Mutualism vs. Parasitism

Mutualism vs. Parasitism

Section One
Mutualism

(Forward to Section Two: Parasitism)

	Environmental (leftist)	Genetic (rightist)
“Y” axis Central- ization (more top down)	“x” axis Environmental Centralized Genetic Centralized Environmental Decentralized Genetic Decentralization (Third dimensional “z” axis entailing “mutualism” vs. “parasitism” not drawn, see discussion below)
Decen- tralized (more bottom up)

The diagram includes a “z” axis sloping backwards as in a perspective drawing to create a cube effect, entailing the “altruist/symbiotist” vs “predator/parasite” (or “mutualism” vs. “parasitism” for short) duality of sociobiology.

A recapitulation of my definition of “mutualism vs. parasitism” from the Introduction section:

I have derived the “z” axis third dimension from the altruist/symbiotist vs. predator/parasite duality in sociobiology. For the sake of convenience, I call this the “mutualism” vs. “parasitism” duality.

“Mutualism” is a scientific term usually applied to animal and plant populations who live in close association and benefit each other, so obviously when we try to apply it to human affairs with popular terminology we are unlikely to find exact language. I think that it is roughly similar to our concept of a human “producer.” However, there are many ways that humans can benefit each other, whether it involves exchanging things of real value with each other in an open and fair way, or by unselfishly defending and nurturing each other, or by remaining respectful of each other’s lives, property, and other interests. It implies a style of leadership where the powerful and less powerful can growth together, rather than the powerful monopolizing and squeezing out their competition or abusing their subordinates. Therefore I can also relate the “mutualism” concept to many different popular terms, such as “altruist,” “open,” “honest,” “unselfish,” “benefactor,” “brotherhood,” “balance of power,” “limited powers,” “guaranteed rights,” “principled,” “self-restrained,” “republican,” “patriot,” “martyr,” “hero,” “chivalry,” “sportsmanship,” “honor,” “protector,” “shared genetic interests,” “supporting genetic fitness,” and “eugenic.” (If the latter three terms seem strange to the reader, I cover them in more detail in my environmental vs. genetics discussion).

The word “parasitism” usually applies to animal and plant populations who live in close association where one species lives as the expense of the other. I think that a good approximation in human affairs is the term “criminal.” Other words that have varying levels of similarity or association include “selfish,” “deceptive,” “enemy,” “thievery,” “untrustworthy,” “exploitive,” “greedy,” “unscrupulous,” “lawbreaker,” “sponger,” “deadbeat,” “wise-guy,” “corrupt,” “traitor,” “tyrant,” “working against your interests,”"unrestrained,” “totalitarian,”"monopolist” (implying viciously selfish and destructive competition),”dysgenic,” and “undermining genetic interests and genetic fitness.”

Speaking of genetics, this concept should not be confused with a child who lives at the expense of his parents. The child offers the chance of long term genetic survival to his parents, whereas the parasite undermines the long term genetic interests of its host and may even drive it into extinction.

OVERVIEW

On his Republic Broadcasting Network radio show, Michael Collins Piper commented that when he first came to Washington, D.C. a few decades ago as an investigative journalist, he originally thought that politics was all about a battle between left vs. right. Now he has come to the conclusion that if you look under the hood in Washington long enough, the biggest issue really involves criminality vs. honest government. “Left” vs. “right” are relatively minor issues by comparison.

One of Piper’s colleagues at the American Free Press, Christopher Bollyn, echoed Piper’s sentiments on his program by labeling Washington, D.C. more of a “crimeocracy” than a “democracy.” John Stadtmiller, head of the Republic Broadcasting Network, added that American politics has ultimately become an issue of not “left vs. right,” but rather “right vs. wrong.”

Craig S. Lerner’s Nov 2004 University of Illinois Law Review paper: “Legislators as the `American Criminal Class’” expanded on this “crimeocracy” theme:

…whether members of Congress are naturally more disposed to criminality than the rest of us, or whether the astonishing perks of their office create temptations that few of us confront and virtually none of us could resist, the fact is that members of Congress are, as Twain long ago noted, the American criminal class.

America is on track for massive hyperinflation. Most of the middle class will get wiped out perhaps worse than Argentina in 2001-2002. All social security and other retirement-related promises will evaporate. Many of our multi-racial cities will probably go up in flames much Los Angeles in 1992. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will get maimed in Middle Eastern war or suffer permanent genetic impairment from depleted uranium as a consequence of America’s “Israel-uber alles” policies. Various parts of America will likely become repressive police states. Torture is already being used in our prisons, which currently hold the highest per capita prisoner population in the world.

When it finally registers with America’s dwindling white population that it has been knowingly misled into a Third World hell hole by its leadership, then the term “criminal class” will definitely mean something stronger than tongue-in-cheek political satire.

As I have discussed earlier in my environmental vs. genetics section, none of this should be a surprise to genetic theorists, since as a very long term historical rule of thumb, the greater the genetic distance between factions within a society, the greater the odds that the relationship between them will periodically swing towards becoming predatory or parasitic (criminal) as opposed to altruist and mutualist. The history of America since the 1840′s has been one of steadily accelerating genetic distance both within its overall population and between its ruling elites relative to its original WASP core population. Genetic theory predicts rising levels of corruption and internal conflict through all levels of society.

We also see charges of criminality frequently appear on an international level. For example, “Silent Coup” by Justin Cowgill describes how Russia’s free market reforms of the 1990′s got high-jacked by Jewish kleptocrats. These ultra-high level criminals with strong Mossad and other Israeli connections made a joke out of the free economic market theory touted by major American economists for Russia.

Ironically, we also see American national media condemnations when certain political leaders are not criminal enough. For example, “Putin the Patriot” by Justin Raimondo describes how Russian President Vladimir Putin has been unfairly condemned by America’s controlled media for prosecuting malefactors and putting Russia’s interests first. As another example, Pat Buchanan got plastered on the cover of Time with the label “Hell Raiser” for openly wrestling with illegal immigration issues.

In this case, we see criminality at the highest levels of America’s national media — as evidenced by cover-ups of the Mossad assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Israeli assault on the U.S.S. Liberty, and Israeli intelligence complicity in 9-11. America’s corrupt national media has covered up for the vicious Russia Jewish mafia and has even supported it against a relatively more honest and patriotic national leader. It also routinely smears patriotic American leaders.

The power of criminality

Sometimes when political commentators use the word “criminal,” it is meant almost tongue-in-check to convey “extreme conflict of interest.” Other times, we discover that criminal activity is vastly more widespread and serious than it has been either reported or joked about to the public by our self-styled national media watchdogs.

“Criminality” is the “plug factor” that helps to explain how a country such as America, rich in natural resources, human resources, and defended by two big oceans, could transform itself from being what was once the most prosperous, powerful, society in the world in 1900 – with a 90% white population — to a bankrupt, Zionist-dominated, minority-ridden, Third World country a little over a century later. White Americans are dwindling at a below ZPG rate. Whites around the world lose on average about 20% of their total population each generation and at this rate can now contemplate the extinction of Caucasian people and Western Civilization with a couple of hundred years.

“Criminality” greatly accelerates the social decline process addressed in Dr. Elmer Pendell’s classic work Why Civilizations Self-Destruct, and the national tragedy described by Patrick Buchanan in Death of the West.

Criminality at the highest levels of society blocks the flow of honest information. It turns vital feedback systems on their heads. It completely distorts incentive systems away from reality-based productive behavior. It prevents men of good will from successfully managing messy social situations. Instead, it leads society towards mass tragedies.

Professional criminals think differently

In my discussion of dualities so far, that is, the top down vs. bottom up and environmental vs. genetic perspectives, I have presumed rational motivation for policy decisions. The aforementioned dualities lend themselves to academic research and scientific tests of facts and logic.

In contrast to all of this, criminals tend to think “kinky.” They usually mock the rational models created by academics. In fact, their ability to be maliciously destructive, deceitful, and unpredictable beyond the comprehension of the average man is an important part of their short term competitive advantage.

For starters, criminals tend to have fractured personalities. They tend to perceive reality and integrate their values differently compared to normal citizens. By definition a criminal must practice a dual value system. As I will explain later, high level criminals frequently demand extreme adherence to honest standards from other citizens while demanding free reign for their own personal greed.

While it is true that many of the low-level criminals who engage in muggings and stabbings are nasty, impulsive, brutish, primitive people who are fairly easy to spot, it is usually the other way around when we talk about sophisticated criminals who engage in high level financial, political, and economic fraud. They tend to be such good actors that in the short run they often appear to be more charming and down to earth than the average citizen.

Greatly complicating the study of criminality is scientific evidence that it can have a genetic basis on both an individualized and broader tribal level.

On an evolutionary level all that matters in the long run is that an animal pass on it genes. We see many instances in nature where animals do extremely bizarre things, simply because somehow they can continue with this behavior and still pass on their genes. One of my favorite weird examples involves the Chinese Mantid, a species of grasshopper where the female literally bites off the head of the male after he copulates with her.

In the short run, criminal behavior can be very rewarding. This can be true on both a Darwinian genetic level and as well as from a financial perspective. However, in the long run, criminal behavior is always by definition a disaster for society. This is why criminality is vastly more sinister and difficult to solve than our national media portrays it based upon its purely environmental models. This is also why I prefer the sociobiological term “parasitism” to really help us intellectually get our arms around this phenomenon.

Criminals vs. nonconformists

“Criminality” has to be a much broader concept than simply describing people who seriously violate lists of “dos” and “don’ts” set down by society. The reason is that the leaders of society who create the lists of “dos” and “don’ts” in government or set the moral tone of the national media might themselves be criminals or incompetent people.

Free thinkers, political dissidents, and innovators are crucial to provide checks and balances and fresh ideas for a healthy, prosperous, and adaptive society. In my “Critical Issues” section I provide the example of David Irving and other historical revisionists who have been unjustly “criminalized” and imprisoned for daring to exercise rights of free speech and free inquiry. In his case, the state is disinterested in logic, facts, and historical truth, and is instead serves as the handmaiden of powerful Jewish interests who seek to ruthlessly suppress any information that threatens their special privileges. Truth is no defense.

We might recollect how Soviet leaders once smeared political dissidents as “criminals” or as “insane” in order to suppress dissent. In such instances, the Soviets capriciously used laws as politically motivated snares. In this case, the “criminalizers” at the top of the Stalinist police state were the real “criminals,” and many “criminals” within the Gulag were genuinely honest, productive, and patriotic individuals.

As another complication in defining criminality, on a state level “criminality” often encompasses institutions as well as individuals. As an example, I view state-sponsored espionage organizations such as the CIA and Mossad as highly “criminal-at-risk.”

While it is true that the CIA may have within it honorable Americans with patriotic motivations, the basic modus operandi of espionage is virtually indistinguishable from the stealth methods used by organized crime. This stands to reason, since espionage is defined as stealing secrets. Therefore, the CIA’s activities are extremely illegal within every host nation where it proactively recruits human intelligence.

It is a cold fact that the U.S. Armed Forces are also “criminal-at-risk.” (Not a pleasant thing for me to admit as a former USMC officer). In our age of total war, it gets very hard at times to distinguish between “military necessity” and cold-blooded mass murder and wanton destruction of property. This can create a perfect environment for psychopathic, serial killers to do their thing.

In the libertarian section of Part One of this series, I describe how “ponzi government” is also highly “criminal at risk.” This includes the spendthrift trend of “social democracy,” so brilliantly analyzed by Dr. Hans-Herman Hoppe’s in his book Democracy: The God That Failed.

We can also see shades of criminality in so-called “well-intentioned” Federal affirmative action and “hate crime” laws. In my “environmental vs. genetics” section, I explain a dark side interpretation. These laws steal from white Americans their right to meritocracy, free expression, and racial nationalist economic self-determination.

Scientific definitions

The glossary of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Dr. Edward Wilson provides us with the following definitions:

Mutualism: Symbiosis in which both species benefit from the association. (Contrast with commensualism and parasitism).

Commensualism: Symbiosis in which members of one species are benefited while those of the other species are neither benefited nor harmed.

Parasitism: Symbiosis in which members of one species exist at the expense of members of another species, usually without going so far as to cause their deaths.

Since we looking at trade-offs between the extreme opposing ends of a spectrum, this paper focuses on mutualism and parasitism rather than the mid-ground of commensualism.

Before describing the dark world of human parasitism, I think that first we need to better understand “mutualist” models of healthy political and economic behavior. As a logic check, our mutualist models should reflect mirror image opposites of our parasite models.

MUTUALISM

In my Critical Issues section I describe how our economy is heading towards disaster. I also describe how both the government and paranoid (mostly Jewish) special interest groups are viciously constraining our civil liberties. Therefore, I think it is really important to understand how the free enterprise system and republican government are supposed to be forms of mutualism.

MUTUALISM AND AMERICAN BUSINESS PROSPERITY

Why chivalrous free enterprise is supposed to be a form of mutualism

Unbridled greed for money, and money alone, has definitely increased in our society over the last few decades. In American Values Decline (page 261; offered by America First Books), Dr. William M. Fox (my father) reports some disturbing indicators regarding America’s top executive leadership:

Arianna Huffington asks: “How can there be talk of a shared destiny in a nation where, between 1990 and 2000, average CEO pay rose 571 percent while average worker pay rose 37 percent? . . . Where, since 1980, real income for the bottom fifth of families fell by $800 while for the top fifth, it rose $56,800?” ["Capital Crimes, Capitol Cronies," U.S. News and World Report, January 20, 2003, page 30]

And this wasn’t the last increase. According to a pay survey by the Corporate Library in 2004, the median compensation for CEOs of S&P 500 companies rose 11.4 percent in 2002, and another 27 percent in 2003. In 1982, the typical CEO made 42 times what the typical employee got — by 2004, it had increased to 301 times! [Reported by Daren Fonda and Daniel Kadlec, "The Rumble Over Executive Pay," Time, May 31, 2004.]

American Values Decline points out egregious instances where CEO’s have awarded themselves increasing pay, perks, and stock options as the performance of their companies has steadily deteriorated. In plain English, they are knowingly gouging shareholders for all they can get. They are issuing fraudulent corporate progress reports to keep their stock prices pumped and to avoid getting thrown out of office as they loot their companies.

This is not funny, especially when their selfish wastage of economic resources destroys the capacity of the American economy to create productive jobs. Their selfishness leaves average Americans with more under-employment, more unemployment, and adds to the general decline in their real standard of living. Arguably these CEO’s are shamelessly exploiting their position in American society far worse than all the worst accusation ever made about the French aristocratic class at the time of Louis XVI.

Low rot as well as top rot

Unfortunately, we also see plenty of evidence of rot at lower levels as well. On page 54, American Values Decline mentions the example of the American Seed Company of Lancaster Pennsylvania, which had to drop its long-standing program for young people in 1981:

For more than 60 years, American Seed had profitably distributed garden seeds to enterprising youngsters to sell in their neighborhoods. Then, between 1975 and 1981, some 400,000 young business people sent for the seeds — but pocketed all of the proceeds — rather than deduct their commission and remit the rest, claiming they had been “mugged.” [Dividends, "Youth Gone To Seed," Time, October 12, 1981, page 86.]

In the past decades, as Americans have read establishment business magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, they have been taught how to rationalize expedient off-shoring of jobs wherever it makes a quick buck. They have also been taught that America’s declining manufacturing base means some kind inevitable trend of advanced industrial societies towards service economies. (Later I explain how this is a fallacy). They are taught ways to feel “comfortably uncomfortable” about more obvious ills such as exploding debt, chronic balance of trade deficits, and sagging productivity described in my “Critical Issues” section.

However, when we put all of this together with the negative demographic and values decline trends, we see an overall pattern of serious decadence that threatens our very national existence.

“Serious decadence” means that a society has become so greedy for immediate gratification that it literally eats its own seed corn. It has become incapable of maintaining the long term investment horizons and the level of honest social cooperation required for long term prosperity. It may also have so many criminal people embedded at the highest level of leadership that nothing short of revolution is likely to root them out.

Henry Ford as an anti-decadence role model

America’s decadence today stands in sharp contrast to the values espoused by Henry Ford in My Life and Work (offered by America First Books). As I point out in my preface to this classic work, I think that Henry Ford was genuinely motivated by his concept of “service” for America. I believe that he placed “service” as his first priority before making money, although in the end his superior “service” had its own reward. It made him one of the richest men in America.

“Service” to Ford was a broad concept, very different from what we mean today when we talk about a “service business” in a “service economy.” To Ford, “service” meant the total benefits that his car production provided to workers, consumers, and society as a whole in addition to entrepreneurs and owners such as himself.

I think that Ford’s “service” concept was close to what entrepreneurial literature today calls “the value proposition.” This is the concept that to be competitive in the long run, one must provide products with a better ratio of quality to price than the competition. At the same time, one must make a profit or at least break-even to stay in business. To stay competitive, one usually needs to keep reinvesting in ones own business automation and in new technologies in order to provide increasing quality at steadily lower prices.

In a decadent society, people stop reinvesting in business infrastructure and technology here in America. Worse yet, they give away hard-earned technology and business advantages to aliens before taking care of their own first. They blow their savings by buying consumer play toys and status symbols that make them feel good but add nothing to productivity or real output. They also give away American “social capital” through multi-racialism and multiculturalism, setting themselves up for the permanent social strife and dislocation brilliantly described in Thomas Chittum’s Civil War II.

That unique European characteristic called chivalry as a key success factor

Henry Ford’s concept of service contained in important element of chivalrous social behavior. While he believed in competition, he was not out to ruthlessly drive his competitors out of business or squeeze his worker’s wages to the bone. Instead, he saw free enterprise capitalism as a way for people to find a place in society where their talents could find the highest use, rather than as something that destroys people and their lives. Chivalrous business competition enables companies to find their best niche for their particular mix of talent and resources. However, it does not ruin the environment or unfairly drive all competitors out of business.

This is a very different moral attitude, incidentally, than that of Jewish-dominated speculative finance which sets the moral tone for American society today. I discuss speculative finance in some detail in my paper about Federal Reserve manipulation. Among other things, ever since America got off the international gold standard in 1971, unregulated derivatives have grown to well over 20 times the size of the U.S. economy and threaten to melt down our financial system. The substitution of speculative finance for productive industry has also played a key role in hollowing out our industrial base. This in turn has led to our chronic balance of trade deficits and declining dollar.

Admittedly, not all forms of speculation are bad, since risk-taking is a necessary part of entrepreneurial business development. However, financial speculation goes off the deep end, because it is completely unconcerned with any underlying business fundamentals or any negative long term impact on society. It focuses exclusively on exploiting market psychology, insider knowledge, and financial manipulation. It is the complete opposite of any form of “value” investing that takes into consideration the underlying quality of a company, its management, and its products.

Henry Ford steadily increased the quality level of goods while steadily reducing prices. He did this by steadily improving engineering design and manufacturing efficiency. He steadily reinvested in better automation equipment and manufacturing facilities.

Henry Ford ultimately created a win-win situation for everyone in America. This included not only himself as a manufacturer, but also workers and consumers. There was nothing particularly secretive about his methods, in fact he was more than happy to educate the public about science and technology. His approach could build upon itself indefinitely, generating ever-increasing wealth across America. The more people adhere to Henry Ford’s values, the more prosperous America can become on a permanent, sustainable basis.

In contrast, in speculative finance there is typically a conflict of interest between “owner” and “customer.” The financial speculator acquires a position of uncertain value and hopes it runs to a level where he can make a profit by offloading the position on a greater fool. High level financial speculators such as convicted Jewish stock swindlers Mike Milkin and Ivan Boesky typically withhold their best information. They even seek to deceive their greater fool customers through their Jewish allies with national media, the central bank, and government.

Speculative finance cannot go on for ever. In fact, its growth as a share of total national economic activity sews the seeds for its own demise.

The more people and money that engage in purely financial-speculative activity, the more volatile markets become. With increased volatility (risk), the mathematical expected value of average returns for everyone goes into decline. In addition, hot money flows create market bubbles that distort the efficient functioning of honest free market economies. Once market bubbles implode, they typically hurt many innocent people.

Speculative finance swaps paper rather than creating better quality goods and services at lower prices. It enriches those who are “first in” investment positions. However, the devil takes the hindmost for those who come in on the back end.

Speculative finance is not open or chivalrous. It is secretive and vicious. It is usually impersonal, highly short term and transactional in nature, and socially irresponsible. It spreads social cynicism while enriching only a few.

Henry Ford and social responsibility

It is very clear from Henry Ford’s work that he was very much concerned about how his enterprise impacted society as a whole. As a prime example, he voluntarily paid his non-union workers twice the auto industry average. He also tried to steadily increase their wages.

All of this was for several important reasons. He wanted to reduce turnover and attract better talent to not only efficiently run his assembly lines, but also suggest ways to innovate automation processes. Ford also felt strongly that as a matter of principle men should be able to buy the things that they produce. He knew that the wages he paid American workers would be recycled towards buying American goods and helping the overall American economy.

Unfortunately today most of America’s largest corporations have capital structures that resemble hedge funds. Chrysler is in foreign hands, General Motors is heading towards bankruptcy, and Ford has a sick balance sheet. Americans today are fed propaganda that justifies speculative finance and devalues manufacturing. They are often left confused about why blind faith in “free trade” with China, Mexico, and other countries has not created some kind of international anarcho-libertarian economic nirvana. As America continues its decline, where is that free market “invisible hand” of Adam Smith which is supposed to turn things around?

Eumon Fingleton’s work In Praise of Hard Industries provides some deeper answers. In the long run, only the continual automation revolution has the ability to continually drive down prices and scale up productivity and quality output. Manufacturing infrastructure is better at creating long term sustainable pay raises and a wide variety of well-paying jobs than the service sector. Wages are typically only a small fraction of the investment required in plant and equipment. In the long run manufacturers need to attract and retain satisfied workers who help them continually innovate and get the best out of their machines. Manufacturers are in a better position to continually raise wages among a broad group of people than any other economic sector.

It bears emphasizing that manufacturing is at the core of productivity gains that create real wealth to begin with. The creation of real products and tradable goods comprises a vital support base that props up the rest of the economy. Several decades ago, when manufacturing comprised about one third of America’s economy, the rest of the economy had vastly better support than it does today with manufacturing at only around 14% of GDP.

The Japanese have known this for a long time, and keep their manufacturing base at more than one third of GDP. Ireland acted on this concept in the early 1970′s and lured in major industries with major tax breaks. This has created tremendous strength and sustained growth within the Irish economy. China caught on a couple of decades ago, and its success has become even more legendary.

Manufacturing entails more than simply setting up and running plant and equipment. Automation innovation is also about continual tinkering with machinery. Obviously it becomes harder to continually upgrade plant and equipment once sent overseas and placed it in the hands of foreigners. In addition, manufacturing requires the proximity of a whole infrastructure of supporting industries, ranging from parts suppliers to logistical handlers. It usually also requires an infrastructure of entrepreneurs who create spin off businesses and provide innovative solutions, as well as supporting groups of technicians, scientists, engineers, and academics who understand the technology and ways to improve it.

Manufacturing also requires managers who can foster a climate of trust so that people can work together on a long term basis. Last, but not least, although no doubt there are patents and trade secrets that need to be protected, on the whole manufacturing encourages the open diffusion of technological and scientific knowledge throughout society. It is mutually supported by universities and other research institutions that openly advance knowledge for everyone.

On the penalty side, when a country loses manufacturing infrastructure in a strategic industry, it may take a long time to rebuild it. In fact, if a country that has lost its manufacturing infrastructure gets embroiled in war, there may be too little time to rebuild infrastructure required to produce vital military equipment and win the conflict.

Eamonn Fingleton makes the important point that global manufacturing is not a zero sum game. If another country such as China gains in manufacturing infrastructure, that does not necessarily imply that some other country must necessarily give up an equivalent amount of manufacturing capacity. In fact, Fingleton argues that all countries should strive to maintain manufacturing at about one third GDP in order to mutually prosper on a long term, sustainable basis.

Once you accept the premise that maintaining competitive manufacturing at about one third of GDP is vital for long term prosperity, your whole thought process regarding economic issues becomes profoundly different than that of the unconditional free trade anarcho libertarians.

Now, all of a sudden, it is important to live in a society that encourages long term investment. That implies low taxes and protection of private property. It means a focus on real innovation, which implies meritocracy rather than social reengineering programs such as affirmative action. It means a focus on continual reinvestment in research and development and upgrading plant and equipment, which in turn means shareholders need to discipline executives who exploit their position to squeeze company cash reserves to line their own pockets. It means both workers and management must remain highly focused on reinvestment and raising the quality of products while reducing prices in a globally competitive way first before helping themselves to rewards such as stock options and pay raises.

A big problem in America, as mentioned earlier, is that we see a strong “help yourself first” attitude everywhere you look, on all levels of American society.

We see “help yourself first” on the part of government, which taxes the public through inflation, direct taxes, and indirect taxes well ahead of any real economic growth. The government also helps itself first to psychological brownie points, thinking that is nobly promoting “equality.” In actuality, it is fueling ever more multi-racial and multi-cultural strife that could bring us Civil War II.

We see “help yourself first” among many unions. Even in periods of low inflation, many unions have focused on steadily squeezing companies with pay raises and benefits, regardless of the lack of productivity gains of their union members or the threat of lower cost competition elsewhere.

We also see “help yourself first” among American managers. Rather than make investments that will pay off over the long term, they make expedient moves such as outsourcing that achieve immediate gains to their earnings while sacrificing long term investment in domestic manufacturing infrastructure. At the same time they give up manufacturing control and ownership of infrastructure over the long run. Meanwhile, they cannot wait to award themselves ever more stock options and higher salaries despite the declining real performance of their companies. This is especially true after we subtract out all the false corporate reporting and financial engineering games they employ to make themselves look good in the short run.

Back to the caretakership issue

In his book Democracy: The God That Failed, Dr. Hans-Herman Hoppe, is on target to highlight the importance of a deeply felt long term sense of caretakership.

Most American CEO’s obviously lack a sense of long term caretakership, not only an economic level, but also a cultural and genetic level. They could care less if the WASP society that America was founded upon in the early 1800′s gets totally obliterated and shanghaied by the Jewish lobby.

Conversely the Japanese, who live in a homogeneous society, have a vastly longer term economic time horizon. That is why their industrial and technological base keeps getting stronger and stronger.

It is interesting how economics, culture, and genetics inter-relate to each other and tend to rise and fall together.

…the good and the bad…

Despite all the baleful influences, there are some American companies that have managed to reinvest in themselves on home ground and are prospering. One example appears to be the Caterpillar corporation. It has increased manufacturing infrastructure at home while improving its global competitiveness.

Therefore, I do not mean to imply that all American CEO’s are rotten, greedy, unpatriotic individuals. There may be enough decent individuals left somewhere to accomplish a turnaround.

We are seeing a new phase of the mobile robotics revolution kick into gear that I describe in my article “I, Robot Entrepreneur” (this title is supposed to be a take-off on Asimov’s story “I., Robot”). If Americans can embrace automation again as they once did in the 19th century, we can see an exciting future ahead in terms of productivity gains and general prosperity. Many high school school science programs and introductory engineering courses at major universities now require students to undertake mobile robot projects. This is because robots integrate so many important disciplines ranging from computers to mechanical engineering.

We might ask what might happen if some foreign country that has a million robots with human-level intelligence, that are producing millions more, which in turn are producing millions more, and we have nothing to compare with this? If America does not get destroyed from a hyperinflationary economic implosion and excessive damage from civil war, or get dragged into a Middle Eastern Armageddon by Israel, then our failure to remain competitive in automation will finish us off for sure.

Summary regarding industrial policy

Obviously the pure free trade position of certain anarcho-libertarians, who insist that industry must always feel free to gravitate to wherever it can achieve the most immediate profits anywhere in the world, is a cop-out on issues related to the necessity of maintaining strategic industries at home and encouraging reinvestment in domestic technology, logistical infrastructure, wages, and industrial capacity.

Conversely, anarcho-libertarians are correct in that high, permanent tariffs can encourage laziness, featherbedding, a lack of innovation, and corruption on the part of certain protected industries.

In order for a tariff policy to work, industries that benefit from protectionism must show the discipline to adequately reinvest in themselves and reconfigure themselves into efficient high quality, low cost, self-sufficient globally-competitive producers.

Andrew Carnegie, one of America’s most successful industrialists, once stated that protective tariffs should be phased out over time after they have accomplished their purpose to help get vital industries up and running. He also felt that the country must not only make a conscious effort to continually bolster and improve is manufacturing, but should also try to continually raise wages ahead of other countries. However, American managers and workers must first earn their increased pay through solid productivity gains. They must also continually reinvest in manufacturing infrastructure.

By the late 1800′s, American workers were already getting paid twice the average wage of many European countries. Men like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford wanted to keep pushing up real wages for average Americans indefinitely. And without question, men like Ford and Carnegie took real pride in creating jobs for American workers. This was truly an amazing attitude compared to the utterly degenerate, greedy, treasonous, quality of industrial leadership we have to suffer today among CEO’s in America.

The mutualist behavior we want to maximize is characterized by a very long term time preference. It aligns the interests of owners, workers, and the general public. It encourages a strong sense of caretakership among everyone involved. It not only increases wealth for the entrepreneur, but for society as well. This echoes themes stated by Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy: The God That Failed, which I discussed in my “top down vs. bottom up” section.

…if this is”good,” how might we address the opposite of all of this?

I cannot leave this economic discussion without at least touching on how we might treat the exact opposite behavior — economic criminal parasitism.

There is an important principle in law that property acquired through fraud or theft is not the legal property of the malefactor who acquired it, but can be rightfully confiscated and returned to original owners. If liquidated, part of the proceeds can go to law enforcement officials or private citizens who act in a law enforcement capacity.

We might ask on a more abstract level if the parties who are currently responsible for the economic destruction of America on a macro level that I describe in my Critical Issues section should be liable to retaliatory treatment.

You betcha. And you just wait until America goes into hyperinflationary economic collapse. The public mood might change to the point that hanging malefactors from the lamp posts might almost be too kind a punishment for them.

There are some interesting libertarian solutions to the problem of criminal economic parasitism that are little explored in contemporary political literature. In fact, they reflect some grand American traditions that stretch back to the early colonial era. They include bounty hunting, privateering, and even the issuance of letters of Marque and Reprisal described in the original U.S. Constitution.

Given that more normal means of redress such as class action suits and damage claims have failed miserably in our current corrupt and largely federalized legal justice system, these more extreme measures may eventually become necessary to take care of vile men who control of strategic bases of our economy.

Let me provide some historical examples of the privateer approach.

A good starting point is Merry Olde England. When Sir Francis Drake seized the Spanish Manila Galleon near Mexico in the 16th century, the loot significantly re-capitalized Queen Elizabeth’s treasury.

During the American Revolution, privateering played a major role in the harassment of British shipping.

During the War Between the States, Confederate shipping was open season for Union sailors. The U.S. Navy gave commissions to its sailors whenever they seized Confederate blockade runners, which dramatically improved their effectiveness in seizing cargo. Paradoxically, this policy also made them more reluctant to fire on ships.

On land, both Union and Confederate raiders robbed each other’s supply depots and banks. This stretched to extracurricular partisan activity by the James Gang after the war during the so-called Reconstruction period. They specialized in robbing trains and banks.

If the scenario envisioned by Thomas Chittum in Civil War II: The Coming Breakup of America comes to pass, we might imagine one or more white revolutionary governments in North America issuing bounty proclamations against special interests who have criminally defrauded America of its prosperity inside its borders. Letters of Marque and Reprisal would apply to malefaction outside our borders, in which case our bounty-hunter heroes would probably need to share part of the take with foreign nationals for their cooperation.

Soldiers, sailors, FBI agents, policemen, and any private citizens who want to get in on the act would be entitled to a privateer’s commission for their assistance in apprehending malefactors, bringing them before a revolutionary court. Once the suspects are convicted, they would be stripped of their assets and subject to other forms of revolutionary justice.

Fair game would include corrupt central bankers around the world. It would also include corrupt CEO’s, corrupt hedge fund managers, corrupt heads of major investment banks, and corrupt national media chiefs who have covered up assassinations and other crimes.

There is a very long list of very evil yet very wealthy people around the world with staggering amounts of ill-gotten assets who are just waiting to get their just desserts. Their ill-gotten loot just cries out to have it stripped away from them.

This includes the fat cat military industrial complex leaders who are genociding American military personnel with aerosolized depleted uranium munitions in the Middle East to make a few extra bucks. It also includes corrupt oil company executives and Jewish neo-cons who lied America into a war to line their own pockets or serve anti-American interests.

Now that the billionaire Jewish real estate mogul Larry Silverstein has admitted on video that he was involved in orders to “pull” World Trade Center Building Center Seven, I am still waiting for law enforcement personnel to haul Larry and his associates before a grand jury to achieve some clarification.

And I am still waiting…and waiting…and waiting…

Perhaps it best not to hold ones breath, or at least under the current regime. Maybe some day in America we will see a major change in the social order, and we might finally get a real investigation into not only 9-11, but also the JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and dozens of other unresolved intrigues described in Mike Piper’s Final Judgment.

Stripping malefactors of their wealth has nothing to do with “communism.” It has a lot to do with some grand old American and English traditions. I would like to see Army soldiers, Marines, FBI agents, policemen , private citizen bounty hunters, and other security personnel earn nice big chunks of the wealth the plutocrats who have been driving America into the dirt once they bring them to justice. More power to them if they help de-fang the really bad actors in our society who are normally too rich and powerful to be brought to justice.

MUTUALISM AND REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT

Why republican government is supposed to be a form of mutualism

According to William Everdell’s End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans, the word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica, which means “for the public.” The direct 17th century English translation was “commonwealth” or “for the common wealth and prosperity of the general citizenry.” Hence, “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts” meant “The Republic of Massachusetts.”

To be really explicit, what “common wealth” or “republic” really meant during the very early colonial era was: “A government for the general benefit of Anglo Saxon members of the Puritan Church in the Colony of Massachusetts.”

Early concepts of republicanism had absolutely nothing to do with contemporary notions of “racial equality,” socialist wealth redistribution, class warfare, welfare programs, universal suffrage (voting), or achieving some kind of global “brotherhood of man” through open borders.

In 17th century America, Negroes need not apply for citizenship in the Puritan Commonwealth, since they were generally viewed as a primitive and backward race who enslaved each other and were often fit to be slaves. Many American Indian tribes (with some exceptions) were viewed as savages, as explicitly noted later in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

In New Amsterdam (today New York City), founder Peter Stuyvesant found the deceitful business methods of the small Jewish presence to be so odious that he tried to expel every last one of them, only to be thwarted by Jewish stockholders in his company back in the Netherlands and also Jewish bankers embedded at the top of the Dutch power structure.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was created by Puritan republican ideologists during the Cromwellian era. Since the Puritans of eastern England provided the bulwark of Cromwell’s Parliamentary supporters during the English Civil War, “republicanism” back then meant rebellion against royalist absolutism under Charles I. Since Puritans were hard-line Protestants, it also meant rebellion against centralized leadership of Christendom under the Pope and his Vatican bureaucracy.

It is ultimately about preventing tyranny

William Everdell points out that “resistance to tyranny” is a consistent theme in the history of republican government going back to ancient Greece and Rome. This includes later historical periods in Europe, to include the medieval Swiss and Icelandic republics, the 16th and 17th century Dutch Republic, Italian city states of the Renaissance, and 17th century England.

From a contractual viewpoint, “republicanism” means allowing the common citizen some kind of stable negotiation position vis a vis his rulers. It means being able to hold public officials accountable who fail to live up to their. agreements. It means having a public defense against leaders who think they can violate their oaths of office and can arbitrarily change the rules and expropriate ones wealth and beat one up or kill common citizens any time they please. In other word, “republicanism” means both the right and the ability of the citizen to function as an adult in a society where he can freely contract on his own behalf rather than being treated like a dependent child or slave.

Developing a set of consistent principles in order to find truth and to achieve rational, stable government is a very different form of “equality” than modern liberal assumptions about biological equality between individuals and races, which does not in fact exist.

Why tyranny seems to fit the concept of “parasitism”

The tyrant is an individual who is happy to break his word with common citizens whenever it suits his purposes. He is happy to run roughshod over other people’s rights and confiscate their property whenever it suits his arbitrary, selfish purposes. The damage that he does to the moral and contractual fabric of society can be extraordinary.

From a contractual viewpoint, the tyrant is like the bad operator described in Robert Ringer’s classic work Winning Through Intimidation. After you have negotiated a business deal and produced some rewards, he is out to cut your hands off while you are reaching for your chips on the table, even though you won them fair and square.

On a macro political level, the tyrant is endlessly greedy for power and authority. He is out to benefit himself regardless of how maliciously destructive he may be to the general welfare of society.

Left unchecked, the tyrant can run a society into the ground. He can slaughter millions of your best people in Gulags. He can run national debt to the sky and inflate your currency into oblivion. He can spread malicious lies through his control of national media to invert basic moral values and undermine unity of your own people. He can get your country involved in wars that totally ruin it.

A really effective tyrant can be an evil plague on society.

Republicanism as an anti-parasite defense tool

Since republicanism is meant to prevent the evil plague of tyranny, and benefit the general welfare of society, I connect it to the sociobiological “mutualism” concept. Hence, the duality of “republicanism vs. tyranny” seems to closely parallel the concept of “mutualism vs parasitism.”

Republican government involves the use of various political strategies to prevent tyranny, which in turn implies forms of decentralization, checks and balances, representation, and respect for private property rights.

Republicanism has a connection with chivalrous free enterprise capitalism described earlier in this article. The creation of real and sustainable prosperity in society is heavily dependent upon successful entrepreneurial calculation. Small businesses provide most of the innovation and real new jobs in America. Since no rational individual wants to start a business anywhere if his investment can be arbitrarily confiscated away from him or his business plan can be capriciously smothered with regulation, successful entrepreneurship requires decentralization, stable private property rights, rational government, and the avoidance of tyranny.

Unfortunately there exists no perfect form of “republicanism”

The tricky part involves getting our arms around what constitutes viable and authentic forms of republicanism.

It is possible to have very sinister forms of republicanism just as it is possible to pervert enlightened chivalrous free enterprise into evil predatory monopolistic capitalism.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm contains the famous phrase “All men are created equal — but some are more equal than others.”

Similarly around the world, while republican governments claim they defend against tyranny, some groups of citizens are more entitled to this defense than others. Worse yet, since republics claim to serve “the people,” they have a tendency to wage total war in the name of one people fighting another. Self-styled republican leaders can themselves become the tyrants when waging war against those they deem unfit to have protection from tyranny.

This gets back to the basic principal I describe at the beginning of this series. Whenever a society moves in a particular policy direction, it usually sacrifices something valuable for everything valuable it gains, much like the way changes in an engineering design solution usually always involves trade-offs.

Two famous historical examples of dangerous perversions of “republicanism” involve the advent “Jacobinism” during the French Revolution, and the plague of “Neo-Jacobinism” in America during the Abraham Lincoln dictatorship and the so-called Reconstruction era in the South (1865-1876).

In the case of the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror, “republicanism” no longer meant a defense of the people from plunder of their rights by their rulers. Instead, it meant the right of rulers to ruthlessly plunder the French aristocracy, middle class, and other perceived “enemies of the republic” in order to benefit itself and some abstract concept of the “common citizenry.”

According to Nesta Webster in her classic work The French Revolution, things got really crazy once conspiratorial gangsters usurped the revolutionary leadership of well-intentioned reformists. Members of the middle class in Paris started wearing shabby clothes to avoid getting guillotined. Robespierre talked about wiping out over a quarter of France before fellow revolutionary leaders turned on him. In the Vendee region of western France, over 300,000 people were genocided. In Brittany, small populations of men, women, and children were gunned down in village squares or put aboard ships that were deliberately sunk.

During much of the American Reconstruction era from 1865 to 1876, Southern whites were not allowed to vote. Their legislatures were run by illiterate blacks, Jewish carpet baggers (cf. Michael Collins Piper Barnes Review article about the utterly corrupt regime run by Gov. Franklin J Moses of South Carolina), and other exploiters. Here, “republicanism” meant plunder of white rights in order to benefit Negroes, Jews, Northern industrialists, and other special interests.

Contemporary libertarians like to use the term “Neo-Jacobinism” to explain the ideological virus that caused the horrors of the Reconstruction era — a virus which is still very much alive in America today. The title of Dr. Jeffrey Hummel’s book about the tragic Civil War and Reconstruction era, namely Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, sums it up well.

A spin-off example of neo-Jacobin activist government today is “Taxachusetts” (also ridiculed as the “Commiewealth” of “Marxachusetts”) a euphemism for the home state of leftist political freaks such as Teddy Kennedy (major sponsor of the 1965 Hart Celler immigration “reform” act that led to the Third World deluge) and Michael Dukakis (of Willie Horton prison furlough fame). This state has become a spendthrift people’s democratic republic that soaks the taxpayer to accomplish social re-engineering schemes. This “republic” has virtually nothing in common with the complete refuge from government taxation and regulation envisioned by its Puritan founders in their early republican vision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Appearances are deceiving

I believe that Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is correct in Democracy: The God That Failed that we need to look underneath the hood at the underlying realities behind any self-styled republican systems.

Ironies and paradoxes exist everywhere. Dr. Hoppe observes that it is possible to have forms of constitutional monarchy, oligarchy, and aristocracy that are vastly more libertarian and republican in substance than many officially republican social democracies.

In my “top down vs. bottom up” libertarian discussion, I discuss Dr. Hoppe’s point about how a monarchy that does not increase laws, taxes, and regulations, keeps government at less than 5% of GDP, and where the monarch is content to leave everything alone and merely keep his face on sardine cans and cheese spreads — this is in reality a de facto libertarian society that practices a noninstitutionalized form of restraint against tyranny.

In contrast, self-styled republican “social democracies” where self-serving politicians continually raise taxes, increase government spending, raise national borrowing, steadily boost inflation (hidden taxation), and draft men to fight foreign crusades, is in reality a de facto tyranny that brutally invades the property rights and freedoms of its citizens, even though it continually beats its own chest and claims it is protecting their interests in true republican fashion.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato once observed: “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”

True republicans owe absolutely nothing to the United States Government

I think that Everdell’s End of Kings remains important and timely for many reasons. First this book underscores the fact that Europeans have experienced various forms of republicanism going back to ancient times,. This demystifies any notion that either the U.S. Constitution or U.S. Government constitute some form of Divine Revelation. Secondly, it provides historical case studies that help us understand what social behaviors republican systems are trying to maximize, and conversely what types of dysfunction they are designed to prevent.

Let us start with the point that America’s Founding Fathers did not invent republican or democratic government. Well-recorded, full blown, fully self-conscious and ideologically well-defined republican and democratic governments stretch back to ancient Greece and Rome.

Actually they stretch back further into the prehistoric traditions of Northern European peoples; however, ancient Greece and Rome comprise the first instances where full blown democratic and republican theory was thoroughly documented in scholarly literature. According to Roger Pearson’s Early Civilizations of the Nordic Peoples, ancient Greece was settled by Ionians and Dorians, a Nordic people who migrated southwards from northwestern Asia. The patrician class of the Roman Republic was descended from Sabine and Oscian tribes, a Nordic people that had migrated southward from central Germany. (As mentioned in my introduction to this series, I use the term “Nordic” very loosely, with the understanding that actual historic populations may have had high percentages of Celts and other closely related whites).

Authentic “republicanism” owes nothing to “Judeo-Christianity”

The Indo-Europeans who created the Grecian and Roman Republics in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. were pagans. Ancient pagan Greeks of the 6th and 5th century B.C. also developed a full-blown methodology of science, mathematics, and geometry.

In my “top down vs. bottom up” libertarian discussion, I talk about why I connect republicanism with scientific thinking. I view republicanism as an effort to adapt elements of the scientific method to government, to include logical analysis (the republican analog is parliamentary debate), open dissemination of knowledge (government accountability), and field research (grass roots representation).

In contrast, there is no systematic theory of science, republicanism, or democracy espoused anywhere in such Jewish works as either the Old or New Testaments or Talmud or Kabala. Instead, this Jewish literature promotes blind belief, religious dogma, authoritarianism, and clever manipulation and perversion of rules and regulations.

The model for good ruler behavior in the Old Testament has to do with maximizing piety and adherence to religious strictures and dogma, not promoting open analysis of public policy and checks and balances on a public level against ruler misrule. The mind-set of the Old Testament fits the absolutist mentality of totalitarian societies ranging from ancient Polynesia to Bolshevik Russia, where the “goodness” of the leader comes from the vigor and sternness with which he stays true to a particular religious or secular dogma while viciously destroying all real or imagined opposition.

Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, by the eminent Israeli dissident writer, Israel Shahak, states in the chapter “Political Consequences,” that “It should be recalled that Judaism, especially in its classical form, is totalitarian in nature.”

It is wrong to state that Americans owe their Constitution, form of government, and “freedom” to some kind of “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Republicanism flourished in various areas of Europe ranging from Iceland to ancient Greece and Rome well before the advent of Christianity.

Sir Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire claims that Christianity accelerated the decay of Rome. Salvian the Priest found greater virtue among pagan Germanic barbarians than fellow Christian Romans. Nicolo Machiavelli claimed that that pagan Romans of the early Roman Republican era held greater Republican virtue than the Christian Romans of the later Imperial era. Many scholars believe that the advent of Christianity did more to put Europe into a mystical slumber than awaken it to the light of science.

17th century England provides an excellent example where fundamentalist Christianity wrecked Britain’s greatest experiment with republican government. After Parliament decapitated Charles I, Oliver Cromwell made himself so unpopular by enforcing Puritanical interpretations of Old Testament laws that Englishmen began to yearn for a restoration of the monarchy.

One might argue that various forms of republicanism in history have succeeded more despite rather than because of hard-line Christian doctrines.

In fact, after one examines the ancient tribal traditions of Northern Europe, and then reviews the history of republican governments in recorded European history, it becomes very clear that there was nothing particularly new on a conceptual level about the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Articles of Confederation, or the U.S. Constitution.

When it comes to finding inspiration to preserve liberty, white Americans owe everything to their ancient European heritage. They owe almost nothing to the United States Government, particularly the corrupt excuse for a government that we are saddled with today under George W. Bush. The U.S. Constitution only has real meaning once it is interpreted within the context of a long perspective of European racial, cultural, and political history.

Interestingly enough, the libertarian writer Dr. Murray N. Rothbard acknowledged the libertarian structure of ancient Germanic and Celtic tribes in Chapter Three “The State” of his book For A New Liberty:

With decentralized power, with a Church separate from the State, with flourishing towns and cities able to develop outside the feudal power structure, and with freedom in society, the economy was able to develop in Western Europe in a way that transcended all previous civilizations. Furthermore, the Germanic — and particularly the Celtic — tribal structure which succeeded the disintegrating Roman Empire had strong libertarian elements. Instead of a mighty State apparatus exerting a monopoly of violence, disputes were solved by contending tribesmen consulting the elders of the tribe on the nature and application of the tribe’s customary and common law. The “chief” was generally merely a war leader who was only called into his warrior role whenever war with other tribes was under way. There was no permanent war or military bureaucracy in the tribes. In Western Europe, as in many other civilizations, the typical model of the origin of the State was not via a voluntary “social contract” but by the conquest of one tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim to the conquerors. At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on. But at some time the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis. The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called “taxation.” And, with equal generality, the conquering chieftains parceled out the land of the peasantry to the various warlords, who were then able to settle down and collect feudal “rent” from the peasantry. The peasants were often enslaved, or rather enserfed, to the land itself to provide a continuing source of exploited labor for the feudal lords.[footnote 18]

We may note a few prominent instances of the birth of a modern State through conquest. One was the military conquest of the Indian peasantry in Latin America by the Spaniards. The conquering Spanish not only established a new State over the Indians, but the land of the peasantry was parceled out among the conquering warlords, who were ever after to collect rent from the tillers of the land. Another instance was the new political form imposed upon the Saxons of England after their conquest by the Normans in 1066. The land of England was parceled out among the Norman warrior lords, who thereby formed a State and feudal-land apparatus of rule over the subject population. For the libertarian, the most interesting and certainly the most poignant example of the creation of a State through conquest was the destruction of the libertarian society of ancient Ireland by England in the seventeenth century, a conquest which established an imperial State and ejected numerous Irish from their cherished land. The libertarian society of Ireland, which lasted for a thousand years — and which will be described further below — was able to resist English conquest for hundreds of years because of the absence of a State which could be conquered easily and then used by the conquerors to rule over the native population.

Transferring republican concepts to alien peoples around the globe

The concept of “spreading democracy” around the world is a tricky topic because there are some very limited ways that “republicanism” and “democracy” might be inferred from the indigenous practices of various exotic peoples around the planet.

Around the globe, people tend to form villages. In these villages, it is common for the most powerful people to periodically meet with each other. When they gather somewhere, they are able to talk to each other face to face and informally share ideas.

To some folks, to include the extreme leftists who dominate so many of our universities, this level of face to face sharing of ideas is “democracy.”

The fact that everyone knows each other in a small, primitive, tribal setting and can gossip behind each other’s backs implies some kind of diffusion of power and restraint on a would-be tyrant.

To some folks, this is “republicanism.”

If one bends over backwards further than a pretzel, one can even find some faint glimmerings of “republicanism” in the Old Testament. In the tract Common Sense by Thomas Paine, he made a big deal over the fact that a Jewish tribal advisor named Samuel (as recorded in the book by his name in the Old Testament) wanted to keep Jewish tribal leadership on an informal tribal chieftainship level, rather than ape other larger societies by trying to support a “king.” Samuel’s main reason for arguing against a king is that monarchs tend to cost too much to maintain. They tend to like expensive palaces, gilded ornaments, large retinues, beautifully kept concubines, and such.

Although Thomas Paine himself was somewhere between an agnostic and atheist in his views towards Scripture, he used this argument to try to de-legitimize King George III in his efforts to bring American Christians over to the Revolutionary cause. Unfortunately for Paine this was the closest thing to “republicanism” he could find anywhere in ancient Jewish literature, which is actually very totalitarian in nature.

Nice try, but not good enough

Small-time settings are not where the tire rubber hits the road when it comes to genuine republican and democratic systems.

Everywhere we go around the world the acid test comes when we deal with increasingly larger and more impersonal social organizations. Once human societies rise beyond the hunting band or village level to groups of cities or regional populations, a very familiar pattern takes place. The larger the society grows, the more pyramidal the leadership structure becomes. Furthermore, as societies grow larger, the people on top of the pyramid gets increasingly ruthless, vicious, and secretive in their tactics to fend off rivals. People at the lower levels become increasingly careful about not even giving the slightest appearance of crossing the leader to stay alive. Even within their scientific and technical communities, subordinates tend to get nervous about advocating any theories that contradict their superiors.

On a broad conceptual level, this is no different than alpha male baboons who must dominate their primate troupes at all costs. Nor is it really different from gorillas who hog the best females for themselves and marginalize weaker males to the periphery of their tribal bands.

Most human societies around the world govern themselves on on a basic primate level, with a tendency towards hierarchy, authoritarianism, and vicious in-fighting. This is particularly true of Third World peoples with evolutionary histories in temperate zones which tend to select for “reactive” behaviors. Contrary to this, peoples with long evolutionary histories under highly dispersed conditions in frost zones show higher levels of individualized, technologically adaptive, rational behavior.

Europeans are unique relative to Third World peoples and primates given their pronounced tendency towards decentralization and the amount of effort they invest towards formalizing and preserving republican strategies as their societies have grown in size.

Those European “X-Men”

Europeans have also been unique in terms of preserving a relatively large middle class of free, armed, self-sufficient citizens with strong property rights. Relative to most other societies around the planet in any era, their de facto ruling elites and underclasses have been fairly small. Conversely, their middle class of free citizens has always been relatively large. This same pattern has occurred spontaneously in many different places and eras throughout history.

Dr. Ralph Raico has observed in his libertarian lectures that for many long historical periods in many Asian countries, it has been customary for merchants to do everything possible to hide their wealth for fear that it would get confiscated by rulers. In his book The New World of Islam, Dr. Lothrop Stoddard commented upon the phenomenon of “Asiatic despotism,” in which people spontaneously accepted cruel dominance-submission roles.

All of this greatly inhibited entrepreneurship in Asian societies until later periods when under pressure of Western imperialism many Asians societies began to successfully borrow certain aspects of Western free enterprise culture to become more competitive.

Europeans are so different compared to the rest of the world in terms of their attitudes towards authority, individual rights, and personal freedom that sometimes I wonder if we are nothing but a bunch of “X-men” mutants compared to the rest of the world.

Indigenous Nordics are not Nazis. White people in general are not automatic fascists

Zionist-controlled Hollywood frequently shows highly misleading imagery of angry white power groups led by blond rednecks who sport black leather jackets with ancient Germanic symbols.

In juxtaposition against these unsavory images we see well-crafted imagery of highly intelligent, compassionate Jews and humane, articulate nonwhites who provide wisdom and “diversity” to misguided, violence-prone whites. We are left with the subliminal impression that were it not for efforts to integrate nonwhites at all levels of society, white people would have nothing better to do than march in jackboot unison and gun each other down in the streets.

Actually “Nordic” is a lot closer to “libertarian” than to “Nazi.” Dr. Lothrop Stoddard observed in Racial Realities in Europe that Germany became increasingly centralized and authoritarian when it transitioned from a majority Nordic to a majority Alpine country following the Thirty Year’s War in the early 1600′s, which wiped out about half the population. The Alpine peoples tend to be more conventional and relatively less free-spirited and libertarian. Wilmot Robertson points out in The Dispossessed Majority that the Protestant Reformation, which at root was about decentralization, occurred virtually everywhere in Europe with a majority Nordic population. Also, my 1957 Encyclopedia Britannica points out that in the 1930′s, the Northern European countries tended to be much more resistant to fascism than the southern European countries.

While there may be some differences in libertarian tendencies within the sub-components of the Caucasian race, it would be wrong for me to overlook heroic struggles for liberty waged by whites in southern and eastern Europe as well as in northern and western Europe. Throughout Europe in the 19th century, when European countries experienced relatively long periods of prosperity and stability, the trend was clearly towards classical liberalism. Everywhere in Europe from Spain to France to Germany to Italy to Greece and to Russia, parliamentary bodies increased in influence to offset monarchical and aristocratic privileges. That period also witness trends towards increasing suffrage and other forms of political representation.

The 19th century European trend was emphatically not towards fascism. I agree with Mises Institute lecturers in their special symposium on “The Economics of Fascism” that the fascist movements which emerged in the 20th century may be characterized as a reaction to the devastation created by World War I. Fascism was also a reaction to the very real threat posed by communist agitation within European countries. Lastly, the late 19th century saw a trend towards urbanization and large industrial complexes that shifted media and political power towards big cities and their controllers.

A point avoided by the Mises Institute lecturers, but which I will make here, is that communist subversion was often funded and directed by Jewish Communists in Moscow who maintained a strange relationship with international Jewish allies in control of European and American central banks and national media.

Therefore it is wrong to suggest that white people have natural fascistic tendencies, and that they are incapable of controlling them without the alleged salubrious effects of Jewish Hollywood propaganda, forced race mixing, and liberal Federal government interventionism.

Instead, we need to turn the Hollywood camera lens around at the Jewish elite and see what they are really all about. America First Books is proud to carry titles by Michael Collins Piper and Col Donn de Grand Pre that cover this important topic of Jewish subversion in great depth, to include the cozy historic tribal relationship between Jewish predatory monopoly capitalists, Jewish organized crime leaders, and Jewish communists.

Without going into too much detail here, I can provide an excellent example of highly problematic international Jewish leadership with Sir Winston Churchill’s famous essay “Zionism vs. Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People.” Here, Sir Churchill started out complementing various Jewish leaders, and then switched gears with a vengeance:

…The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honourable and successful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia’s economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organisations, the Russian Cooperative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain.

International Jews.

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus- Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Terrorist Jews.

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and an the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution: by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek — all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.

Winston Churchill was not stupid. However, his article barely scratches the surface of a terrible global evil. I will return to the topic of highly problematic Jewish leadership again later in this article when I address Jewish criminal totalitarian psychopathology in the “parasitism” section.

Meanwhile, our own house is on fire…

Rather than being led away from fascism by America’s media elite, white American’s have been dumbed down to accept big Federal government and massive government interventionism in all areas of American society. In his article “Constitutional Illiteracy and Attention Deficit Democracy” James Bovard notes that:

Many Americans have long been constitutional Know Nothings. A 1979 Gallup poll found that 70 percent of respondents did not know what the First Amendment was or what it dealt with. A 1991 American Bar Association poll found that only 33 percent of Americans surveyed knew what the Bill of Rights was. A 1987 survey found that 45 percent of adult respondents believed that Karl Marx’s communist principle “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” was in the U.S. Constitution.

The recent poll found that 36 percent of Americans believe the right to a public education is guaranteed by the First Amendment. This widespread notion vivifies the failure of public schools. More years in government schools have done little or nothing to help citizens understand the limits on government power codified by the Founding Fathers. Politically controlled education cannot be trusted to enlighten people on the perils of political power.

The McCormick Foundation warned, “The less Americans know about freedoms, the more they are likely to erode without our notice.” But it is not a question of freedoms’ eroding; it is a question of their being plowed under at a high rate of speed.

From the proliferation of free speech zones (quarantining anyone who protests against the president’s policies), to the assertion by Justice Department lawyers that the president is above the law (regarding interrogation methods), to the nullification of limits on government searches (the warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps), individual rights are becoming an endangered species. But few Americans recognize the rising danger.

The conventional wisdom is that, though Americans may not know the Constitution or the laws, they still imbibe sufficient political wisdom merely from living in the United States. But there is no reason to assume that most Americans know enough to prevent politicians from trampling their rights. If a citizen is unaware of his rights, then, for all practical purposes, in disputes with government officials he does not have them.

Defining the real nature of republican government

According to William Everdell in The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans (page 6), “…to [John] Adams, a republic was `a government whose sovereignty is vested in more than one man.’ He got this from Doctor Johnson, who, in his Dictionary of 1755, called it, more concisely, `government of more than one.’”

Republicanism has a dual nature. On the one hand, it comprises a set of power brokerage strategies. On the other hand, it constitutes a cultural-racial phenomenon.

Republicanism as a social phenomenon

I think that the old Roman term “republican virtue” captures the social dimension. Viable republicanism requires a certain level of innate competency, honesty, self-restraint, and courage on a grass roots level among its constituents. I talk about “republican virtue” in greater depth in my “Inspiration” article.

“Republican virtue” entails a thought process where people seek open and honest and government that reasonably balances individual and group needs. While republicanism can decentralize political power, this power can only be retained by people with the will and ability to wisely exercise it on a decentralized level.

Republican government does not make stupid or ignorant people wise. It does not make lazy people productive. Nor does it make crooked people honest. It is simply reflects a set of power brokerage and decision-making strategies that can help honest and intelligent people improve the level of rationality of their decision making and the quality of their representation. Thomas Jefferson summed it up well when he said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Republican governments in Europe tended to originate among proud and fiercely independent tribal bands. They had long traditions of settling violent conflict on a decentralized level rather than by taking orders from a highly centralized and despotic state. Clan feuds, dueling, and rebellions were common.

Republican government became an alternative to violent methods for replacing abusive and incompetent leaders. However, it is worth emphasizing that with their independent minds and proud spirit, Europeans were fully prepared to replace bad leaders anyway in the absence of formalized republican systems.

An example where a strong will and independent intellect worked together, the Roman Republic started when the first Brutus (Lucius Junius Brutus) deposed Rome’s last King, Tarquinius Superbus in 510 B.C. He was prepared to use whatever level of violence was necessary.

Both violent and peaceful approaches to the circulation of elites were always more common in Western society than in more autocratic and collectivistic Asian societies. All of this gets back to genetic interpretations of natural law and the relationship between political institutions and innate traits of particular populations. The traits of Europeans include chivalry, personal territoriality, and the capacity for rational decision-making in addition to greater rebelliousness and independence of thought.

Republicanism as a power brokerage strategy

Many libertarian commentators emphasize the point that the Constitution does not give Americans any rights. Americans did not need to be given any rights because they already had their natural rights before they formed their government. Instead, the Constitution merely defines and circumscribes the powers that are granted to government by the people. Even the Bill of Rights does not give any rights to the people. Instead, it details what rights the government cannot take away.

Americans had liberty and their rights as Englishmen long before either the Constitution or Articles of Confederation were created. In fact, it is worth repeating the point that I make many times in this series that the anti-Federalists, who demanded the Bill of Rights, felt the Constitution was actually a step backwards in preserving liberty compared to the Articles of Confederation. I happen to agree with them. (More on this in my history reinterpreted discussion of libertarian racial nationalism).

Once you reject the idea of vesting all power in a single man who rules for life (the definition of a king, monarch, or dictator), and you decide to figure out a peaceful way to replace a bad ruler without feeling his hot blood drip off your dagger blade, this begins an interesting thought process.

As a set of power brokerage strategies, republicanism entails a long menu of approaches that can be used towards the end of defining, limiting, and redistributing power away from the one man rule of the would-be tyrant.

Republican power brokerage strategies

Limiting powers of government by written contract: This is called Constitutionalism. Another approach is to rely on custom or legal precedent, which tends to work only in a racially homogeneous population with a long cultural and historical memory.

Paradoxically, Constitutionalism can become dangerous if tempts the ruling class to throw away the homogeneity and ancient traditions of their society on the false belief that Constitutionalism alone can serve as a crutch to somehow “remold” aliens, criminals, and unintelligent people into viable citizens.

Limiting terms in office: One of the purposes of term limits is to create a circulation of elites, whereby fresh talent and ideas can continually circulate in high places. This also reduces the ability of individuals to develop monopoly power.

The downside is that shortened terms can also reduce a sense of caretakership, and hence more irresponsible towards fulfilling their duties towards the general citizenry. This strategy can consist of many different approaches, such as a) limiting each term by a certain period, such as for two, four, or six years and b) limiting the number of terms someone can serve or c) limiting ones term through a vote of no confidence or impeachment.

Compartmentalizing top government functions: Also known as “checks and balances,” the idea is to spread out power under enough different department heads so that a chief executive has to shoot the moon to consolidate enough power under his arbitrary personal authority to exercise tyranny.

In America we have the division between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. We also have protocols that separate various other powers. As an example, military personnel who are banned from wearing their uniforms while engaged in partisan political activity.

An important vulnerability of this approach consists of the fact that there may be no checks and balances to prevent particular individuals or alien tribal groups from monopolizing national media, a central bank, or various sources of wealth, all of which can be far more powerful over the long run than any official parts of government. One has to consider all the power bases of society, to include those that are technically outside the realm of “government.”

Another important drawback is the possibility that as government becomes more compartmentalized, government officials may lose their sense of caretakership. They may also become more inclined to pass the buck and hence slower at making timely decisions.

Preserving the right of exit: This is similar to the notion that it is much easier for an employee to avoid being exploited by an employer if he can easily find a good job elsewhere than if he faces lengthy unemployment if fired. Similarly a wife is less likely to be abused by her husband if she can independently support herself and find a better spouse. On a political level, it means that states are more likely to retain decentralized power in the face of a centralizing federal government if they can make a credible threat to secede. Conversely, where individuals or provinces lack the right of exit, power tends to gravitate to a higher, central level.

Dr. Ralph Raico emphasized the “right of exit” in his Mises Institute lecture on the Rise of the West. He believes that in Europe of the Middle Ages, where countries such as Germany and Italy were each divided into dozens of principalities, that the relative ease with which people could move from one state to another helped deter rulers from becoming too oppressive with taxes for fear that they would lose their most productive people. Interestingly enough, William Shirer notes in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that during its period of decentralization in the 16th century, Germany was actually ahead of Elizabethan England in human rights.

The “right of exit” does not necessarily imply “all or nothing” action. It can be exercised in degrees. It can include selective acts of disobedience to directives without necessarily leaving a political union. As one example, Thomas Jefferson advocated the right of states to nullify certain Federal directives that they felt exceed Constitutionally-mandated authority in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 that he wrote in response to the Alien and Sedition laws. As another example, the doctrine of jury nullification provides an “exit” option within the legal system.

Formalizing rational decision-making procedures: Usually this means adapting political debate to the scientific method as much as possible. This means using representatives to gather inputs and evidence. It means trying to debate policies in a manner similar to a scientific debate. This includes allowing both sides of a debate to have the floor, protecting contrary opinions, observing established voting procedures, and maintaining public records of proceedings. One well known approach is Parliamentary procedure. The book Effective Group Problem Solving (carried by America First Books) describes methods developed through management science research to optimize group results.

Adjusting the quality and quantity of decision-making bodies: The original Constitution restricted voting to males who owned property. Extending the right of voting to new categories of people is called suffrage. This can create more parties who can provide vigilance and opposition to tyranny. On the dark side, unwise extension of the right of voting to uneducated people can also dumb down the quality of the electorate and increase participation by parasitic special interests.

The limitations of republican strategies

There is no one republican strategy that works in all situations. In fact, all of them can be misapplied and seriously backfire, such as extending suffrage to criminals, aliens, and imbeciles. When we add or change a republican strategy, we need to keep our eye on the ball. Our original purpose is to have a system that allows us a peaceful means to replace leaders who turn out to be incompetent or rotten, and to have some reasonable level of rationality in government and representation of our interests. Beyond a certain point, it is more a case that is the men who make the system, rather than the system that makes the men, and simply piling on more republican strategies is not going to help — in fact it can backfire.

Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out that there are no free lunches in pursuing any particular republican strategy. As we spread out or limit power, we also reduce the sense of long term caretakership. This can lead to the creation of a spendthrift, perpetually self-aggrandizing social democratic (or “neo-Jacobin”) government run by pork politicians. I would add that the lack of a strong sense of caretakership can also create security holes and power gaps for infiltration and takeover by alien financiers, as documented in Edwin Griffin’s landmark work The Creature from Jekyll Island.

One can argue that when a society starts mindlessly piling republican strategies on top of each other as an end in itself, that this is a bad sign. Republicanism has now become an authoritarian secular religion with its own dogma, rather than a set of strategies to deter tyranny or a representative system that arises organically out of the ethos of a people.

There are no “free lunches” in regular science as well as political science

We see this “no free lunch” concept in such scientific disciplines as physics and engineering. In physics, we see “no free lunch” in the principle that total matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed on either side of an equation, or in the concept of the preservation of angular momentum.

In creating design solutions in mechanical engineering, every time you add a design feature to a machine, you sacrifice something important somewhere else. As an example, when you add weight to a car frame to make it safer in a crash, you simultaneously reduce gas mileage. Earlier in this series, I suggested the exact same principle applies on a broad ideological level, namely that when one moves from, say genetic bottom up to environmental top down, one makes sacrifices and trade-offs.

The scientific discipline used by engineers for analyzing trade-offs is called constraint analysis. In computer science, it is called “linear programming.” Three important principles of constraint analysis are a) the need to prioritize constraint variables and free up the most critical variables first; b) the need to minimize diminishing returns, and c) the need to recognize that in imbalanced systems, un-constraining uncritical variables does not accomplish anything, and in fact can mean lost resources, wastage, or can even backfire and work destructively against ones system.

Questions of balance and diminishing returns

Two very important corollaries of the no free lunches concept in political science are the ideas that one experiences diminishing returns as one adds on more and more republican strategies, and that furthermore adding republican strategies can backfire or be wasteful if one fails to use a balanced approach.

In regard to piling more and more republican strategies on top of each other, not only does one dilute the sense of caretakership that Dr. Hoppe talks about, but one also increases “security holes” and other vulnerabilities in ones political system. Among other things, as authority and responsibility become more atomized, it becomes easier for alien mafia groups to buy off portions of the government in piecemeal and incrementally infiltrate and take it over. This illustrates the principle of the need to avoiding diminishing returns.

Another negative that comes from piling on more republican strategies is that they tend to slow the system down and make it more cumbersome, which can imply more bureaucracy and reduced flexibility in reacting to and handling crises.

In regard to our need to balance our strategies, one can easily see the absurdity of destroying one of the most important republican strategies of all — the right of exit — while expanding one of the least important republican strategies — extending suffrage. This is precisely what happens when one reduces the right of exit by crushing states rights and confiscating privately held firearms on the one hand, while extending suffrage to increasing populations of criminal, alien, or unintelligent people. This has in fact been the trend of American political history since 1861. Dr. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel wrote an excellent book that explains this foolishness, whose title tells it all: Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. (Hummel’s viewpoint is actually more anarcho-libertarian rather than racial nationalist). The right of exit is the most critical variable that needs to be unconstrained. Extending suffrage to criminal, alien, or unintelligent people is the least critical variable that creates wastage, or even worse, creates security holes in ones social system that the worst parasites in the world can enter (more on this later in my section on Jewish criminal totalitarian psychopathology). .

There is no “divine right” for republicanism or democracy either

During the Enlightenment, one commonly found republican theorists scoff at the “Divine Right” justifications for monarchy, namely the idea that God provided a special blessing to legitimize the rule of a king. A major purpose of Common Sense by Tom Paine that helped ignite the American Revolution was to debunk this concept.

However, it also works the other way around. There are no particular republican strategies which are “blessed” either. To the contrary, as mentioned earlier, there are no free lunches anywhere in economics or political science, just like there are none in engineering and physics. Any republican or democratic strategy can be misapplied and fall flat on its face.

Libertarian racial nationalists believe that a long term, a viable republican system requires a racially conscious, racially homogeneous population with a long term cultural, historical, and racial memory, who in turn only allow people to control the strategic bases of their society such as banking, media, and government who share their racial background and cultural loyalty. To bolster heritage loyalty, it helps to have a significant portion of the population practice an indigenous, folkish natural religion rather than a universalistic religion that might dignify alien parasites looking for ways to infiltrate and take over their society.

The ultimate “right of exit” to deter tyranny is the right to associate with members of ones own race and ethnicity rather than being forcefully integrated into a multi-racial, multi-cultural collective. All of this is essential to preserve a sense of long term caretakership at the top as the society tries to implement various republican strategies that limit power.

Republicanism as an imperfect adaptation of the scientific method

As mentioned previously, republicanism is first and foremost supposed to be a defense against one type of particularly dangerous social parasite called the tyrant.

Secondly, when intelligently designed and executed, republican government is supposed to provide more rational decision-making than one man rule, especially to the extent that it can incorporate the scientific method in its deliberative processes. Better government should in turn help to bolster the anti-parasite defenses of a people, much like boosting the immune system of someone’s body can increase their natural defense against viral infection.

However, there is a dark side to many forms of republicanism. When pursued in an unintelligent, imbalanced, or corrupt way, or by a corrupt people, republican government can actually become an invitation to parasite infiltration and takeover. In this case, republicanism can be worse than useless. It can become a mask, giving a pretense to better government than what the people really have, which has in reality become a parasite-friendly entity.

This bring us back to a paradox suggested by Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe (and also by Nicolo Machiavelli and other republican theorists before him), namely that a Constitutional monarchy that shares power with a limited parliamentary advisory body, and which preserves a sense of long term caretakership, may in the long run be a better and more viable de facto republican and libertarian system than a social democratic system which has allowed itself to degenerate into a greedy, parasitic, corrupt, self-aggrandizing and ultimately self-destructive bloat-bag. Incidentally, I am not saying this because I seek to install constitutional monarchy and a limited parliamentary advisory bodies in America; to the contrary I do not think that would have a good fit with American traditions and core values, however, I do believe strongly that we need to overhaul our Federal and state governments in ways that make them vastly leaner and more responsible.

This also suggests another paradox. Since maintaining a sense of caretakership is so important, an intelligently-interpreted religion can play an important role in preserving all of this, as well as maintaining racial and heritage consciousness. So for example while an Islamic republic may lose some elements of rational process by moving away from secularism, at the same time it may gain even more in terms of overall system integrity by making its leaders more conscious of their people’s heritage, ancient customs, and ancient ethno-racial loyalties. For similar reasons, I think that activists who want to revitalize Asatru in Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, or Native Americans who are revitalizing their indigenous Native American religions on their tribal reservations are on to something.

All of this underscores another final point. As an American, I have absolutely no idea what particular mix or application of republican strategies is appropriate for various foreign countries. I can not intelligently make recommendations for France, Russia, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, China, Japan, or any other foreign country if I have not lived in that country, do not speak the language, and am not intimately familiar with the culture, history, and the people. And it is more ridiculous to think that Americans such as myself who have not lived in foreign countries are doing their citizens a favor if we should apply heavy-handed economic coercion or military conquest to impose our institutions upon them. Yet this is exactly what the neo-cons are advocating at web sites such as www.newamericancentury.org.

Willis Carto and the staff of the former Spotlight (now American Free Press) wrote an excellent book titled Populism vs. Plutocracy: The Eternal Struggle (formerly titled Profiles in Populism) that provides examples of authentic American leadership. By “populism,” Mr. Carto means 19th century American populism, a very different animal than the sickly and perverse forms of “populism” that emerged in the late 20th century. In my chart at the beginning of this series, I place 19th century populism in the “genetic bottom up” category and call it libertarian racial nationalism.

Forward to:		Part Two: Parasitism
Back to Part One:		Overview
Back to Part Two:		Centralization vs. Decentralization
Back to Part Three:		Environmental vs. Genetic

Is demographics destiny for America?

Posted 1 year 9 weeks ago by Ben and Joel

More fuel for the immigration debate: The Pew Research Center says immigration will drive the population of the United States sharply upward between now and 2050 — and will push whites into a minority.

The Hispanic population will triple in size to become 29 percent of an American population of 438 million people. Eighty percent of the increase will be due to immigrants and their U.S.-born children.

What will shifting demographics mean for America’s future politics and culture? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the moderators of RedBlueAmerica.com, weigh in on the issue:

Joel Mathis

Before America was a country, Benjamin Franklin was fretting about immigrants. Pennsylvania was being overrun by … Germans.

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion,” Franklin asked in a 1751 essay.

Sound familiar? It should. Over the years, similar sentiments — about Italians, Irish and now Hispanics — have been heard during every wave of immigration: New residents cling too tightly to their languages and customs, it is said, refusing to assimilate and become “real” Americans.

Somehow, we’ve survived and thrived.

The historic pattern is repeating itself today: Pew reports that while just 23 percent of first-generation Latino Americans can carry on a conversation in English, the number rises to 88 percent among their children, and higher yet among their grandchildren. Assimilation is not an instantaneous process, but it it does happen.

So sure: Secure the borders. Crack down on businesses that violate the law. But don’t panic. Yes, our new neighbors will change us. We’ll change them, too. And, as before, we’ll all end up stronger for it.

Ben Boychuk

Should Americans worry that immigrants are changing the country’s demographic make-up? As long as newcomers embrace the principles and institutions of America, there is nothing to fret about. And there’s the rub.

Assimilation doesn’t occur by magic. The sentiments voiced by Franklin and others didn’t float out into the American discourse and disappear into the ether. And America didn’t just survive and thrive waves of immigration “somehow.” Traditionally, patriotic assimilation happened through a fairly rigorous and unapologetic process of civic indoctrination.

Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant from the West Indies, insisted that “the safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.” America’s success, Hamilton argued, would depend on “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character” between native born and immigrant alike.

What was true in the young republic two centuries ago remains true for the world’s superpower today. The United States should always be open to anyone who seeks to participate in this great experiment in self-government. But never forget that Americans are made, not born.

How New York Went
From World’s Greatest City
To Third World Jungle

(Originally published by JTF.ORG on January 26, 2005) Puerto Rican children play amid the ruins of the South Bronx
Once a highly fashionable white neighborhood, the South Bronx has become a Third World war zone

Until the 1940s, New York City was safe, clean and beautiful - Present-day white New Yorkers make their way past a black loafer and a pile of garbage reminiscent of the Third World

A New York City alcoholic

The rise and fall of New York – once the world’s greatest city – to a nightmarish Third World jungle is a story that should haunt every American. Because what happened to New York City demographically is what is quickly happening to all of America. Within the foreseeable future, America will have a non-white Third World majority population that will forever destroy this once great nation unless the American people wake up and act.

Up until the 1940s, New York was an incredibly safe, clean and beautiful city.

There was very little violent crime in the city even during the peak years of the Great Depression in the 1930s when more than 25% of New Yorkers were unemployed.

New Yorkers were literally starving during the Depression years. Every day, there were long lines of hungry New Yorkers waiting on bread lines that were set up to hand out free bread, or on soup lines that churches and synagogues established to meet the desperate needs of the city’s residents.

“Crime does pay” - Graffiti-covered subway cars were once a common sight in New York City – and although a cosmetic campaign has removed the offensive “art,” its root source, the city’s highly criminal Third World majority, has not only not gone away, it is in fact increasing daily, by leaps and bounds

New Yorkers wait politely, hat in hand, for the charity of a 1932 Depression-era bread line - Despite crushing poverty and sometimes starvation, white New Yorkers – native residents and European immigrants alike – routinely left their doors unlocked in a city in which there was very little violent crime and in which robbery and burglary were practically unheard of

Despite severe poverty and even starvation, New Yorkers often left their doors unlocked when they left their homes because burglaries and robberies were almost unheard of.

“The city that never sleeps!” – a slogan that describes New York’s exciting night life – was safe 24 hours a day.

After World War II came the first disastrous changes. Starting in the late 1940s, a huge immigration was initiated from Puerto Rico to New York. Left-wing Democrat politicians, labor union bosses, and journalists started encouraging Puerto Ricans to move from their Carribean island to New York.

A South Bronx bodega, abandoned for a year with meat and other food still on its shelves, and crawling with rats - A student of the Bronx Science College told a reporter that he could recognize individual rats on the sidewalk

The leftists realized that Puerto Rican immigrants would be natural allies of the Left.

Geraldo “Nazi Pig” Rivera marches as a guest of honor in a New York City Puerto Rican Day parade - The annual event is regularly marked by violence, including sexual assaults on women spectators; Rivera, who is of Jewish and Puerto Rican parentage, is a notorious left-winger who once referred to Israeli soldiers as “Nazi pigs”

Since Puerto Rico is defined as a “Commonwealth” of the United States, all residents of the island are automatically U.S. citizens. Puerto Ricans can therefore move to anywhere in the United States with full citizenship rights.

Therefore, U.S. law does not define Puerto Ricans as “immigrants.” However, since we at JTF consider Puerto Rico to be a foreign country – even if it is foolishly classified as part of the United States – we will refer to Puerto Ricans as immigrants.

“Crack!” - A drug-addled South Bronx “artist” and his drug-addled “art”

Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans flooded into New York in the 1950s and 1960s, creating new Hispanic neighborhoods such as Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx.

A sad survivor of a bygone era - The pretty art deco lobby of the Fish Building, on the Bronx’s once fashionable Grand Concourse, reminds the visitor that the area was not always a dirty, dangerous, diseased Third World hell hole

With the Puerto Rican immigration came a new phenomenon: massive violent crime, including murder, rape, robbery, mugging, burglary, drug use, drug smuggling and drug dealing.

A bleak reminder of better times - In a New York ghetto stairwell stained with graffiti and urine, a little black girl stands on an elegant mosaic floor, a forlorn memorial of the building’s once stylish past

Spanish Harlem was a safe, clean and beautiful neighborhood until the Puerto Rican invasion turned it into a nightmare.

Italian, Jewish, Irish, Greek and Slavic residents of East Harlem fled the neighborhood in horror as buildings were burned down and vandalized, citizens were shot to death by murderous criminals in broad daylight, women were raped in hallways and elevators, and thousands of apartments were burglarized.

Blame it all on the “gringo” - After destroying one of the loveliest neighborhoods in the nation, South Bronx residents assign the responsiblity for their misery not on themselves but on what they allege are the “broken promises” of white Anglo society. (A doll lies amid the incredible ruins of the South Bronx, which to this day resemble a Third World war zone.)

Soon few whites lived north of East 116th Street. Then the plague spread until few whites lived north of East 96th Street.

One of America’s worst slums – in sight of the Capitol - A drug-infested, crime-infested black ghetto in Washington, DC, with the Capitol dome in the background

What happened in Spanish Harlem also happened in the South Bronx. With a vengeance.

The South Bronx, with its majestic apartment buildings on rolling hills, was an upper middle class Jewish neighborhood. Jewish professionals – lawyers, doctors, engineers and teachers lived in the flourishing community.

Left-wing New York City Mayor John Lindsay with left-wing President Lyndon Johnson at the White House - Like Lindsay, LBJ was a self-hating white whose “Great Society” welfare entitlement program and “civil rights” legislation wreaked immense and lasting havoc on the American body politic

The South Bronx soon became one of the worst neighborhoods in America, with one of the highest violent crime rates in the country.

Many of the South Bronx’s majestic, exclusive apartment buildings were set on fire and burned down to the ground, leaving only charred empty shells.

Black drug addicts in a “shooting gallery” within sight of the nation’s Capitol - The Washington, DC drug abusers at first attacked the journalist who came to record their images for posterity; later, however, they allowed him to witness their parasitic, anti-social, self-destructive behavior. The filthy sty in which they conducted their criminal activity was the scene of a female addict’s murder. A police officer was shot and wounded in the hallway.

To try to cover up the ugly scene of hundreds of burned-out buildings, Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s ordered that “decals” – cardboard drawings of windows – be placed over the burned-out windows so that people driving by on the highway would not see that the buildings were only burned-out shells.

In the late 1940s, blacks from the South also started swarming into New York City. Black neighborhoods such as Central Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant and South Jamaica quickly became symbols of violent crime, welfare, drug addiction and illegitimacy.

Like the left-wing media, Lindsay saw himself as “another John F. Kennedy” - And like Kennedy, Lindsay was an advocate for policies which resulted in the murder, rape, robbery and burglary of millions of decent, hardworking Americans

In the 1960s, Mayor John Lindsay encouraged Southern blacks to move to New York to collect generous welfare checks and to live in modern public housing projects.

Lindsay – an extreme leftist – correctly believed that blacks would vote for him. He did not care in the least that he was destroying the city. As long as he could get more black votes.

Extreme leftist John Lindsay, a self-hating white, with extreme leftist Gary Ackerman, a self-hating Jew - Now a – much fatter – Queens Congressman, Gary Ackerman was in 1969 an owner of the Queens Tribune, a Lindsay backer. (Ackerman, who on national television attacked JTF as “wackos,” danced gleefully on ABC World News Tonight after obtaining the autograph of the Arab Hitler Yasser Arafat, who murdered thousands of Jews during his career as a Muslim terrorist.)

Lindsay doubled the city’s black welfare population in his first four years in office. After eight years as mayor (from 1966 to 1974), Lindsay succeeded in turning the most exciting, productive, innovative and spectacular city in the world into a filthy, crime-ridden, socialist, Third World jungle.

As long as their political careers are advanced, Democrats and most Republicans could not care less what happens to an America drowned in Third World immigration - The Traitor-in-Chief Bill Clinton with President Vicente Fox of Mexico

Our national politicians are now doing to all of America what Lindsay did to New York.

The Democrats want massive Third World immigration because they believe that Hispanic, Arab and other Third World voters will elect them to office. The Democrats could not care less that Third World immigration will turn America into a Third World banana republic.

When it comes to the Third World demographic threat, most Republicans are no better than the Democrats - To the thunderous applause of his “conservative” Republican sycophants – including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland “Security” Director Tom Ridge – President Jorge Bush announces his plan to legalize 20 million illegal aliens (January 7, 2004)

But most of the Republicans are no better.

“If you are detained, you have rights!” - The Mexican government provides an informational booklet to illegal aliens crossing into the United States. (In a propagandistic image from the booklet, a pair of illegal Mexican aliens are depicted cowering under the stern eyes of a brutal “gringo” border guard and his equally brutal “gringo” rancher ally.)

President Jorge Bush is willing to turn America into another Mexico just to get a few more Mexican votes. Bush proposes legalizing 20 million illegal aliens because he and the Republicans believe that such proposals will increase the Republican share of the Hispanic vote.

The fact that the Bush amnesty for illegal aliens will destroy America is of no concern to Republican politicians. Republican leaders note with immense satisfaction that Bush received over 40% of the Hispanic vote in the 2004 Presidential election because of his pro-amnesty position.

Most of the Republicans are no better than the Democrats when it comes to the issue of America’s burgeoning Third World fifth column - John Lindsay (r.) posed with Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970s at a dedication of the World Trade Center. (Like Lindsay, Rockefeller, a Bolshevik phony posing as a Republican, encouraged the massive and unrestricted Third World immigration which was ultimately responsible for the vicious September 11th Muslim terrorist attack which destroyed the World Trade Center.)

White-hating, America-hating Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) describes left-wing New York City Mayor John Lindsay, who died in 2001

Before the New York politicians encouraged massive non-white immigration into the city, New York was more than 90% white.

Now New York City is only 33% white and 67% non-white.

In other JTF articles, we have explored how the non-white majorities of America’s largest states and major cities make it impossible to do anything at the ballot box to save those areas from eventual destruction, and how all of America will be in the same hopeless situation unless the American people finally wake up.

Only JTF brings you the politically incorrect truth needed to save America
and Israel. Which is why supporting JTF is so important.

A black prostitute – male or female – favors the world with an obscene gesture, excised by us

Arrogant Hispanic gang members, fearless of the law, pose for the media

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President Obama? Many White Supremacists are Celebrating

Posted in White Supremacist by Mark Potok

With the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate clinched, large sections of the white supremacist movement are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing America’s first black president would be a very good thing.

It’s not that the assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who make up this country’s radical right have suddenly discovered that a man should be judged based on the content of his character, not his skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white supremacists, and even some of those who pass for intellectual leaders of their movement, think that a black man in the Oval Office would shock white America, possibly drive millions to their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan victory.

“He will make things so bad for white people that hopefully they will finally realize how stupid they were for admiring these jigaboos all these years,” “Darthvader” wrote on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network web forum. “I believe in the motto ‘Worse is Better’ and Obama certainly fits that description.” Just last week, another poster on the same thread chimed in with this: “I hope Obama wins because in four years, white people just might be pissed off enough to actually do something. … White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them. So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

“Oh man,” enthused “Centimanus” on the white nationalist Stormfront website. “I am gleefully, sadistically looking forward to Obama as president. … It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country. Added “Fulimnata”: “To the average white man and woman, they could look at Obama and see plain as day that whites are not in control.” Another message, from “TheLastOfMyKind,” agreed: “Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black, muslim [sic] rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites throughout the nation.” “Actually,” said another poster, “if Obama were to win, it would be the best thing that ever happened to the Klan. They would have massive growth.” And “TeutonicLegion” said that “a whole bunch of people will join us and find these boards” if Obama becomes president.

Even David Duke (right), the neo-Nazi and former Klan boss who is the closest thing the movement has to a real intellectual these days, sees clear advantages in an Obama victory in the fall. “Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people,” Duke wrote in an essay entitled “A Black Flag for White America” last week. “Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. … Obama is the pain that let’s [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let the American people know that there is a real cancer eating away at the heart of our country and Republican aspirin will not only not cure it, but only masks the pain and makes you think you don’t need radical surgery. … My bet is that whether Obama wins or loses in November, millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it.”

Opinion on the radical right is far from unanimous on the topic of a possible Obama victory. Many of those writing on the topic — perhaps half of those who have posted recently — think an Obama presidency would destroy the country and oppose it mightily. On the other hand, there is virtually no enthusiasm on the radical right for presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who is widely seen by white supremacists as a sellout, particularly on the issue of nonwhite immigration into the United States. But increasing numbers think that a bad situation with a black president will be good for their movement.

“Thomas Dixon Jr.,” a Stormfront poster using the name of the racist author who wrote the classic novel The Clansman, put it like this: “As WLP [William Luther Pierce, the late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance] would say… ‘What is bad for the system is good for us.’” “Obama,” added “The Patriot” in the same thread, “would be better for our cause in the long run, no doubt about it.”

• How Paleo and Fusionist Conservatism Differ
  By Daniel Larison

  “… my sense is that paleoconservatism is principally distinct from “fusionist” conservatism in three things: paleoconservatism possesses a greater, overt hostility to Enlightenment assumptions about human nature and social organization; it takes a much more critical view of the culturally coarsening effects of commercialism and the market; arguably, while it does not deny the great importance of the inheritance of Israel for Western civilisation, it also essentially rejects the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” hybrid tradition as such and consequently emphasises the importance of Christian tradition that much more. These are, for the most part, differences in degree rather than in kind.

  Fusionists can also be skeptical of or hostile to the fictions of social contract, the idea of the perfectibility of man or imaginary equality, but it seems to me that they tend to try to push these criticisms into the background, while paleoconservatives persistently put them at the forefront. …

  Paleoconservatism is the name that has become a useful shorthand for those American conservatives who desire not only an old republican, constitutional system but perhaps also an older social structure that once accompanied and created that system but has since disappeared.”

• The End of Paleoconservatism? Not quite…
  by Scott McConnell
  VDARE, 03 DEC 2000

  “… if paleoconservatism is defined with some modesty (how about: skeptical resistance to multiculturalism, support for immigration reform, and opposition to an over-extended and militaristic foreign policy) there is still a heated battle for the soul of the Republican Party taking place between paleoconservatives and neocons. …

  The reason that some mild version of paleoconservatism lives on, despite all, is that it is not a normal conservative sentiment to want your country made over by foreign immigrants; or to go to war against people who mean you and your family no harm.”

• Problems Of Paleoconservatism
  Jack Ross

  “The paleocons… are therefore beginning to pursue options with political formations on the ostensible left. Indeed, in many parts of Europe, they are becoming the real left, as the working class based opposition to the managerial state.

  So what, then, are the problems of paleoconservatism? As demonstrated, the paleocons do stand firmly rooted in a rejection of revolutionary libertarian doctrines, both old and new, and in a consciousness of the admonition of Russell Kirk that conservatism has more in common with socialism than with libertarianism. Indeed, many if not most paleocons relish in adopting the intellectual style characteristic of the old socialists. It is here that we can begin to examine the flaws of the paleoconservative ethos. It is useful to begin by examining the roots thereof in antiquity, which tells us much about their dissent from the neocons. Rooted in the overwhelmingly Catholic persuasion of the paleocons is a highly pronounced fealty to Aristotle, and to a construct of human governance, both political and spiritual, based in Aristotle’s original and half-hearted dissent from the doctrine of perpetual revolution as it was first enunciated by Plato. Thus it can be said that the paleoconservative critique essentially amounts to the Aristotelian answer to the Platonism of Leo Strauss (We should presumably compare Karl Popper, also a modern critic of Plato, on this). It should be self evident that this proposition falls desperately short of the vision and critique needed by the resistance.

  There are three areas in which this bias of world view adversely affects the paleocon critique in the modern context. The first and most pronounced of these is that the paleocons appear to have, in common with the Communists, an aversion to any understanding of macroeconomics, meaning great deference and ambivalence toward international high finance and the issue of its pervasive and undue influence over policy, often at the expense of democracy. The second and third are merely two aspects of the same issue, which is on the question of nationalism. The paleocons have always been of the position to give a spirited and reactionary defense of the nation-state, again based in Aristotelian conceit, professing great faith in the philosophical grounding thereof. It should not be surprising then that one finds in the paleocons a considerable aversion toward nationalism itself. While they certainly do not behave outlandishly toward it as do the Communists, they do tend to exhibit a libertarian-minded aversion toward nationalist sentiment. This does, however, become striking when we consider the approach of the many Jewish paleocon intellectuals in light of this, thus invoking the old left intellectual style which is characteristic of the paleocons, and animated by all of the attributes listed here.

  Put together, in light of these phenomena it is evident that paleoconservatism is quite explicitly an intellectual movement as opposed to a political movement. … This is especially striking when we consider that paleoconservatism probably constitutes the most radical and unequivocal critique of, and rejection of the fundamental assumptions of, modern society and culture (of Modernism, per se?). Therefore, we should at this point begin to re-examine the “dynamism gap” with the left spoken of earlier in this essay. If it is established that the Green political persuasion has more in common with the “old right” then the “old left”, we should examine this in relation to the phenomenon of which the Greens are the primary product, the new left.”

• A Neocon Gatecrashes VDARE
  by John Derbyshire
• Why I am (Probably) a Paleoconservative
  by Richard Poe
  02 AUG 2002

  “Many issues divide neocons from paleocons, but race seems to be the crucial one. Neocons believe that America will always be America, with or without white people. Some neocons even preach that the sooner American whites intermarry with non-whites to produce a new race of amorphous cosmopolites with café-au-lait complexions, the better off everyone will be.

  Not so, say the paleocons. Anglo-Saxon civility will not survive the disappearance of Anglo-Saxon people. If white folks lose their demographic and political dominance here, America will likely degenerate into a hellhole of Zimbabwe-style violence, they warn.”

  — Links are Poe’s — ed.

  A page on this site on / Diversity, Tolerance, and Pluralism /

  .

• The Old Right — Wikipedia
  

  “In the United States, the Old Right, also called the Old Guard, was a group of libertarian, free-market anti-interventionists, originally associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft. …

  In addition to opposition to the welfare state, the Old Right soon became the major anti-war ideology, opposing interventionism and the drive toward war against Nazi Germany in Europe and the Empire of Japan in Asia. The Old Right denounced FDR’s adoption of Wilsonian “global crusading,” which had involved the U.S. in World War I. The Old Right’s “America First” movement countered Wilson-Roosevelt interventionism. …

  They were called the “Old Right” to distinguish them from their anti-communist New Right successors, who were more friendly to big government, foreign military intervention, and domestic economic intervention.

  Their successors and torchbearers in the late 20th century and present century are paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians. Both of these groups often rally behind Old Right slogans like “America First” while sharing similar views to the Old Right opposition to the New Deal.”

• Paleoconservative entry in thefreedictionary.com
  Includes a list of “prominent paleoconservatives”
• The Surrender Option
  by John Derbyshire
  National Review Online, 12 SEP 2001

  “… I don’t mind Paleos. I understand the appeal of their vision: a busy commercial republic, minding her own business, with no troops stationed beyond her shores, the champion of liberty in every land, but never its guarantor. Heck, I used to belong to a Paleo email list. …

  I dropped off that Paleo list, after much thought, because I just didn’t share that vision. I say again, I see its appeal, and I have a lot of sympathy for it: I just don’t share it.

  … there are some strong practical reasons to favor American interventionism….

  Republic or Empire? Empire, please.”

America’s Democratic Collapse

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on June 3, 2008, Printed on April 19, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/86973/

Note: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University’s Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college’s decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.

When it was announced in May that Bush would deliver the commencement address, 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school’s Web site a statement titled “We Object.” The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration’s “obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits.”

“We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel,” the statement read. “Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values.”

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II, or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves.

I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father’s father and his father’s father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country’s founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The “consent of the governed” has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, “a coup d’etat in slow motion.” We are being impoverished — legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that — a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

“There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China’s totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated, and 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

The growing desperation across the United States is unleashing not simply a recession — we have been in a recession for some time now — but the possibility of a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This desperation has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. This is good news if you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you work for a living. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual income has been on a slow, steady decline for three decades. The majority’s income peaked at $33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book “Free Lunch,” it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000, this despite three decades of economic expansion. And where did that money go? Ask ExxonMobil, the biggest U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, leaving us to pay close to $4 a gallon to fill up our cars. Or better yet, ask Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36 million bonus and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson, 56, received more than $7.6 million from exercising options and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous year. But Tillerson’s 2007 pay was not even the highest mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental Petroleum Corp. CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million, and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.

For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top tenth’s greatest share of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before the Roaring ’20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And within the top 10 percent, those who made more than $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top tenth of 1 percent, people like Tillerson or Irani or Hackett, who made at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real election reform, until we make it possible to run for national office without candidates kissing the rings of Tillersons, Iranis and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions of dollars, this rape of America will continue.

While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let’s set aside Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history. The president, as the Boston Globe reported, has claimed the authority, through “signing statements,” to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, whistle-blower protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” George Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement. And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face, and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China. Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending.

Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions. Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world’s largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate. And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make their money off the American citizen. Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and non-compete $7 billion contract to repair Iraq’s oil fields, as well as the power to oversee and control Iraq’s entire oil production. This has now become $130 billion in contract awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars, what has Haliburton done? It has made sure only 36 of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in 30 different countries. Halliburton is able through this arrangement to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a “controlled foreign corporation” and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries known as a “tax havens.” They take our money. They squander it. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. Halliburton — and Halliburton is just one example — is the engine of our new, rogue corporate state, serviced by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, once the company’s CEO.

The disparity between our oligarchy and the working class has created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimates that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States over the next two years will total 1,390,000 and that by the end of 2012, 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers in the United States will be forced out of their homes. The corporate state, which as an idea is an abstraction to many Americans, is very real when the pieces are carefully put together and linked to a system of corporate power that has made this poverty, the denial of our constitutional rights, and a state of permanent war inevitable. The assault on the American working class — an assault that has devastated members of my own family — is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually. A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed, or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software — from finance to architecture to engineering — can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.

Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities, we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.

We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries, or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority. They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry, which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity.

Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense. This will not end when Bush leaves office. And so we build Cold War relics like $3.4 billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation’s resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. (Seymour) Melman, like President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This massive military spending, aided by this $3 trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside. Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay, and our safety net is taken away.

The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year. But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip program “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as “bona fide newscasts.” The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse “participatory fascism.”

How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation — the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.” In it, he wrote:

The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same. There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state. This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.

Sen. Frank Church, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government’s massive and highly secretive National Security Agency. He wrote:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

When Sen. Church made this statement, the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.

… We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. The consumer price index, for example, used by the government to measure inflation, has become meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low, the government has been substituting basic products they once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect between what we are told and what is actually true is worthy of the old East German state. The New York Times’ consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. The advantage to the corporations is huge. A false inflation rate, one far lower than the real rate, keeps equitable interest payments on bank accounts and certificates of deposit down. It masks the deterioration of the American economy. The Potemkin statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real adjustments for inflation. These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. It has reduced the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The term “unemployment” has also been steadily redefined. This has rendered official data on employment worthless. In real terms, about 10 percent of the working population is unemployed, a figure that is, over the long run, unsustainable. The economy, despite the official statistics, is not growing. It is shrinking. And as the nation crumbles, we are awash with the terrible simplicity of false statistics. We confuse our emotional responses, carefully manipulated by advertisers, pundits, spin doctors, television hosts, political consultants and focus groups, with knowledge. It is how we elect presidents and those we send to Congress, how we make decisions, even decisions to go to war. It is how we view the world. Four media giants — AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup — control nearly everything we read, see and hear. This growing disconnect with reality is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

So what do we do? Voting is not enough. If voting was that effective, to quote the activist Philip Berrigan, it would be illegal. And voting in an age when elections are stolen by rigged ballot machines and a stacked Supreme Court willing to overturn all legal precedent to make George Bush president, will not work. I am not saying do not vote. We should all vote. But that has to be the starting point if we want to reclaim America. We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. The WTO and NAFTA have handcuffed workers and consumers and stymied our efforts to create clean environments. These agreements are beyond the control of our courts and have crippled our weakened regulatory agencies. The WTO forces our working class to compete with brutalized child and prison labor overseas, to be reduced to this level of slave labor or to go without meaningful work. We need to repeal the anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947. The act obstructs the organization of unions. We need to transfer control of pension funds from management to workers. If these pension funds, worth trillions of dollars, were in the hands of workers, the working class would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange.

The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.

George Bush, who will be here on Saturday, has done more to shred, violate or absent the government from its obligations under domestic and international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law. He has set up offshore penal colonies where we deny detainees basic rights and openly engage in torture. He launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we allow the Democratic majority in Congress to get away with its refusal to begin the process of impeachment, which appears likely, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation — largely put in place by the United States — destroy our own constitutional rights and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away from a police state. Time is running out.

We must not allow international laws and treaties — ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences — to be discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of George Bush’s violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow American citizens along with those outside our borders, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and military brigs in cities such as Charleston. George Bush — we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo — fabricated a legal pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisers manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied. He lied to us and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as “a criminal war of aggression.”

We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We can either begin an orderly withdrawal or watch the mission collapse.

A rule-based world matters. The creation of international bodies and laws, the sanctity of our constitutional rights, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation — one that seeks at its best to respect and defend the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate domestic and international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, democracy and law are worthless, if we allow these international and domestic legal safeguards to unravel, our moral and political authority will plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies. We will lose our country. And we will, in the end, see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides’ history. Read how Athens’ expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war — if we do not understand how deadly that poison is — it can kill us just as surely as the disease.

Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid. We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney, who seek to destroy our nation.

A state of fear only engenders cruelty — cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante’s circle, the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us toward the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.

Their Legacy: Race Riots Doomed Detroit Forever

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By Debbie Schlussel

Forty years ago today, several days of race riots began in Detroit.

On July 23, 1967, Black Panthers and assorted other Black extremists (with White hippies and far-leftists backing and encouraging them) eventually wrote their political epitaphs with it (though their movement unfortunately died a long, slow death–far past its time, if there ever was a time). But they robbed and killed Detroit–and a significant portion of Black America with it.

Black Panthers and their radical allies, supported by a thousands of Black Detroiters, rioted for days, starting fires and destroying the city. They wanted more power in the city. They wanted a Black Mayor, a Black police chief, a Black city council.

Scenes from the Detroit Race Riots of 1967 . . .

Detroit Black Panthers Today, they have all those things. And they have nothing. They won the riots, they lost the war. And 43 people died–no, were murdered–in vain (along with countless others since).

As my Dad says, when the riots began, Gentile, White Detroiters ran out to buy bullets. Jews ran out to buy guns (way too late). But eventually, they all ran out–and away–from Detroit. Today, more than nine out of ten Detroiters are Black. And even Blacks are leaving the Detroit morass faster than Roger Bannister. The city is losing population by the tens of thousands, every year. Black Americans, like White Americans, don’t want to live in the crime, failed schools, and other living conditions brought to you by the Detroit riots. Crime under Detroit’s Black police chiefs (the city has had several) is at an all-time high, and Detroit Public Schools, under its Black superintendents and school boards (there have been several of those, too), are at their worst, with record high drop-out rates and numbers of illiterate graduates.

When Black radicals started the riots, they achieved their goal of driving out White Detroiters, but their separatism only isolated them. Unlike every other inner city in America, Detroit is not a tourist destination. It’s not a place where suburbanites generally clamor to go to nightclubs and restaurants. It’s simply too dangerous.

The violence and destruction of the riots never really went away, just the press coverage of it. Such prominent figures as the son of former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and the daughter of Detroit Tigers/Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch have been mugged.

During the Superbowl, with thousands of FBI and Homeland Security agents roaming around, there were two murders in the vicinity of the temporary bars and restaurants dotting the main drag of Woodward Avenue. I say “temporary” because that’s what they were. Despite all the moving around of cranes to make it look like something–anything!–positive was going on in the city, Detroit Superbowl Committee personnel had to lease out shops, restaurants, and bars on 7-day leases. Any more than that, and they couldn’t convince anyone to do business on the normally abandoned streets.

Crime is rampant, the city can’t attract a major business, and the banana republicans on the city council junta are busy passing resolutions to name a tunnel after John Conyers, declaring Dubai a sister city of Detroit, and maintaining Sanctuary City status for illegal aliens. Monica Conyers (wife of the radical Congressman) is symbolic of the city council. Drunk and in fist fights at bars, she’s a mess. And so is her legislative body and the city it governs.

With a pimp daddy mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who dresses like a Gangsta and is involved in scandal after scandal, the city is the laughing stock. But, hey, the Mayor made an appearance on “Living Large,” a now-cancelled national hip-hop show. Thank you very little. Kilpatrick, whom I like to call Kwame the Kingpin, was suspected in the drivebuy shooting of “Strawberry,” a stripper who allegedly performed in the Mayoral Manoogian Mansion for “His Honor.” He used his 21-bodyguard posse of police officers to serve as his personal harem-recruiter and to ferret him to and from different girlfriends.

These are the people who betrayed Blacks in Detroit, not the Whites who took White flight (followed by Black flight) from the city and gave them free reign to “run” the city . . . and fail magnificently. And, yet, they still blame even this on the White man.

Is it any surprise with “leadership” like this that the city is a ruin much used by Director Michael Bay as a set for movies? With the city a ghost town, even at lunchtime, he has a cornucopia of empty, decrepit, vandalized buildings–once grand palaces of business and industry–to choose from. And he doesn’t have to deal with much traffic–by foot or car–interrupting his shoots.

Instead, Detroit is a burnt out shell. It is the only inner city in America that has not undergone a revival, a gentrification (even Cleveland–the former “Mistake on the Lake”–was reborn). While some of that can be attributed to recent, never-ending downturns in the auto industry, this is a phenomenon that has metastasized throughout the city, even when Ford, GM, and Chrysler were at their height. Now, that they, too, are on the unreclaimable decline, it only helps solidiy Detroit’s rigor mortis.

Drive down the Lodge Freeway, the main artery from Detroit’s Northwest suburbs into the city, and you will see burnt out house after burnt out house dotting the freeway. All of them are in Detroit, and all of them–in their burnt out “splendor”–have sat vacant and ashen for years.

Ten years ago, when I was sworn in to practice before U.S. District Court, my father took me to lunch. We walked down the streets of downtown Detroit on a beautiful spring day, but there was hardly a soul as far as the eye could see. Ten years later, nothing has changed. It’s only gotten worse.

Detroit is in the worst condition of any major city in America, except perhaps New Orleans, and that took a hurricane, an act of G-d. Three weeks ago, A&P-owned Farmer Jack–the last national supermarket in Detroit, the last large national retailer in the city–closed its doors and said Sayonara to the environs South of Eight Mile.

This is the legacy of the Detroit riots. And despite all the Detroit newspaper and media hype that those days are over, their legacy has only just begun.

To the last Black Panther leaving Detroit: Don’t forget to turn out the lights. And start your usual fires, in their place.

Osama Bin Laden has a better chance of getting elected President than Detroit has of arising from the dead.

As Mark Twain might say, reports of its rebirth are highly exaggerated.

US boycotting, Iran starring, at UN racism meeting

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer Bradley S. Klapper, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA – The United Nations opens its first global racism conference in eight years on Monday with the U.S. and at least five other countries boycotting the event out of concern that Islamic countries will demand that it denounce Israel and ban criticism of Islam.

The administration of President Barack Obama, America’s first black head of state, announced Saturday that it would boycott “with regret” the weeklong meeting in Geneva, which already is experiencing much of the bickering and political infighting that marred the 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa.

The Netherlands declared its boycott Sunday, while Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy already have said they would not attend.

“I would love to be involved in a useful conference that addressed continuing issues of racism and discrimination around the globe,” Obama said in Trinidad on Sunday after attending the Summit of the Americas.

But he said the language of the U.N.’s draft declaration risked a reprise of Durban, during which “folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive.”

“We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that’s not something we can sign up for,” Obama said.

“Hopefully some concrete steps come out of the conference that we can partner with other countries on to actually reduce discrimination around the globe, but this wasn’t an opportunity to do it,” he said.

Some European countries are still deciding whether to attend the U.N. conference.

U.N. spokesman Rupert Colville said Germany informed the global body on Sunday that it would boycott it. In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry refused to confirm that, but said the government would announce its final decision on Sunday night.

Britain said it will send diplomats, despite concerns the meeting could become a forum for Holocaust denial or anti-Semitic attacks.

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI said the conference is needed to eliminate racial intolerance around the world. Asia News, a Catholic news agency that is part of the missionary arm of the Vatican, said of the pope’s comment: “The Holy See is distancing itself from the criticisms of some Western countries.”

“I am shocked and deeply disappointed by the United States’ decision not to attend,” said U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay, who is hosting the conference.

She conceded some countries were focusing solely on one or two issues to the detriment of the fight against intolerance, but said it is essential that the issue of racism be tackled globally.

The major sticking points regarding the proposed final U.N. declaration are its implied criticism of Israel and an attempt by Muslim governments to ban all criticism of Islam, Sharia law, the prophet Muhammad and other tenets of their faith.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who repeatedly has called for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust — is slated to speak on the first day.

He arrived in Geneva on Sunday evening and was meeting President Hans-Rudolf Merz of Switzerland, the country which represents the diplomatic interests of the United States in the Islamic republic.

The pullout of Germany would be significant as it has played a leading role in U.N. anti-racism efforts as a result of its troubled historical legacy. In recent meetings, it has expressed dismay about some governments’ attempts to downplay the significance of the Holocaust.

The bland U.N. draft statement does not mention Israel by name, but it reaffirms the Durban statement and its reference to the plight of Palestinians. That document was agreed after the United States and Israel had walked out over attempts to liken Zionism — the movement to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land — to racism.

Israel and Jewish groups have lobbied hard against Western participation in the meeting, arguing that the presence alone of American and European negotiators would give legitimacy to what they fear could become an anti-Semitic gathering.

Still, after years of contentious preparations there appears little evidence to validate these fears. The statement of 2001 that is so contentious now was cheered in Israel at the time, as it recognized the Jewish state’s right to security.

Regarding its boycott, the Obama administration said it could not endorse any statement that singled out Israel or included passages demanding a ban on language considered an “incitement” of religious hatred. Such calls “run counter to the U.S. commitment to unfettered free speech,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

Many Muslim nations want curbs to free speech to prevent insults to Islam they claim have proliferated since the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. They cite the 2005 cartoons of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper that sparked riots in the Muslim world.

European countries also have criticized the meeting for focusing heavily on the West and ignoring problems of racism and intolerance in the developing world.

Jackie Chan’s China comments prompt backlash

Jackie Chan’s China comments prompt backlash (AP)

Source: AP Sun Apr 19, 2009,

HONG KONG – Action star Jackie Chan ‘s comments wondering whether Chinese people “need to be controlled” have drawn sharp rebuke in his native Hong Kong and in Taiwan .

Chan told a business forum in the southern Chinese province of Hainan that a free society may not be beneficial for China ‘s authoritarian mainland.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said Saturday. “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

He went on to say that freedoms in Hong Kong and Taiwan made those societies “chaotic.”

Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders, but did not sit well with lawmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“He’s insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren’t pets,” Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung told The Associated Press. “Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law.”

Another lawmaker, Albert Ho, called the comments “racist,” adding: “People around the world are running their own countries. Why can’t Chinese do the same?”

Former British colony Hong Kong enjoys Western-style civil liberties and some democratic elections under Chinese rule. Half of its 60-member legislature is elected, with the other half picked by special interest groups. But Hong Kong’s leader is chosen by a panel stacked with Beijing loyalists.

In democratically self-ruled Taiwan, which split from mainland China during a civil war in 1949, legislator Huang Wei-che said Chan himself “has enjoyed freedom and democracy and has reaped the economic benefits of capitalism. But he has yet to grasp the true meaning of freedom and democracy.”

Chan’s comments were reported by news outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but were ignored by the mainland Chinese press.

Although Chan was a fierce critic of the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, which killed at least hundreds, he has not publicly criticized China’s government in recent years and is immensely popular on the mainland.

He performed during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and took part in the Olympic torch relay .

Chan also is vice chairman of the China Film Association, a key industry group.

The Charlottesville Tea Party by Baron Bodissey

The Charlottesville Tea Party

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/04/charlottesville-tea-party.html#readfurther

by Baron Bodissey

Yesterday’s tea party at the Pavilion on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville attracted about 1,500 people, which was a huge turnout, given the abominable weather. I didn’t think there were that many conservatives in Charlottesville, so the organizers must have bussed them in from Greene, Farmville, Lunenburg, Lynchburg, and all those other nests of gap-toothed inbred mouth-breathing right-wing extremists that abound here fin the Virginia heartland.

Seriously — there are more conservatives in Charlottesville than you might think; but they’re not much in evidence except in times of crisis. And recent events demonstrate that a singular moment of crisis has arrived.

This was the sign that Dymphna and I made and brought with us to the event:

The quote comes from a famous speech by Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg on May 29, 1765. According to the account in John Burk’s History of Virginia, Mr. Henry was inveighing against the odious stamp act imposed on the colonies by George III:

“Caesar,” said he, “had his Brutus, Charles his Cromwell, and (pausing) George the third (here a cry of treason, treason was heard, supposed to issue from the chair, but with admirable presence of mind he proceeded) may profit by their examples. Sir, if this be treason,” continued he, “make the most of it.”

Charlottesville takes great pride in celebrating its status as the home of Thomas Jefferson, and this occasion was no exception — the atmosphere was decidedly Jeffersonian. Our third president was quoted frequently during the proceedings, and the theme of the American Revolution was constantly in evidence. The Master of Ceremonies was Joe Thomas of WINA, who dressed up as Tom Paine for the occasion.

The first speaker was former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. He spoke after I dropped Dymphna off while I was still parking the car, so I can’t tell you what he said.

He was followed by John Taylor, the chairman of Tertium Quid. After that came Karin Agness, a UVA law student, who spoke from a student’s perspective about the parlous state of higher education in America. She was acting as a de facto spokesman for the young people in the crowd, who were fairly well-represented, especially considering that it was the middle of a cold and dreary weekday.

- – - - – - – - -

An Iraq War veteran named Matthew Thomasson was one of the more interesting speakers of the day. Not only did he have relevant anecdotes from his tour of duty in Iraq, but he spoke knowledgeably on a number of other issues that are familiar to regular readers of this blog. He was the only speaker to mention sharia law, and he also mentioned the attempts made by the European Union to coerce the people of Ireland into voting for the Treaty of Lisbon.

He concluded his talk with a rousing recitation of the Military Oath of Enlistment:

I, Matthew Thomasson, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…

By the time he reached “So help me God” at the end, a good portion of the audience was reciting it with him

Almost everyone at the tea party was carrying a sign, but some had other sorts of props.

A man next to us was carrying a money tree, made out of a cut sapling festooned with phony dollar bills.

There were various forms of tea party hats, usually red, white, and blue, with tea bags hanging from them or affixed to them.

Several families had children carrying signs that were designed to be read in sequence — see the photo near the top of this post for a representative example.

Virginia Delegate Rob Bell spoke after Matthew Thomasson.

How is it possible that the 58th District can elect a Republican? After all, Metro Charlottesville is one of the most liberal cities on the East Coast — they don’t call it “Berkeley East” for nothing.

During the election last fall, the city was a virtual sea of Obama yard signs and bumper stickers. It’s home to Peace Cooperatives and Transgendered Food Banks and Women’s Socialist Revolutionary Collectives and every other imaginable trendy lefty activity, ranging from bright pink all the way to Barricades Red.

Notwithstanding this ambient political atmosphere, Rob Bell is the district’s Republican delegate, and the Pavilion was full of people who applauded everything he had to say.

As the afternoon wore on, the weather got so cold and windy that Dymphna and I retreated to the visitors’ center to keep warm, and were unable to hear the last few speeches. After the speakers finished, the remaining audience formed a column and marched to Rep. Perriello’s office on Garrett Street. The organizers insisted that we refer to our procession as a “parade” rather than a march, to keep the City Fathers from being alarmed by our right-wing extremist terrorist activities.

For some reason, no counter-demonstrators were on hand to shout as us as we passed. Maybe the bad weather kept them indoors. At the corner of 2ns Street I saw a handful of people wearing Obama shirts watching us, but there was no overt antagonism.

When we arrived at Mr. Perriello’s office, everybody left their teabags on the doorstep or the windowsill. A number of people deposited their signs against the wall. There was no sign of any activity from inside the office.

John Munchmeyer, the chairman of the Libertarians, gave a brief speech thanking us for participating. After that the dogged remnant headed back through the cold rain to a restaurant on the Downtown Mall.

Food, beer, and coffee were most welcome at that point.

I talked to some of the Libertarians for a while about the recent Homeland Security report, which designates as potential terrorists those who support a third political party or recognize state and local authority over federal authority. In other words, all of the people in that room yesterday evening were potential terrorists, according to the official criteria put forth by Washington. Strictly speaking, anybody who wishes to abide by the United States Constitution might come under suspicion as a terrorist.

With 1,500 terrorists-to-be gathered in the heart of Charlottesville, there must have been at least one federal agent keeping us under observation. At least that was my theory — but recent events have brought out my paranoid tendencies, so who knows?

I entertained myself during the tea party by watching the people at the edge of the crowd, trying to spot someone in nondescript normal attire who might be an FBI or DHS employee charged with monitoring the tea party.

There was at least one fellow who matched the profile. He wore average clothes with no political buttons or stickers. He carried no sign or other paraphernalia. His expression never changed, and he never clapped or booed, showing neither approval nor disapproval of the proceedings.

He stayed on the perimeter outside the canopy along the upper walkway, even when the cold rain and wind came in. For a while he watched from the south side, and then later sauntered around by the visitors’ center and stood at the railing on the north side. He just observed, turning his gaze slowly from one side to the other, looking at different parts of the crowd.

Later he disappeared down Main Street into the Mall, and I thought he was gone. But he returned a minute later, and walked slowly up by City Hall. After that I lost sight of him. I looked for him again on the Mall during our “parade”, but he didn’t appear.

It made me wonder what exactly he was doing there, and what his job might be. He seemed to be keeping an eye on us.

But, then again, I’m paranoid.

History Lesson: And These Are the People We Expect to Fix Things Now?

George Santayana once famously said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But what about those who don’t just ignore history, but who hire and take counsel from those who committed historic follies in the past?

Back in November 1999, Congress passed legislation pushed by then Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), rescinding the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act. The measure, backed by the Clinton administration, and overwhelmingly passed by the Senate (90-8) and the House (362-57), opened the way for banks to merge with investment banks and insurance companies, and led directly to the current financial cataclysm.

A contemporaneous report on that Congressional action written by reporter Stephen Labaton and published in the New York Times on Nov. 5, 1999 under the headline “Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws,” includes some remarkable quotes from key players in that unprecedented sellout to the financial sector.

Here’s Larry Summers, a chief architect of the current financial industry multi-trillion-dollar bailout giveaway being orchestrated by the Obama administration, where he serves as director of President Obama’s National Economic Council:

”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

And here’s what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), awash in Financial industry campaign donations but currently in feigned high dudgeon over Wall Street’s bonus payments to executives, had to say, speaking in support of the ’99 measure eliminating Glass-Steagall:

”If we don’t pass this bill, we could find London or Frankfurt or years down the road Shanghai becoming the financial capital of the world. ‘There are many reasons for this bill, but first and foremost is to ensure that U.S. financial firms remain competitive.”

The article quotes the Clinton administration and Summers’ Treasury Department as predicting that revoking Glass-Steagall and permitting banks to expand into investment banking and insurance would save consumers “$18 billion a year” through economies of scale—a figure that seems rather quaint as taxpayers now pony up trillions of dollars to rescue those same institutions. (The article notes that critics of deregulation argued–presciently it turns out–that even those paltry savings, probably overstated, would flow to financial sector investors, not to consumers.)

The old Times clip (brought to my attention by alert veteran radical writer and activist Bert Schultz of Philadelphia), does highlight a couple of prophetic heroes, too.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), one of seven Senate Democrats who voted against revoking Glass-Steagall, said:

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930′s is true in 2010. I wasn’t around during the 1930′s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980′s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

And then there’s the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), who died in a tragic and still unexplained plane crash near the end of his campaign for re-election in 2002. Congress, he said, seemed:

“…determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes. Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.”

For the record, also voting against Glass-Steagall repeal in the Senate were lone Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, and six other Democrats: Barbara Boxer (CA), Richard Bryan (NV), Russ Feingold (WI), Tom Harkin (IA), and Barbara Mikulski (MD). 51 Democrats, 5 Republicans and 1 independent voted against the measure in the House.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a key player in the current bailout scheme, isn’t mentioned in the Times article about Glass-Steagall, but at the time was a protégé of Summers, working as undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs.

While they are thankfully well out of the loop in the current scramble in Washington to both reverse the economic collapse and try and help financial companies and financiers profit from it, it’s worth reading too in this 10-year-old clip what Phil Gramm and then Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE) and now embattled president of the New School in New York City) had to say about ending Glass-Steagall.

Sen. Gramm:

‘The world changes, and we have to change with it. We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.”

And then Sen. Kerrey, offering a line that should probably be etched someday on his tombstone as his most memorable quotation:

“The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown.”

Addendum:

Today President Obama met to consult with bank industry “leaders” about his recovery plans. Among them was the CEO of Citigroup, the bank holding company that really kicked off the whole deregulation fiasco back in 1998 when, in open defiance of the Glass-Steagall Act, it merged with Travelers, the insurance giant, undermining 66 years of separation of banking from more speculative financial activities, and paving the way for the repeal of Glass-Steagall less than a year later.

Nice place to turn for advice, Mr. Prez (what’s next, inviting your predecessor, George W Bush, over for some friendly advice on how to rescue the Constitution, or visiting Charlie Manson to discuss ways of ending torture?).

Liberalism’s Dark Unnatural Utopian Fantasy

Commentary by Linda: Liberalism’s Dark Unnatural Utopian Fantasy

In an online Liberal forum, an ‘out-and-proud’ Liberal gay told a male conservative, ” I am more man than you’ll ever be…
and more woman than you’ll ever have.”

What this ‘gay’ really is, is a sexually and morally confused male.    Captive to dark impulses and emotions, he  imagines himself to be something he is not.  He is like a little boy playing the pretend game in which he is really superman rather than just a little boy.  As long as his playmates agree to play along by suspending reality in order that they may enter into the little boy’s fantasy, fantasy becomes reality and the little boy can be superman.

All children play the ‘pretend game.’  It’s part of childhood and growing up.  And though all adults may sometimes seek escape from the harshness of reality through daydreams or fantasy, ultimately we must live within reality and conform ourselves to the way in which it works.

American Liberalism is in essence, a yearning to escape reality and instead, dwell in a fantasy realm.  Liberalism evolved out of Progressive Fascism, one of the twentieth century’s totalitarian religions spawned by the French Revolution.  The two others were Marxist Communism and National Socialism.  These religions were part ideology and part fantasy.

At the deepest level of all they were expressions of despair, resentment, and rebellion.  Despair with and resentment over man’s mortality, the human condition (man’s sin nature and conscience), the created order of being (ie., He made them male and female), objective truth and universal  moral absolutes, virtue, judgement, heaven, and hell.  Despair and resentment found outward expression in revolutionary doctrines, rebellion, destruction, violence, and murder.  In short, the rebellion was, and remains to this day, against objective truth and reality.

The utopia dreamed of by the revolutionaries is a place unspeakably unnatural.  In the reimagined order of perfection, mankind’s sin nature (Hyde) has been reconciled with his better nature (Dr. Jekyl), hence man now stands beyond good and evil. There is no sin since there is no longer good and evil.  Dr. Jekyl and the evil Mr. Hyde have become ‘one.’  In the sinless, perfected utopia, man can escape the created order of being just by reimagining and/or reinventing himself, therefore, for instance, adrogyny, homosexuality, pedophilia, pederasty, and sadomasochism are the norms and the two sexes and morality are abnormal.  Now man can become superman, god, goddesses, powerful witches, magicians—the imagination is his only limit.  Procreation, monogamy, fidelity, and the traditional family are no longer necessary to mankind’s survival, for through the magic of technology and science man will finally gain boundless ‘free love,’ immortality and salvation.

Resentment of and rebellion against objective reality is not a new thing but a very ancient thing.  Shortly after the cutain arose on history in the post-deluvian world, Nimrod—offended by mortality and the created order of being, and gnawed by narcissism, covetousness, greed, and envy— declared the death of God and then set himself up as God.  He would tear down the existing order and create a New Order to his satisfaction.

Totalitarian tactics, such as terror, intimidation, and lying became immediately neccessary in order to force all of the people to enter into his fantasy, or at least to behave as though they believed that Nimrod was really a god and not simply a mortal, as they were.

It should come as no surprise to learn that the Evil Eye superstition arose during this time, or that other mortals—in pursuit of personal power—reimagined themselves as magicians, wizards, and so forth.

In modern times the primary God-killers, August Comte, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, reenacted Nimrod’s role when they arbitrarily announced the death of God.  It is not true that they disbelieved in His existence, but rather the reverse.  They believed that He existed, but their inflated narcissism and envy were such that they wanted to become gods themselves.  The ‘will to power’ fueling Nietzsche’s fantasy was his desire to become a superman.  Comte’s envy of Jesus Christ was such that he could barely utter the name of Jesus.  His imagination’s desire was that he be exalted as the Pope of Positivism.  Karl Marx was truly demonic.  His imagination’s desire was luridly expressed in his Luciferian poems, where he usurps God’s throne and destroys the entire creation and damns everyone to hell.

This mad, escapist utopianism—the dark fantasy of unnaturalness– is alive and thriving right here in America.  It is political correctness, speech codes, hate crime laws, and multiculturalism.  It is the reappearance of feminist goddesses, ‘gay’ shamans, witches, and an ever-expanding menu of reimagined beings.  It is the vicious attacks against traditional marriage.  It is abortion and euthanasia. It is the malice-driven conditioning of our youth to hate their parents, country, and God, and to accept as ‘good,’ promiscuity, porn, ’gayness,’ abortion, and other evils. It is  the ‘gay’ agenda, which is really an attempt at erasing the two sexes.

The vicious attacks against Sarah Palin—a woman who lives within and conforms to reality—finally comes into focus when we understand that Liberalism is the rejection of and rebellion against objective truth and reality.

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class – the long road to hell!

The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class

Population of the 3rd world is growing too fast:

Painting a Picture – A Demographic Overview Of Whites Within The United States

Painting a Picture

A Demographic Overview Of Whites Within The United States

By The Narrator

The following is a basic look at the demographics of White percentages by state(s) within regions. I’ve used general geographic definitions to cluster states that are, well, naturally clustered together. So, for example, my usage of the term “south-west” may not be what an American would necessarily concur with. But my compartmentalizing of the states is more functional and done with Europeans, Australians, etc in mind …. I hope it’s all clear.

The point here is not to advocate some sort of regional movement by saying this region is Whiter than that region. It is simply to provide basic information. Besides migration patterns can change quickly and what appears to be a doomed state or region today may be Whiter in years to come. And Whiter regions or states today may be dramatically less so in ten years time.

So this is a “Just the Facts” type of exercise.

The percentages here are not fixed and tend to fluctuate a point or two even within the Census material. We’ll know more after next year when the 2010 census begins. And I expect the news for us to be worse than some imagine. I hope I’m wrong.

A few things to keep in mind looking at these percentages is that they are based on estimates from 2007 by the Census Bureau, not concrete numbers. Also, the definition of white which the Census uses includes peoples from North Africa and the Middle-East. So it erroneously includes Jews, Arabs, Iranians, Turks etc, as “white”. And there are somewhere around 14 million of those peoples in America. Lastly, the numbers of illegals have been, by all accounts, rather obviously (and likely intentionally) underestimated.

So looking at these percentages, you could arguably subtract anywhere from 1 to 10 additional points from the percentage of Whites in some, or all, states.

With that said, here goes. The percentage of Whites will appear next to each state. At the bottom of each list will be a total average for that region, except with the single states and the District of Columbia which would be redundant.

THE NORTH EAST

Maine: 95.5%
New Hampshire: 93.4%
Vermont: 95.3%
Massachusetts: 79.7%
Rhode Island: 79.3%
Connecticut: 74.4%
New York: 60.3%

Total average for the North East is 82.5% White.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

District of Columbia: 32.5%

THE CENTRAL EAST

Pennsylvania: 81.8%
New Jersey: 62.2%
Delaware: 68.7%
Maryland: 58.1%
West Virginia: 93.6%
Virginia: 67.3%

Total average for the Central East is 71.9% White.

THE SOUTH EAST

North Carolina: 67.5%
Tennessee: 77.2%
South Carolina: 65.3%
Georgia: 58.5%
Florida: 60.8%
Alabama: 68.6%
Mississippi: 58.9%

Total average for the South East is 65.2% White.

THE NORTH-EAST CENTRAL

Ohio: 82.7%
Kentucky: 88.0%
Indiana: 83.5%
Illinois: 65.0%
Michigan: 77.6%
Wisconsin: 85.4%

Total average for the North-East Central is 80.3% White.

THE NORTH-WEST CENTRAL

North Dakota: 89.9%
South Dakota: 86.4%
Minnesota: 85.7%
Nebraska: 84.5%
Iowa: 90.6%

Total average for the North-West Central is 87.4% White.

THE CENTRAL SOUTH

Kansas: 80.7%
Missouri: 82.3%
Oklahoma: 71.8%
Arkansas: 76.0%
Texas: 47.9%
Louisiana: 62.3%

Total average for the Central South is 70.1% White.

THE NORTH WEST

Washington: 76.1%
Idaho: 85.6%
Montana: 88.2%
Oregon: 80.5%
Wyoming: 87.3%

Total average for the North West is 83.5% White.

THE SOUTH WEST

Nevada: 58.0%
Utah: 82.3%
Colorado: 71.3%
Arizona: 59.1%
New Mexico: 42.3%

Total average for the South West is 62.6% White.

CALIFORNIA

California: 42.7%

ALASKA

Alaska: 66.1%

HAWAII

Hawaii: 24.7%

There are around 180 to 185 million Whites in the United States which makes us still the largest single White nation on earth. There are as many (or more) Whites in the United States as there are in Great Britain, France and Germany all together.  And what’s more, those 180+ million Whites in the US all speak the same language and have the same general culture.

But, the United States also suffers the greatest deluge of non-Whites in the Western world. And as the percentages above show we lack a core center region where Whites make up 95% or more of the population. Being continent sized (approximately 3,000 miles from east to west and 1,500 miles from north to south) we’ve been blindsided by the demographic upheaval through the sheer vastness of space. You might say that we’ve not seen the trees for the forest!

And I would also reiterate that the clustering of states was done for the advantage of a casual observation of regions. Alternate clusterings can certainly give a different view, as can numbers vs. percentages. For example, the North-West Central region listed above is 87% White, yet has a total population of just over 11 million people in an area that is slightly bigger than France and Germany put together. Alternatively you could certainly cluster Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky together and have a population of around 30 million, 86.5% of which is White.

But as noted in the introduction, the percentage of “whites” by Census definition as well as the potential number of illegals could possibly reduce that percentage by several points.

Other variances can obviously be made by, for example, expanding the parameters of the area involved. Such as looking at White percentages in northern states that border Canadian provinces and factor in their numbers as well. But Canada’s demographics are hard to get a handle on so I focused on the United States alone. ( I mention that primarily as a reminder that there are around 20 million Whites in Canada as well.)

So what is the picture painted? Bad and apt to get a lot worse, but not apocalyptic. Not yet.

The Problematic Nature of Assimilation By exP

The Problematic Nature of Assimilation

By exP

People, even elite multiculturalists, seem to understand that groups of human beings undergo various “trials and tribulations” – which test their loyalty to each other, their toughness in struggle, and their willingness to sacrifice and undergo hardship for one another. I hope we can assert here, without it being merely a facile truism, that nations, groups, peoples undergo periods of prolonged struggle and disorder which require some stronger allegiance or internal reference point – if said nation is to hold together and persist, rather than be broken by circumstance.

Put bluntly, it won’t always be days of wine and roses. Even the Blitz, even the Great Depression, don’t represent the putative low-point of communal existence: harder things may yet be demanded of us.

And there is still a lingering intuitive understanding that the only groups to actually persist through such difficulties, the only groups to survive, are those which will sacrifice for one another and bear hardship, following Hamilton’s rule, these groups are those sharing familial relationship.

That’s why they want us to assimilate. So that one day, the strife will end. One day, the controversies and debates and inflammatory denouncements and hate-speech measures will end. We will have become one. Even multiculturalists understand, in a somnambulatory way, the importance that we become family. So they posit that as their horizon:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

But the fact is that assimilation is an exquisitely delicate and complicated matter – each act of exogamy and miscegenation, and thus “assimilation” – is quite a different thing. Everyone who crosses the racial and ethnic divide, does it as a shit-scared tight-rope walker, straddling the abyss of true individualism, which yawns open beneath one perhaps for the first time in its true aspect, when one attempts this great feat. Miscegenation and exogamy are, in fact, some of the only pursuits in which it is possible to confront and to actually live true individualism in its fullest manifestation- not just putatively, as a kind of philosophical affirmation of a concept, but as an actual life-experiment upon which one’s future legacy is based. Ask the legions of single mothers already left in the wake of this project: it’s one thing to experiment with musical styles and an unconventional piercing: quite another to stake your prosperity on a partner of foreign stock.

In some sense it is the legions of single mothers raising cafe-au-lait children who could answer cultural individualists’ rebellion with the rejoinder:

“You think you have balls? We’re such individualists that we are actually raising a crop of children from sundry foreign wanderers who have abandoned us. Check that, if you want individualism.”

And the various leather-clad tattoo-sporting rockers would have nothing at all to say to them: they’d be genuinely one-upped by the Open Legs Brigade.

Unfortunately, these women are generally too stupid to appreciate the greater context of their actions; as it turns out, if Nelson had charged into Napoleon’s navy without knowing it was there, he would not be credited with the heroism which has since attached to his name. Likewise, these women cannot be said to understand the burden they have shouldered until they come to appreciate it’s gravity bit by regrettable bit – ex post facto – as the left side of the bell-curve is always appreciating and understanding its actions. In hindsight.

The hope that governments implicitly stake on the idea of “assimilation” is that the end-products of these processes will somehow come to unify under one banner, and will feel and act as one – ending forever our otherwise perpetual and ever-worsening divisiveness. Well, let’s consider what this looks like in practice.

If western rulers were enlightened enough to praise miscegenation – which they definitely have done through the vehicles of BBC hospital dramas and Hollywood movies – they should have done more than merely plant the seed of miscegenist thought. If “assimilation” was their goal, they should have included an instruction manual – because miscegenation is in fact an extremely complicated thing. First question: whom does one mate with? The liberal immigration policies certainly give the white western woman no end of choice as to possible mates. She could take an African, a West Indian, a Pakistani, an Arab, a Vietnamese, a Chinese, a Serbian, a Russian, a Slovenian, a Greek, a French or Swedish husband.

Secondly, how will the child be raised? With some degree of respect for his [unspecified] foreign ancestry? With equal respect for his white Anglo-Saxon and foreign ancestry? With no respect for his foreign ancestry? At what age will he be made conscious of his foreign ‘ties’? Will they be reaffirmed each year? Stringently denied? Portrayed as if they do not matter? Will the father be violently pro-[his homeland] or will he coyly pour saccharine love out on the new western polity he has adopted?

If anyone here has followed Steve Sailer’s exposition of a certain famed historical figure’s ancestry – one will no doubt be aware the many problems that arise from mixed matings. There are inferiority complexes, superiority complexes – the feeling of not belonging to either group, the militant desire to prove one’s allegiance to one group: those raised in mixed households will know already just how problematic forging an identity can be. As what does one identify oneself? Does one pretend to belong to both groups? Which group does one admire? Which group does one romanticize? After which group’s affection does one strive?

The narcissism, self-seeking and naivete of teenagers doesn’t respect the boundaries of “that which should not matter” – and so children growing up in mixed households tend to dote more on these concepts, during their identity search, than PC-commissars would like to think. Especially because the perception of these things by others speaks to the self-consciousness of the young.

Coming from a mixed family makes one naturally very idiosyncratic and individualistic by nature. Even different siblings can have completely different views on matters central to identity – thus increasing the tendency to divisiveness.

So let’s draw some pictures in our minds. Imagine a Swedish man takes an Englishwoman to wife. Its not a cross of the racial divide, but its an ethnic experiment, to be sure. The Swedish man will no doubt speak good English, with a slight accent, and be successful at his career, with a respect for British culture and a self-effacingness that lets him melt into the landscape. He does represent a repudiation of Englishness but one that is justified – at least in view of the woman in question – with gains in human capital which make him far above average anywhere, thus also in England.

But this grand game isn’t just for Swedish businessmen, and accomplished northern Europeans seeking adventurous mating propositions abroad – other foreigners also enter into the mix. Imagine a Greek, who runs a restaurant and engages in the same experiment. His conflict with Englishness is necessarily a bit more profound, but he gets along in one way or another. The union likewise produces some kind of children, who feel necessarily conflicted – and aren’t too keen on flying the cross of St. George.

Alas, if only we could draw the line at the admission of the Greek, this might all end in smiles. No, our commitment to anti-racist principles and the accidental nature of our “who will pop up next?” immigration policy demands of us even more radical experiments. A Tunisian businessman takes another Englishwoman to wife. Necessarily conflicted with the whole notion of European identity as such, he is nevertheless tenacious and intelligent, and can make a way in the world. The union produces children.

Alas, if only the Tunisian were the end of our troubles. Several different Africans and West Indian immigrants arrive, all similarly desiring to sire children with English women. Like degraded scientists in a perverse underground lab, all these experiments give birth to new, heretofore unknown strains of children.

Now all of these foreigners have assimilated – the question is: what have they assimilated to? To a fragmented, sterilized, seen-through-a-prism idea of Englishness? An idea which, under any interpretation, would clash with their other identities and require relativizing merely to be rendered safe? An idea of Englishness which, were it to place any high value on English cultural belonging, would necessarily categorize them all as half-breeds, outsiders and people-not-quite-belonging?

Understand, in clear terms, that this means Englishness has to be made devoid of all value, just in order that these peoples’ existence will not represent some kind of affront against it. They will forever be aware that, if Englishness constitutes a central value, it is one from which they are forever excluded. It is these people who primarily have an interest in seeing English identity relativized – something to be subtly scoffed at, something not to be taken too seriously.

If they have any university education, the idea will come very naturally to them that they are “better than the Englishman in the street” who has trouble articulating himself and speaks in simple tones. They will naturally grasp the concept of aristocracy to justify their existence, being born ‘outside the blood’ and thus with a grievance which must be justified – even if cultural attainment and a glib tongue is all they can offer us in exchange for the ethnic bond sacrificed as a result of their parents’ experimental breeding. Nothing else will satisfy their alienation at the knowledge that they do not pass John Bull’s ‘sniff test’ – which is the kind of thing that makes human beings supremely alienated and hateful: knowing they are not wanted on the basis of their essential features. The motto is: if I can’t have English physiognomy and pedigree, then even knowledge of the existence of such is anathema to me! I must see it all destroyed! I must see it all made a mockery of!

One might ask, bemused: are the results of these experiments expected to breed with one another? What future does ‘assimilation’ have in mind for the Turkish-Hungarian-Greek-Swedish-Gypsy-Somali-Scotsman?

How about this: a future in which the possibility of “Ozmir Ulysses Henrik Ogdabishu Allen” ever meeting another person like himself are precisely zero! Zero!!
A future in which he will forever be a ‘freak’ striving to re-assert the boundaries of what he thought was normalcy. A future in which all of the miserable beneficiaries of these breeding experiments are striving to reassert their belonging to an ethnic group with static norms and expectations – just because they grasp the fact that life isn’t a genetic free-for-all and one has to maintain some basal conservatism in order to create children vaguely resembling oneself. They will understand this because they will see how dangerously near their parents’ experiments brought them to the verge of racio-cultural anomie, and see the need to avert this in their own choices.

Just consider in all its absurdity the grand central premise of “assimilation” – that every single generation will be some individualistic experiment in breeding. That every generation, one can reach outside the bounds of history and mate with some completely different specimen, making one’s pedigree not an ordered progression, but a riotous explosion of dazzling colors in conflict. I will take a Persian to wed, and my son, an Egyptian, and his son, an Inuit, and his son, a Scotswoman. Oh, it will be so colorful. We will all be Björk. We will all be Freddy Mercury. We will be Cher.

The multiplicity of different characters and backgrounds within a nation forms the fodder for the assimilationist experiment – this is one side of the equation. Here there are advanced medical doctors representing the upper classes, high-school dropouts, working men classed as ‘losers’ – each of these people will be ‘mixing’. So the variation of the original population is present, multiplied by the variation of the “colonizing” population …  As if England, with its class divides and regionalisms, were not divided enough as ‘starting material’. The end product could look like literally anything imaginable. One imagines cafe-au-lait cognitive elitists and Mediterranean-looking Chavs; slant-eyed punk-rock hooligans and mulatto churchgoers. A thousand myriad forms, each one representing a fragment of our collective death.

All this combined with the fact that both the colonizing population and the English population will consist (for the most part) of people adhering to their respective heritages, and thus, tacitly denying the model of assimilation which is presently being put forth. This alienates the half-breeds and adds yet more to the divisiveness of social life generally.

Assimilation, far from being a “gasp! we’ve finally arrived” salvation-through-copulation-Endlösung, is more like an endless spiral which gets more messy and more problematic and complicated the deeper one advances into it. This trick which was meant to save us, overcoming ethnic conflict by playing musical chairs with our genitals, well, it turns out the real world ain’t that simple.

Map of Unemployment Epidemic