be the source of passivity and immobility?

A few writers, principally on the Left, cite the divorce or distance between intellectuals/academics and the downwardly mobile middle and working class. In the United States there are few intellectuals – politically engaged writers and political lecturers.

What passes for the educated classes, are full-time professional academics who differ little in their social and everyday life, regardless of their stated ideological philosophies. The vast majority of leftist academics conceive of their ‘activism’ as reading papers to each other at ‘left’ or ‘social forums’, which differ little in format and consequences from mainstream professional meetings.

Even those left academics who take a political role, it is mostly in relation with the multi-millionaire senior trade union officials and their loyalist apparatus. As a result the progressive academics have ended up with little entrée into the vast majority of workers who are outside of the trade unions and those dissident union factions challenging the trade union – Democratic Party – corporate nexus.

An Alternate Explanation for the ‘Paradox’

One of the key problems inhibiting an understanding of the paradox is the treatment of the key concept – “crises”. Many writers conceive of the ‘crises’ in a ‘holistic’ way, presuming what is ‘general’ or ‘systemic’ has a homogenous effect on the middle and working class. In fact the vast majority, say three-quarters have not been seriously impacted by the “crises”.

Assuming that the unemployed and under-employed comprise about twenty percent and adding those who have suffered serious downward mobility, we still have at least 70 percent whose main preoccupation is to retain their ‘privileged’ position and to disengage from those who have fallen out of their class-social orbit.

In the US, more than any other country, the sharp internal differences, between employed and un-underemployed, has led to ‘competition’ not solidarity. In most countries of the world ‘unemployed’ and underemployed workers can expect backing, active support from unionized workers; in the US once middle class employees and workers lose their job and cannot pay dues they are dropped.

Even in terms of social, family and neighborhood life, they are seen as a ‘cost’, a potential drain on the resources of those who are employed. The employed see the unemployed and poorly paid as a welfare cost , hence an added tax burden instead of as an ally in a struggle to make the corporate elite pay higher taxes and reduce war spending. Among employed workers higher taxes, means capital flight; lesser military expenditures mean few war industry jobs.

Segmentation within the middle and working class operates at many levels. The most striking is between the pay scale of top union officials which runs over $300,000 plus perks and the unemployed/underemployed living on less than $30,000. These economic differences are played out politically and socially. The trade union apparatus buys ‘job security’ by contributing tens of millions to mostly Democrats, to ensure that unions retain their formal legality and collective bargaining rights.

In other words the ‘organized’ unions, all of 1

Middle and working class are differentially, impacted by the crises: those with jobs and ties to the Democratic Party place their partisan loyalties above any notion of class solidarity. Job holders don’t support the jobless – they see them as competitors over a shrinking income pie.

If we examine these two groups in detail we find that the poorly paid and un and underemployed tend to be young people under 30 years, blacks, Hispanics and single parents; the better paid employed middle and working class tend to be older, white educated and of Anglo-Jewish background. The generational, racial, ethnic divisions play a far bigger role in the US than anywhere else, because of the obliteration of class identity and outlooks, which has diluted any notion of class solidarity.

The segmentation of the middle and working class is deepened in the US because those with stable employment in many cases benefit from the adverse consequences affecting downwardly mobile (unemployed) employees and workers.

Mortgage foreclosures affect over 10 million American families unable to meet their payments. Banks eager to recover some part of their loan, offer to sell houses at sharply reduced prices. Employed middle and working class home buyers are elated to purchase homes, even as their class members are evicted to the street or trailer camp. There is no movement to block or protest evictions from neighbors, workmates and/or relatives; instead discreet inquiries are made about the auction date.

Better paid workers look to secure cheaper consumer goods in super-stores that employ minimum wage workers. The ‘interests’ of workers are defined by immediate individual-consumer interests not in terms of the improvement of strategic interests resulting from the potential social and political power of an organized class.

Employed middle and working class homeowners see themselves as ‘tax payers’ allied with corporate and real estate moguls fighting to lower taxes by cutting welfare and social services for the low paid working class and unemployed. The growth of upper and middle/working class tax revolts against the welfare state is in effect a war of one segment of the class against another. Clearly one segment fights to grab the crumbs from the mouth of another segment.

Even among the organized working class, there is segmentation. Pockets of better paid unionized public sector workers secured pay raises and pension and health plans via collective struggle, ignoring the interests, demands and needs of the sea of non-unionized workers, who were in the process of downward mobility while paying higher taxes. Hence their socio-economic differences were politicized and exploited by the Right – and the public-private sectors of the middle and working class competed over the crumbs of a shrinking budget.

As public facilities for health and education declined, the middle and working class divided between those who turned to private clinics and schools and those who remained dependent on public facilities, based on state expenditures. Those segments tied to the ‘private’ rejected taxes to fund the ‘public’; undercutting any class solidarity to improve the financing and quality of public health and education.

Conclusion

It is clear that the crisis of capitalism has evoked contradictory responses among different segments of the middle and working class based on its differential impact. Pre-existing non-class identities, internal economic division between leaders and followers and generational divisions and party partisan loyalties have undermined class solidarity and led to inconsequential complaints and diffuse hostility.

Competition- not solidarity- within and among the middle and working class is the reason for the profound immobility of Americans in the face of a prolonged and deepening economic crises.

That is now and in the past. Are there any prospects for a different future? Is there any possibility for uniting middle and working class segments in any sustained struggle? Are there alternative roads to class solidarity and popular mobilizations?

The most promising direction is to start at the local and regional level and involve local community organizations and dissident rank and file trade unions and progressive professionals (lawyer, doctors, etc.) in struggles, which resonate with the most adversely affected groups facing unemployment, foreclosures, no health plans, etc.

All polls show a deep divergence between the vast majority of Americans and the political elite of both parties on issues of bank bailouts, tax exemptions for the rich, “reforms” (privatizations and cut backs), Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Divergences exist over the loss of life and expenditures in America’s multiple and longest wars (Afghanistan).

Referendums proposing (1) to end the cap on social security taxes for the rich would end the so-called “social security crises”. (2) A sales tax on financial transactions would fund the Medicare deficit. Public investments in our deteriorating infrastructure based on the transfer of war funds ($790 billion) would create jobs, increase demand in the domestic economy and augment the productivity and competitiveness of the US economy.

Support for public health is an issue that unites most segments of the middle and working class, unionized health workers and community organizations in a potential confrontation with Big Pharma and the private corporate health industries.

A higher minimum wage – starting at $12 an hour – could mobilize most middle and working class segments, and initiatives at the local level could bring in the immigrant and domestic low paid workers.

The interview data demonstrate that most Americans have apparently ‘contradictory’ attitudes: supporting progressive and regressive policies. For example many support Medicare and ‘small government’; federal job creation and deficit reduction; import tariffs and cheap consumer imports.

An comprehensive activist political educational program, that demonstrates that progressive social reforms are feasible and fundable, based on a sustained fiscal struggle against corporate and financial capital, can be converted into organization and direct action. We start with an objective reality, demonstrating that the sustained crisis of capitalism does not and cannot deliver the most elementary demands: jobs, housing, security, peace and growth.

That is a big advantage over the advocates of the system who argue for prolonged and deeper regressive measures for the foreseeable future.

Secondly, we start with the advantage of knowing that the country has the potential wealth, skills and resources to overcome the crises. Thirdly, we can argue from relatively successful popular programs which have vast support – social security, Medicare, Medicaid – as ‘examples’ to extend and deepen social coverage.

For most Americans, the fight today, to the extent that it exists is defensive – efforts to preserve the last vestiges of independent organization, to defend social security, health programs, affordable public education, pensions. The corporate offensive is increasingly ‘homogenizing’ the organized middle and working class with the lowest paid unorganized segments. There are fewer ‘privileged workers’ even as they are still in self-denial.

The near extinction of private sector unionism and the moribund millionaire leadership provides an opportunity to start anew with a horizontal leadership, accountable to the membership and integrated with community based co-op, ecologist, immigrant, consumer based organizations. What is absolutely clear is that ‘crises’ alone will not result in any mass upheaval; nor do ‘enlightened’ progressive academics holed up in their micro-world offer any leadership.

The road forward starts with local leaders emerging from local coalitions, building organizations on the bases of independent political and social initiatives which resonate with their neighbors, fellow workers and the organized and unorganized downwardly mobile Americans. I see no easy or quick solutions to the ‘paradox’ but I do see the objective conditions, for building a movement. I hear a multitude of angry and discordant voices. Above all, I hope the oppressed will stop “snatching the crumbs from each other.”

New Erickson Project News: Bigfoot DNA Project Using Two Dead Bigfoot Bodies for Samples

Note: Long, runs to 24 pages.

I was recently put into touch with a hunter from Western North America who is quite well known in his field. You might even say that he is famous. He and others were the subject of a recent book, and he often gives talks at various forums. He was formerly employed at America’s foremost science museum but is no longer working there.

He is considered to be at the top of his field, which I will not reveal here. He is also a hunter and travels around North America hunting. He especially likes to hunt bears. This puts him in touch with many other hunters. He is also active on taxidermy boards. He has deep ties to the Erickson Project and the Olympic Project.

He will be known anonymously as Bear Hunter in this article, as he only talked to me on the grounds that his identity was kept secret.

Robert Lindsay: Hi, what made you decide to get in touch with me?

Bear Hunter: Well, I read your article where you interviewed Richard Stubstad, and I thought, “Wow! This guy is hot on the trial! He’s really close. He’s closing in. So I decided to fill in some blanks for you.”

RL: Is there a reason why you decided to spill the beans on this hot news to me just now?

BH: Yes, I am getting very impatient with the pace of this project. You know, it’s always coming out this year, then next year, then this year again, then next year again, then this spring. I’m getting tired of it. I want to jumpstart this project and tell them to get going and finish it up.

RL: You say you have some blockbuster news regarding the Erickson Project Bigfoot DNA study, right?

BH: Yes I do. This all started from a thread on Taxidermy.net, a website where I hang out. There are sometimes threads on Bigfoots, and in this one thread, in November 2010, a guy said that he had just shot two Bigfoots! The guy is a trapper, a taxidermist and a hunter. This was huge news of course, and pretty soon there were lots of followup posts. Somehow the guy’s name and number got out, and there were reports of people bothering him and harassing him. He asked the webmaster, George Ruff, to shut down the thread. George shut it down.

Well, afterward, I got in touch with the guy and talked to him for a while.  Adrian Erickson, Matt Moneymaker and Tyler Huggins all got involved. Moneymaker and Huggins are with the BFRO (Bigfoot Field Research Organization). Erickson had heard of Bigfoots getting shot; actually, he has lots a number of stories from Canada where they get shot pretty regularly. But, as he put it, “I’ve never been two weeks behind a shooting before.” Everybody was scrambling after this guy!

RL: How was it that the Bigfoots came to be shot, and were they killed?

BH: In November 2010, [name withheld] was hunting on the border between Nevada and California, inside California, near a game refuge. (RL: Based on my investigation, it took place in or near the Dixie Mountain Game Refuge west of Frenchman Lake on the Plumas National Forest in Plumas County. It borders Washoe County in Nevada. See a map here).

On one side of the game refuge, there was this single road in a canyon leading into and out of the refuge. Bigfoots were apparently using the game refuge, since they are safe from hunters there.

The guy was on this road when he came upon a large dirty-white (RL: supposedly female) Bigfoot standing in the road. Since the narrow road was the only route in and out of the place, the Bigfoots were forced to use this road whether they wanted to or not. The Bigfoot was standing there waving her arms at him. I thought maybe she was telling the hunter to back up so the Bigfoot could move through, since the Bigfoot was stuck on the road, no?

The guy stopped his truck and jumped out. He knew it was a Bigfoot, but he thought she was threatening him. The Bigfoot knew his intentions by now, and she started to run away. He shot her with a 25.06. He shot her through the side of her chest, piercing her lungs. The Bigfoot took off into the brush, but he heard her crash down soon afterward.

Next thing he knew, he heard barking sounds coming from the side of the road. There were two young Bigfoots there that popped up out of nowhere. They were brown-colored. The hunter shot one of the young Bigfoots dead! He’s an idiot, right?

It died in his arms. 4 feet tall, 80 pounds. He said it had a huge head, and then I knew it was a young Bigfoot, because the young ones have gigantic heads while they are still young. The head is more normal sized as they get older. Remember that “Pancake Video” from the Kentucky Project, where the young Bigfoot has a huge head that everyone was saying was a human with some birth defect? Well, that is what they look like when they are young.

Have you seen the Jacobs footage that they say is a mangy bear? The shooter told me the juvenile he shot looked just like the Jacobs creature.

RL: Yes, what is it? A bear?

BH: No way. It’s a juvenile Bigfoot. You can tell by the hips. And the neck. The thing has no neck. I know bears. I love bears. No way is that a bear.

RL: Why did he shoot the adult Bigfoot? He says he thought it was a bear.

BH: No. He knew what it was. Because of the color. Bears don’t come in off-white. Anyone knows that. He shot it because he thought it was threatening him.

RL: Why did he shoot the juvenile Bigfoot? He says it got up on an outcrop and was threatening him.

BH: No, that’s not true. Why did he shoot it? He’s that kind of guy. I know a lot of hunters. Most are good people, but some are not. There are a lot of guys like him out there hunting. People shoot things just because they can, just to kill them. That’s why he did it. He did it because that’s what kind of person he is.

RL: What did he do with the Bigfoots?

BH: He told us that he left them lying there. There was snow on the ground, so we figured that there might still be enough time to go in and get the bodies. Pretty soon, we decided that the guy was probably lying. We thought he probably took the bodies, because taxidermists are hoarders – they never leave anything they shoot in the field.

RL: The Olympic Project says they went back to the site over two weeks later and found a bit of flesh on the ground, left over from the shooting. They used this bit of flesh to slice up and submit to the DNA project.

BH: No, they told me they never went back there.

RL: What happened to the dead Bigfoots?

BH: Well, we put the hunter in contact with the Olympic Project that is working on Bigfoots in Washington State. We didn’t hear much for a while, only that the OP folks kept saying, “We are just trying to keep [name withheld] out of jail.” The hunter was convinced that if California figured out he shot these two Bigfoots, he was going to jail. He was really afraid of going to jail.

RL: Ok, then?

BH: Moneymaker and the BFRO were in on this too. It was a mad rush for those bodies!

We didn’t hear much more for a while until the Olympic Project starting sending samples to Melba Ketchum for her DNA project as part of the Erickson Project. Some of the samples that the EP was getting were of tissue, and they looked like they were carved off a dead body!

(RL: One sample appeared to be carved off of the thigh of a human or hominid cadaver. Dr. Ketchum was so freaked out by the sample that she called people up asking them to hold it for her in case the police came to her lab, because she was afraid of going to jail.)

The samples had two different colors of hair. Obviously, the Olympic Project was sending Ketchum samples carved from the bodies of the two dead Bigfoots? Isn’t that incredible?

RL: Who has the Bigfoots, the hunter or the Olympic Project?

BH: I think that the hunter still has the bodies or he has parts of the bodies. Maybe he cut parts off them before he left. If he has the bodies, he has probably cut them up, cut off the heads and has them on ice. They can last a long time like that. I don’t think the Olympic Project has the bodies.

We did a lot more digging, and we found that now the hunter is associated deeply with the OP. He’s part of their project. The OP is not admitting to anything. They deny it all, they say they have no dead Bigfoots, and they don’t have access to any. 

RL: Incredible news!

BH: Yes, there’s more too. Notice how the Olympic Project is all over the Internet boards talking about how they have enough Bigfoot samples to last for years? Guess why they say that? Probably because they have access to two dead Bigfoot bodies! Think about it.

RL: Too much…Do you know about any leaks from the Erickson Project DNA study?

BH: Yes, I do. They are very close to humans. Say if chimpanzees are 2 clicks away from humans, these things are maybe 3/4 of a click away.

RL: Ok, and they are in the Homo line?

BH: Yes, I am sure of that. Recall that say 50,000 YBP, there were maybe five different hominids on the planet. Homo sapiens sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo Floresiensis, Denisova, Homo heidelbergensis and Neandertal Man. All of these other hominids are gone. What happened to them?

RL: We killed them all.

BH: Yes, we killed them all. So the only thing that could survive was something that was huge, very stealthy and wary, hated humans, favored the most remote areas, had the use of bad smell to ward off enemies, used an intense EMF field to paralyze and disorient enemies, was very strong and had a very thick skin that was hard to penetrate. They’re the ultimate survivors of our genocidal wars.

RL: Do you think they are humans or apes?

BH: I don’t know. You know Bindernagel wrote that book, America’s Great Ape, but then after he saw the Bigfoots in Kentucky, he changed his mind. Now he thinks that they are hominids. But I know one fellow who saw one face to face on a trail. He said it’s ape-like; it’s an ape-man. So who knows?

RL: Do you have any info on the Kentucky Project?

BH: I do. Erickson bought that place, and he got a lot of great video out of there. He installed Dennis Pfohl and Leila Hadj-Chikh there, and they shot quite a bit of Bigfoot video. Erickson said he had so much good Bigfoot video that he was getting tired of taking pictures of them. At one point, he brought Bindernagel down there to see the Bigfoots. Bindernagel was able to see them. He also wanted to bring John Green down there, but he was very sick with prostate cancer and could not make it.

A friend of mine saw the famous video of the young female Bigfoot walking in the forest. She walks towards the camera, then sees the camerawoman, growls and turns away. He said there is no way that this could be a costume. They also shot video of a huge male at that site, but everyone is keeping very quiet about that.

RL: Do you believe that Erickson is in it for the money?

BH: I get tired of hearing this. Erickson has sunk $3 million of his own money into this thing. $3 million! He hasn’t made one nickel back.

RL: Do you have any information about Erickson’s movie about Bigfoot?

BH: Yes, it’s finished! 10

RL: Do you know if Dr. Ketchum has any TV or film interests in the works?

BH: Yes, she is involved with National Geographic. They want to do a special on Bigfoot, and she is involved in that.

RL: What’s the relationship between Bigfoots and trappers?

BH: Bigfoots hang out along traplines and raid them. I heard of one case where a Bigfoot got caught in a trap. The Bigfoot got himself out of the trap by bending the solid steel! Unbelievable!

RL: You say you hear a lot of stories of Bigfoots getting killed?

BH: Yes, I get a story about every 2 months. They range from recent to pretty far back in time. There are many stories coming out of Canada too. Erickson also has many stories. It’s the same story every time. People kill it, and it looks so much like a human being that they leave it in the field because they are afraid they are going to be prosecuted for murder.

RL: I say that if you believe in Bigfoot, you must also believe in a few things. 1) People are shooting at and killing these things fairly regularly. 2) There must be a government coverup. 3) We are photographing and videotaping Bigfoots on a fairly regular basis.

BH: I agree. As far as a government coverup, of course the government must know about these things. And I know that the timber industry knows about them. And people shoot them all the time.

There was a recent case in Alberta where the Fish and Wildlife people were poisoning wolves. They are supposed to tell trappers about this, but they didn’t in this case. A trapper found a dead wolf partly eaten and huge tracks leading away from it. The tracks were of a Bigfoot that had been poisoned by eating the wolf. The guy tracked it for a while but then lost the trail.

He reported it to the Game people, but they paid him $20,000 to shut him up. They kept saying, “So, you lost 5 cougar dogs tracking that thing. That’s worth about $20,000.” He hadn’t lost any cougar dogs. He finally figured out they were offering him money to shut him up, so he took the money.

RL: What’s the motivation for the coverup?

BH: In Canada, they are worried about resource lockup. They are afraid it will shut down logging. I know that up there, as soon as there is a Bigfoot sighting, the timber people get word of it and come in and clearcut the area. They do that to drive the Bigfoot off, because they don’t want the Bigfoot on their logging land. They’re afraid it will keep them from logging the land.

RL: Do you think Bigfoots are getting habituated to humans in any way?

BH: Yes, a friend of mine in Alberta told me about a Bigfoot that was living on the outskirts of the Nordegg dump, living off the garbage, foraging food out of the trash. People tracked the thing way back into a remote area and found its nest. All sorts of stuff from the dump had been hung in trees 8-10 feet up, bicycles, chairs, you name it. The Bigfoot was decorating its home with that stuff.

RL: Wow!

BH: Yes, I have so many stories. When I go to give my talks, I always say if you have any Bigfoot stories, come up and talk to me afterward. Every time, people come up to talk to me. All sorts of people. They haven’t told many others about their sightings, and every case, they have not reported it to any private or public agency.

One guy told me how he was hunting in a swamp in the Southeast US, and he passed out from the swamp gas. The stuff can overwhelm you and make you pass out.

He woke up, and he was next to a spring. There was a huge 8-foot Bigfoot crouched down next to him, offering a cup of water from the spring. The cup had been hanging from the spring. People sometimes hang metal cups from springs. He took a drink, passed out again, and then woke up again later on. The Bigfoot was still there, and it offered him another drink. He drank it and passed out again. He woke up the third time, and the Bigfoot was gone.

RL: Do you think that tracking dogs are good for tracking Bigfoots, say in order to capture one? Jeff Meldrum has been talking about that a lot lately.

BH: I think dogs are useless when it comes to tracking these things. You know, I am a hunter, and I use tracking dogs all the time. We take people out on guided hunts, and I hunt myself all the time using guides. Dogs will track anything, but they won’t track these things. The meanest dog on Earth will be left pissing, shivering and whimpering by his master’s legs.

I knew one guy who sent six dogs after a Bigfoot. Only five of them came back; the sixth was torn up. The other five dogs were so traumatized that they were useless as trackers. They would never track another animal again. And these were good tracking dogs.

RL: What do you think of Bigfoots’ use of infrasound?

BH: I am not sure that they use infrasound. You see, all animals have an EMF field that they give off, and these things do too. One of my theories is that these things have a very strong EMF field that they give off, and they may be able to manipulate it. One thing you notice is that when these things are around, everything goes quiet, and most of the animals around take off. That’s because of the strong EMF field that the Bigfoots give off. It scares the crap out of other animals.

I know that they use this field to disorient people. Erickson said he was being chased out of the forest in Canada by one once, and he was so disoriented and delirious that he had to keep looking at the moss on the trees, because you know, moss only grows on the north? That’s because the Bigfoot was disorienting him so much that he kept getting lost.

I am going to test this theory out by buying an outfit that they sell for $100. It neutralizes your own EMF field. Supposedly, you can wear it and walk right up to animals and touch them.

RL: Were you always a Bigfoot believer?

BH: Not at all. I was a skeptic until five years ago. Then I started looking into this thing, and all of these people started coming forward, including people I had known for years and trusted completely. I started getting swamped with these stories, even people I had known a long time had stories, but they had never told me! I dove into it, started doing a lot of research, and soon it became completely obvious that these things exist. People can ridicule me all they want to, and they do, believe me. But I don’t care; I know they are real.

RL: Have you met any skeptics who saw one?

BH: Many times. And a lot of them were hardcore skeptics. But then they saw a Bigfoot, and they all changed over to believers. They said that their lives were changed completely.

Check out Bigfoot Forums for the best Bigfoot discussion on the web.

Jewmerica Threatens Flotilla Participants

The United States of Jewmerica, or, more properly, “USreal,” which is the US and Israel combined into a single nation for all intents and purposes, is threatening USreali citizens with long imprisonment terms if they deliver aid to Gaza via a flotilla. The charges would include proving material aid to a terrorist group, Hamas, which violates a new USraeli law. Alice Walker is on that boat. I dare this punk Obama to throw her in prison, I really do.

The flag of Usrael. Usrael is not yet recognized by the UN, because USrael itself, as an international scofflaw and outlaw state, does not recognize UN sovereignty. USrael does what it wants, always has and always will, the Hell with the rest of the world.

Honestly, USraeli citizens ought to be free to provide material aid, or any other aid, or even to go fight for, any armed group on Earth that is not engaged in hostilities against the US. If some USraeli ally then wants to extradite the USraeli citizen for working for the group, then Usrael has a right to extradite them. But why is it against USraeli law to give money or other aid to, or to train or go fight for, some guerrilla group that has nothing whatsoever to do with USrael in any way, shape or form?

When I was a student at USC in 1983, a professor I knew pointed out one of the other professors in the Education Department. He was a young Hispanic guy. The professor told me that the prof periodically took time off his job to go down to El Salvador, where he actually took up arms and fought alongside the FMLN rebels. And what was wrong with that? It was his life, right? It was between him and the Salvadoran government.

But a recent fascist law would have sentenced this guy to 10 years in prison for fighting for his conscience. What of the US fighters for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Franco’s fascists? The present fascist USraeli government would obviously call the Republicans (the only Republicans I’ve ever supported besides the IRA) a terrorist group. Obviously, all of the anti-Nazi guerrillas of WW2 were terrorists too. Anyone who takes up arms against any state, except, whoops! Enemies of the US, is automatically a terrorist.

However, for some reason, the KLA, the Syrian rebels, the Libyan rebels, and the Ahwaz, Kurdish and Baloch rebels in Iran are automagically not terrorists, because if they were, the whole US government would have to go down on the fascist law about support for terrorism, because USrael is supporting all of those groups to the hilt.

The truth is that in general, the whole “terrorist group” designation is complete shit. If you’re a guerrilla group fighting a US enemy, you’re a freedom fighter. If you’re a guerrilla group fighting a US ally, you’re a terrorist. The designation is garbage, and it’s pitiful that the vast majority of Moronicans have fallen for this sick lie.

Onto the Gaza flotilla. All of these flotillas have been repeatedly inspected, and I suspect it’s no different with this one. So the idea that the flotilla members are providing material aid to a terrorist group is nothing but a twisted lie.

This shows once again who controls America, and it’s not ordinary Americans.

If we are looking for someone to blame here, let’s not blame the elites. The fault is Americans themselves. Truth is that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly content to turn America into Jewmerica, such is their overwhelming and idiotic Judeophilia. The majority of Americans are overjoyed at the joining of two nations at the hip to form the USrael entity, such is their passionate and fanatical Zionism.

In that case, then USrael surely must reap what it sows then, from endless wars to burning and collapsing towers. Cause and effect is still a law of the natural world, and men are part of that world.

Is this America or Jewmerica? Which will it be?

Is this the US or is Usrael? Which will it be?

Wikipedia Jews Attack James Petras

Repost from the old site.

James Petras is a fine man of the Left who has long been interested in Latin America and especially revolutionary movements down there. He has long supported the FARC revolutionaries in Colombia (as does this blog) and lately he has been supporting the Movement of the Landless in Brazil.

He’s a great labor organizer who goes down to Latin America and works with the people, getting his hands dirty with the workers and peasants themselves. He’s a towering intellect, and has often criticized Left movements from a Far Left perspectives, accusing them of being sellouts. For instance, he has gone after the FMLN in El Salvador lately for pursuing a half-hearted effort at reform.

I believe he was going after Evo Morales in Bolivia lately. He’s great for tearing the masks off these Latin American Leftists who the US press is screaming Commie Bloody Murder about, showing us that many of them are not even very far to the Left and the proposals they are offering are quite moderate and unlikely to seriously shake up socioeconomic relations in these places.

It’s always great to read him on anything having to do with the Latin American Left.

Lately he has sort of gone off on a bender against US Jews and particularly the Israeli Lobby and Israel. He has received some criticism for this from the Left, especially the anarchist Left (see Three Way Fight) and Maoists. Maoists and anarchists (Three Way Fight critique here) are among those on the Left who are particularly sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism and go to great lengths to avoid such.

This despite the recent rightwing Jewish – Zionist rewriting of history that shows the entire 20th Century Left as being anti-Semitic. See Why the Jews? The Reasons for Contemporary Anti-Semitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for more on that – it’s actually an excellent read and I recommend it.

The ADL has recently weighed in against Petras, accusing him of fomenting some kind of “New Anti-Semitism” (this means an anti-Semitism focused mostly on Israel). All of this crap is a rather minor sideshow to Petras’ excellent corpus and career, but as you can see in his Wikipedia entry, most of the entry is given over his tussle with the Jews.

On the discussion page, the Wikipedia Jews have gone nuts, accusing him of being an “anti-Jewish racist” and other bullshit. There’s the usual crap about Israel Shamir on there, straight from the UK Spotlight Trotskyite antifa loonie-tunes accusations – Shamir as a Swedish neo-Nazi living in Norway.

In fact, Israel Shamir, whatever one thinks of him (and he surely has his anti-Semitic moments) is a Russian Jew, son of a famous rabbi, who immigrated to Israel, fought in the Israeli military, wrote for some Israeli papers, moved to Japan where he translated Japanese haiku books, moved back to Russia where he got involved in some dubious anti-Semitic far right Russian publications, moved back to Israel, where he currently resides in Jaffa (in fact, you can probably even visit him there – lots of folks do).

It’s really sad that this “Swedish neo-Nazi” bullshit has been allowed to gain as much traction as it has. Yes, his Wikipedia page says that too. I know what you were thinking. Chip Berlet is one of the leaders of the Israel Shamir Lynch Mob. Berlet, the strange “Marxist” who is in deep with the radical right libertarians that rule Wikipedia.

Looks like the Wikipedia Jews got pretty much thwarted on this one. Maybe someone is finally starting to reign them in over there. Note that “Humus Sapiens” is one of the most notorious Wikipedia Jews, active for years now. Still at it, I guess.

Check out the article history. Real food fight.

Links to some Wikipedia nasties.

Wikipedia Jews: Jayjg, one of the worst Jewish POV-pushers on Wikipedia. Humus Sapiens, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the US. Izak, one of their sidekicks.

Slim Virgin , one of the worst ones of all. I understand that SV is not even Jewish (!); she’s just some Gentile philosemite. She’s obsessed with 1. The Jews, 2. 9-11. SV is one of the most horrible and abusive administrators on Wikipedia. She was so abusive that the Wikipedia Review undertook an investigation of her.

She was very hard to track down as she covers her tracks very well, but they eventually determined that she is a former Cambridge University graduate student named Linda Mack who was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger and John K. Cooley to investigate the Lockerbie bombing.

Two Libyans were eventually convicted of the bombing, and Ghaddafi was ordered to pay a huge fine, but there is good evidence that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing. There is also evidence that UK law enforcement knew this but went after Ghaddafi anyway because they hated him and wanted to wrap up the case.

It is still not known who was behind the bombing, but the Iranian regime was probably the author of the attack. The attack was probably a payback for the US shooting down of an Iranian airliner during the Iran-Iraq War, an act that the US said was accidental. Iran refused to accept the accidental shootdown theory.

Linda Mack was instrumental in steering Salinger and Cooley towards the Libyans. Salinger and Cooley eventually decided that Mack was a spy with the UK’s notorious MI5 intelligence agency (the British CIA). Linda Mack is now reportedly living in Alberta, Canada under the name Sarah McEwan.

Antifascist, who uses the same handle and has the same obsessions as a notorious Jewish Zionist who used to stalk anti-Zionists on Indymedia, often issuing them horrible death threats. He’s obsessed with Wendy Campbell and Gilad Atzmon.

His name is Ketlan Ossowski ( blog here) and he is described as an obsessive Jew who uses Leftism and anti-fascism as a cover to promote Zionism. I strongly suspect that he is the same guy who stalked and threatened Wendy Campbell. Zeq, long-notorious, the lone Wikipedia Jew busted in the CAMERA fiasco, now banned.

Others: Roland Rance, a Jewish Marxist (Jewish first, Marxist far distant second) from London, famous from the wars over Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo’s Peace Palestine blog, apparently active in the Socialist Workers Party and in with the Lenin’s Tomb crowd. I’m not going to comment on this guy much as he’s written me civilly via email.

Just another frothing Trot about sums it up though.

The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation

Repost from the old site.

James Schipper writes in the comments section:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I respond:

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

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

Class war is continuous under capitalism.

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

Owners oppose increased

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

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

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

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

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

This is how capitalism is supposed to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950’s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 6

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 2 Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800’s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 9

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800’s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800’s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870’s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 7

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 2

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

Peak Runoff in Streams and Rivers

Around these parts, in the Central Valley, low foothills and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, peak runoff in streams and rivers is generally around the first week of spring. This year, it was the last week of March, about March 22-28. This is because most of the runoff from streams and rivers in this area is from rainfall. We have little snow in the Valley and foothills, and for some reason, snow runoff from the Sierras is generally not enough to cause flooding in the foothills and valleys below.

What is the peak runoff for rivers and streams in your region of wherever? Chime in.

White Pride Latin America

Interesting comments from the comments section. First a fellow named Robert posts a comment, then a White Mexican named Rafa responds. I very much enjoyed their interchange, and I will comment at the end:

Robert: As a White Latin American, I think a lot of the information you put was wrong. At least the part about White Latin Americans disappearing. The CIA World Factbook puts Mexico White population at

You can talk to a lot of Latin Americans about that. They’ll tell you the same thing. My friend who goes to Mexico says the same thing. And as for Brazil, Sao Paulo is 7

Personally I AM GLAD there are a lot of white people in Latin America. But then again, I personally think that if a person looks White, then they are obviously white. Even if they are 2

I don’t mean to come off as if I am insulting you but I think at least half the information you got was wrong. At least when it came to the decline of White population. However, remember, all mestizos do not look the same. The phenotype can range from more European to more Indian. The White upper class of Mexico and Brazil may be mixed, but the non-white ancestry may not be enough to show and vice-versa.

Basically its a color continuum.

Rafa: I find it interesting that you said that if a person is 2

There are even White Americans who are known to have claimed some sort of native indigenous ancestry such as Chuck Norris, the late Patrick Swayze, and Johnny Depp (this last one actually looks like a lot Mexicans I grew up with). The term Euro-Mestizo has even entered the lexicon of American English terms used to describe people according to their race, specifically light-skinned Mexicans who are predominantly White in appearance.

I don’t know about you, but I think that ever since the world got smaller through the invention of broadcast television and the internet, Latin Americans have gotten into a tendency of competing with each other to see whose country is whiter or has a larger population of Whites. What do you think?

By the way, as far as Northeastern Mexico being majority White, I would have to say that I agree with that statement. As you might have already guessed, I am in fact Mexican and from the Northeastern border city of Nuevo Laredo,Tamaulipas.

I grew up across the border in Laredo, Texas and it is basically an explicit fact that my native region is not as White as it used to be. Many people from Southern Mexico, and even some from Central America have established themselves in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros, and Monterrey in neighboring Nuevo Leon state.

Most Mexican nationals who reside in Laredo, Texas are in fact White (as are most of their Mexican-American brethren in the region), and this often shocks non-Mexican Hispanics coming from the East Coast and California.

This is a sort of Latin American White Pride that I do not have a whole lot of issues with. To me, it resembles Black Pride in the US, which is generally healthy because it avoids some extremes and pitfalls. Some of the benefits vis a vis nasty US White Pride:

No emphasis on purity: If anything, in Black Pride there is an emphasis on less purity due to Black America’s obsession with light skin. That is, the less Black you have in you, the more proud you are, paradoxically. Now, that is not necessarily a good thing, but at least it gets us away from the purity poison.

Your average Black person in the US is 1

In contrast, US White Pride is utterly toxic in terms of racial “contamination.” If you have the tiniest bit of non-White in you, you’re automatically non-White. Even a lot of White ethnics are ruled out as Whites and described as non-Whites. Examples include Jews, Armenians, Turks, Eastern Aryans, Iranians, White Berbers, White Arabs, Georgians, the Caucasus, Albanians and Southern Europeans in general.

It’s absurd. Another thing to note is that in general, among races, the more emphasis there is on purity, the more violent, fascist and even genocidal the group is. It’s no accident that the Germans and Japanese were both genocidal and strongly emphasized purity of race. The two things go together quite well. As you get away from the purity trap, you become more loving and inclusive and less likely to engage in race-based violence, much less genocide. This is because, as a “contaminated” person yourself, you can’t much demand purity from others.

Increased love for others: Most White Latin Americans don’t hate the small amount of Indian or Black in themselves. It’s not the end of the world. They have a more relaxed attitude towards race, and they often love the non-White in themselves. If you love the Other in yourself, you are more likely to love the Other in others.

No demands for segregation. Latin American Whites don’t demand segregation. There was some segregation in Latin America, especially in Cuba and Ecuador, but it’s long gone. In Cuba, it lasted as long as the Revolution.

Let’s get real here for a second. What’s behind the demands for segregation? They are about fears of racial annihilation. This is what the fears of race-mixing and miscegenation were all about. But White Latin Americans are already somewhat mixed, so in a sense, they are already an annihilated race. There’s nothing to fear from dilution if you’re already diluted yourself, so there’s no need for segregation. Let the mixing begin!

A more relaxed attitude about race. White nationalists go on and on about colorism in Latin America, but at the end of the day, it’s not as big a deal as racism is here in the US. Colorism is simply not as virulent and nasty as White racism here in the US. It’s all a continuum, a sliding scale.

Thinking in a grey or continuum type manner is healthier than thinking in a black and white Manichean manner. Grey thinking is more relaxed and adaptive and leads to more tolerance and flexibility.

What problems there are in Latin America regarding race are ll tied up with class. Many Latin American so-called Whites don’t even look all that White. Indians are disliked due to class hatred, not necessarily racial hatred. The most hardened attitudes are found in South America, especially in the Andes.

It’s not that Latin America has overcome the race issue, but more that they have more or less transmuted it into a class issue. In a region where you can trade in your Indian clothes, stop speaking Indian, move to the city and then start wearing mestizo clothing and speaking Spanish and thereby automagically transform yourself from an Indian into a mestizo is a place were biological race is not so important anymore. It has been replaced by social race.

Less fear of miscegenation. I am not aware that Latin American Whites are zealously guarding their bloodlines anymore. If they are, let me know. You can hardly demand that others marry White if you are not pure White yourself. There are some Latin American Whites who would like it to be this way, but they are going against nature. In particular, Latin American White males are increasingly marrying and breeding with relatively light-skinned mestizas. The purists lament this, but what can you do? A man will be a man.

In addition, there  is another operative trend, and that is the widespread tendency among Latin American mestizas to try to “marry White” in an effort to move up in the world themselves and to create a better future for their offspring. This is highly adaptive female thinking, and it leads to a paradoxical “Whitening” effect among mestizos that occurs concurrently with whatever “darkening” effect is going on among Latin American Whites.

It’s the wave of the future. As the world’s population gets more mixed, the sort of White Pride seen in Latin America will become more the norm for all groups. True, pure races will slowly die out and become more rare, but that’s neither good nor bad, it just is. If US Blacks, a mixed group, can be proud, then anyone can be proud of their racial elements. The progeny of a racial stew can feel proud of all of the elements that went into that stew. The result is an ethnic pride that is more tolerant, loving and unconditional.

Poverty in Cuba and the US

Tulio is profoundly upset at the notion that Cubans might be better off than Americans. In fact, the very notion makes him want to pull his hair out.

If that’s the case than that would mean Cuba has a lower poverty rate than the US, but nobody in their right mind would say we are worse off than them.

It depends on what you want. In the US, many have no medical insurance, so they cannot afford any medical care at all. If you live below the poverty line in the US, you can’t even afford to rent an apartment! You could pay for the apartment, but then you might only have $200 left over for the rest of the month. How can you possibly live on $200/month? Forget it. A lot of Americans can’t even afford utilities, even if they have an apartment. If you are a single person living below the poverty level, I don’t see how you could afford utilities and an apartment. Even if you could pay for utilities and an apartment, how could you afford food? I just don’t see it.

In Cuba, everyone can afford a place to live. Rent is set at 1

The problem with Communism is that while at best they did wipe out poverty, they were only able to be provide a low standard of living for their people.

So you are really arguing against apples and oranges here. Cuba, the USSR and the East Bloc made it top priority to wipe out poverty. Everyone agrees that they were successful at this. However, at least the USSR and the East Bloc failed at economic growth to the extent that the West surpassed them. This was an embarrassment, especially for the East Bloc when Western Europe started beating them badly in economic growth. This was the main reason that Communism collapsed in the East Bloc.

People wanted the higher economic growth that they saw in the socialist but social democratic West of Europe. This was really a competition between two different forms of socialism, and it’s clear that social democracy beat Communism. By the way, Western Europe still had significant poverty while the East Bloc wiped it out.

Moral to the story is that there is more to life than just wiping out poverty. Even if you wipe out poverty, if you can’t keep up with competing systems, people will tire of a mere poverty-less state and will wish that they had a state with higher economic growth.

Is Cuba better than the US, as tulio painfully suggest? Obviously, this notion is very painful for tulio to consider. Well, Cuba has wiped out homelessness and everyone has health care. Is anyone hungry in the US? If so, Cuba has us beat there too?

On the other hand, there is more to life than just food, shelter and health care. People want stuff. The US GDP per capita is 4.7 X the Cuban GDP. Cars are not common in Cuba and blackouts occur regularly. There are lots of problems with the system. We Americans have much more luxuries. I have a nice apartment, a computer, wide screen TV, a car and air conditioning that works. I doubt if I would have that in Cuba.

So your question does not really have an answer, whether Cuba or the US is better than the other. It depends on what you value in life. Depending on what you think is important, one or the other is better than the other one.

Homicide and Rape Rates in the Caribbean

Here.

Some commenters suggested that other than Haiti, violent crime and homicide in the Caribbean is not particularly high. In other words, Haiti was giving the whole place a bad reputation.

The link is to an article in a Jamaican newspaper lamenting the high homicide rate in Jamaica and in the region as a whole. The piece notes that the UN has found that the Caribbean has the highest homicide rate on Earth, at 30/100,000, surpassing Latin America proper at 26/100,000 and South and West Africa, both at 29/100,000. So the Caribbean has an even higher homicide rate than the worst parts of Africa! In 2005, Jamaica’s rate was an incredible 68/100,000.

Much of the violence seems to be related to the drug trade. Drugs are produced in South America and then trafficked to North America. The Caribbean sits between the two, and a lot of drugs are trafficked through the Caribbean.

The rape rate is also very high in the Caribbean. 4

White Gangbangers in Argentina

Original link not working, but this photo album is similar. The text refers to the original link.

Click on the photo album to see more of these idiots acting all tough and throwing gang signs. They are from Cordoba, Argentina, which is in the center of Argentina. Known from growing wine grapes, relatively dry climate in the rain shadow of the Andes. These folks look like Whites, which seemed strange to me. An Argentine friend of mine told me that they were typical Argentine mestizos. If that is so, then your Argentine mestizo looks awfully damned White.

I knew that Hispanic-Black US gang culture was spreading to other areas, particularly mestizo and Indian populations in Latin America and I believe Black and mulatto populations in the Caribbean. I have also seen pics of Filipinos and Negritos in the Philippines who have adopted US gang culture. There are some Australian Aborigines and Polynesians who have adopted it too. The Polynesians like to imitate US Black culture, possibly because they feel closer to Blacks. In gang fights at LA schools, the Samoans would always line up with the Blacks.

If you have any information on other regions where US gang culture is spreading, please let us know in the comments. I guess this is one of the only products we are exporting anymore.

10,000 Unidentified Bodies Found in Colombia

A survey of Colombian municipalities found over 10,000 unidentified bodies reported, with only one half of Colombian municipalities reporting. I am not sure of the time period involved, whether the 10,000 unknown dead turned up in 2009 alone, or whether other years are covered.

8

In addition, over 18,000 Colombians disappeared in Colombia in 2009 alone. There are over 50,000 disappeared in Colombia according to the government.

Why doesn’t NATO and the UN step in and order the Colombian regime to quit killing its people? If they don’t obey, why don’t the UN and NATO order sanctions on Colombia, freeze their bank accounts in the West (steal their money) and then bomb the country for regime change?

Is Texas Screwed Up Because It Is Full of Mexicans?

In response to my post about the Medieval state of Texas, some have suggested that the extremely poor figures on the minimum wage, poverty and the uninsured were due to lots of Mexicans living in Texas. Texas has one of the worst poverty rates in the US, has one of the nation’s highest rates of uninsured people who lack medical insurance and has one of the nation’s highest rates of people working at the minimum wage.

There is a problem with this analysis. Look at California. White nationalists like to trash California by saying it has gone downhill ever since it has become heavily Hispanic. However, California’s economy, last time I checked, was the 8th largest economy in the world. It’s quite a stretch to say that 8th largest economy on Earth is an economic basket case. I for one don’t buy it.

We have budget problems now, mostly because the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. The budget crisis is similar all over the country, and Republicans at the federal level have made it worse by constantly slashing federal money to the states for unknown reasons. What are they trying to do? Crash state governments?

The cause of the economic crisis in California was the housing crash, caused by neoliberal economics and lack of regulation. It was particularly bad in California since our housing prices had run up so high.

The thing is that I do not believe that California has horrible rates of poverty, people working at the minimum wage and persons without medical insurance. These are problems all over America these days, but I don’t believe that California has these problems to any profound degree. At least I have not heard that it does. We have a very liberal Legislature, and if these problems got very bad, they would probably try to do something about it.

Further, Cuba is an Hispanic country. Everyone has health coverage, everyone has a job at a reasonable, non-poverty level wage, and the poverty rate is very low. I think it is

Alt Left: When Will US Whites Quit Drinking the Koolaid?

Commenter: It’s really not hard to understand why you hate White Americans so much. They really are some whacked out nutters.

I hear you though. I grew up in an all White suburb in Orange County. Though it was reasonable in the 1970’s, at the moment,  I would say that 10

I would add that almost all of these people were drug users, and most of them were drug dealers. Some even moved quantities of marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD. But they were Republicans at the time (Republican surfer/stoner/hippies?!), and they are Republicans now.

Later in the early 1980’s I hung out with the early Goths. Everyone smoked, drank like fish, took a lot of drugs, and hung out in nightclubs all the time acting like weirdos. Most of the chicks seemed like they were bisexual, and most all the guys seemed like they were gay or bi or at least they acted like it. There was epidemic homosexuality and bisexuality. And you know what? They were all Republicans!

It was like there was something in the water.

Later, I moved to the all White Sierra Nevada foothills, and it was the same theme all over again, this time with a huge dose of anti-abortion and fundamentalist Christianity. Same thing, all the potheads and hippies were Reaganites, Dittoheads, and Glen Beck fans. And these were working class White people!

In between, I worked all over Orange and LA Counties, and it was the same everywhere I went. I worked in San Pedro in the 1980’s, and it was the same old stuff. If you were White, Reaganism just crawled into your bloodstream. I’m now in the Central Valley, and it’s the same again, except here, most Whites are apparently mentally retarded to boot. There’s also a shocking number of Republican Hispanics around here, which strikes me as very bizarre.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even want to speak to most White people anymore because I am so sick and tired of this rightwing politics. I would add that your average “Centrist” White person is pretty damned rightwing themselves!

I honestly do not know WTF is the matter with White people. We have had over 40 years of this radical rightwing BS ever since Reagan started it (Don’t even compare these new ones to Nixon, Ford, or 1970’s Republicans please – we can live with them), and it’s sent the nation right down the tubes. The longer it goes on, the more wrecked we are getting. I am afraid that most Whites are ideologically invested in this Reaganite (now MAGA) crap, and they are just not willing to give it up, nor are they willing to acknowledge how it has clusterfucked our land.

They’re going to find out the hard way, but even then, will they learn?

Until very recently, Colombia has been a very rightwing country for a good 50-60 years or more, or maybe since colonization. The place is trashed, there’s a civil war going on, political murder goes on every day, there are the worst slums on Earth, crime is rampant – the murderous oligarchic politics have turned the whole country into a Hellish sewer. But every few years until just very recently, the people go to the polls, and everyone votes radical Right again.

Texas: A State Destroyed by Rick Perry

Rick Perry is the quintessential Republican looney-tune nutcase, 2011 style. He’s intensely religious, after all, he’s been put here by God Himself. He even states, comically, that he is implementing God’s will by serving as governor.

And he’s single-handedly destroyed the state of Texas. As goes Texas, so goes the nation. Look in the mirror, America. Texas is the future.

Granted, Texas was pretty near ruined when George Bush got through with it, but it seemed there was no where to go but up. Then along came Rick Perry.

Perry’s Texas has the greatest percentage of minimum wage in the US. That is the future of America under Republican rule – a nation of minimum wage workers. Republicans have been waging war on workers, wages and unions from the time they were formed as a party. There was a respite for a bit, but now they are back in style.

In fact, the best way to describe the Republican Party is “low-wage conservatism.” This philosophy is very popular in the South, which has been trashed by low wages, anti-worker and anti-union attitudes and lax regulation and environmental laws. The South is the future, splayed over the entire land. Welcome to Shithole America.

Rick Perry’s Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured Americans as any other state. Repubicans are all about making sure that you are uninsured. That’s their policy – under Republican rule, the uninsured always grow. They cut back on state funding for low income folks, and as a business friendly party, they encourage businesses to get rid of medical coverage for their workers.

The Republicans believe that you, not your employer, should pay for your own health insurance. That’s what George  Bush’s ownership society crap was all about. You get to go out and buy your own insurance, and then you get to “own” it, see? You get to buy your own insurance instead of Medicare, then you get to “own” your private old age insurance, see? Isn’t ownership fun?

Under Rick Perry, the budget deficit blew out of control due to his endless tax cuts. Texas now has one of the worst deficits of any state. Under Republican rule, deficits everywhere will explode due to irresponsible tax cutting.

Under Rick Perry, the Texan dipshits threatened to secede from the union if the government didn’t stop trying to give them health care. Yeah, you heard me right. The government tried to give the people health care, and it pissed Rick off so much that he threatened to secede. What a dumbass!

Under Rick Perry, Texas has the 3rd highest poverty rate in the nation. Under Republican rule, look for the poverty rate to explode. Rightwing rulers almost always send the poverty rate through the roof, at Republican Presidents are no exception. Poverty always rises under a Republican President. Poverty doubled under Pinochet. It’s what they do.

Texas is still an extremely rightwing state. Despite being wrecked by Republican governor after Republican governor, Texans keep coming back for more. Some folks just can’t get enough abuse.

Very Nice New Piece on Race in Mexico

Here.

The site is actually named after me, which has me shaking my head in amazement.

The piece, and the site itself, was inspired by my site, in particular my pieces on race in Mexico and on the major and minor races of man.

Most Mexicans are mestizos, but there are large minorities of more or less pure Europeans and Indians. He describes most of the significant White groups in Mexico and puts Whites at ~1

Although most Whites have Spanish roots, there are also significant French, Portuguese, German, Italians and Irish minorities. I met a young woman who is Mexican-American, but she is mostly Portuguese. The village she was born in in Mexico is made up of primarily Portuguese people! There are also quite a few Jews in Mexico.

More or less pure Indians make up ~1

Mestizos make up ~6

There are what he calls 3 occult roots in Mexico: Blacks, Asians and Arabs.

The first root, the Blacks, has its basis in African slaves who were brought to the east coast of Mexico. This affair did not last long as a slave who married a free Mexican had children who were free. So, slavery quickly went out and the Blacks disappeared via mixed breeding as slaves quickly took free, non-Black Mexicans as spouses.

The result was that pure Blacks nearly disappeared and the remainder are mostly mulattos, zambos (Indian-Black) and triracials. In addition, your average Mexican mestizo now is ~4-

The next root is Asians. In the early days, quite a few Filipinos came to Mexico when it was part of Spain via the colony of the Philippines. By this time, they are heavily mixed with other races in Mexico. In the early 20th Century, many Chinese came to Mexico. Unfortunately, most were tossed out in the 1930’s in a wave of nativism, but in Mexico city and Mexicali, there are still quite a few Chinese and part-Chinese, as the Chinese also married heavily into the mix.

The last root is Arabs. Most of these Arabs are Christians from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. They came in response to anti-Christian attacks waged by the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1. Since they came from the Ottoman Empire, many Mexicans referred to them as “Turks.” Carlos Slim, Mexico’s richest man, is Lebanese, as is Salma Hayek.

All three of these occult roots each make up ~

There have been various studies of Mexico’s admixture, but they tend to come up with quite different results. I agree with the the author that the best studies show Mexico’s genome to be 5

Most self-identified Mexican Indians have some White in them, in addition to a bit of Black. Percentages range from

The author notes that Mexican-Americans have traditionally been a lot Whiter than Mexicans, because they tend to come from the Whiter regions of Northern Mexico. Southwest Mexicans have usually tested out at 6

A photo on his site of Chicano gangbangers shows that they are mostly White, something we have always known here.

Towards the end he makes up a list of racial categories of Mexicans, following my lead in this piece, even adopting my formulae and marking scheme.

He lists five major races in Mexico – Whites, Indians, Mestizos, Blacks and Asians.

No major disagreement there.

I have been regarded as a mad splitter in my piece above. One critic said that if Lindsay doesn’t stop soon, he’s going to have as many races as there are languages. This criticism, in addition to endless bashing by race deniers, hurt my feelings, as a result, I have made few new updates to my races of man post.

However, the author is much worse of a splitter than I have ever been, splitting off all sorts of groups that I probably would not have split off. Hence, his scheme is better seen as a view towards Mexican ethnies or ethnic groups than races per se. For instance, he divides Mexican mestizos and Mexican Whites into quite a few different races, on what basis I am not sure. Are they ethnies? Quite possibly. Races? Dunno about that.

In my scheme, I actually adopted a conservative scheme in which I tried not to split off new races unless I couldn’t help it. I wanted some significant genetic distance between a group or ethny before I would split them off. Hence, I lumped most Europeans into a single race because there isn’t much genetic distance between them. I am wondering if the author has any genetic data to back up splitting many of these groups into different races, because I only split based on hard genetic data.

At the end, I think we have two different schemes here. One is dividing races based on hard genetics and the other is splitting racers and also ethnies on the basis of partly genetics but also subjective factors. On the other hand, there probably is not much genetic data on the various different Mexican mestizos and Whites.

All in all, a very commendable piece, the fruit of long research. By the way, the photos are excellent. Make sure to check them out.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity,” by James Petras

This is an excellent article by James Petras.

He shows how Hugo Chavez has turned so far to the right that he is now in some ways one of the most rightwing Presidents in Latin America. For instance, only Chavez has supported the US and Colombia in backing the Honduran coup regime. And he is becoming one of Colombia’s sole allies in the region.

Why has he done this? A few reasons. For one, he’s surrounded and threatened. Colombia keeps threatening the invade Venezuela to go after Colombian rebels that hide there, and the US under “liberal” Barack Obama has just stationed 7 new military bases in Colombia for the sole purpose of attacking the Colombian guerrillas and threatening Venezuela. Colombia built up forces on the border, repeatedly crossed the Venezuelan border, and moved Colombian death squads into Venezuela to attack the people.

The Colombian guerrillas are on the defensive and can no longer provide the buffer that they formerly provided along the border to a Colombian invasion of Venezuela.

The Obama-backed coup against Honduras, which has resulted in a wave of murders against the Honduran Left, changed things. Chavez now realized that the Obama regime was willing to use military force to get what it wanted in Latin America.

At home, the opposition has made its strongest showing in a decade, winning about 5

In other words, he’s boxed in with nowhere to turn. Under these circumstances, Chavez has decided that the Colombian guerrillas, who they used to support, are a liability. He has been cooperating with Colombia in handing over guerrillas who are in Venezuela. He signed a non-aggression agreement with Colombia in return for an agreement to help catch any Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela. However, he has gotten little in return for this other than that Colombia has stopped invading and threatening his territory.Colombia still maintains a deep alliance with Chavez enemy, the US. Colombian forces are still massed along Venezuela’s borders.

Chavez hope to keep Colombia from joining in the US in any joint US-Colombian military escapades inside Venezuela. He also hopes to keep Colombia from joining in any US propaganda-destabilization efforts in Venezuela.

However, the threats have escalated, and the US appears emboldened. Chavez’ moves to the Right have not earned him the tiniest bit of praise or space from the US – they hate him more than ever. US imperialism slapped an embargo on the Venezuelan oil company due to Venezuela trading with Iran. I am not sure what this embargo entails? Incredibly, the Venezuelan opposition supported this foreign embargo on Venezuela! What a bunch of traitors.

Following his new alliance with Colombia, Chavez became the only nation other than Colombia in Latin America which has recognized the coup regime in Honduras. He did this under pressure from Colombia.

Petras points out how Allende’s Chile, Mexico in the 1980’s, Cuba and Brazil have all harbored Latin American guerrillas (in Brazil’s case, an Italian guerrilla). They refused to extradite them. But Chavez is boxed in in a way that these regimes may not have been.

Petras shows how other Left regimes also cooperated with the Right at various times. Stalin cooperated with Hitler for a while in order to buy some time to move his industry east of the Urals and build up his military-industrial complex. He even sent some German Communists who were hiding in the USSR to Germany, where they were certainly tortured and killed. But Stalin was boxed in, and he needed to buy some time, so he made a deal with the devil.

In the early 1970’s, Mao entered into a new alliance with the US under Richard Nixon’s detente. Afterward, Mao supported Pinochet and the rightist rebels in Angola. They denounced any Left regime that head the slightest ties with the USSR and supported their enemies, no matter how rightwing they were. All for the benefits of a sunshine policy with the US.

In the event of a new confrontation with the US, can Chavez expect his new Colombian ally to be neutral? Dubious. Colombia will probably ally with its imperial master in the US. And can he expect any support for the radical Left in Latin America now that he has betrayed them? This also is dubious. He may well end up with no friends at all.

Chavez’s Right Turn: State Realism versus International Solidarity

Introduction

The radical “Bolivarian Socialist” government of Hugo Chavez has arrested a number of Colombian guerrilla leaders and a radical journalist with Swedish citizenship and handed them over to the right-wing regime of President Juan Manuel Santos, earning the Colombian government’s praise and gratitude.

The close on-going collaboration between a leftist President with a regime with a notorious history of human rights violations, torture and disappearance of political prisoners has led to widespread protests among civil liberty advocates, leftists and populists throughout Latin America and Europe, while pleasing the Euro-American imperial establishment.

On April 26, 2011, Venezuelan immigration officials, relying exclusively on information from the Colombian secret police (DAS), arrested a naturalized Swedish citizen and journalist (Joaquin Perez Becerra) of Colombian descent, who had just arrived in the country. Based on Colombian secret police allegations that the Swedish citizen was a ‘FARC leader’, Perez was extradited to Colombia within 48 hours.

Despite the fact that it was in violation of international diplomatic protocols and the Venezuelan constitution, this action had the personal backing of President Chavez. A month later, the Venezuelan armed forces joined their Colombian counterparts and captured a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Guillermo Torres (with the nom de Guerra Julian Conrado) who is awaiting extradition to Colombia in a Venezuelan prison without access to an attorney.

On March 17, Venezuelan Military Intelligence (DIM) detained two alleged guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), Carlos Tirado and Carlos Perez, and turned them over to the Colombian secret police. The new public face of Chavez as a partner of the repressive Colombian regime is not so new after all.

On December 13, 2004, Rodrigo Granda, an international spokesperson for the FARC and a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, whose family resided in Caracas, was snatched by plain-clothes Venezuelan intelligence agents in downtown Caracas where he had been participating in an international conference and secretly taken to Colombia with the ‘approval’ of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Bogota.

Following several weeks of international protest, including from many conference participants, President Chavez issued a statement describing the ‘kidnapping’ as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and threatened to break relations with Colombia.

In more recent times, Venezuela has stepped up the extradition of revolutionary political opponents of Colombia’s narco-regime: In the first five months of 2009, Venezuela extradited 15 alleged members of the ELN and in November 2010, a FARC militant and two suspected members of the ELN were handed over to the Colombian police. In January 2011 Nilson Teran Ferreira, a suspected ELN leader, was delivered to the Colombian military.

The collaboration between Latin America’s most notorious authoritarian rightwing regime and the supposedly most radical ‘socialist’ government raises important issues about the meaning of political identities and how they relate to domestic and international politics and more specifically what principles and interests guide state policies.

Revolutionary Solidarity and State Interests

The recent ‘turn’ in Venezuela politics, from expressing sympathy and even support for revolutionary struggles and movements in Latin America to its present collaboration with pro-imperial rightwing regimes, has numerous historical precedents. It may help to examine the contexts and circumstances of these collaborations: The Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia initially gave whole hearted support to revolutionary uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Finland and elsewhere.

With the defeats of these revolts and the consolidation of the capitalist regimes, Russian state and economic interests took prime of place among the Bolshevik leaders. Trade and investment agreements, peace treaties and diplomatic recognition between Communist Russia and the Western capitalist states defined the new politics of “co-existence”. With the rise of fascism, the Soviet Union under Stalin further subordinated communist policy in order to secure state-to-state alliances, first with the Western Allies and, failing that, with Nazi Germany.

The Hitler-Stalin pact was conceived by the Soviets as a way to prevent a German invasion and to secure its borders from a sworn rightwing enemy. As part of Stalin’s expression of good faith, he handed over to Hitler a number of leading exiled German communist leaders, who had sought asylum in Russia. Not surprisingly they were tortured and executed. This practice stopped only after Hitler invaded Russia and Stalin encouraged the now decimated ranks of German communists to re-join the ‘anti-Nazi’ underground resistance.

In the early 1970’s, as Mao’s China reconciled with Nixon’s United States and broke with the Soviet Union, Chinese foreign policy shifted toward supporting US-backed counter-revolutionaries, including Holden Roberts in Angola and Pinochet in Chile.

China denounced any leftist government and movement, which, however faintly, had ties with the USSR, and embraced their enemies, no matter how subservient they were to Euro-American imperial interests.

In Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China, short-term ‘state interests’ trumped revolutionary solidarity. What were these ‘state interests’?

In the case of the USSR, Stalin gambled that a ‘peace pact’ with Hitler’s Germany would protect them from an imperialist Nazi invasion and partially end the encirclement of Russia.

Stalin no longer trusted in the strength of international working class solidarity to prevent war, especially in light of a series of revolutionary defeats and the generalized retreat of the Left over the previous decades (Germany, Span, Hungary and Finland) .The advance of fascism and the extreme right, unremitting Western hostility toward the USSR and the Western European policy of appeasing Hitler, convinced Stalin to seek his own peace pact with Germany.

In order to demonstrate their ‘sincerity’ toward its new ‘peace partner’, the USSR downplayed their criticism of the Nazis, urging Communist parties around the world to focus on attacking the West rather than Hitler’s Germany, and gave into Hitler’s demand to extradite German Communist “terrorists” who had found asylum in the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s pursuit of short term ‘state interests’ via pacts with the “far right” ended in a strategic catastrophe: Nazi Germany was free to first conquer Western Europe and then turned its guns on Russia, invading an unprepared USSR and occupying half the country. In the meantime the international anti-fascist solidarity movements had been weakened and temporarily disoriented by the zigzags of Stalin’s policies.

In the mid-1970’s, the Peoples Republic of China’s ‘reconciliation’ with the US, led to a turn in international policy: ‘US imperialism’ became an ally against the greater evil ‘Soviet social imperialism’.

As a result China, under Chairman Mao Tse Tung, urged its international supporters to denounce progressive regimes receiving Soviet aid (Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, etc.) and it withdrew its support for revolutionary armed resistance against pro-US client states in Southeast Asia. China’s ‘pact’ with Washington was to secure immediate ‘state interests’: Diplomatic recognition and the end of the trade embargo.

Mao’s short-term commercial and diplomatic gains were secured by sacrificing the more fundamental strategic goals of furthering socialist values at home and revolution abroad. As a result, China lost its credibility among Third World revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, in exchange for gaining the good graces of the White House and greater access to the capitalist world market.

Short-term “pragmatism’ led to long-term transformation: The Peoples Republic of China became a dynamic emerging capitalist power, with some of the greatest social inequalities in Asia and perhaps the world.

Venezuela: State Interests versus International Solidarity

The rise of radical politics in Venezuela, which is the cause and consequence of the election of President Chavez (1999), coincided with the rise of revolutionary social movements throughout Latin America from the late 1990’s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century (1995-2005).

Neo-liberal regimes were toppled in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina; mass social movements challenging neo-liberal orthodoxy took hold everywhere; the Colombian guerrilla movements were advancing toward the major cities; and center-left politicians were elected to power in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay. The US economic crises undermined the credibility of Washington’s ‘free trade’ agenda.

The increasing Asian demand for raw materials stimulated an economy boom in Latin America, which funded social programs and nationalizations. In the case of Venezuela, a failed US-backed military coup and ‘bosses’ boycott’ in 2002-2003, forced the Chavez government to rely on the masses and turn to the Left. Chavez proceeded to “re-nationalize” petroleum and related industries and articulate a “Bolivarian Socialist” ideology.

Chavez’ radicalization found a favorable climate in Latin America and the bountiful revenues from the rising price of oil financed his social programs. Chavez maintained a plural position of embracing governing center-left governments, backing radical social movements and supporting the Colombian guerrillas’ proposals for a negotiated settlement. Chavez called for the recognition of Colombia’s guerrillas as legitimate ‘belligerents” not “terrorists’.

Venezuela’s foreign policy was geared toward isolating its main threat emanating from Washington by promoting exclusively Latin American/Caribbean organizations, strengthening regional trade and investment links and securing regional allies in opposition to US intervention, military pacts, bases and US-backed military coups. In response to US financing of Venezuelan opposition groups (electoral and extra parliamentary), Chavez has provided moral and political support to anti-imperialist groups throughout Latin America.

After Israel and American Zionists began attacking Venezuela, Chavez extended his support to the Palestinians and broadened ties with Iran and other Arab anti-imperialist movements and regimes. Above all, Chavez strengthened his political and economic ties with Cuba, consulting with the Cuban leadership, to form a radical axis of opposition to imperialism. Washington’s effort to strangle the Cuban revolution by an economic embargo was effectively undermined by Chavez’ large-scale, long-term economic agreements with Havana.

Up until the later part of this decade, Venezuela’s foreign policy – its ‘state interests’ – coincided with the interests of the left regimes and social movements throughout Latin America. Chavez clashed diplomatically with Washington’s client states in the hemisphere, especially Colombia, headed by narco-death squad President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). However recent years have witnessed several external and internal changes and a gradual shift toward the center.

The revolutionary upsurge in Latin America began to ebb: The mass upheavals led to the rise of center-left regimes, which, in turn, demobilized the radical movements and adopted strategies relying on agro-mineral export strategies, all the while pursuing autonomous foreign policies independent of US-control. The Colombian guerrilla movements were in retreat and on the defensive – their capacity to buffer Venezuela from a hostile Colombian client regime waned.

Chavez adapted to these ‘new realities’, becoming an uncritical supporter of the ‘social liberal’ regimes of Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Vazquez in Uruguay and Bachelet in Chile. Chavez increasingly chose immediate diplomatic support from the existing regimes over any long-term support, which might have resulted from a revival of the mass movements.

Trade ties with Brazil and Argentina and diplomatic support from its fellow Latin American states against an increasingly aggressive US became central to Venezuela’s foreign policy: The basis of Venezuelan policy was no longer the internal politics of the center-left and centrist regimes but their degree of support for an independent foreign policy. Repeated US interventions failed to generate a successful coup or to secure any electoral victories, against Chavez.

As a result Washington increasingly turned to using external threats against Chavez via its Colombian client state, the recipient of $5 billion in military aid. Colombia’s military build-up, its border crossings and infiltration of death squads into Venezuela, forced Chavez into a large-scale purchase of Russian arms and toward the formation of a regional alliance (ALBA). The US-backed military coup in Honduras precipitated a major rethink in Venezuela’s policy.

The coup had ousted a democratically elected centrist liberal, President Zelaya in Honduras, a member of ALBA and set up a repressive regime subservient to the White House. However, the coup had the effect of isolating the US throughout Latin America -not a single government supported the new regime in Tegucigalpa. Even the neo-liberal regimes of Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Panama voted to expel Honduras from the Organization of American States.

On the one hand, Venezuela viewed this ‘unity’ of the right and center-left as an opportunity toward mending fences with the conservative regimes; and on the other, it understood that the Obama Administration was ready to use the ‘military option’ to regain its dominance. The fear of a US military intervention was greatly heightened by the Obama-Uribe agreement establishing seven US strategic military bases near its border with Venezuela.

Chavez wavered in his response to this immediate threat: At one point he almost broke trade and diplomatic relations with Colombia, only to immediately reconcile with Uribe, although the latter had demonstrated no desire to sign on to a pact of co-existence.

Meanwhile, the 2010 Congressional elections In Venezuela led to a major increase in electoral support for the US-backed right (approximately 5

Chavez faced several options: The first was to return to the earlier policy of international solidarity with radical movements; the second was to continue working with the center-left regimes while maintaining strong criticism and firm opposition to the US backed neo-liberal regimes; and the third option was to turn toward the Right, more specifically to seek rapprochement with the newly elected President of Colombia, Santos and sign a broad political, military and economic agreement where Venezuela agreed to collaborate in eliminating Colombia’s leftist adversaries in exchange for promises of ‘non-aggression’ (Colombia limiting its cross-border narco and military incursions).

Venezuela and Chavez decided that the FARC was a liability and that support from the radical Colombian mass social movements was not as important as closer diplomatic relations with President Santos. Chavez has calculated that complying with Santos political demands would provide greater security to the Venezuelan state than relying on the support of the international solidarity movements and his own radical domestic allies among the trade unions and intellectuals.

In line with this Right turn, the Chavez regime fulfilled Santos’ requests – arresting FARC/ELN guerrillas, as well as a prominent leftist journalist, and extraditing them to a state which has had the worst human rights record in the Americas for over two decades, in terms of torture and extra-judicial assassinations. This Right turn acquires an even more ominous character when one considers that Colombia holds over 7600 political prisoners, over 7000 of whom are trade unionists, peasants, Indians, students, in other words non-combatants.

In acquiescing to Santos requests, Venezuela did not even follow the established protocols of most democratic governments: It did not demand any guaranties against torture and respect for due process. Moreover, when critics have pointed out that these summary extraditions violated Venezuela’s own constitutional procedures, Chavez launched a vicious campaign slandering his critics as agents of imperialism engaged in a plot to destabilize his regime.

Chavez’s new-found ally on the Right, President Santos has not reciprocated: Colombia still maintains close military ties with Venezuela’s prime enemy in Washington. Indeed, Santos vigorously sticks to the White House agenda: He successfully pressured Chavez to recognize the illegitimate regime of Lobos in Honduras- the product of a US-backed coup in exchange for the return of ousted ex-President Zelaya.

Chavez did what no other center-left Latin American President has dared to do: He promised to support the reinstatement of the illegitimate Honduran regime into the OAS. On the basis of the Chavez-Santos agreement, Latin American opposition to Lobos collapsed and Washington’s strategic goal was realized: a puppet regime was legitimized. Chavez agreement with Santos to recognize the murderous Lobos regime betrayed the heroic struggle of the Honduran mass movement.

Not one of the Honduran officials responsible for over a hundred murders and disappearances of peasant leaders, journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists are subject to any judicial investigation. Chavez has given his blessings to impunity and the continuation of an entire repressive apparatus, backed by the Honduran oligarchy and the US Pentagon.

In other words, to demonstrate his willingness to uphold his ‘friendship and peace pact’ with Santos, Chavez was willing to sacrifice the struggle of one of the most promising and courageous pro-democracy movements in the Americas.

And What Does Chavez Seek in His Accommodation with the Right?

Security? Chavez has received only verbal ‘promises’, and some expressions of gratitude from Santos.

But the enormous pro-US military command and US mission remain in place. In other words, there will be no dismantling of the Colombian paramilitary-military forces massed along the Venezuelan border and the US military base agreements, which threaten Venezuelan national security, will not change. According to Venezuelan diplomats, Chavez’ tactic is to ‘win over’ Santos from US tutelage.

By befriending Santos, Chavez hopes that Bogota will not join in any joint military operation with the US or cooperate in future propaganda-destabilization campaigns. In the brief time since the Santos-Chavez pact was made, an emboldened Washington announced an embargo on the Venezuelan state oil company with the support of the Venezuelan congressional opposition. Santos, for his part, has not complied with the embargo, but then not a single country in the world has followed Washington’s lead.

Clearly, President Santos is not likely to endanger the annual $10 billion dollar trade between Colombia and Venezuela in order to humor the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s diplomatic caprices. In contrast to Chavez policy of handing over leftist and guerrilla exiles to a rightist authoritarian regime, President Allende of Chile (1970-73) joined a delegation that welcomed armed fighters fleeing persecution in Bolivia and Argentina and offered them asylum.

For many years, especially in the 1980’s, Mexico, under center-right regimes, openly recognized the rights of asylum for guerrilla and leftist refugees from Central America – El Salvador and Guatemala. Revolutionary Cuba, for decades, offered asylum and medical treatment to leftist and guerrilla refugees from Latin American dictatorships and rejected demands for their extradition.

Even as late as 2006, when the Cuban government was pursuing friendly relations with Colombia and when its then Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque expressed his deep reservations regarding the FARC in conversations with the author, Cuba refused to extradite guerrillas to their home countries where they would be tortured and abused.

One day before he left office in 2011, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denied Italy’s request to extradite Cesare Battisti, a former Italian guerrilla. As one Brazilian judge said -and Chavez should have listened: “At stake here is national sovereignty. It is as simple as that”. No one would criticize Chavez efforts to lessen border tensions by developing better diplomatic relations with Colombia and to expand trade and investment flows between the two countries.

What is unacceptable is to describe the murderous Colombian regime as a “friend” of the Venezuela people and a partner in peace and democracy, while thousands of pro-democracy political prisoners rot in TB-infested Colombian prisons for years on trumped-up charges.

Under Santos, civilian activists continue to be murdered almost every day. The most recent killing was yesterday (June 9,2011): Ana Fabricia Cordoba, a leader of community-based displaced peasants, was murdered by the Colombian armed forces.

Chavez’ embrace of the Santos narco-presidency goes beyond the requirements for maintaining proper diplomatic and trade relations. His collaboration with the Colombian intelligence, military and secret police agencies in hunting down and deporting Leftists (without due process!) smacks of complicity in dictatorial repression and serves to alienate the most consequential supporters of the Bolivarian transformation in Venezuela.

Chavez’ role in legitimizing of the Honduran coup-regime, without any consideration for the popular movements’ demands for justice, is a clear capitulation to the Santos – Obama agenda. This line of action places Venezuela’s ‘state’ interests over the rights of the popular mass movements in Honduras.

Chavez’ collaboration with Santos on policing leftists and undermining popular struggles in Honduras raises serious questions about Venezuela’s claims of revolutionary solidarity. It certainly sows deep distrust about Chavez future relations with popular movements who might be engaged in struggle with one of Chavez’s center-right diplomatic and economic partners.

What is particularly troubling is that most democratic and even center-left regimes do not sacrifice the mass social movements on the altar of “security” when they normalize relations with an adversary.

Certainly the Right, especially the US, protects its former clients, allies, exiled right-wing oligarch and even admitted terrorists from extradition requests issued by Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina. Mass murders and bombers of civilian airplanes manage to live comfortably in Florida.

Why Venezuela submits to the Right-wing demands of the Colombians, while complaining about the US protecting terrorists guilty of crimes in Venezuela, can only be explained by Chavez ideological shift to the Right, making Venezuela more vulnerable to pressure for greater concessions in the future.

Chavez is no longer interested in the support from the radical left: his definition of state policy revolves around securing the ‘stability’ of Bolivarian socialism in one country, even if it means sacrificing Colombian militants to a police state and pro-democracy movements in Honduras to an illegitimate US-imposed regime. History provides mixed lessons.

Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the Soviet people: once the Fascists got what they wanted they turned around and invaded Russia. Chavez has so far not received any ‘reciprocal’ confidence-building concession from Santos military machine. Even in terms of narrowly defined ‘state interests’, he has sacrificed loyal allies for empty promises. The US imperial state is Santos’ primary ally and military provider.

China sacrificed international solidarity for a pact with the US, a policy that led to unregulated capitalist exploitation and deep social injustices.

When and if the next confrontation between the US and Venezuela occurs, will Chavez, at least, be able to count on the “neutrality” of Colombia? If past and present relations are any indication, Colombia will side with its client-master, mega-benefactor and ideological mentor.

When a new rupture occurs, can Chavez count on the support of the militants, who have been jailed, the mass popular movements he pushed aside and the international movements and intellectuals he has slandered? As the US moves toward new confrontations with Venezuela and intensifies its economic sanctions, domestic and international solidarity will be vital for Venezuela’s defense. Who will stand up for the Bolivarian revolution, the Santos and Lobos of this “realist world”? Or the solidarity movements in the streets of Caracas and the Americas?

US, Chinese and Russian Investment in the Developing World

US imperialism is a nasty and ugly thing. It’s paranoid, and it’s out to dominate the world. In contrast, Russia is not an imperialist power. Russia just wants friends and allies, not enemies. They are not out to dominate others; they want cooperation. There is still a lot of the spirit of the old USSR in Russia. Putin after all was a KGB man.

For instance, Russia is friends with many socialist states. They are very close to Venezuela, China, Vietnam and Cuba. They don’t care what kind of economic system you have in our country. Russia retained many of the more or less socialist allies of the old USSR in its sphere. It has not been pressuring them to get rid of socialism and adopt capitalism.

China is similar. Chinese investment in Africa does not care what kind of state or system the Africans have. They can be socialist, capitalist, or anything in between.

Russian and Chinese investment in the 3rd World is done more on a basis of mutual cooperation as opposed to imperialist exploitation which is typical of US imperialism.

When the US goes into a foreign country, they demand conditions favorable to US firms. This usually means favoring the wealthy elite of the country at the expense of the masses. The US tends to oppose any socialism in countries they invest in, and they often demand radical free market changes in the economy as a condition of investment. The US military is often as a threat used to force foreign countries to dismantle their socialism are put in radical neoliberal capitalism.

For example, the US opposes attempts to raise the minimum wage in 3rd World countries. Aristide in Haiti was overthrown by the US in part because he dared to raise the minimum wage. The US-backed coup in Honduras was sparked Zelaya’s raising of the minimum wage.

One reason is that Russia and China do not have many large non-state corporations yet. The Russian and Chinese firms that are involved in the 3rd World are often either state firms or quasi-state firms. Russia helps develop oil via their state oil corporation and makes money selling arms from state arms firms. So Russian and Chinese investment is done more on a win-win basis. Not quite solidarity, but at least not imperialist exploitation.

The US Army is the Army of the Rich

The truth is that the US military has always been the army of the rich, the army of the imperialist thieves and mass murderers. Look at how many billions America stole from Iraq – estimates are that the US imperialists stole uncounted billions from the Iraqis in the course of running their government for them after the war. The US is now planning to steal Libya’s money to help bomb Libya – that money belongs to the Libyan people, but the Western imperialists have simply stolen the Libyan people’s money to drop bombs on their heads.

The cruel truth is that the US military is the army of the rich and the corporations. The US homeland needs very little defending, and no one ever tries to invade anyway. Instead, the purpose of the Pentagon is to go around the world killing workers and poor people in order to uphold the rule of the rich and the right of US corporations to exploit the Third World.

It is interesting to look at US wars and military engagements to see how many of them really benefited working class people of the US and other countries. The imperialist wars in Cuba and the Philippines? Are you kidding?

The endless list of interventions in Latin America? They were all to benefit the rich and to kill workers and the poor. Even the invasion of Panama was because Noriega would not play ball with the US on the Sandinistas anymore. The drug dealing thing was a joke. The US, the CIA and our buddies in the rightwing governments and militaries down there have been running dope forever. We look the other way or even help them run the drugs.

Grenada? Pull the other one. The various interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic? Give it up. The 7 new US bases in Colombia? They are there to help the Colombian state kill the poor and Left of Colombia.

The intervention in Lebanon? To help Israel. The war against Iraq? A Nazi-like war or aggression that resulted in the US colonization of Iraq. The bases scattered all over the Arab World? To control the oil supply, imperialist style, so no one else can get their mitts on it. This benefits US workers how?

The bases in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? An imperialist project to surround and threaten Russia. How does surrounding and threatening Russia benefit US workers? Someone?

Bases in South Korea? To threaten North Korea. How does threatening North Korea benefit US workers? Anyone?

I have a question for you. If you are a working class person, why would you join the army of the rich and go around the world killing poor people and workers so that the rich and the corporations can continue to rip them off and exploit them? Why join an anti-worker, anti-poor army? Why go fight for the rich? Why fight for the corporations? Because that’s what you are doing when you join the US military. Why would a working class person do that?  For the money? For the adventure?

How the Latin American Right Thinks

From this interesting comment on my piece about the FARC in Colombia:

RL: Labor unionists, community leaders, peasant leaders and peasants, Indian leaders and Indians, women’s organizations, gay rights organizations, environmental groups, anti-free trade agreement groups, human rights groups, journalists, students, professors, anti-mining and anti-oil groups…[are all accused of being “FARC supporters” or “members of the FARC” and are liable to be arrested, beaten, tortured, jailed or murdered at any time.] Parasites, dead-wood, leeches, crooks, thugs, villains, leftist shit-heels. Fuck them too.

This is how these people think. To them, if you are a member of a labor union, a women’s organization, a gay rights organization, an environmental group, an anti-free trade agreement groups, a human rights groups, an anti-mining or anti-oil group, a community leader, a peasant leader or a peasant, an Indian leader or an Indian, or a leftwing  journalist, student or professor, you are a parasites, dead-wood, a leech, a crook, a thug, a villain or a leftist shit-heel. And presumably, you deserve to be killed at any time.

So the war is not really against the FARC at all. The war is against the entire Left of society. The rightwing of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil and Ecuador has a similar attitude: kill the Left. It was formerly the attitude of the Bolivian, Peruvian, Uruguayan, Dominican, Paraguayan, Chilean and Argentine rightwings too. But they have been out of power for a while and haven’t been killing many people lately.

Furthermore, this is not only the attitude of both political parties – the Democrats and the Republicans, but it also the attitude of the US military. This is a very important note: both US political parties, even the supposedly liberal Democratic Party, are 10

The US military runs a school called the School of the Americas in Georgia where they train Latin American military officers. As part of their coursework, the US military teaches these officers that the legal Left are “Communists” who are trying to overthrow the government. They are a military target and need to be dealt with via force. These officers then go back to their countries and often turn into major human rights violators.

The US has been behind or supportive of every single rightwing military coup that ever happened in Latin America. The Obama Administration supported the Honduran military coup and the mass terror that followed. Obama also tried to overthrow the Ecuadorian regime of Correa. I thought Obama supports democracy?

The Bush Adminstration hatched and carried out a coup against President Aritide of Haiti and supported the terror afterwards that followed that left 3,000 Haitians murdered. Bush also backed and helped plan the coup against Hugo Chavez. I thought Bush supported democracy?

See what liars these Americans are? If you are an American, why do you believe the American liars when they go on and on about democracy? Why fall for their lies?

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