The Beginning of White America

By Ian Jobling • 1/19/09

The emblem of our movement.

<!– –>Today, we launch together a new website, as well as, I hope, a new intellectual and political movement, called White America. It is not necessary to describe our premises and goals at length here as they have been spelled out in Principles of the Pro-White Movement. In brief, our thesis is that American culture is rooted in the biology of the race that created it and that our nation will decline if white people lose control of their land.

White America thus stands for the truths that our age most fears and wishes to suppress. Other articles on this site document in detail the phenomena of race denial and leukophobia, the first of which suppresses the truth that the races are naturally different, and the second of which casts whites as the great villains of history, rather than the bearers of civilization and humanity. The brazenness of the lies that are directed against us, and the hatred inflicted on those who combat them, demonstrate how powerful and terrifying the ideas that we defend are.

White America supersedes and replaces my previous website, The Inverted World. As I explained in From “The Inverted World” to “White America”, I decided to change the title of the website in order to give it a more political tone. Political activism will be a priority of White America—the activism section of the website has not yet been launched, but it will be shortly.

As you will see from the website’s banner and the illustration on this page, I have chosen as the emblem of our movement the image of a kind and noble young lady serenely holding out the flag of our nation. The image comes from an early 20th century greeting card and perfectly expresses the ethos of that era, when almost all Americans held it as self-evident that theirs was a nation for and by white people and that their national character was rooted in their racial nature. When I first viewed this image, I was shaken by an almost unbearable nostalgia. Whatever its faults, that time was a far wiser one than ours, and this emblem will remind us daily of what we have lost and what we must work to restore.

Many will no doubt judge that our movement was obsolete before it even started, founded as it is on ideas that the current age deems pathetically backwards and out of date. And indeed, this website is being launched on a day when our prospects seem very dark. Today we are reminded that the only national holiday that bears the name of an American is Martin Luther King Day. Moreover, tomorrow we will witness the inauguration of America’s first black president. Another irony is that we begin White America a few days after The Atlantic, one of our nation’s most respected magazines, published an article called… The End of White America!

It would seem then that we are too late, that we begin to defend White America at the moment when it has been decisively eclipsed and superseded. We respond that, however despised it may be, the truth is never out of date and delusion can never supersede it. For on matters of race America is beyond deluded—it is in a state of advanced psychosis, and this psychosis threatens to lead our nation into collapse. We stubbornly insist, in the teeth of conventional wisdom, that it is only from our perspective that the errors of our time can be clearly seen and their disastrous consequences be addressed and corrected.

“The End of White America” is a sterling example of America’s racial psychosis. Written by Vassar professor of English Hua Hsu, the upshot of the article is that “whiteness has become a vacuum,” and white people are “culturally broke.” Only non-whites have a thriving culture in which they can take pride, and all white Americans can do is look on in envy. As Christian Lander, the creator of the blog Stuff White People Like says,

Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.

The views of “whiteness studies” founder Noel Ignatiev have become mainstream today:

There is nothing positive about white identity. As James Baldwin said, “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

To the extent that whiteness isn’t mere nullity, it is evil or at least obnoxious. White people are acutely conscious of the crimes, real and imaginary, that they have committed in history, such as slavery, segregation, and the Holocaust. To the extreme liberal imagination, other atrocities would also include the Iraq War and global warming. As Lander says,

Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world… And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, “You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.”

Hsu also suggests that our socioeconomic success is due to “white privilege” or pervasive bias in favor of whites in American society. He alludes to “the obvious material advantages that come with being born white—lower infant-mortality rates and easier-to-acquire bank loans, for example.”

The contempt for whiteness is a result of a change in the structure of American culture: “Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.” The result is a nation “which prizes diversity above all else, and whose ultimate goal is some vague notion of racial transcendence.” Authenticity therefore requires white people to embrace this decentralization and become “race traitors,” as Ignatiev preached in his journal of that title.

The paradigmatic symbol of whiteness today is, consequently, the “wigger,” who imitates minority rap culture. However, even they do not rise to the level of true coolness: white rappers are, in the end, a “profoundly confused caricature” whose racial identity crisis becomes an “instant punch-line.”

There are some white Americans who adopt a white identity, but, in Hsu’s portrait, there is little that is attractive about it. The alternative to white self-loathing is a backwards, xenophobic, redneck culture, as symbolized by Kid Rock, Larry the Cable Guy, and conspiracy theories about Obama being a closet Muslim. Other examples of white identity are Mormons and picturesque nostalgia for the WASP culture of the past, symbolized by “seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes.” None of these is likely to inspire.

There is no reason to believe that Hsu’s article is out of line with the commonsensical vision of whiteness in America today. What he says is very much in accord with my articles on the leukophobia that pervades contemporary culture. The current age casts white culture by turns as stultifying, spoiled, rapacious, and backwards. We are the only race that has nothing to recommend it.

This website exists to convince the world that this view, however commonsensical it has become, is entirely inverted. It is an almost inconceivable injustice rooted in a tragic ignorance of history or willful blindness.

The most obscene distortion is the one that makes Larry the Cable Guy the symbol of our people. The world has apparently forgotten Shakespeare was white, Isaac Newton was white, Michelangelo was white. Indeed, nearly all the great innovators in science, technology, art, literature, and philosophy have been white, as Charles Murray demonstrated in Human Accomplishment. Despite the rise of east Asia in the 20th century, white dominance in creativity was as overwhelming as ever. Historian of ideas Peter Watson says of his interviews with 150 thinkers from around the world:

all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note.

Indeed, white people created the whole moral system that condemns them. Today the world blames white Americans for slavery but forgets that whites were the first to formulate the concept of human rights that is the basis of this condemnation. Until the 19th century slavery was a universal practice, and Arabs, Africans, and Asians never realized it might be wrong until white people told them so and pressured them to abolish it.

In his response to Hsu’s article, Steven Sailer makes short work of the idea that whites are privileged. The idea that “easier-to-acquire” bank loans are evidence of white privilege “sounds completely clueless in the wake of the catastrophic 15-year-long campaign by the Clinton and Bush administrations to boost mortgage lending to uncreditworthy minorities.” There is no denying that affirmative action permeates American business, government, and education, and there is also no denying that it is minority privilege. If whites are more successful than blacks and Hispanics then, it is not because the game is rigged in our favor, but because of innate differences among the races in the traits that lead to accomplishment, like intelligence and providence.

Hsu’s failure to appreciate whites’ overwhelming dominance in creativity leads him to poo-poo the theory our demographic and cultural eclipse would lead to civilizational decline. “Civilization is not,” he declares serenely, “in the words Tom Buchanan, ‘going to pieces’ and America is not, in the phrasing of Pat Buchanan, going ‘Third World.’” Is he sure? After all, Hsu’s article was published in the middle of a financial crisis that has prompted respected and sober thinkers to warn of a new Great Depression. The end of white America seems to have coincided with the end of the stock market.

It has now been widely recognized that one of the major, if not the primary, source of the crisis was “affirmative action” mortgage lending, combined America’s increasing diversity. In other words, the darkening of the American population, combined with efforts to bring about socioeconomic equality among the races, is leading to a serious decline in the American standard of living. Furthermore, the global effects of the crisis may well result in serious social and geopolitical unrest. In short, America is indeed beginning to look more like the Third World, and civilization may well be in decline. Although we may disagree with much of what Pat Buchanan and Lothrop Stoddard have written, in this matter they are clearly on to something, and it is foolish to dismiss their ideas out of hand.

Understanding the fallacies that underlie Hsu’s article does not require great intelligence or any other special ability. Rather, all that is needed is the courage to recognize the obvious and the self-respect to defend oneself against slander. No matter how dark our prospects may seem, there are, consequently, good reasons to begin White America with optimism and confidence. After all, how long can white Americans remain blind to the obvious and deaf to slander? Not long, I think, especially when the disastrous effects of our racial psychosis grow more apparent every day.

Am I an “Equal Opportunist”?

By Ian Jobling • 1/22/09

David Kelsey, who runs the blog The Kvetcher, has praised The Inverted World and now White America in a few blog entries. I was always glad to have such an intelligent fan and defender as Kelsey, but I found his interpretation of my writings peculiar, and told him so once in a comment on his site. Kelsey believes that I am fired by a rage against racial discrimination and that my fundamental goal is the equal treatment of white Americans. Consequently, he labels me a “true equal opportunist” and a “civil rights advocate.”

Certainly, I have never used this language to describe my agenda. In Principles of the Pro-White Movement, you will not find anything about equal opportunity, nor will you find any civil rights advocacy, at least as the term is commonly understood. I do advocate restoring Americans’ right to racial discrimination, and so, in an odd way, I am a civil rights advocate, but in the topsy-turvy inverted world that we live in, this advocacy makes me an enemy of the “civil rights movement.”

One of Kelsey’s commenters pointed out that his interpretation of me did not fit very well with the facts. He quoted the following passage from The Meaning of the Obama Election to prove that I’m just a plain old white supremacist:

By racial consciousness, I mean the instinctive understanding among American whites that their country has a distinctive and precious heritage, that this heritage is rooted in the nature of the white race, and that only white people can be true Americans.

Given that it’s clear from the context that I think that white racial consciousness is a good thing, these are, indeed, hardly the words of an equal opportunist. This statement is quite consistent with the rest of my writings.

Let me be clear then. I think that, since white people founded and built America, we are the true Americans and should be privileged in our country, just as a man in his own home is privileged over guests. I believe whites should have the right to racially discriminate, and I believe that they should act on that right.

At the same time, I also believe that the rule of law is almost always superior to anarchy, so I am committed to obeying the law in all respects even as I preach how wrong-headed it is.

I reject the term “white supremacist,” however, because it is a slur. The term has been ascribed almost exclusively to Klansmen, Nazis, and has been indelibly colored by these associations. My views are founded on respected scholarship, not on irrational folk wisdom, and I have been very clear in my rejection of anti-Semitism. So I am not a “white supremacist” as the term is actually understood. Rather, I call myself “pro-white.”

I gave Kelsey a hint of what my answer would be, and he posted another entry where he asked: “How is that realistic? How are you a realist?”

I would respond to this that the times are so sick and deluded that anyone who is conscious of the fundamental realities of race and nation looks like a hopeless idealist. But I think that one day reality will return with a vengeance.

A final thought. If equal opportunity advocacy is what you want, you don’t need to turn to radical websites like mine. There are many mainstream commentators and activists like Roger Clegg, Linda Chavez, and Ward Connerly who oppose affirmative action as discrimination against white people. I wonder, in fact, why Kelsey ever became a fan of my work. Perhaps it appealed to him for reasons that he isn’t entirely clear about.

Dear Black America…

A draft for a letter I’m thinking of sending….

Dear Black America,

In the midst of what is for you the joyous occasion of the inauguration of the first black president of the United States, I’m really sorry to have to write something that I know is going to hurt you. It’s the last thing I would ever want to do. But I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, and there’s no getting around the truth.

You know it and I know it. Our marriage is not working out.

I want a divorce.

I have not come to this decision lightly. When we married, we promised to stay together for the rest of our lives, “till death do us part.” And I’ve taken that vow seriously through all these years, and tried ceaselessly to fix what was wrong with me to try to make you happy. And then, there are the children, who didn’t get to choose their parents and now will have to suffer from our failed marriage. But you know, sometimes, a marriage is just so impossible and so hurtful to everyone that there’s nothing left to do but cut your losses. I’ve decided that’s what I need to do.

I’m not playing the saint here. I wasn’t a saint at all. It was I who started things to begin with. I seduced you and took advantage of you, and I forced you to do things against your will. It was terribly wrong and there’s nothing I can do to fix the way I hurt you. True, that’s the way everyone did things in those days. I did try, in my own way, to treat you well…. Well, I don’t need to remind you what happened after that. We got into a situation where the only honorable thing to do was to offer to marry you. I gave you the option to get out quietly, but you said no, we were together and you meant for us to stay together, and so we were married.

We never got along completely peacefully, but I think that, at least at first, we both tried to make it work out. You asked me to teach you about what was in all those books of mine, so you could improve yourself and so we’d have more in common to talk about. And I think we were both pretty excited about the progress you made, at first. I tried to get to know your interests, too, and really came to appreciate your charms and your talents and your own special kind of wisdom. We went places together, and we helped each other out in all sorts of ways. I thought things were going pretty well there for awhile. Even you have to admit we had some good times.

I always tried to be good to you, and I think I did many things to help you. But I admit, despite my best intentions, I could sometimes be abusive and violent and cruel to you. I didn’t mean to be, but I was. I was used to being in control and I felt threatened when you challenged me on it. Oh, you provoked me often enough, and nobody can be meaner than you when you want to be, but I’m not going to use that as an excuse. I take responsibility for my own actions. I eventually managed to get myself under control, and I thought you’d forgiven me for the past and that we had an understanding now of how to settle disputes between us. And we had a period where I thought we got along pretty well. Don’t you think so?

Well, it came as a shock when you came out and said you were miserable and that I was still mistreating you just as badly as before. You wanted us to be equal. You wanted an equal say in how our household was run, you wanted an equal share of our possessions and prestige. Well, I was completely shocked because I’d always figured the arrangement we had was what was best for both of us. We weren’t completely equal, but each of us had his own sphere of activity and it seemed to work smoothly most of the time. But what could I say if that’s what you wanted? I believe in marriage as an equal partnership; I don’t want to keep my spouse under my thumb. So I promised to devote myself to making our partnership into an equal partnership.

Well, I believe I have done the best any person could do to meet your request. I’ve had myself analyzed and re-educated; I’ve apologized and renounced my acts;  I’ve been punished and rebuked. I cut off ties with those relatives of mine who didn’t accept you; I sent money and gave my help to your relatives across town and invited some of them to join our family. And I never lost faith. Every time I tried something new, I believed that this time, you would be happy.

Instead, I’ve ended up the victim in an abusive relationship. First there is the physical abuse. I just never know when you’re going to lash out and hit me or worse. There’s been some sexual abuse too, I’m sorry to say. Then there is the psychological abuse. You are constantly talking about our past and how I’ve mistreated you, and I’m starting to realize that you’re exaggerating and making up things that aren’t even true. And you’ve made me a stranger in my own home, talking about me with your friends and telling the children lies about me to get them to side against me. Then, when I draw back from you, you get teary-eyed and sentimental and tell me I need to understand you, that if we both just try a little harder we can get along. Something about you is so sweet when you cry to me like that that I begin to believe what you say. But now I realize it’s part of the way you manipulate me.

And I don’t know why it’s only recently that I’ve noticed you never say you love me?

I have to be honest with myself. Living with you makes me miserable. I’ve given up my friends, my hobbies, even my values and beliefs, to try to make you happy. But it’s just not working out. And I’ve realized that it never can. You know why? We are just naturally different. We don’t fit together, spiritually, intellectually, or physically. And we really have known it all along. I’m not saying this to put you down. You are a wonderful person. But you need to be with someone else, not me. And the same is true for me. If I stay with you, I seriously feel it is going to destroy me.

What I’ve said may be very hurtful to you. So though it may not help any, I want to say that I care about you very much. We have been together for a long, long time and our lives have been changed forever by the experience. In some ways, we know each other better than anyone. I value the good times we had together and all the things you have taught me. It is a cliché, but I sincerely hope that we’ll be able to be friends, once the pain of separation has subsided. We like and care about many of the same things, and sometimes we really enjoy each other’s company. And I assure you that if you ever need help in the future, I’ll do anything in my power to assist you.

I want to be friends. But I don’t want to be married to you anymore. I want a divorce.

Please try to understand.

Sincerely,

White America

Leukophobe Joseph Lowery Speaks at Obama Inauguration

By Ian Jobling • 1/20/09

Rev. Joseph Lowery’s portrait of American race relations has the virtue of simplicity:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

Preserving the gentile’s civilisation. No, make that the gringo’s.

By Bo Sears

A conference with the title “Preserving Western Civilisation” takes place in Baltimore on February 6 to February 8.  It’s purpose is advertised on its website as follows:-

We believe that America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity must be defended. Today, our glorious Western civilization is under assault from many directions. Three such threats will be discussed at this conference.

First, the massive influx to the United States and Europe of Third-World immigrants who do not share our fundamental political and cultural values.

Second, the threat from Islam, a militant ideology that is hostile to our society and, in principle, committed to destroying it.

Third, because of the persistent disappointing performance of blacks (which many whites mistakenly blame on themselves) many whites have guilt feelings that undermine Western morale and deter us from dealing sensibly with the other threats.

Are all the speakers sincere?

The lead speaker is Lawrence Auster. At other times and in other contexts, he has quite a different interpretation of Western civilization. Consider his remarks in FrontPageMagazine on June 22, 2004F. His subject was Jewish organizational opposition to immigration reduction.  He liberally sprinkled this piece with the word “gentile” to make clear what he thinks of Euro-Americans (plus one “goyim” if we were in any doubt). As weird as these remarks sound, they are perfectly typical Austerisms.

To seek to overturn entire societies [by Jewish organizations] in order to get rid of one’s own ethnic identity may seem a rather drastic approach to solving the Jewish problem, yet it reflects, in a uniquely exacerbated and destructive form, Jews’ recurrent pattern of forming some global ideology for reasons relating to their particular situation as Jews. (Let us note that this tendency, while it can take negative forms as in the current example, is natural for a people whose tribal history and beliefs became the basis for all of Western civilization.)

To label our heritage “Judeo-Christian” …

“a term used to describe the body of concepts and values which are thought to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity”

… is already begging a very Jewish question.  But to assert that the entire cultural edifice of Western Civilisation is based on “the tribal history and beliefs” of Jews, and by implication Greece and Rome and the Nordic traditions, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment amount to nothing, is a remarkably narrow and exclusive view. But at least now we know what Auster thinks about our civilization, and about us and why we are nothing more than “gentiles”.

Such a view, of course, is at considerable odds with the matters to be discussed at the Baltimore conference in February.  It doesn’t sound as though he believes in anything remotely like a “European identity.”

Perhaps Auster will find time to discuss it with the second speaker listed for the conference, Peter Brimelow.  He has revealed over the past year that his immigration reduction efforts spring from a neocon philosophy, demonstrated by his frequent publishing at VDare of racist labels like the Spanish-language epithets “gringo” and “anglo”, as well as the artificial “WASP”.  The latter, by the way, is defined by Wikipedia as “a sociological and cultural pejorative ethnonym that originated in the United States”.

Maybe the comedian Julia Gorin or the junior BNP politician Pat Richardson, both also speakers at the conference, will be able to offer a pejorative-free way out of the impasse.  Or maybe not.  European identity is a subject best left to those of European descent.

At least Prof Phillipe Rushton is on hand to illuminate his audience about the “persistent disappointing performance of blacks”.  Personally, I’m not too disappointed, but maybe that’s just me.  To judge from the “Statement of Purpose” reproduced above, the meat of the discussion won’t be about black performance at all.  It will be about the “guilt feelings” that grip “many whites” and which apparently “undermine Western morale”.

Naming us, then, isn’t enough.  Our foolish gentile minds and our self-destructive gentile ways must stand exposed to the gimlet gaze of the conference organisers.  And why, precisely?  So that the “folly of the gentile … no, make that the gringo” can explain the failure of our “Judeo-Christian heritage” … and the “the massive influx of immigrants” … and the “threat of Islam”.  No other explanation in sight.

And just who are these gimlet-eyed conference organisers?  Well, the chairman of the organizing committee is … Michael Hart.

It will be interesting to see how the dominant media culture reports this conference, and whose voice they say was spoken during it.  Not a voice with a “European identity”, that’s for sure … not the voice of the diverse white American peoples.

I can’t help but wonder what the “gentiles” slated to speak there actually understand about the conference’s real purpose … Brimelow, Phil Rushton, Brenda Walker are intelligent people.  Sadly, they are also too trusting.

Bo Sears is a senior activist at ResistingDefamation.org.

Obamas new Deal – reveal the new anti-white, anti-middle-class agenda

Reich and Rangel reveal the new anti-white, anti-middle-class agenda

Thanks to Bo for this video of Robert Reich and Charles Rangel at an Economic Recovery Plan meeting on 7th January.

Today the $825 billion economic stimulus package was marked up by the House Ways & Means Committee.  It includes money for infrastructure, health care and education projects.  But little to none of it will be coming your way if you are white or middle-class.

Mexico Police Chief’s Head Found in Ice Box

Telegraph (London), January 20, 2009

The head of a Mexican police chief was delivered to his colleagues in an ice box in the country’s latest drug-related violence.

The incident came as 16 other people were also killed in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua in attacks the authorities believe are linked to the country’s drug wars.

“Hitmen cut off commander Martin Castro’s head and left it in an ice cooler in front of the local police station,” said a statement issued by the state justice authorities.

His head was left in the town Praxedis with a message from the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel.

The police commander was abducted on Saturday, along with five other police officers and a civilian, only five days after starting his job.

Six bodies in police uniforms bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds were found on Monday in a street in the state capital, Chihuahua, officials said.

Hitmen killed four men in separate attacks in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez, while six others, including a woman, were found dead in other towns across the state.

Mexican police and soldiers are battling a wave of drug-related violence across the country, particularly in northern areas bordering the US, with more than 5,300 people killed last year.

The federal government launched a campaign against drug-related violence more than two years ago involving the deployment of around 36,000 troops across the country.

Original article

Researchers Try to Cure Racism

More news stories on Indoctrination

Brandon Keim, Wired Science, January 20, 2009

As the first African-American president in United States history takes office, researchers have shown that it may be possible to scientifically reduce racial bias.

After being trained to distinguish between similar black male faces, Caucasian test subjects showed greater racial tolerance on a test designed to to measure unconscious bias.

The results are still preliminary, have yet to be replicated, and the real-world effects of reducing bias in a controlled laboratory setting are not clear. But for all those caveats, the findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that science can battle racism.

{snip}

Tarr’s findings overlap with other results suggesting that the key to reducing racial bias—at least in a short-term, laboratory setting—is exposure to people in personalized ways that challenge stereotypes. {snip}

But unlike carefully structured social mixing, with precisely controlled conditions of interdependence and equality, Tarr and others raise the possibility of a lab-based shortcut to bias reduction.

Underpinning this research is the Implicit Association Test, used by psychologists to measure deep-rooted, often unconscious biases. During the test, subjects are measured on the time it takes to associate faces with positive or negative words. If, for example, someone more quickly associates negative words with minority rather than white faces, they’re likely to have a bias—a bias that translates into a tendency to hire same-race workers, choose same-race partners, and find minority defendants guilty.

{snip}

“It’s remarkable that our brain is so flexible that 10 hours of training will affect something that is the product of your whole life experience,” said Tarr, who hopes his work will lead to race training for people working in potentially race-sensitive situations, such as police officers, social workers and immigration officials.

In a study published Tuesday in Public Library of Science ONE, Tarr’s team put 20 Caucasian college students through ten hours of face-identification training, testing their ability to discern previously-seen from unknown faces. Students with the largest improvements in face memory also showed significant improvements on a variation of the Implicit Association Test.

According to Banaji, a brief talk about working for women suffices to reduce gender bias. City University of New York psychologist Curtis Hardin showed that having black experimenters administer a test produced lower bias scores among white subjects.

{snip}

For at least the next four years, however, the United States will collectively undergo a real-world experiment in stereotype defiance.

“The first black president—that’s going to have a huge effect on things that come to mind,” said Ohio State University psychologist Richard Petty. “Instead of just negative associations, there will be all sorts of positive associations.”

{snip}

[Editor’s Note: “Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias,” by Sophie Lebrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr and James W. Tanaka can be read on-line here.]

Original article

Larry King on Barack Obama: “Black Is In . . . My Eight-Year-Old Son Wishes He Was Black.”

More news stories on Racial Suicide

Toby Harnden, Telegraph (London), January 22, 2009

CNN’s orange-haired septuagenarian chatterbox Larry King has been bowled over by the new Age of Obama, enthusing that his youngest offspring (from his seventh marriage) wants to be black. I guess it’s a case of black being, er, the new black.

Interviewing a visibly uncomfortable Bob Woodward on his eponymous CNN show last night, Larry, 75, gushed: “My younger son Cannon, he is eight. And he now says that he would like to be black. I’m not kidding. He said there’s a lot of advantages. Black is in. Is this a turning of the tide?”

The distinguished Watergate scribbler responded “well, maybe” and talked about how his 12-year-old daughter Diana liked Barack Obama’s inaugural speech before gingerly steering the discussion towards George W. Bush’s magnanimity and how he “hasn’t, you know, made any cheap shots” at his White House successor.

It could have been worse, Bob. The other day, Larry blurted out that things were changing so fast that there could soon be a lesbian in the Oval Office. “Who would’ve thunk it,” he said on KIIS radio in Los Angeles. “I can’t believe it. Well, in 10 years’ time we’ll have, a what, a lesbian?”

Original article

Another Real Estate Crisis Is About To Hit

By Paul Craig Roberts

For a picture of the US real estate crisis, imagine New Orleans wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, and before the waters even begin to recede, a second Katrina hits.

The 1,120,000 lost US retail jobs in 2008 are a signal that the second stage of the real estate bust is about to hit the economy. This time it will be commercial real estate—shopping malls, strip malls, warehouses, and office buildings. As businesses close and rents decline, the ability to service the mortgages on the over-built commercial real estate disappears.

The over-building was helped along by the irresponsibly low interest rates, but the main impetus came from the slide of the US saving rate to zero and the rise in household indebtedness. The shrinkage of savings and the increase in debt raised consumer spending to 72% of GDP. The proliferation of malls and the warehouses that service them reflect the rise in consumer spending as a share of GDP.

Like the federal government, consumers spent more than they earned and borrowed to cover the difference. Obviously, this could not go on forever, and consumer debt has reached its limit.

Shopping malls are losing anchor stores, and large chains are closing stores and even going out of business altogether. Developers who borrowed to finance commercial ventures are in trouble as are the holders of the mortgages, derivatives and other financial junk associated with the loans.

The main source of the economic crisis is the infantile belief of US policymakers that an economy could be based on debt expansion. As offshoring moved jobs, incomes, and GDP out of the country, debt expanded to take the place of the missing income. When the offshored goods and services were brought back to be sold to Americans, the trade deficit rose, adding another level of financing for an economy that consumes more than it produces.

The growth of debt has outpaced the growth of real output. Yet, the solution offered by Obama’s economic team is to expand debt further. This is not surprising as Obama’s economic team consists of the very people who brought on the debt crisis. Now they are going to make it worse.

The unexamined question is: Who is going to finance the next wave of debt?

The US budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 already appears to be on a path to $2 trillion, and that is before Obama’s stimulus program. What we are looking at is a $3 trillion budget deficit if Obama’s program is enacted in time to impact the economy this year.

Foreign countries can finance a $500 billion US budget deficit out of their trade surpluses with the US. But foreigners do not have the funds to finance a US budget deficit in the trillions of dollars, and they would not finance such a deficit even if they had the funds. Foreigners are over-weighted in dollar holdings and prefer to lighten their holding than to add to them. America’s economic prospects are dim as are the dollar’s prospects as reserve currency. An annual budget deficit in the trillions of dollars makes the dollar’s prospects appear even dimmer.

The federal government’s likely solution to the debt problem will be to monetize the debt, that is, the government will finance its deficit by printing money. Debt will be inflated away. But for those Americans without jobs or whose incomes do not rise with inflation, life will be cruel.

Life is already cruel for Americans living on retirement savings. Not only has the stock market bust reduced their wealth by half, but also their remaining assets are producing no income. Interest rates are so low that debt instruments produce no income, and there are scant capital gains in the stock market. Retirees are living by consuming their capital.

America’s economic policy of low interest rates and debt expansion bodes ill for everyone living off their savings. Their future prospects are even worse as high inflation will destroy the value of their savings, especially if held in cash or debt instruments, including “safe” US Treasuries.

There are more intelligent ways to try to escape from the current crisis. However, the financial gangsters and their shills that Obama has put in charge of economic policy are thinking only of their own interest. What happens to the American people is not a concern.

A compassionate government would handle the crisis in this way:

The trillions of dollars in credit default swaps (CDS) should be declared null and void. These “swaps” are simply bets that financial instruments and companies will fail, and the bulk of the bets are made by people and institutions that do not hold the financial instruments or shares in the companies. The ideology that financial markets were self-regulating allowed illegal gambling free rein. There is no reason under the sun for taxpayers to bail out gamblers.

The bailout money, instead of being given to favored financial institutions to finance their acquisition of other institutions, should be used to refinance the defaulting mortgages. This would slow, if not stop, the growing inventory of foreclosed properties that is driving down home prices.

The mark-to-market rule should be suspended until the real values of the troubled properties and instruments can be determined. Suspension of the rule would prevent the failure of sound institutions and lessen the need for a bailout.

Interest rates have to be raised in order to encourage saving and to provide incomes to retirees.

To preserve the dollar’s status as reserve currency, a credible policy of reducing both budget and trade deficits must be announced. In the near term the budget deficit can be reduced by $500 billion by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and by cutting a bloated defense budget that represents the now unattainable goal of US world hegemony.

The trade deficit can be significantly reduced by bringing offshored jobs back to America. One way to do this is to tax corporations according to the value added to their output that occurs in the US. Corporations that produce their products for US markets abroad would have high tax rates; those that produce domestically would have low tax rates.

This approach to the economic crisis stands in marked contrast with the approach of the gangsters running US economic policy. The gangsters are using the crisis as an opportunity to steal from taxpayers and to finance their misdeeds and exorbitant salaries with Federal Reserve loans. Their shills among economists and the financial press tell the people that the solution is to fatten up the banks with funds so they will resume lending to an over-indebted public that will then return to the shopping malls.

This unrealistic approach to a serious crisis indicates a leadership crisis on top of an economic crisis.