Eligible whites, blacks more likely to vote than Hispanics, Asians

Eligible whites, blacks more likely to vote than Hispanics, Asians

The Pew Research Center recently put out a report entitled “Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in US History”. This translates as the white percentage of total voters being the lowest it ever has been in a Presidential election. Recognizing the slow but steady relative reduction in the size of the white vote is nothing novel. It has been occuring for several decades, to the enormous benefit of the Democratic party.

What I found interesting was the level of voter participation relative to eligibility, by race. The following graph shows actual voters as a percentage of eligible voters, by race, on a relative scale for the population as a whole. That is, if the graph included a line for the entire electorate, it would be a perfectly horizontal with a y-value of 100. If in a given election cycle whites represent 80% of actual voters and 75% of eligible voters, they have a civic score of 107 ((80/75)*100). Whites are represented by the white line, blacks by the black line, Hispanics by the brown line, and Asians by the yellow line:

With the exception of the steady increase in civic-mindedness among blacks over the last couple of decades, the relative values are pretty steady. Hispanic and Asian electoral participation has consistently remained below that of blacks and whites for as long as reliable demographic data has been kept. This helps in understanding why, at over 15% of the US population, Hispanics make up less than half that proportion of actual voters (with age structure and illegal residency status completing the picture) and also why anything that facilitates casting a ballot will tend to be supported by Democrats and opposed by (non-politically suicidal) Republicans.

A few other noteworthy facts gleaned from the report:

- The percentage of eligible white males who voted in 2008 dropped to 64.2%, down from 65.9% in 2004. That 1.7 point decrease was more than three times larger than the decrease among white females, from 68.4% in 2004 to 67.9% in 2008. White men, the GOP’s stalwarts, weren’t inspired by what was offered them last November.

- Eligible black women were the most likely group to vote in 2008, and also the most inclined to vote for Obama.

- The male:female participation rate ratio by race follows the common ‘hierarchical’ pattern found in so many other measures of social variables. Male participation among eligible voters as a percentage of female participation among eligible voters, by race, averaged for the 2004 and 2008 elections:

Asians — 95.1%
Whites — 93.5%
Hispanics — 91.6%
Blacks — 88.2%

Fascinating how this ‘ranking’ manifests itself in so many ways.

Red region, blue region, smart region, dull region

One of the major themes discussed by Andrew Gelman in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is how affluence tracks more strongly with the tendency to vote Republican in poorer states than it does in wealthy states. Since blue states are on the whole wealthier than red states are, this translates into a larger income gap between Republicans and Democrats in red states than in blue states. As affluence correlates with intelligence, the IQ gap presumably follows the same pattern.

In states like Massachusetts, liberal whiterpeople who vote Democratic and whose friends all vote Democratic think of Republicans as simpletons of a lower social class than themselves. And in the Bay State, that’s understandable. Gelman points out that this is a problem when those localized assumptions are projected across the entire country, because in other regions of the country, they simply don’t hold. In the South, the monied classes are overwhelmingly Republican.

There are no data tracking IQ and voting patterns at the state level. The GSS, however, does break respondents up into the nine broad geographic regions used by the US Census.

First, I should point out that during the Bush years, in aggregate Republicans are smarter than Democrats are (with IQ scores converted from Wordsum results of 100.5 and 98.6, respectively–independents are lower than either, at 95.3). This holds in every region of the country except for New England, where Democrats average 4.9 IQ points higher than Republicans do*.

But in the interracial status games whites play against one another, minorities are often invisible. Considering the same period of time, white Democrats are slightly more intelligent than white Republicans are (102.1 to 101.7, with independents at 97.6). A noisome Republican can use this to force a whiterperson into a politically incorrect corner where he has to choose between conceding that Republicans are smarter than Democrats are or admitting that the Democratic average is dragged down by its one-third non-white contingent.

Among whites alone, Republicans and Democrats differ in red and blue states. Following is a table showing Obama’s advantage among white voters and the IQ advantage (converted from Wordsum scores with the assumption the white mean is equivalent to an IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15) of self-identified white Democrats by region**. Only responses from 2000-2008 are included to ensure that what we’re looking at is contemporary:

Region	Obama vote+ (%)	White Dem IQ+
New England	14.3	7.4
Pacific	10.0	1.1
Middle Atlantic	1.0	(0.3)
East North Central	0.2	0.2
West North Central	(6.4)	1.2
Mountain	(14.8)	(0.9)
South Atlantic	(24.0)	(0.6)
East South Central	(47.0)	(1.4)
West South Central	(49.3)	(2.6)

By region, white Republicans in red states are a little more intelligent than white Democrats are. In blue states, it is the reverse, with white Democrats being smarter than white Republicans. The correlation between Obama’s level of white support and the average white Democrat’s IQ advantage over the average white Republican’s is .72 (p=.03) at the regional level. This provides some explanation for why people in the Northeast may see the GOP as the party of rustic dummies while those in the South see it as the party of merit and prosperity.

Bundling states into nine broad geographic regions isn’t optimal, because red and blue states are lumped together in varying degrees, especially the East and West North Central areas. That such a pattern is nonetheless apparent suggests that at the state level it is even stronger. This isn’t surprising. After all, it’s implied in Gelman’s book, as IQ and earning power are correlated at the group level.

Data are available here.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM, YEAR(2000-2008), RACECEN1(1), PARTYID(0-2)(3)(4-6), REGION

* The Democratic IQ (dis)advantage by region for all races:

Region	Dem IQ+
New England	4.9
West North Central	(0.8)
Mountain	(1.3)
East North Central	(1.7)
Pacific	(1.8)
East South Central	(2.1)
South Atlantic	(3.1)
West South Central	(4.1)
Middle Atlantic	(4.2)

The only region that jumps out in surprise is the Middle Atlantic, which includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. My guess is that many people involved in the financial industry from New York and New Jersey are Republicans, buoying the average. In the other direction, those three states are all heavily unionized, translating into lots of working class Democrats.

** To obtain white votes by region and compare them, I used exit polling data by state to obtain white percentages of each state’s total vote and multiplied them together. I then added up the total white votes for each candidate for all the states in a particular region to arrive at that region’s vote distribution for the 2008 Presidential election.

Immigration’s Rotten Borough dynamic…

Immigration’s Rotten Borough dynamic…

By James Fulford

[Helpful VDARE note: “Rotten Boroughs” were districts returning members to the British House of Commons, prior to the democratic Great Reform Act of 1833, despite having few or even no inhabitants.  As a practical matter, they were in the gift of local magnates.  Well, guess what…]

Fred Siegel has an excellent book on ethnic politics in American cities – The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of  America’s Big Cities

He points out that in Los Angles, where between 40 and 50 percent of the population is foreign born,  the small percentage of the population who are actually citizens control the vote.

This means that while a recent immigrant from El Salvador would like to send his children to a school where they can learn English, he doesn’t get a vote. A Mexican-American schoolteacher would like to keep her bilingual education job, which will actually have the effect of keeping the Salvadorean’s children in poverty.

But the schoolteacher will be able to send her kids to private school.

[P. 147, hardback]

Most Latino pols in L.A. are classic ethnic operatives – with a twist.  What’s different is most represent “rotten boroughs,” districts where, because of recent immigration and the youth of the average Latino, the percentage of voters in  the total population is tiny. This means that the real voting base  is that small fraction of the population already eligible to vote and sometimes directly dependant on government employment programs.  In practice this means that Latino-elected officials, like county commissioner Gloria Molina and City Councilman Richard Alarcon, support the failed bilingual education programs for the same patronage reasons they oppose charter school reform. Their  support is based on getting their group’s cut of the local government and social service jobs.

The Voting Rights Act: Time To Include Whites

By Steve Sailer

“President Bush asked Congress Thursday to renew portions of a landmark voting rights act as he signed a measure championed by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) to erect a statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in the Capitol. Jackson and his namesake father have been campaigning for months to extend and strengthen key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act due to expire in 2007.” Rosa Parks statue to stand in Capitol (December 2, 2005 By Lynn Sweet Chicago Sun-Times

Here we go again.

The voting rights of American citizens are being trampled. But you can be sure that the next version of the hallowed Voting Rights Act will only address pseudo-problems.

It wasn’t always this way. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the most successful of the famous civil rights enactments of the 1960s. It dealt with a genuine issue—the systematic finagling by the ruling Democratic Party in Southern states to keep most black citizens from voting—and solved it almost immediately.

As soon as blacks had the vote, they were well equipped to protect that right. The number of black voters and officeholders shot upwards. White Southern politicians, such as George Wallace, responded to the now-level electoral playing field by dropping anti-black demagoguery.

The calm, prosperous modern South soon emerged, with the black minority dominating the Democratic Party and most of the white majority moving into its natural home in the Republican Party. Under this fair system, conservatives do well in the South.

Today, when you hear about blacks having problems at the election booth, as many did in trying to cast valid ballots in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida, they are almost always self-inflicted.

The 2000 Presidential election in Florida has become encrusted in myths (“Blacks were disenfranchised!”) because what really happened stems directly from the media’s Great Unmentionable: the white-black IQ gap.

In Florida, more Gore supporters showed up to vote than Bush supporters. But as so often happens, the Democrats botched up their ballots, rendering them invalid, at a higher rate than the Republicans. Most unmentionably, Gore’s biggest problem was that blacks, who voted for him by at least a 10-1 margins, were much more likely to make a hash of their ballots than were whites, who tended to support Bush.

La Griffe du Lion‘s analysis is conclusive, but this New York Times article at least hints at the truth:

Democrats Rue Ballot Foul-Up In A 2nd County

By Raymond Bonner with Josh Barbanel

“JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Nov. 16 [2000] — … But the results of Duval County’s vote left Democrats here shaking their heads. More than 26,000 ballots were invalidated, the vast majority because they contained votes for more than one presidential candidate. Nearly 9,000 of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly African-American communities around Jacksonville, where Mr. Gore scored 10-to-1 ratios of victory, according to an analysis of the vote by the New York Times…

“Local election officials attributed the outcome to a ballot that had the name of presidential candidates on two pages, which they said many voters found confusing. Many voters, they said, voted once on each page. The election officials said they would not use such a ballot in the future.

“Rodney G. Gregory, a lawyer for the Democrats in Duval County, said the party shared the blame for the confusion. Mr. Gregory said Democratic Party workers instructed voters, many persuaded to go to the polls for the first time, to cast ballots in every race and ‘be sure to punch a hole on every page.’

“‘The get-out-the vote folks messed it up,’ Mr. Gregory said ruefully.

If Mr. Gregory’s assessment is correct, and thousands of Gore supporters were inadvertently misled into invalidating their ballots, this county alone would have been enough to give Mr. Gore the electoral votes of Florida, and thus the White House.

Yet the Voting Rights Law still assumes that Southern whites are guilty unless proven innocent. Suzanne Gamboa of the Washington Post reported in a December 3 2005 story about the current brouhaha over the Republican redistricting of Texas that:

“The House Democratic leader wants an independent inquiry into the Justice Department’s decision to approve a Texas redistricting plan that staff lawyers concluded diluted minority voting rights… Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required under provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes to ensure they don’t undercut minority voting.”

My emphasis! That “discrimination” is “historic” all right—1965 was 40 years ago! [Vdare.com note: Abigail Thernstrom and Edward Blum argue that Texas never needed the VRA, anyway. In 1937 one-sixth of the registered voters in Dallas were African-American.]

You’ll notice that the law doesn’t require fairness to all races, just to nonwhites. Over time, the inevitable net effect of that bias will be to push voting systems in the direction of unfairly favoring nonwhites.

Imagine trying to drive your car down the highway with your steering wheel rigged so you can’t nudge it to the right but can nudge it to the left. Eventually, you’ll end up in the ditch on the left.

Yet the GOP has been a big supporter of recent Voting Rights Acts. They favor drawing district lines that favor the election of minorities.

Why? Because concentrating anti-Republican minorities into a few “majority-minority“ House and legislative districts in each state also helps create a lot of safe Republican districts (for now).

The downside: minority politicians get radicalized. This has ominous consequence for the long-term cohesiveness of America.

Due to this gerrymandering to create black districts, a large fraction of black politicians now run in black-majority districts. They learn to harvest votes by pandering only to black resentments of whites. This is terrible preparation for later running for statewide office, where they have to avoid frightening whites to win.

Which accounts for their miserable statewide performances. Although 39 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives are black, of the 150 U.S. Senators and state governors, only one is black (the café-au-lait Barack Obama, whose mother is white, late father, who abandoned the family when he was two, Kenyan, and whose upbringing was more Indonesian than African-American.)

Less widely-noted: this system funnels ambitious Hispanics into the Democratic Party. Nationwide, 92 percent of all Latino elected officials who ran under a partisan label are Democrats, in large part because Hispanics are clumped together in “majority-minority” districts. For example, in California, Hispanics hold 29 of the 120 seats in the two houses of the legislature, and 27 of the 29 are Democrats.

What America needs instead of a same-old-same-old Voting Rights Act that ignores non-minority rights is comprehensive reform to ensure the rights of all citizens.

The worst electoral problem:

• Gerrymandering.

With the computer technology available today, state legislators are able to gerrymander districts boundaries to protect incumbents, both themselves and House members, in ways beyond the fondest dreams of old time political bosses. For example, due to gerrymandering, no incumbent legislator in California lost in 2004—even the ones targeted by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, then at the peak of his popularity.

“Democracy is supposed to be about people choosing their representatives, not representatives choosing their people,” comments gerrymandering critic Daniel D. Polsby, associate dean of the George Mason University law school. (He explains how to replace gerrymandering with an equable system based on geographically-compact districts here.)

In the past, with districts less scientifically drawn, representatives felt the need to be on the right side of public opinion. Today, however, most incumbents assured of endless re-elections—unless the public’s passions are extremely stirred up.

So our representatives have become cowardly and don’t want to take a stand on controversial issues. That’s a major reason why Congress hasn’t carried out its Constitutional duty to declare war since the 1940s—the kind of crucial vote, incumbents worry, for which the electorate might hold them responsible. It’s safer from a career standpoint to simply delegate decisions about war or peace to the President.

Today, the vast majority of House races are effectively decided when district boundaries are redrawn following each decennial Census. Only the small fraction of the electorate’s votes that are in swing districts can really make a difference in House elections.

Another problem:

• “Rotten boroughs”

In most states, House and legislative districts are drawn up to equalize not the number of citizens eligible to vote, but the number of residents—including both illegal and legal aliens, and their children.

This gives Hispanic Democrats a huge advantage. Their ethnic group is heavily immigrant, and ineligible to vote. But their presence in Hispanic-dominated areas translates into safe seats.

That’s why Democrat Latinos make up 23 percent of the entire California legislature even though Democratic-voting Hispanics only made up about 12 percent of the California electorate in 2004.

For example, in the 2002 midterm election in Southern California’s beachfront Congressional District 46 (17 percent Hispanic), 173,000 voters participated in the election of immigration-restrictionist Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher. Next door in gritty Orange County’s gritty District 47 (65 percent Hispanic), prominent Democratic fundraiser Loretta Sanchez triumphed despite just 68,000 votes being cast.

Overall, the eight California congressional elections won by Latinos averaged only 80,000 ballots split among all the hopefuls. In the other 45 races, a mean of 143,000 voters went to the polls.

This meant that the average voter in a district that elected a Latino had a 78 percent greater say in choosing a House member than voters in the rest of the state.

That’s not fair.

Rotten boroughs aren’t Constitutional, according to the highest court to consider the issue. In the majority opinion of the 1998 7th Circuit federal case Barnett vs. City of Chicago, famed Judge Richard J. Posner ruled:

“We think that citizen voting-age population is the basis for determining equality of voting power that best comports with the policy of the (Voting Rights) statute. … The dignity and very concept of citizenship are diluted if non-citizens are allowed to vote either directly or by the conferral of additional voting power on citizens believed to have a community of interest with the non-citizens.”

It’s time for a Voting Right Act that guarantees the equal treatment of all American citizens—and doesn’t just benefit minorities and incumbents of all parties.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

Diversity is Strength! It’s Also…“Jim Snow” Disenfranchisement Of Whites

You can have the rule of law, based on the U.S. Constitution. Or you can have “diversity”, “civil rights” laws, and the corrupt, racist, federal agencies dedicated to imposing them.

As this article goes to press, the U.S. Supreme Court has not announced its decision on whether

“to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act…. requir[ing] many Southern states, counties and school districts to get approval from the Justice Department before making changes in their election rules. These rules range from the location of polling places to the makeup of districts in state legislatures.

“The provision also applies to a few counties in Northern California, New York and elsewhere that have a high percentage of residents who do not speak English.” [Supreme Court skeptical about preserving Voting Rights Act provision, By David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2009]

The states for which the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 was originally designed are Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Justice Department attorneys and those from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund are of one mind: Section 5 exists for “minorities”, and thus must be retained.

Since the entire 1965 Voting Rights Act was designed for blacks, these officials aren’t saying anything new. They see it as fit and proper not only to have laws just for blacks as against whites—so-called “civil rights” laws—but also for those laws to have a superior force to all other, color-blind, laws.

Thus does America now have a dual system of law:

* An emerging first class law system, privileging “protected” groups, including Hispanics, the handicapped, homosexuals and criminal invaders;

* A second-class law system, covering unprotected white Americans in their relations to each other.

Which is not what my copy of the Constitution says.

Case in point: The “KKK” was in total charge in Noxubee County, Mississippi—preventing some people from being able to vote or hold office, while ensuring that other people, based on their race, could—despite of being ineligible to do so.

Except that this “KKK” was black, not white.

One of the blessings of diversity: race-based electoral fraud and disenfranchisement. In Noxubee County, it was whites who were disenfranchised, and illegally frozen out of jobs, in this 69.9 percent black/ 28.9 percent white county. It was blacks whose spoiled ballots were counted. It was ineligible blacks who were encouraged to run for office.

Liberal Media Bias and the Myth of White Racism By Ian Jobling

From whiteamerica.us web site By Ian Jobling •  5/15/09

Liberal Media Bias and the Myth of White Racism

By Ian Jobling •  5/15/09

Buy Coloring the News from Amazon!

[I posted the first version of this article last August. However, since someone recently offered to publish it, I decided to add material about the Duke lacrosse rape scandal and the Jena Six case to the article. The revised article is below.]

Several White America articles have dealt with anti-white, or “leukophobic,” bias in the media. However, a comprehensive perspective on liberal media bias on race has been lacking. Fortunately, William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by far the most penetrating and thorough treatment of liberal bias in the news media, provides the basis for such a perspective. Since the book was published in 2001, McGowan’s examples are now dated, but media bias is plainly as egregious today as it was in the 1990s, as examinations of the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal and the Jena Six case will show.

McGowan paints a portrait of a media establishment that obsessively promulgates what I will call “the myth of white racism” at the expense of objectivity and accuracy. According to the myth, irrational hatred and fear of non-whites is rampant among white Americans and causes whites to subject non-whites to discrimination and abuse. To bolster this myth, the media establishment eagerly seeks out incidents that reveal white racism. This eagerness often causes journalists to fall for hoaxes and poorly supported accusations of racist treatment. The media establishment also believes that white racism is the primary reason for high rates of poverty, incarceration, and other types of social dysfunction among non-whites. Consequently, the establishment censors and silences journalists who suggest non-whites themselves might be responsible for their failings. Finally, the media establishment is convinced that pervasive and profound racism is unique to whites and, therefore, downplays and apologizes for manifestations of racial hatred among non-whites.

McGowan gives several examples of incidents in which the press, eager to expose white racism, leapt to conclusions that were later proved false. The most flagrant is the 1996 black church burning hysteria. The story began with a report from Center for Democratic Renewal, a leftist activist group, that claimed there had been a surge in arson attacks against black churches in the South. The attacks were supposedly perpetrated by “night riders,” recruited from among the ranks of white supremacist groups like the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood.

The story appealed so deeply to journalists’ stereotypes about race that the church burnings became one of the major stories of the year, generating over 2200 newspaper articles. Earnest editorialists scorched readers with the full heat of their liberal outrage. USA Today said the fires were an “attempt to murder the spirit of black America.” The New York Times called the attacks an “epidemic of racial terror.” The media establishment interpreted the burnings as a manifestation of widespread anti-black racial hatred among whites. As Jack White of Time fumed, “the coded phrases” of Republican leaders “who build their careers George Wallace-style on a foundation of race-baiting” were “encouraging the arsonists.” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, “The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the past quarter century.”

After all of this, investigations finally revealed that the whole story was false and perhaps even a deliberate hoax. There had been no increase in church burnings in recent years—there had, in fact, been a decline. Arsonists burned down more white churches than black ones. An investigation by the Alabama government found not a single instance of racial motivation in arson attacks on churches in the state, and such attacks were also extremely rare elsewhere. The media had been led astray by its eagerness to crusade against white racism.¹

The second prejudice that slants media coverage of race is that white racism is the primary explanation for the failings of non-whites, such as high rates of incarceration and illegitimacy. The press has cast the war on drugs as a war on blacks that unfairly sentences them to illegitimate hardship. In 1996, Washington Post writer Courtland Millroy attacked three-strikes laws that sentence repeat offenders to long prison sentences as a manifestation of white hostility to blacks: “If you were writing a law to target blacks one could scarcely have done it more effectively than three strikes.” McGowan also cites evidence that the press ignores research that argues there is no racial bias in the criminal justice system.² Similarly, a Newsday columnist named Les Payne improbably blamed the high black illegitimacy rate on the legacy of slavery, when slaves were deprived of the legal right to marry and forced to bear children out of wedlock.³

The media establishment tends to be hostile to work that threatens the dogma that white racism is responsible for black failings. Thus, Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism, which argued that black poverty was blacks’ own fault, was greeted with hysterical and unfair abuse from a Time magazine reviewer, who said it was “full of obscene ideas” and proved that “bigotry sells books.”⁴

This hostility was particularly evident in the reaction to Eugene Richards’ 1994 Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, a photojournalistic depiction of drug addiction in America’s inner cities. The book contained disturbing images of the reality of the black underclass, including a photo of a deranged-looking woman clenching a syringe in her nearly toothless mouth, as well as interviews with drug addicts and dealers. In the New York Times Book Review, Brent Staples accused Richards of staging the photos to make blacks look bad and whined, “Couldn’t Mr. Richards have found a setting where most or at least half of the drug addicts are white?”⁵

Sometimes journalists disguise the embarrassing reality of black failure by glamorizing it. In 1996, the New York Times ran a profile of rap producer Suge Knight, who had a long criminal record and collaborated with the most violent, anti-social “gansta rappers.” The piece recognized Knight’s vile past, yet managed to transmute him into a sort of rebel hero. Knight and his associates:

move at their own time, they do things their own way. Suge and his boys are grand. Men without women, they believe the masculine code defines everything.⁶

The last component of the myth is the conviction that pervasive and profound racism is unique to whites. This prejudice causes journalists to hide or downplay racial hatred among non-whites. In their coverage Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March, the press soft-pedaled Farrakhan’s history of anti-white hate mongering, which included accusing the US government of inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against blacks. Rather, reporters did their best to paint the event in a positive light. One Washington Post reporter was “overcome… with the sights, sounds and spirit of a community renewing itself in a day-long myth-shattering celebration of smiling faces, slapping hands, upbeat voices, hugs and goodwill.” Reporters emphasized the lip-service to tolerance and downplayed the race-baiting and zany conspiracy theories in Farrakhan’s speech at the march.⁷

Two more recent incidents confirm that the media bias McGowan identifies is still present, and probably even more virulent, today. In the notorious Duke lacrosse rape case of 2006, the media were once again tripped up by their eagerness to promote the myth of white racism. The incident began in March when black stripper and prostitute Crystal Mangum accused members of the Duke lacrosse team of having raped her at a party where she had been hired to perform. Despite the lack of evidence for Mangum’s claim, and much evidence contradicting it, District Attorney Mike Nifong aggressively prosecuted and publicized the alleged crime. The media collaborated in this smear of the students, granting Nifong dozens of sympathetic interviews during which he painted a ghastly portrait of what he called “ganglike rape activity accompanied by the racial slurs and general racial hostility.”⁸ Over the coming months, the case became a cause célèbre, just as the church burnings had a decade before. Editorialists fumed with outrage. For example, in “Bonded in Barbarity,” New York Times columnist Selena Roberts railed against “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.”⁹ Nancy Grace of CNN assumed the players were guilty, dismissed all evidence to the contrary, and subjected the players to insults. “The Blue Devils!” she said, “It may not be just a nickname at Duke University.”¹⁰

After nearly a year of hysteria, the case against the players unraveled, and they were found innocent of all charges. In the aftermath, some press commentators admitted that they and their colleagues had taken the stance they did because the story appealed to their prejudices. As a reporter from the Raleigh News & Observer, reflected, “I was viewing the scenario through the prism of white liberal guilt… I stereotyped the entire Duke lacrosse team.”¹¹

Despite this soul searching, the next year proved that journalists had not learned a thing. This time the source of outrage was the allegation that white high school students in Jena, Louisiana had displayed racial hatred towards blacks and that blacks were treated in an unfair manner by the criminal justice system. The media’s story, which was again taken uncritically from the account of a leftist activist group, went as follows. On August 31, the white students had hung nooses from a tree on Jena High School grounds in order to mark it as a “whites-only tree” that blacks were forbidden to sit under. Three months later, a group of black students who became known as the “Jena Six,” retaliating for the noose incident and other alleged racist treatment, attacked a white student named Justin Barker, who was not one of the students responsible for the nooses. In what seemed like a clear instance of disparate treatment by race, five of the black students were initially charged with attempted murder in the courts, whereas the white students had only gotten nine-day suspensions from the school board for the noose incident.

Typical of the furious tone the media adopted in covering the story was the New York Post’s description of the noose-hanging incident as a throwback to “the reign of lynching terror that once permeated the South.” Thanks in large part to the investigations of Craig Franklin, an assistant editor at The Jena Times, the whole story was revealed as a patchwork of falsehoods. There had never been any “whites-only tree” at the high school. A black student had jokingly suggested that the tree might be reserved for whites the day before the noose incident, but everyone at the school understood the joke for what it was. The nooses were not intended as a reference to the South’s history of lynching. Rather, the students had gotten the idea of nooses from the Lonesome Dove, a television show set in the Old West that depicted lynchings of cattle rustlers. The prank was directed at the students’ white friends on the school’s rodeo team, not at blacks. There was no evidence that the attack on Barker was related to the noose incident either; such a link had not been suggested by anyone interviewed during investigations of the attack. As Franklin concluded:

I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

Finally, the initial charge of attempted murder, which was later dropped, against the black students was not a clear case of racial injustice, as the attack on Barker was severe enough to endanger his life. Mychal Bell, one of the Jena Six, had knocked Barker unconscious by slamming his head against a concrete beam, after which the gang had stomped and kicked him. Bell had four prior convictions for crimes of violence. By casting the attack as a response to racism followed by unjust sentencing, the media perpetuated the myth that whites are to blame for high black crime and incarceration rates.

Coloring the News is an indispensable book for anyone who is interested in any aspect of liberal bias or “political correctness” in the media—McGowan also deals with the coverage of women’s issues, homosexuality, and immigration. His work on race paints a comprehensive portrait of the stubborn prejudices that slant news coverage. Unfortunately, McGowan’s book has not prevented the media from making the mistakes he skewered over and over again.

Notes and References

1. William McGowan, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 88-94. ↑
2. Ibid., 75. ↑
3. Ibid., 43. ↑
4. Ibid., 42. ↑
5. Ibid., 47. ↑
6. Ibid., 51. ↑
7. Ibid., 71. ↑
8. Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), 87. ↑
9. Ibid., 121. ↑
10. Ibid., 124. ↑
11. Ibid., 125. ↑

http://whiteamerica.us/index.php/articles/articles/liberal_media_bias_and_the_myth_of_white_racism/

What the Tea Parties are about- and A theory on the housing bubble

What the Tea Parties are about

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

I see a lot of discussion about what the “Tea Party” activists are concerned about. It isn’t really taxes. As others, including David Frum, have pointed out, taxes are not the issue right now. The rates are still fairly low by historical standards. This is what we are concerned about:

There are lots of complaints about Bush’s spending and I was unhappy with it. Still, the graph shows the difference. We have never seen anything like this before in our history. There is no way this debt can be repaid without either huge tax hikes or runaway inflation. We were already worried about paying for the Boomer generation retirement benefits in Social Security and Medicare. This will make that impossible. Obama said he wanted to change the country. That is certain unless he is stopped. That is what the tea parties are about.

A better explanation of what happened is now published in the WSJ today. It may not be the last word but it makes sense.

Why does one large asset bubble — like our dot-com bubble — do no damage to the financial system while another one leads to its collapse? Key characteristics of housing markets — momentum trading, liquidity, price-tier movements, and high-margin purchases — combine to provide a fairly complete, simple description of the housing bubble collapse, and how it engulfed the financial system and then the wider economy.

They believe that the housing bubble was unique because it involved heavy leverage and a low income segment of the population who could not service their debt once property appreciation ended. They were betting that trees grow to the sky. I have lived through other housing bubbles.

In just the past 40 years there were two other housing bubbles, with peaks in 1979 and 1989, but the largest one in U.S. history started in 1997, probably sparked by rising household income that began in 1992 combined with the elimination in 1997 of taxes on residential capital gains up to $500,000. Rising values in an asset market draw investor attention; the early stages of the housing bubble had this usual, self-reinforcing feature.

The 1979 bubble ended with inflation and high interest rates. In those days, however, the down payments and income requirements kept some level of sanity. In 1979, my partner built a custom home in a new gated section of Mission Viejo that was located on a lake. His neighbors on either side also built custom homes but, when the time came to convert from construction financing to permanent home loans, the interest rates were 21% and neither could qualify for the loan in spite of excellent incomes.

The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve decided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counteract the downturn. When the Fed increased liquidity, money naturally flowed to the fastest expanding sector. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations aggressively pursued the goal of expanding homeownership, so credit standards eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages used rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and income.

There are You Tube videos of Franklin Raines explaining to Congress in 2004 that single family home values could never decline.

But they did decline and we have seen the consequences. Why did this bubble take down the financial sector of the economy ?

In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the assets outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbed by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were often, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin. In some of the cities hit hardest, borrowers who purchased in the low-price tier at the peak of the bubble have seen their home value decline 50% or more. Over the past 18 months as housing prices have fallen, millions of homes became worth less than the loans on them, huge losses have been transmitted to lending institutions, investment banks, investors in mortgage-backed securities, sellers of credit default swaps, and the insurer of last resort, the U.S. Treasury.

I think this is as close as we will get to an explanation for a while. Now, we have to worry about efforts to reinflate the bubble, which is what seems to be going on now. Here is another data point. Home equity withdrawals have gone negative, meaning people are paying down mortgages instead of drawing cash out.

And we don’t need this.

The same banks that offered warehouse lines of credit often turned around and bought the finished product — the mortgage-backed securities. Tom Lindmark, a former banker with a background in real estate, says, “In the boom years the banks looked to the third-party originators to be their sales force.” The big commercial banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo provided the financing on the front end and bought the securities on the back end, but the independent mortgage banks actually made the loans. The problem with this business model was that it outsourced due diligence to third parties that didn’t have skin in the game. They were under enormous pressure to keep making loans with other people’s money, so many let their standards slide.

The mortgage originators lived on fees and had no risk with default. This must be left behind as a relic of the bad practices during the bubble.

A theory on the housing bubble

Friday, March 27th, 2009 It is pretty clear by now that the origin of the bubble was the push to increase home ownership among low income people. The first action in this direction was the Community Reinvestment Act passed in the Carter Administration. The role of the CRA has been disputed by left-leaning commentators including the oddly named “Businessweek, which represents the views of few businessmen I know. Still, you can learn a lot of history by reading between the lines of opposing views.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977, requires banks to lend in the low-income neighborhoods where they take deposits. Just the idea that a lending crisis created from 2004 to 2007 was caused by a 1977 law is silly.

Read those two sentences and note which one is fact and which is opinion.

Now, let’s look at an official site and see what it says.

The CRA requires that each insured depository institution’s record in helping meet the credit needs of its entire community be evaluated periodically. That record is taken into account in considering an institution’s application for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions.

Notice the steel fist through the velvet glove ?

Here is another opinion from a different perspective. The CRA was modified and expanded in 1995. Here is more history with comments on the Clinton Administration’s expansion of the law.

The CRA regulations were substantially revised again in 1995, in response to a directive to the agencies from President Clinton to review and revise the CRA regulations to make them more performance-based, and to make examinations more consistent, clarify performance standards, and reduce cost and compliance burden. This directive addressed criticisms that the regulations, and the agencies’ implementation of them through the examination process, were too process-oriented, burdensome, and not sufficiently focused on actual results. The agencies also changed the CRA examination process to incorporate these revisions.

That means quotas, of course.

The financial collapse had other causes, as well, and I don’t want to reargue the entire story. Bush allowed the Fed to keep interest rates too low in the mid-2000s. Investment banks got too enamored of exotic derivatives like credit default swaps, which was bad enough. What was worse was an informal market in trading derivatives of the derivatives.

What I am interested in is where this all began. I would like to suggest that Margaret Thatcher had something to do with it. In the late 1960s, a concept arose called The Right To Buy, which allowed council housing tenants to buy the home they were living in, with a discount for the rent they had paid for some period of time. This quickly became popular and the theory was that owners would take better care of the home they owned than a renter would. Labour, once she had passed form the scene, adopted the same policy and she is now being blamed for the British housing bubble in similar fashion.

The theory was probably right so long as the house being bought was modest and within the means of the buyer to maintain. Once housing prices began to rise, disaster followed.

A glimpse of the future

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Today, a bankruptcy judge gave us a glimpse of the future in the public pension situation. It will not be pretty.

In the first ruling of its kind, a bankruptcy judge held the city of Vallejo, Calif. has the authority to void its existing union contracts in its effort to reorganize, holding public workers do not enjoy the same protections Congress gave union workers at private companies.

Municipal bankruptcy is so rare that no judge had yet ruled on whether Congressional reforms in the 1990s that required companies to provide worker protections before attempting to dissolve union contracts also applied to public workers’ union contracts

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael McManus held March 13 that when Congress enacted 11 U.S.C. sec. 1113 to limit companies from outright rejection of union contracts it limited it to Chapter 11 bankruptcies. By failing to extend the limits to Chapter 9, which covers municipal bankruptcy, McManus said cities have broader latitude to break existing union pacts, In re City of Vallejo, 08-26813-A-9 (E. Dist. Calif.)

All I can say is “Holy Shit!”

The public employee unions will be racing to have Congress change the law but it may be too late.

California is next.

Welcome to fascism

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

UPDATE #2: The political left is already deciding which barrier to their agenda will be taken down next. The filibuster has to go, of course. ACORN is working on vote fraud.

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen sees it. His second column is here.

What is happening now–and Newsweek is honest enough to say so down in the body of the article–is an expansion of the state’s role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business. Yes, it’s very “European,” and some of the Europeans even call it “social democracy,” but it isn’t.

It’s fascism. Nobody calls it by its proper name, for two basic reasons: first, because “fascism” has long since lost its actual, historical, content; it’s been a pure epithet for many decades. Lots of the people writing about current events like what Obama et. al. are doing, and wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that “f” epithet.

Second, not one person in a thousand knows what fascist political economy was. Yet during the great economic crisis of the 1930s, fascism was widely regarded as a possible solution, indeed as the only acceptable solution to a spasm that had shaken the entire First World, and beyond. It was hailed as a “third way” between two failed systems (communism and capitalism), retaining the best of each. Private property was preserved, as the role of the state was expanded. This was necessary because the Great Depression was defined as a crisis “of the system,” not just a glitch “in the system.” And so Mussolini created the “Corporate State,” in which, in theory at least, the big national enterprises were entrusted to state ownership (or substantial state ownership) and of course state management.

Maxine Waters was on This Week today. That is a scary prospect and it was as bad as it sounds. A grinning fool is in charge of our future.

I have worried about Obama and the fascist tendencies of the left. This “stimulus bill” is an example. It is a spending orgy of Democrat priorities, mostly to reward and strengthen constituencies. Thus, we see ACORN get billions even while they are prosecuted for election fraud. They are a core constituency of Obama’s and were even behind a lot of the real estate abuses that brought on the crisis. No matter. They will be rewarded.

Obama is not a communist. Fascism is a form of socialism that includes private property. It is often supported by private interests that think they have an inside track with the government. One example is big business, which loves this bill. The “Progressives” of the early 20th century were interested in power and control, not necessarily public ownership of the means of production. They also used censorship, just as threats of the “Fairness Doctrine” circulate in Washington now.

Why would Obama want to roll back welfare reform? That was Clintons great accomplishment but it was really, like most of his accomplishments, an act of the Republican Congress. Democrats have no interest in reducing the welfare rolls. Those are voters ! Why risk the possibility that they might stray as they gain self confidence in the work force?

The economic stimulus bill had very little economic stimulus in it, if you mean a solution to the crisis. That comes next. Banks will be bailed out on condition they continue to fund Democratic party imperatives like loans to risky borrowers. After all, there are few Democrats who understand economics.

I suspect we have begun our own “lost decade.” The Japanese used exactly the same sort of spending priorities in the early 1990s and built billions of dollars of infrastructure projects, many useless and redundant. We are about to do the same with the same result. Stagflation, here we come!

The political risk is an even worse consequence as we have a fascist in the White House.

The federal bailout bill has flooded the markets with money but it doesn’t seem to be working. Why ?

An Obama win and its consequences

I think this editorial says it best:

The freeze-up of the financial system — and government’s seeming inability to thaw it out — are a main concern, no doubt. But more people are also starting to look across the valley, as they say, at what’s in store once this crisis passes.
And right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.
It isn’t only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It’s that he’ll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.
Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it’s no wonder panic has set in.

The federal bailout bill has flooded the markets with money but it doesn’t seem to be working. Why ?

It starts with a tax system right out of Marx: A massive redistribution of income — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need — all in the name of “neighborliness,” “patriotism,” “fairness” and “justice.”
It continues with a call for a new world order that turns its back on free trade, has no problem with government controlling the means of production, imposes global taxes to support continents where our interests are negligible, signs on to climate treaties that will sap billions more in U.S. productivity and wealth, and institutes an authoritarian health care system that will strip Americans’ freedoms and run up costs.
All the while, it ensures that nothing — absolutely nothing — will be done to secure a sufficient, terror-proof supply of our economic lifeblood — oil — a resource we’ll need much more of in the years ahead.
The businesses that create jobs and generate wealth are already discounting the future based on what they know about Obama’s plans to raise income, capital gains, dividend and payroll taxes, and his various other economy-crippling policies. Which helps explain why world stock markets have been so topsy-turvy.

And that doesn’t even mention the assault on freedom of speech that is planned by the people who ensure that You Tube videos critical of Obama and his friends disappear in an hour.

We do have the advantage of a preview of Democrat government in charge in California.

The Golden State’s finances are a mess. California’s general obligation debt has tripled in the past six years and is now almost equal to the state’s $145 billion annual budget. Even without any new loans, in three years the state will spend a record 6.1% of its budget just to service the debt it already has. What’s more, with the economic slowdown, the state is now expecting a deficit larger than $1.1 billion for the first three months of this fiscal year. The state’s rainy-day fund is running dry, which has hurt its credit rating.

Would that cause a retrenchment in spending ? Not with Democrats (and a RINO governor).

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sent an extraordinary letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking for $7 billion. Although the governor has since withdrawn that request, it testifies to the dire state of his budget. Yet days before penning his note, the governor told an audience at the Commonwealth Club of California not to worry about the state’s budget crunch and to approve $9.95 billion in new debt on the November ballot to build a bullet train to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco: “Just because we have a problem with the budget does not mean people should vote ‘no’ on high-speed rail.”

The bullet train is a fantasy that will never pay for itself, let alone add thousands of new net jobs. The Democratic Party used to be just as conservative on spending as the Republicans. The difference was in emphasis on working men and women vs businessmen. Now, rich businessmen donate most money to Democrats and fiscal prudence is not a feature of Democrat rule. It isn’t just limited to the state, either as cities and counties are also insolvent.

God help us all.

War is coming

May 9th, 2009

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is David Pryce-Jones opinion on the coming meeting between Obama and Netanyahu.

UPDATE #2: The London Times tomorrow will have this story, with the same theme as below.

The critical juncture will be what comes out of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. If there is procrastination by Israel on the two-state solution or there is no clear American vision for how this is going to play out in 2009, then all the tremendous credibility that Obama has worldwide and in this region will evaporate overnight if nothing comes out in May. All eyes will be looking to Washington in May. If there are no clear signals and no clear directives to all of us, then there will be a feeling that this is just another American government that is going to let us all down.

UPDATE: The NY Times dutifully regurgitates the Obama line on Israel. Israel is building parks in East Jerusalem, an action viewed as enhancing their ownership of the city.

“Everything Israel does now will be highly contentious,” said Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special Middle East coordinator, on a recent tour of East Jerusalem. He warned the Israeli authorities “not to take actions that could pour oil on the fire.”

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, however, that it will push ahead. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said last week of the activity in one core area: “I intend to act on this issue with full strength. This is the land of our sovereignty. Jewish settlement there is our right.”

As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history.

The parts of the city that are being developed were captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but their annexation by Israel was never recognized abroad.

The fact that the holiest site in all of Judaism is included was not mentioned in the article.

Israeli officials point out that when East Jerusalem was in Jordanian hands from 1949 to 1967, dozens of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed, Jewish graves were desecrated and Jewish authorities were largely denied access to the Western Wall or other shrines. By contrast, in Jerusalem today Muslim and Christian authorities administer their holy sites in a complex power arrangement under Israeli control.

This doesn’t matter to Obama. He has his own agenda; making friends with Islam. The Palestinians even deny that Jews ever lived there.

At the same time, the Web site of Al Quds University, one of the most important Palestinian institutions, states that the Western Wall, the remnant of the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, was probably built by the Romans because the temple could not have stood there.

There is no scholarly dispute about whether the temple stood beneath what is today the Aksa Mosque compound.

These are the people Obama is trying to make friends with. Israel stands in his way.

The Obama administration is taking steps that, if carried through, will lead to a Middle east war within two years. He has been on an apology tour of Europe and is now planning more “outreach” to the Islamic world. No doubt this will be an attempt to depict the US as a cuddly, friendly little cub that no one would fear or distrust. Unfortunately, cuddly, friendly cubs get eaten unless there is a mother bear nearby. We have been that mother bear for the past 64 years but Obama seems determined to end that. His target is Israel.

His administration is planning to present Israel with a fait accompli with regard to the Palestinians.

Using the annual AIPAC conference as a backdrop, this week the Obama administration launched its harshest onslaught against Israel to date. It began with media reports that National Security Adviser James Jones told a European foreign minister that the US is planning to build an anti-Israel coalition with the Arabs and Europe to compel Israel to surrender Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

According to Haaretz, Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, “The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.”

He then explained that the US, the EU and the moderate Arab states must determine together what “a satisfactory endgame solution,” will be.

As far as Jones is concerned, Israel should be left out of those discussions and simply presented with a fait accompli that it will be compelled to accept.

I think Bibi Netanyahu knows enough history to recall Czechoslovakia in 1938. I wonder if Obama does ?

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, Israel is the only obstacle to peace.

To make certain that Israel understands this central point, Vice President Joseph Biden used his appearance at the AIPAC conference to drive it home. As Biden made clear, the US doesn’t respect or support Israel’s right as a sovereign state to determine its own policies for securing its national interests. In Biden’s words, “Israel has to work toward a two-state solution. You’re not going to like my saying this, but not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement.”

What Obama may not understand is that the Jews will not be complicit in another Holocaust, no matter his convenience and his desire to accommodate Muslims.

As Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel made clear in his closed-door briefing to senior AIPAC officials this week, the administration is holding Israel indirectly responsible for Iran’s nuclear program. It does this by claiming that Israel’s refusal to cede its land to the Palestinians is making it impossible for the Arab world to support preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Does anyone else remember Chamberlain’s words ?

Speaking over British radio, in words that again ring
familiar, Chamberlain called the Czech issue “a quarrel in a
faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” and
observed that “however much we may sympathize with a small nation
confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all
circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in
war simply on her account. If we have to fight, it must be on
larger issues than that. … War is a fearful thing.”

I would suggest that Obama consider the consequences of convincing Israel that they are alone, or worse, that we sympathize with their enemies. For the consequences, you might read this report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

he expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International,

some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.

It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term,” Cordesman notes. The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.

The report also points out that Israel, backed into a corner, would most likely strike at its other potential enemies, including hostile Arab states. The fallout would probably mean the end of the Age of Petroleum, since the oil fields in the Middle East would be unusable for decades.

I don’t think Obama is equipped to make these judgements. He is starting down a very dangerous road with no evidence that he understands the risks. Neither did Chamberlain.

The culture war

May 6th, 2009

The past eight years has seen the growth of a culture war between traditional values, like marriage and religious belief, and cultural attitudes toward gay rights, gay marriage and the environment. Some of these differences have become heated, such as animosity toward religious believers by gay marriage advocates. Another set of values that is under attack could be called “fiscal prudence” or “The Protestant Ethic.” We work and save and get an education and eventually we own something like a house and a car and some money in the bank. Recently the latter value system has come under attack by a political party that believes in “spreading the money around.” When I was a child, there was a nursery story called “The Three Little Pigs” which emphasized the point that the prudent person is safest in the long run.

Of course, John Maynard Keynes dismissed this idea by pointing out that In the long run we are all dead.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

We can see that our present leadership is firmly of the belief that short term plans are best because who knows what the future brings ? What we see right now is a war on capitlalism and saving and investing.

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country. In these grass-roots protests, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans have joined together to make public their opposition to government deficits, unaccountable bureaucratic power, and a sense that the government is too willing to prop up those who engaged in corporate malfeasance and mortgage fraud.

The data support the protesters’ concerns. In a publication with the ironic title, “A New Era of Responsibility,” the president’s budget office reveals average deficits of 4.7% in the five years after this recession is over. The Congressional Budget Office predicts $9.3 trillion in new debt over the coming decade.

The US educational system has been busy re-educating the youth about capitalism and the free market.

Just 35% of American voters believe that a free market economy is the same as a capitalist economy. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 38% disagree and 27% are not sure.
This helps explain earlier data showing that 77% prefer a free market economy over a government managed economy while just 53% prefer capitalism over socialism.

That is surprising since I don’t know how a free market operates in any but a capitalist system. I expect that this is a consequence of Marxist professors teaching college students that capitalism, a word coined by Marx, is bad. They aren’t completely stupid, though, because they don’t think the government can run the auto companies. Only 18% expect Obama to do a good job with them. I guess that’s his base. Democrats, as expected, are clueless.

However, two-thirds of Democrats (67%) say it is at least somewhat likely that Chrysler and GM will become profitable again under union and government ownership, a view shared by just 34% of Republicans and 33% of unaffiliated adults.

What is going on ? We are seeing the Chicago Way in action as the Obama people threaten those, like the Chrysler secured creditors, who would like the law to apply instead of Obama “spread it around” favoritism. Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama, has reservations but a little late. We could have told her.

This is troubling, because it’s now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends.

(The government is apparently still taking the line that they are only intervening because the automakers are splendid, robust companies that got caught in a “perfect storm”. If so, Chrysler must be stuck in the Bermuda Triangle, because owners have been playing “hot potato” with its dying brands for most of the last decade.)

Countries that use their banking systems this way don’t get good results. If you’re a fairly uncorrupt developed country, you get slower growth and bloated “critical” sectors that are usually more critical in providing campaign support, lavishly remunerated make-work jobs, and photo ops, than any products the public actually wants. Then, if something like Japan happens, you have a twenty-year “lost decade” while everyone pretends as hard as hard can be that everything is all right, in the sincere but misguided believe that wishing hard enough will make it so.

If you are a badly managed country, you end up like much of Latin America or Africa, with a dysfunctional economy that booms only along with the price of some commodity you happen to produce.

We are hardly Zimbabwe, or even Venezuela. But if we keep using TARP to create a sort of “Most Favored Borrower” status, we’ll erode the safeguards that keep election to office in America from being the kind of giant spoils system that’s common in much of the world. What the bankruptcy judge did was entirely right and proper–it’s his job to allocate losses among creditors. And it’s always true that some of the credtiors won’t like the deal they get. On the other hand, what the administration did really wasn’t. It got its pet majority stakeholders to screw both their own shareholders, and the other creditors, in order to give a powerful union a sweetheart deal.

Imagine even having to say that “We are not Zimbabwe” under the last president.

This will not end well.

Say good night CA!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 Election Results

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  Other Contests
  U.S. Congress District 32
  State Senate District 26
  State Ballot Measures

State Ballot Measures

25.1% ( 4,364 of 17,393 ) precincts
partially or fully reporting as of May 19, 2009, at 9:34 p.m.
Visit our County Reporting Status page to determine if a county has submitted a final report or returns.

Statewide Results

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County: — Select — Statewide Alameda Alpine Amador Butte Calaveras Colusa Contra Costa Del Norte El Dorado Fresno Glenn Humboldt Imperial Inyo Kern Kings Lake Lassen Los Angeles Madera Marin Mariposa Mendocino Merced Modoc Mono Monterey Napa Nevada Orange Placer Plumas Riverside Sacramento San Benito San Bernardino San Diego San Francisco San Joaquin San Luis Obispo San Mateo Santa Barbara Santa Clara Santa Cruz Shasta Sierra Siskiyou Solano Sonoma Stanislaus Sutter Tehama Trinity Tulare Toulumne Ventura Yolo Yuba

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Proposition Title		Yes Votes	%	No Votes	%
N	1A “Rainy Day” Budget Stabilization Fund	851,583	36.8%	1,457,153	63.2%
N	1B Education Funding. Payment Plan.	928,600	40.3%	1,373,066	59.7%
N	1C Lottery Modernization Act	889,734	38.7%	1,406,344	61.3%
N	1D Children’s Services Funding	874,251	38.1%	1,418,536	61.9%
N	1E Mental Health Funding	859,041	37.6%	1,420,835	62.4%
Y	1F Elected Officials Salaries	1,767,347	76.8%	534,492	23.2%

Maps

All Ballot Measures	Statewide/County
Ballot Measures	Proposition 1A	Proposition 1D
	Proposition 1B	Proposition 1E
	Proposition 1C	Proposition 1F

Other

California 2009 ballot propositions

From Ballotpedia

<!–
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Six statewide ballot propositions will be on a special May 19, 2009 election ballot in California. The ballot measures were voted onto the ballot in a special legislative session in Sacramento the week of February 16th as a negotiated effort between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Democratic majority in the California State Legislature and a handful of Republican legislators.^[1],^[2]

Although the six ballot propositions (1A through 1F) are intended to close an approximately $42 billion budget gap, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, an agency of the state government, said in early March that tax revenues flowing into the state treasury are “well below” the projections it used earlier in the year, and that California’s government now faces an additional $8 billion gap in addition to the earlier $42 billion gap.^[3]

Several statewide ballot propositions that were discussed as possible contenders for a 2009 statewide ballot will instead be on the 2010 California ballot.

On May 19 ballot

See also: May 19, 2009 ballot measures in California

Proposition	Description
Proposition 1A	Prop 1A combines a 4-year tax hike of about $16 billion with a state spending cap
Proposition 1B	Modification of California Proposition 98 (1998) to free up money for state’s budget overruns.
Proposition 1C	Sell rights to future lottery proceeds as a way of raising some cash now for state budget.
Proposition 1D	Asks voters to approve taking money from Prop 10 in 1998 for purposes not allowed in that 1998 vote.
Proposition 1E	Asks voters to take money from Prop 63 for purposes not allowed in that 2004 vote.
Proposition 1F	No pay raises for state legislators in years when there is a state budget deficit

Public opinion polling

• The Field Poll conducted a public opinion research survey between February 20 and March 1 to assess the current state of public opinion regarding the six budget-related measures on the May 19 ballot. A Sacramento Bee report notes that the poll question on Prop 1A “omitted the fact that it would trigger $16 billion in tax hikes.”^[4],^[5]

• A Public Policy Institute of California poll that concluded in late March showed declining support for 5 of the 6 budget measures. Mark Baldassare of PPIC characterized the poll results as indicating, “Voters’ disappointment with the state’s elected leaders is deep, and the temptation to send a message by voting down these propositions is strong.”^[6],^[7]

• On April 20-21, SurveyUSA conducted a poll of 1,300 California adults for KABC-TV Los Angeles, KPIX-TV San Francisco, KGTV-TV San Diego, and KFSN-TV Fresno. 15% of the registered voters they spoke with had already cast their vote. They concluded, “As early voting begins on six state of California ballot propositions, opposition is growing to 5 of the 6 measures.”^[8]

• Field conducted a second poll between April 16-26 that indicates that “voters strongly oppose” five of the six budget measures on the May 19 ballot, including Prop 1A. According to Field Poll Director Mark DiCamillo, “The majority of voters just doesn’t believe what is being sold to them. The skepticism extends up and down the ballot. Voters feel the Legislature isn’t doing its job, hasn’t been able to work with the governor and is just passing these things on to them.”^[9]

• PPIC conducted its second poll on the propositions between April 27-May 4. This poll shows growing opposition to five of the six measures. Worse news, from the point-of-view of supporters, is the poll’s finding that “the more voters learn about the measures, the more likely they are to want to vote them down.”^[10]

Prop	Pollster	Conducted	Likely voters	Pollster	Conducted	Outcome	Pollster	Conducted	Outcome
1A	Field	February 20-March 1	57% yes/21% no	PPIC	Late March	39% yes/46% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	29% yes/42% no
1B	Field	February 20-March 1	53% yes/30% no	PPIC	Late March	44% yes/41% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	42% yes/37% no
1C	Field	February 20-March 1	47% yes/39% no	PPIC	Late March	37% yes/50% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	23% yes/41% no
1D	Field	February 20-March 1	48% yes/36% no	PPIC	Late March	39% yes/46% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	37% yes/39% no
1E	Field	February 20-March 1	57% yes/23% no	PPIC	Late March	47% yes/37% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	32% yes/41% no
1F	Field	February 20-March 1	77% yes/13% no	PPIC	Late March	81% yes/13% no	SurveyUSA	April 20-21	32% yes/34% no

Voter turnout predictions

• In contrast to the 78% voter turnout in November 2008 in San Mateo County, elections manager David Tom says he expects a much lower turnout for the May 19 election, in the vicinity of 30-35%.^[11]

• Ventura County Assistant Registrar of Voters Tracy Saucedo said on May 15 that about a third of voters who had been issued mail-in ballots had returned them, or about 13% of Ventura County’s 422,342 registered voters. This rate of voting is about the same as the June 2008 ballot proposition election, in which a total of 29.5% of voters in the county ultimately voted.^[12]

• Fresno County Clerk Victor Salazar said, “”I just don’t see any driving force that’s going to bring out the voters.” He predicts that turnout in the county will come to 25% of registered voters. It was 72% in November.^[13]

Massive unemployment could lead to riots and revolution

Massive unemployment could lead to riots and revolution

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski was on Morning Joe this morning to discuss the economy, his suggestions for turning it around , and a warning about unemployment and class warfare.

what do the viewers think?

xmuneebx (2 days ago) Show Hide

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they want us to cause riots so they can bring in a golbal police force and form there new world order…Rioting is exactly what they want us to do

thablackmarkit (1 day ago) Show Hide

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YUP order out of disorder

they WANT us to throw the first punch. dont give them what they want.

insertthissideup (4 days ago) Show Hide

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Brzezinski is a psychopath – evil F=*/er

MrZLeroy92 (5 days ago) Show Hide

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In our nation and some others for many people money = success. It does not matter if you are happy with yourself. Your morals dont matter. Your since of community does not matter. If you are materialistic that is a great sign that you probably will be successful financially and thats all that matters. Money>Morals.

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º°¨ ¸„ø¤º°¨„ø¤º°¨°º¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ How about a world º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ without money º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ Governments, courts º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ religions and armies? º¤ø„¸
¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø¤º „¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ ¸„ø¤º „¸¨°From Portugal

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Joe: “K-K-Klass Konflict.”

weagainstthem (3 weeks ago) Show Hide

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Brzezinski is a psychopath. A very dangerous one at that. The kind that has power and influence. Please read the book he tried to block from being published. It’s about psychopaths with political powers, and might be the most important book you’ve ever read: “Political Ponerology” by A. Lobaczewski. This book was surpressed for 60 years,both by Soviet and the US. Look out for these sleasy smooth-talking spellbinders, they all hav definite pathological traits!

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‘Brzezinski is a psychopath?’

You seem to be able to recognize the condition easily. See the same thing in the mirror do you? You disagree with his considered, educated, opinion that the present economic collapse may create serious social disruption. Clearly, he is stating a well established understanding of what happens when people in large numbers get hungry and see others wallowing in ill gotten wealth. They gather in groups and kill the rich. France, Russia, China, and Cuba are examples.

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Its really a war against you and your family but people haven’t figured it out yet…The rise of the 4th Reich is at hand…Unless you get the phuck off the couch and do something…

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This is some bullshit.. damn lie…

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FreedomForMankind (6 days ago) Show Hide

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º°¨ ¸„ø¤º°¨„ø¤º°¨°º¤ø„¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ How about a world º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ without money º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ Governments, courts º¤ø„¸
¨°º¤ø„ ¸ religions and armies? º¤ø„¸
¸„ø¤º°¨¸„ø¤º „¸¨°º¤ø„¸¸„ ¸„ø¤º „¸¨°From Portugal

WolYou (1 week ago) Show Hide

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Ok. Terrorism is cancelled. Now its the economy. I’m wainting for the headlines reading “WAR AGAINST ECONOMY”

melpuzon (4 days ago) Show Hide

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WAR AGAINST THE MONETARY SYSTEM!

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Americas greatest threat is the unrest because of the global recession? What a joke , the worlds greatest threat is the greed and lack of decency of american corporate types. When are the people from Merrill Lynch etc. going to put in jail? They are the real threat to world harmony.

melpuzon (4 days ago) Show Hide

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Um, I think it’s the RING OF POWER.

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“America” and its imperialist accomplices flounder about as their voodoo economic dystopia house of cards ponzi scheme comes tumbling down. “Capitalism and imperialism, which has grown fat on the blood and sweat of the working masses and lorded it over their destiny for centuries, is precipitating irreversibly into bankruptcy and towards its downfall, deep into the grave of history.”

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This collapse is because they have to pay irak war debts and for the next step > ” mass globalization ” ..they can control us much easier if it will be only one currency, religion, language maybe … those who are in the top rulez and others ( slaves) are crying … Fuck this bullshit forced economical collapse to hide their dirty business !!!

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Finally!!! The monetary systen is breaking down entirely!!!

This should not come as a surprise. The system is made to collapse in its own construct.

Locust: For those of you who have not bought your AR-15 you know what is coming, buy them up, buy them all, preferably White-male should buy, I know exactly what the blacks and Latinos would do, remember LA riots and Katrina, now times that nation wide.

Glen Beck 20 STATES SEEKING SECESSION!!!

Buy guns and ammo, This nation is toast!

Texas Straight Talk

A weekly column

Big Government Responsible for Housing Bubble

The House passed two bills attempting to rehabilitate the housing and mortgage market this week.  There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of criticism and blame for the bad decisions, and rightly so.  Lenders and banks do share much of the blame for the overheated market.  Lending standards were relaxed, or even abandoned altogether, creating an exaggerated pool of homebuyers that led to ballooning home prices that many, especially real estate investors, expected to continue forever.  Now that the bubble has burst, the losses are staggering.

However, many in Washington fail to realize it was government intervention that brought on the current economic malaise in the first place.  The Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates created the loose, easy credit that ignited a voracious appetite in the banks for borrowers.  People made these lending and buying decisions based on market conditions that were wildly manipulated by government.  But part of sound financial management should be recognizing untenable or falsified economic conditions and adjusting risk accordingly.  Many banks failed to do that and are now looking to taxpayers to pick up the pieces.  This is wrong-headed and unfair, but Congress is attempting to do it anyway.

These housing bills address the crisis in exactly the wrong way, by seeking to hide the problem with more disastrous government bail-outs and interventions.  One measure, HR 5830 the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Housing Stabilization and Homeowner Retention Act would allow the FHA to guarantee as much as $300 billion worth of refinanced home loans for those facing threat of foreclosure.  HR 5818 the Neighborhood Stabilization Act, would provide $15 billion in loans and grants to localities to purchase and renovate foreclosed homes with the object of then selling or renting out those homes.  Thankfully, President Bush has vowed to veto both of these bills.  It is neither morally right nor fiscally wise to socialize private losses in this way.

The solution is for government to stop micromanaging the economy and let the market adjust, as painful as that will be for some.  We should not force taxpayers, including renters and more frugal homeowners, to switch places with the speculators and take on those same risks that bankrupted them.  It is a terrible idea to spread the financial crisis any wider or deeper than it already is, and to prolong the agony years into the future.  Socializing the losses now will only create more unintended consequences that will give new excuses for further government interventions in the future. This is how government grows – by claiming to correct the mistakes it earlier created, all the while constantly shaking down the taxpayer.  The market needs a chance to correct itself, and Congress needs to avoid making the situation worse by pretending to ride to the rescue.

Texas Straight Talk

A weekly column

Secession: the Ultimate States’ Right

Last week the governor of Texas ignited a media firestorm for his remarks involving the idea of secession.  He did not call for Texas to secede from the United States.  He merely pointed out that the federal government was treading heavily on the sovereignty of the states and that this can not continue indefinitely without a breaking point.

The reaction to Governor Perry’s statements has been nothing short of hysterical.  He has been called treasonous for making this obvious point and opening up a discussion.  I am not calling for secession either, however there is nothing wrong with a healthy and open discussion of this issue.

America was born from an act of secession.  When King George’s rule trampled on the rights of the colonies, we successfully seceded from England.  It took a war, but we were well within our rights.  We applauded when former soviet states seceded from the USSR and declared their sovereignty.  And hopefully the United States will eventually secede from the United Nations.  We pay most of the bills of the UN, yet do not have the commensurate votes, so someday we will wake up and realize that membership, for these and other reasons, does not serve our interests.

On a personal level, contracts you enter into can be terminated if one side unilaterally changes the terms.  If a credit card company jacks up your interest rate, you have every right to fulfill your obligations and close the account.  Imagine if you were forced to stay with a credit card company forever no matter what just because you previously signed up!  The principle of self-determination applies to political unions as well.  In the cases I mentioned above, governing organizations transformed into much more overbearing entities than originally agreed upon.  Several state constitutions originally had clauses explicitly allowing them to opt out of the Union down the road if they so chose.  I doubt our country would have ever come together if this were not the case.  Just because the north successfully kept the union together by force with the Civil War does not mean that enslaving the states is a legitimate alternative.

Secession is the last resort of states whose sovereignty is over-ridden by an overreaching federal government.  The federal government has only itself to blame for this talk.  Recently, some states have enacted laws allowing for the medicinal use of marijuana, yet these laws are basically voided by the continuing raids by the DEA, sanctioned by the administration.  The federal government is also strong-arming states with stimulus money, forcing them to expand programs they know they will not be able to afford in the future, at a time when many states’ budgets are already in the red.  This is not a new problem.  No Child Left Behind burdened the states’ education systems and forced them through many hoops designed by federal bureaucrats in distant Washington DC rather than allowing communities to tailor education to their children’s unique needs.  There are numerous other examples of the erosion of state sovereignty and many governors are frustrated, not just ours in Texas.  Without the right to secede, state’s rights are meaningless.

A republican form of government should also be as close to the people as possible, which means the decisions of local governing bodies must be respected.  Where the decisions of local governments are disregarded, the voice of the people is also disregarded.  The more that happens, the more frustrated and angry the people will become.

Posted by Ron Paul

Texas Straight Talk- Audit the Fed, Then End It! by Ron Paul

Texas Straight Talk

A weekly column

Audit the Fed, Then End It!

1. I am very encouraged to see so many of my colleagues in Congress stand with me for greater transparency in government.

Some have begun to push back against this bill, and I am very happy to address their concerns.

The main argument seems to be that Congressional oversight over the Fed is government interference in the free market.  This argument shows a misunderstanding of what a free market really is.  Fundamentally, you cannot defend the Federal Reserve and the free market at the same time.  The Fed negates the very foundation of a free market by artificially manipulating the price and supply of money – the lifeblood of the economy.  In a free market, interest rates, like the price of any other consumer good, are decentralized and set by the market.  The only legitimate, Constitutional role of government in monetary policy is to protect the integrity of the monetary unit and defend against counterfeiters.

Detractors have also argued that the Fed must remain immune from the political process, and that that more congressional oversight would distort their very important decisions.  On the contrary, the Federal Reserve is already heavily entrenched in the political process, as the Fed chairman is a political appointee.  High level officials routinely make the rounds between positions at the Fed, member banks, Treasury and back again, taking care of friends and each other along the way.

As far as the foolishness of placing complex monetary policy decisions in the hands of politicians – I couldn’t agree more.  No politician or central banker, no matter how brilliant, is smart enough to know more than the market itself.  The failure of central economic planning has been witnessed over and over.  It is frankly beyond me why we ever agreed to try it again.

To understand how unwise it is to have the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the magnitude of the privileges they have.  They have been given the power to create money, by the trillions, and to give it to their friends, under any terms they wish, with little or no meaningful oversight or accountability.  Thus the loudest arguments against greater transparency are likely to come from those friends, and understandably so.

However, it is the responsibility of every member of Congress to represent the interests of the people that sent them to Washington and find out what has been happening with our money.  As the branch of government with the power of the purse, we really have no other reasonable choice when the economy is in the shape it is in.

Posted by Ron Paul (05-18-2009, 12:42 PM)

The Worst Case Scenario (Someone Has to Say It)

The Worst Case Scenario (Someone Has to Say It)

Since the economy began sliding downhill in late 2007, mainstream economic and market experts have consistently erred on the sunny side.

As late as June 2008, mainstream consensus held that the U.S. was heading for a “soft landing” and would avoid recession. Several months later, the slump was acknowledged to have started in January 2008, but we were supposed to see renewed growth by mid-2009, with unemployment peaking in the eight-to-nine percent range. A quick “shovel-ready” stimulus bag was supposed to set us back on the road to prosperity.

In January, recovery projections were pushed forward to late 2009. Today, the consensus is for a mid-2010 recovery, with unemployment peaking at just over 10 percent. Clearly, the mainstream has struggled to catch up to reality for well over one year. What are the chances that they finally have it right this time?

Moreover, the mainstream continues to see what is going on as a plain-vanilla recession that will be quelled with some on-the-fly monetary and fiscal tinkering. Washington, we are told, will pull us out of this slump—as soon as the masses can be enticed back to the shopping malls. Then things will return to how they were before. But what if the experts and politicians are wrong not only on their ever-changing recovery timeline, but also on the nature—nay, the very existence—of a recovery?

America’s reigning political-economic ideology has demonstrably failed. Given that its government is obviously fumbling along without a clue, its foreign and domestic credit is tapped out, and its 300 million people are discovering that their hopes for continuous material improvement will never be met, could the U.S. be headed the way of the USSR?

Instead of a recovery as the mainstream envisions it, what if America permanently bankrupts, impoverishes, and marginalizes itself? What if its cherished institutions fail across the board? For example, what happens when the police realize that their under-funded pension plans cannot support a decent retirement? Will they stay honest, or will they opt to survive by any means necessary? These are questions that the mainstream does not even begin to contemplate.

In the interests of providing you with an alternate vision—something outside the mainstream—below are ten predictions for America through the year 2012. This is not boilerplate doom-saying. Rather, I am laying out in highly specific terms what will happen over the next three-odd years. Others have thrown around the term “Depression”, but I am going to tell you precisely what it means for you, your investments, and your community.

When these predictions come true, I expect to be rewarded with a seven-figure consulting gig, a book contract, or a high-level position in whatever administration succeeds the doomed Obama team—that is, if anyone succeeds it at all.

Prediction one. The twenty-five-year equities bubble pops in 2009. U.S. and foreign equities markets will stop treading water and realign with economic reality. Stock prices will cease to reflect the “greater fool” mentality and will return to being a function of dividend yields, which have long been miserable. The S&P 500 will sink below 500. In a bid to stem the panic, the government will enforce periodic “stock market holidays”, and will vastly expand the scope of its short-selling prohibitions—eventually banning short-selling altogether.

Prediction two. With public pension systems and tens of millions of 401k holders virtually wiped out—and with the Baby Boomers retiring en masse—there will be tremendous pressure on the government to get into the stock market in order to bid up prices.

Therefore, sometime in 2010, the Federal Reserve will create and loan out hundreds of billions of fresh dollars to the usual well-connected suspects, instructing them to buy up stocks on the public’s behalf. This scheme will have a fancy but meaningless name—something like the “Taxpayer Assurance Equities Facility”. It will have no effect other than to serve as buyer of last resort for capitulating smart-money types who want to get out of stocks entirely.

Prediction three. Millions of new retirees—including white-collar people with high expectations for a Golden Retirement—will be left virtually penniless. Thousands will starve or freeze to death in their own homes. Hundreds of thousands will find themselves evicted and homeless, or will have to move in with their less-than-enthusiastic children. Already strained by the rising tide of the working-age unemployed, state and local welfare services will be overwhelmed, and by 2012 will have largely collapsed and ceased to function in many parts of the country.

Prediction four. “Quantitative easing” will fail to restart previous patterns of lending and consumption. As the government sends out additional “rebate” checks and takes ever-more drastic measures to force banks to lend, hyperinflation could take hold. However, comprehensive debt relief via a devaluation of the dollar is even more likely. This would entail the government issuing one “new” dollar for some greater number of “old” dollars—thus reducing both debts and savings simultaneously. This would make for a clean slate a la Fight Club.

As there are many more debtors than savers in the U.S., the vast majority would support devaluation. The Chinese and other foreign holders of our bonds would be screaming mad, but unable to do anything. Every country that has not found a way out of dollar-denominated reserve assets by 2012 will see its reserves eliminated.

Prediction five. The government will stop pretending that it can finance continuous multi-trillion-dollar deficits on the private market. By late 2010, the sole buyers of new U.S. Treasury and agency bonds will be the Federal Reserve and a few derelict financial institutions under government control. This may or may not lead to hyperinflation. (See prediction four).

Prediction six. As the need for financial industry paper-pushers declines and people have less money to spend on lawyers and Starbucks (SBUX), unemployment will rise until the private sector has eliminated all of its excess capacity and superfluous or socially needless jobs. The government’s narrow unemployment figure (U3) will rise into the high teens by late 2010. The government’s broader unemployment figure (U6) will cease to be reported when it reaches 25 percent—it will simply be too embarrassing. Ultimately, one in three work-eligible Americans will be unemployed, underemployed, or never-employed (e.g. college grads permanently unable to find suitable work).

Prediction seven. With their pension dreams squashed, and their salaries frozen or cut, police and other local government workers will turn to wholesale corruption in order to survive. America’s ideal of honest, courteous, and impartial cops, teachers, and small-time local functionaries will have come to an end.

Prediction eight. Commercial overcapacity will strike with a vengeance. By 2012, thousands of enclosed malls, strip malls, unfinished residential developments, motels, truck stops, distribution centers, middle-of-nowhere resorts and casinos, and small-city airports across America will turn into dilapidated, unwanted, and dangerous ghost towns. With no economic incentive for their maintenance or repair, they will crumble into overgrown, plywood-and-sheet-rock ruins.

Prediction nine. By the end of 2010, tens of millions of households will have fallen behind on their mortgages or stopped paying altogether. Many banks will be unable to process the massive volume of foreclosure paperwork, much less actually seize and resell the homes.

Devaluation (as mentioned in prediction four) could ease the situation for those mortgage holders still afloat, but it would also eliminate any incentive for most banks to stay in the mortgage business. In any case, the housing market in many parts of the country will lock up completely—nothing bought or sold.

With virtually no loans being made, even the government will finally acknowledge that most banks are fundamentally insolvent. A general bank run will only be averted through a roughly one trillion-dollar recapitalization of the FDIC, courtesy of new money from the Federal Reserve.

Prediction ten. As an economy is never independent of the society within which it functions, the next few paragraphs will focus on social and political factors. These factors will have as much of an impact on market and consumer confidence as any developments in the financial sector.

Whether rightly or not, President Obama, having come to power at the dawn of this crisis, will be blamed for it by over 50 percent of the population. He will be a one-term president. In response to his perceived socialization of America, there will be a swarm of secessionist and extremist activity, much of it violent. Militias and armed sects will be more prominent than in the early 1990s. Stand-off dramas, violent score-settlings, and going-out-with-a-bang attacks by laid-off workers and bankrupted investors—already a national plague—will become an everyday occurrence.

For both economic and social reasons, millions of immigrants and guest workers will return to their home countries, taking their assets and skills with them. The flow of skilled immigrants will slow to a trickle. Birth rates will plummet as families struggle with uncertainty and reduced (or no) income.

Property crime will explode as citizens bitter over their own shattered dreams attempt to comfort themselves by taking what is not theirs. Mutinies and desertions will proliferate in an increasingly demoralized, over-stretched military, especially when states can no longer provide the educational and other benefits promised to their National Guard troops.

There will be widespread tax collection issues, and a huge backlash against Federal and state bureaucrats who demand three-percent annual pay raises while private sector wages remain frozen or worse. In short, the “Tea Parties” of tomorrow will likely not be so restrained.

Finally, between now and 2012, we are likely to see another earth-shaking national embarrassment on the scale of the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This will demonstrate conclusively to all Americans that their government, even under a savior-figure like Obama, cannot, in fact, save them.

By 2012, there will be a general feeling that the nation is in immediate danger of blowing up or coming apart at the seams. This fear will be justified, given that the U.S. has always been held together by the promise of a continuously rising material standard of living—the famous “pursuit of happiness”—rather than any ethnic or religious ties. If that goes, so could everything else. We were lucky in the 1930s—we may not be so lucky again.

“The Worst Is Yet to Come”: If You’re Not Petrified, You’re Not Paying Attention

“The Worst Is Yet to Come”: If You’re Not Petrified, You’re Not Paying Attention

Posted May 15, 2009 09:31am EDT by Aaron Task in Investing, Recession, Banking, Autos, Housing

Related: ^DJI, ^GSPC, DDR, XLF, GM, RWR

The green shoots story took a bit of hit this week between data on April retail sales, weekly jobless claims and foreclosures. But the whole concept of the economy finding its footing was “preposterous” to begin with, says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates.”We’re in a complete mess and the consumer is smart enough to know it,” says Davidowitz, whose firm does consulting for the retail industry. “If the consumer isn’t petrified, he or she is a damn fool.”

Davidowitz, who is nothing if not opinionated (and colorful), paints a very grim picture: “The worst is yet to come with consumers and banks,” he says. “This country is going into a 10-year decline. Living standards will never be the same.”

This outlook is based on the following main points:

• With the unemployment rate rising into double digits – and that’s not counting the millions of “underemployed” Americans – consumers are hitting the breaks, which is having a huge impact, given consumer spending accounts for about 70% of economic activity.
• Rising unemployment and the $8 trillion negative wealth effect of housing mean more Americans will default on not just mortgages but student loans and auto loans and credit card debt.
• More consumer loan defaults will hit banks, which are also threatened by what Davidowitz calls a “depression” in commercial real estate, noting the recent bankruptcy of General Growth Properties and distressed sales by Developers Diversified and other REITs.

As for all the hullabaloo about the stress tests, he says they were a sham and part of a “con game to get private money to finance these institutions because [Treasury] can’t get more money from Congress. It’s the ‘greater fool’ theory.”

“We’re now in Barack Obama’s world where money goes into the most inefficient parts of the economy and we’re bailing everyone out,” says Daviowitz, who opposes bailouts for financials and automakers alike. “The bailout money is in the sewer and gone.”

Housing will continue to plumet for 5 more years, Notice of Financial Default: California Develops a Mortgage Tsunami Patter Reminiscent of the 2007 Subprime Collapse. Alt-A and Option ARMs Unite.

Notice of Financial Default: California Develops a Mortgage Tsunami Patter Reminiscent of the 2007 Subprime Collapse. Alt-A and Option ARMs Unite.

To put it bluntly, there is major economic distress in the form of further collapsing housing heading down the California highway.  You wouldn’t know this by looking at short term evidence.  Future indicators are flashing red while many people simply choose to ignore bad news and pretend the bottom is in.  They will get a rude awakening in a few months.  The California economy is still in tatters with unemployment reaching 11.2% which is the highest in the post-War era.  Yet some people think this is reason enough to call a bottom.  What many fail to realize is the notice of default surge is starting to look very similar to what occurred in early 2007 when we were still reaching peak home prices.  The only difference this time is median prices are down by 50% and there is no buffer anymore.  First, let us discuss notice of defaults and foreclosures:

*Click for sharper image

The first thing I want you to notice is that in Q4 of 2006, we had 37,273 notice of defaults (NODs) and only 6,078 actual foreclosures.  If you go back further, say Q2 of 2006 you will have 20,752 NODs and only 1,936 actual foreclosures.  What happened here?  This is one of the quirky things about bubbles.  People still faced distress during these times.  Divorces happened.  Job losses occurred.  Life went on.  Yet if someone needed to get out, the bubble was still moving up so someone had an option aside from foreclosure and just sold into the wind.  That is, they simply sold the home for a higher price and all was well because the bubble disguised luck with business skill.  Sort of like paying a few hundred bucks for a share of JDS Uniphase back in 2001.  This of course has radically changed.  In any bubble be it tech or housing, once people wake up from their mania, prices come down and come down fast.

Let us look at the chart again.  You’ll notice that in Q1 of 2008 we saw a massive NOD surge while foreclosures only moved up slightly.  The reason this pattern emerges is that NODs are basically canaries in the coalmines letting us know more foreclosures are in the pipeline.  And as you can see from the chart, in Q3 of 2008 we saw a massive jump in actual foreclosures.  Keep in mind that much of this was because of the subprime mess.  But now we have a bigger mess with Alt-A loans and Option ARM products floating in the market.  And the more disturbing thing about the chart is Q1 of 2009 is looking like a replica of Q1 of 2008 only worse.  We are now in record territory.  In Q1 of 2009 we had a record shattering 135,431 NODs filed.  Much of this was due to lenders catching up for lost time because of moratoriums or because of SB 1137.  And here I’d like to make another important point.  Many pointed to this decline in NODs and foreclosures as a sign the market was getting healthier.  Well of course if it happened organically and not because lenders stopped sending NODs and expected to go under the covers for 6 months and wake up and expect everything to be 2007 again.  This isn’t Kansas Dorothy so stop clicking those red slippers your broker bought for you.

Looking at the chart, you’ll see that NODs and actual foreclosures fell in the last 2 quarters.  That is no longer the case.  If these patterns hold, we can expect a gigantic tsunami of foreclosures hitting the market in Q3 and Q4 of 2009.  And there is no reason to believe otherwise.  Let us see how many of these loans are going bad:

This is a very important chart.  A NOD is basically a notice of default stating that if you do not bring your mortgage current, foreclosure action will occur in a few months.  It also means you are missing payments (not a good thing).  In the past as the chart above shows, a lower number of NODs ever made it to auction.  Now, nearly 75% of NODs will go to auction.  This on top of many of the homes being directly taken back by lenders in the form of REOs.  In some quarters 80 to 90 percent of all NODs went to foreclosure.  Look at the first chart again for Q3 of 2008.  NODs and foreclosures nearly matched up which is a sign of massive market distress.

The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have been ill guided in trying to attack this problem either through buying down mortgage rates or looking to buy up toxic junk through the public private investment program.  The reason these programs won’t work is because the assets underlying the mortgages are troubled.  Just look at a few examples of Real Homes of Genius and tell me what you would pay for these places?  This is similar to those in Holland buying up tulips after the bust because there was some sort of market mispricing hundreds of years ago.  No, prices collapsed because collectively as a society people went nuts in the mania.

Q1 of 2009 NODs is an ominous sign.  You also need to remember that for Alt-A and Option ARMs the average balance is much larger than a subprime loan.  Meaning, for each default banks are going to take more of a loss.  Plus, banks are still too optimistic about these loans.  So even if we had half the amount of loans defaulting in this category compared to subprime, the actual bottom line losses would be larger.  But we actually have NODs surpassing the subprime NOD wave!  And this right here is another reason why I don’t believe we will have a housing bottom in California until 2011.  Many Alt-A and Option ARMs are on more higher priced homes.  So while people are getting into bidding wars in prime locations they are blowing their down payment which they saved for years, not looking at the bigger picture realizing the market is going be flooded at the end of the year during the worst seasonal time.  That is, many people putting in that 10, 15, or 20 percent down may have it all gone by 2010/11.

People may argue that these loans are nothing to worry about.  They are nothing like the subprime loans.  In fact, these are even worse.  And yes, they have all the patterns of subprime loans:

Subprime loans have default rates in the 40 percent range which is insane.  But Option ARMs are quickly catching up followed by Alt-A.  I think this new data warrants two charts that have been out for a very long time:

The foolish bet many analyst made was default rates of these more exotic mortgages wouldn’t be defaulting at such high rates.  They also never envisioned prices dropping so fast but what would you expect from people that depend on higher real estate for their money?  So now, we are in wave 2 of this mess and what the NOD chart above shows, is we are gearing up for a second thrashing.  Keep in mind that these loans are on higher priced properties thus it would make sense that we should see more higher priced foreclosures hitting the market toward the end of the year.  But many people feel that they were left out of the bubble mania and can’t wait to sit on the sidelines for a few more months or another year.  What do I tell them?  Go ahead and buy but get yourself prepared to flush that down payment down the toilet.  If you think waiting 1 year isn’t worth $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 them by all means jump in.  You are flying in the face of the macro trend and jumping again with the sheep getting ready for the second slaughter.

The pattern is unmistakable.  This is subprime redux. The main difference is that prices are already weak and the employment situation is horrible.  There is no reason to believe prices will be going up so the only reason I can attribute to these bidding wars is more of a psychological rush to buy.  An impatient move to jump in.  I can understand many have been saving for years and now they are itching to buy seeing record low rates and thinking, “well what if we do have another run up?”  This is a gamblers psychology where you have busted numerous times on blackjack but feel going all in with the next hand will make you break even.  But how do you convince people just wanting to throw their money down the drain not to do it?  If this bubble has taught us anything it is people will make wildly irrational moves with their money.  To think that people are somehow acting rationally now in the state with the biggest bubble is probably the real insanity.

The Housing Wave of the Future: Two Main Mortgage Tsunamis.

You really have to pause when you hear certain housing pundits state lucid thoughts such as, “we never saw this mortgage mess coming” or “all indications pointed to a stable market.” Just like earthquakes sometimes give way to tsunamis out in the ocean, we’ve had a window of warning that this mortgage mess was going to happen. So what did people do in the housing industry with this information? They simply rolled out the beach blanket, opened up the picnic basket, and idly stared at the quite ocean expecting that the oncoming tsunami would somehow stop by serendipity. Even in January, I’m sure all of you have seen the chart below at some point in the past year, we have a near perfect picture of what was going to happen in the mortgage markets. Instead of scaling back lenders stepped it up a notch and started funneling even more absurd mortgages. In fact, Countrywide in May of this year was talking about 50 year mortgages, expanding their subprime unit, and even adding 2,000 jobs! Of course they will soon take the axe to about 10,000+ people. Even an amateur economist can see with this chart that a mild pull back in housing prices was going to lead to what we are now living through:

This is the pipeline of foreclosures, and the reason why housing will go down for 5 more years.

We are only in first stages of this mortgage mess. We are point 10 on the horizontal axes. We’ve all been hearing about people refinancing and getting out of these risky mortgages trying to buy extra time. Well the IMF has come out with another reset chart and a fantastic paper that gives you an idea of the overall world credit markets. What does this new chart show us? Well take a look below:

First, you’ll notice that the subprime market will keep on having problems up until 2009. But an interesting new wave emerges with this new data. Now we are seeing a growth in Option adjustable mortgages; that is, mortgages where you can pay even less and have your mortgage balance grow! So clearly if you can put 2 and 2 together, many people refinanced out of toxic subprime mortgages (if they could) into option mortgages and all those late comers to the housing party substituted subprime loans for option mortgages. Jumping from one frying pan to another! An option mortgage is just as bad as a subprime loan, possibly even worse. First, these loans give you various payment options. At the bare minimum, you have the ability to pay less than the interest on the loan. How can that be? Well, any interest is simply tacked onto your balance so when your mortgage fully amortizes, you will have a larger mortgage. Call it mortgage appreciation. It is another wonder of the financial engineering that we are now living through. As you can see from the chart above, this wave doesn’t fully expand until 2010 through 2012.

The two waves of the future. If we are already having trouble dealing with the ramifications of stage one of the subprime reset bomb, what do you think will happen in Q1 and Q2 of 2008 when we hit the peak subprime stages?

The Meltdown Goes Global – David Moberg says we should abaondon capalism

The Meltdown Goes Global

It is time to rethink capitalism.

By David Moberg

On April 1, people walk past the G20 logo in the main press center of the ExCel centre in east London, in advance of the G20 summit.

The contemporary financial system was based on the assumption that financial markets were always efficient and rational. That idea fell off the cliff, along with the world economy it helped to wreck. Beyond preventing a greater meltdown, the world must rethink capitalism.

Only a year ago, the United States seemed likely to be the main victim of its own bursting housing bubble and financial crisis. Now the American collapse has deepened—and spread worldwide.

Economic activity is shrinking in nearly every country, with Japan facing the steepest drop among the Group of Seven rich countries. Even in red-hot China, unemployment has become a major problem. This year, for the first time in 60 years, the world economy will contract.

Read the rest here: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4361/the_meltdown_goes_global/

Locust agrees with Paul:  Are you serious?

Let me see if I understand you correctly.  In your Green Keynesian scenario:

- The governments of the world will put aside their own national interests and unite (we see how well that works on a daily basis at the UN) in a common economic purpose.

- These governments will pump tens of trillians of dollars into green energy projects.

- Because of this noble experiment, the economy will rebound magically as Al Gore channels the spirit of Keynes, capitalism will be overturned, and we will all sing around a campfire.

Here is what will happen if we do this:

- Capitalism, which has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of mankind will be replaced by corrupt statism.  As we can see with the current bailout mess, the line to ride the gravy train will be long, and countless billions will be squandarded in corruption.

- Green energy, which I personally support, is not to the technical point where it is as efficient or more efficient than current sources.  Unless you can overturn the laws of physics, it will not be in any reasonable period of time.

- To pay for this merry adventure, we have three choices.  Tax everyone to the hilt (least likely), borrow more (fewer people will buy our bonds as we become more a deadbeat nation), or start the printing presses.  In any case, inflation will go through the roof.

- Within the next decade, we will be tapped out, and when the government / green bubble bursts (as all do when you pump trillions into one), nothing will be there to arrest its fall.

That’s when the next Depression starts.  Bush started the process by 8 years of insane spending, Obama will not be upstaged, and there it is…

In summary, you’re nuts.  Go back to academia.

David Moberg says we should abandon the ship of capitalism, and jump into the sea of sharks, great liberal thinking.

Revolt brews in California counties – Death of the Dream as Liberal nuttery goes on unabated in California

Revolt brews in California counties

Loretta Kalb and Robert Lewis
The Sacramento Bee
February 5, 2009

Counties in California say they’ve had enough – and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

In what amounts to a Boston Tea Party-style revolt against the state Capitol, they’re threatening to withhold money.

Los Angeles is considering such an option. And Colusa County supervisors said they authorized payment delays for February.

“We didn’t vote on it, because I don’t think anybody wants to go to jail,” Colusa County Supervisor Kim Vann said.

Closer to home, Sacramento County is planning to file a lawsuit this week against the state and Controller John Chiang for withholding millions of dollars – much of it for social service programs.

“The Legislature authorized those expenditures, and (the controller) has decided to withhold it,” said Susan Peters, chairwoman of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. “I believe it’s possible other counties will be joining in the action.”

Riverside County is looking at a similar lawsuit but plans to go one step further. It authorized going to court to relieve it from having to provide state-mandated services without state funding.

Hallye Jordan, a controller spokeswoman, said Chiang “shares the frustration of counties” but was forced to act because of the failure of the Legislature and governor to address the budget deficit.

“It’s an awful situation,” she said. “We understand that many counties are suffering.”

Death of the Dream

California has come back before, but ‘hysterical greens’ aren’t helping.

For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

The facts at hand are pretty dreary. California entered the recession early last year, according to the Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is expected to lag behind the nation well into 2011. Unemployment stands at roughly 10 percent, ahead only of Rust Belt basket cases like Michigan and East Coast calamity Rhode Island. Not surprisingly, people are fleeing this mounting disaster. Net outmigration has been growing every year since about 2003 and should reach well over 200,000 by 2011. This outflow would be far greater, notes demographer Wendell Cox, if not for the fact that many residents can’t sell their homes and are essentially held prisoner by their mortgages.

For Californians, this recession has been driven by different elements than the early-1990s downturn, which was largely caused by external forces. The end of the Cold War stripped away hundreds of thousands of well-paid defense-related jobs. Meanwhile, the Japanese economy went into a tailspin, leading to a massive disinvestment here. In South L.A., the huge employment losses helped create the conditions conducive to social unrest. The 1992 Rodney King verdict may have provided the match, but the kindling was dry and plentiful.

This time around, the recession feels like a self-inflicted wound, the result of “bubble dependency.” First came the dotcom bubble, centered largely in the Bay Area. The fortunes made there created an enormous surge in wealth, but by 2001 that bust had punched a huge hole in the California budget. Voters, disgusted by the legislature’s inability to cope with the crisis, recalled the governor, Gray Davis, and replaced him with a megastar B-grade actor from Austria.

Yet almost as soon as the Internet bubble had evaporated, a new one emerged in housing. As prices soared in coastal enclaves, people fled to the periphery, often buying homes far from traditional suburban job centers. At first, it seemed like a miraculous development: people cheered as their home’s “value” increased 20 percent annually. But even against the backdrop of the national housing bubble, California soon became home to gargantuan imbalances between incomes and property prices. The state was also home to such mortgage hawkers as New Century Financial Corp., Countrywide and IndyMac. For a time the whole California economy seemed to revolve around real-estate speculation, with upwards of 50 percent of all new jobs coming from growth in fields like real estate, construction and mortgage brokering.

As a result, when the housing bubble burst, the state’s huge real-estate economy evaporated almost overnight. Both parties in the legislature and the governor failed miserably to anticipate the impending fiscal deluge they should have known was all but inevitable.

To many longtime California observers, the inability of the political, business and academic elites to adequately anticipate and address the state’s persistent problems has been a source of consternation and wonderment. In my view, the key to understanding California’s precipitous decline transcends terms like liberal or conservative, Democratic and Republican. The real culprit lies in the politics of narcissism.

California, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That’s especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as “the narcissus of the West,” a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.

At first this high self-regard inspired some remarkable public achievements. California rebuilt San Francisco from the ashes of the great 1906 fire, and constructed in Los Angeles the world’s most far-reaching transit system. These achievements reached a pinnacle under Gov. Pat Brown, who in the 1960s oversaw the expansion of the freeways, the construction of new university, state- and community-college campuses, and the creation of water projects that allowed farming in dry but fertile landscapes.

Yet success also spoiled the state, incubating an ever more inward-looking form of narcissism. Even as the middle class enjoyed “the good life”—high-paying jobs, single-family homes (often with pools), vacations at the beach—there was a growing, palpable sense of threats from rising taxes, a restless youth population and a growing nonwhite demographic. One early expression of this was the late-1970s antitax movement led by Howard Jarvis. The rising cost of government was placing too much of a burden on middle-class homeowners, and the legislature refused to address the problem with reasonable reforms. The result, however, was unreasonable reform, with new and inflexible limits on property and income taxes that made holding the budget together far more difficult.

Middle-class Californians also began to feel inundated by a racial tide. This was not totally based on prejudice; Californians seemed to accept legal immigration. But millions of undocumented newcomers provoked fear that there were no limits on how many people would move into the state, filling emergency rooms with the uninsured and crowding schools with children whose parents neither spoke English nor had the time to prepare their children for school. By 1994, under Gov. Pete Wilson, the anti-immigrant narcissism fueled Proposition 187. It was now OK to deny school and medical services to people because, at the end, they looked different.

Today the politics of narcissism is most evident among “progressives.” Although the Republicans can still block massive tax increases, the predominant force in California politics lies with two groups—the gentry liberals and the public sector. The public-sector unions, once relatively poorly paid, now enjoy wages and benefits unavailable to most middle-class Californians, and do so with little regard to the fiscal and overall economic impact. Currently barely 3 percent of the state budget goes to building roads or water systems, compared with nearly 20 percent in the Pat Brown era; instead we’re funding gilt-edged pensions and lifetime guaranteed health care. It’s often a case of I’m all right, Jack—and the hell with everyone else.

The most recent ascendant group are the gentry liberals, whose base lies in the priciest precincts of San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and the west side of Los Angeles. Gentry liberalism reflects the narcissistic values of successful boomers and their offspring; their politics are all about them. In the past this was tied as much to cultural issues, like gay rights (itself a noble cause) and public support for the arts. More recently, the dominant issue revolves around environmentalism.

Green politics came early to California and for understandable reasons: protecting the resources and landscape of the nation’s loveliest landscapes. Yet in recent years, the green agenda has expanded well beyond that of the old conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, who battled to preserve wilderness but also cared deeply about boosting productivity and living standards for the working classes. In contrast, the modern environmental movement often adopts a largely misanthropic view of humans as a “cancer” that needs to be contained. By their very nature, the greens tend to regard growth as an unalloyed evil, gobbling up resources and spewing planet-heating greenhouse gases.

You can see the effects of the gentry’s green politics up close in places like the Salinas Valley, a lovely agricultural region south of San Jose. As community leaders there have tried to construct policies to create new higher-wage jobs in the area (a project on which I’ve worked as a consultant), local progressives—largely wealthy people living on the Monterey coast—have opposed, for example, the expansion of wineries that might bring new jobs to a predominantly Latino area with persistent double-digit unemployment. As one winegrower told me last year: “They don’t want a facility that interferes with their viewshed.” For such people, the crusade against global warming makes a convenient foil in arguing against anything that might bring industrial or any other kind of middle-wage growth to the state. Greens here often speak movingly about the earth—but also about their personal redemption. They have engaged a legal and regulatory process that provides the wealthy and their progeny an opportunity to act out their desire to “make a difference”—often without real concern for the outcome. Environmentalism becomes a theater in which the privileged act out their narcissism.

It’s even more disturbing that many of the primary apostles of this kind of politics are themselves wealthy high-livers like Hollywood magnates, Silicon Valley billionaires and well-heeled politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown. They might imagine that driving a Prius or blocking a new water system or new suburban housing development serves the planet, but this usually comes at no cost to themselves or their lifestyles.

The best great hope for California’s future does not lie with the narcissists of left or right but with the newcomers, largely from abroad. These groups still appreciate the nation of opportunity and aspire to make the California—and American— Dream their own.

Of course, companies like Google and industries like Hollywood remain critical components, but both Silicon Valley and the entertainment complex are now mature, and increasingly dominated by people with access to money or the most elite educations. Neither is likely to produce large numbers of new jobs, particularly for working- and middle-class Californians.

In contrast, the newcomers, who often lack both money and education, continue in the hierarchy-breaking tradition that made California great in the first place. Many of them live and build their businesses not in places like San Francisco or West L.A., but in the increasingly multicultural suburbs on the periphery, places like the San Gabriel Valley, Riverside and Cupertino. Immigrants played a similar role in the recovery from the early-1990s doldrums. In the ’90s, for example, the number of Latino-owned businesses already was expanding at four times the rate of Anglo ones, growing from 177,000 to 440,000. Today we see signs of much the same thing, though it often involves immigrants from the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Mexico or South Korea. One developer, Alethea Hsu, just opened a new shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley this January—and it’s fully leased. “We have a great trust in the future,” says the Cornell-trained physician.

You see some of the same thing among other California immigrants. More than three decades ago the Cardenas family started slaughtering and selling pigs grown on their two-acre farm near Corona. From there, Jesús Sr. and his wife, Luz, expanded. “We would shoot the hogs through the head and sell them off the truck,” says José, their son. “We’d sell the meat to people who liked it fresh: Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics … We would sell to anyone.” Their first store, predominantly a carnicería, or meat shop, took advantage of the soaring Latino population. By 2008, they had 20 stores with more than $400 million in sales. In 2005 they started to produce Mexican food, including some inspired by Luz’s recipes to distribute through such chains as Costco. Mexican food, notes Jesús Jr., is no longer a niche. “It’s a crossover product now.”

Despite the current mess in Sacramento, this suggests some hope for the future. Perhaps the gubernatorial candidacy of Silicon Valley folks like former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (a Republican), or her former eBay employee Steve Wesley (a Democrat), could bring some degree of competence and common sense to the farce now taking place in Sacramento. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who’s said to be considering the race, would also be preferable to a green zealot like Jerry Brown or empty suits like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom.

But if I am looking for hope and inspiration, for California or the country, I would look first and foremost at people like the Cardenas family. They create jobs for people who didn’t go to Stanford or whose parents lack a trust fund. They constitute what any place needs to survive: risk takers who are self-confident but rarely selfish. These are people who look at the future, not in the mirror.

Kotkin is a presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive editor of newgeography.com. He is finishing a book on the American future for Penguin Publishing.

Liberal nuttery goes on unabated in California

Are you young and “confused” about your sexual identity? Well then California is just the place for you (h/t: Van Helsing):

Forget everything you learned in kindergarten about the difference between boys and girls. According to Gov. Schwarzenegger and the California Legislature, schoolchildren can now choose their own sex. I’m not talking about choosing “sexual behavior or sexual preferences.” Kids are going to be taught that they have the right to completely ignore their physical anatomy and choose the status of being “male” or “female.”

Ignore your common sense, ignore your chromosomes and ignore your anatomy. This is what your politicians want to teach your kids in school. After all, California’s kids have mastered reading, writing and arithmetic, haven’t they? In October, California Senate Bill 777 was signed into law. Senate Bill 777 eliminates Education Code 212, which currently defines “sex” as “the biological condition or quality of being a male or female human being.” And worse yet, SB 777 redefines the term “gender” for all schoolchildren by adding Education Code 210.7, which will read: “‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” In short, this redefinition of gender states that you are what you choose to be regardless of your anatomical make-up.

SB 777 also uses this redefinition of gender to forbid educators from discriminating against any individual employee, student or other person based upon that individual’s unspoken claim of being male or female, regardless of his or her actual sex.

Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to pro-family issues, filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court, San Diego, on behalf of the California Education Committee LLC, a project of California Family Council. Members of the California Education Committee include school board trustees, educators, parents and students.

The lawsuit argues that the redefinition of gender should be declared unconstitutionally vague as no school administrator or teacher would ever know whether they are unlawfully discriminating against a person based on their chosen sex. For example, how is it possible for an educator to segregate the boys from the girls if each individual has the ability to randomly self-define their sex regardless of their anatomy? Should educators really have to face the possibility of being sued for discrimination every time they segregate boys and girls or should they just be responsible for asking every child what sex they choose to be that day?

One school district in CA is already operating by this code:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has already adopted policies allowing boys to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms —- and vice versa! You can read LAUSD’s Reference Guide 1557 on the district’s Web site.

It even tells teachers they need to refer to students using the student’s preferred pronoun. And of course, it prohibits the teachers from disclosing a student’s chosen gender to the student’s parents. Since LAUSD has such a strong academic record, don’t you think all school districts should duplicate this program?

Indeed – but you can’t find this information on Reference Guide 1557 on the LAUSD Reference Guide page (surprise surprise), but I did find it on a page for transgender law. You might want to sit down before reading what it says:

DEFINITIONS:

The following definitions apply:

“Transgender students” refers to students whose gender identity is different from their sex at birth, and whose gender expression is different from the way males or females are expected to look or behave.

“Gender identity” refers to one’s understanding, interests, outlook, and feelings about whether one is female or male, or both, or neither, regardless of one’s biological sex.

“Gender expression” refers to the way a person expresses her or his gender, through gestures, movement, dress and grooming.

“Gender Nonconforming Students” refers to students that have a gender expression that does not conform with stereotypical expectations, for example, “feminine boys” “masculine girls” and students who are androgynous. Another example might be the boy who comes to school in clothing that some might perceive as “girls’ clothing” or the girl who plays games on the playground that might be perceived as “boys’ games.”

Sound outrageous? Read on:

Issues of Privacy: All persons, including students, have a right to privacy; this includes keeping a student’s transgender status private. Therefore, school personnel should not disclose a student’s transgender status to others, including parents, and/or other school personnel, unless there is a specific “need to know.”

Umm, that would be kinda hard to keep “private” for a variety of reasons, and especially considering the LAUSD’s policy on the use of student restrooms:

Restroom Accessibility

Schools may maintain separate restroom facilities for male and female students. At the discretion of the school administrator, a student may be provided access to a restroom facility that corresponds to the gender identity that the student consistently asserts at school. If the student and administrator feel that there is a reason or desire for increased privacy and safety, regardless of the underlying purpose or cause, any student may be provided access to a reasonable alternative restroom such as a single stall “unisex” restroom or the health office restroom. In all instances, decisions about alternative restroom use should be governed by the school administrator’s judgment concerning the safety and best interests of the student in question.

And what about those locker rooms?

Locker Room Accessibility

Schools may maintain separate locker room facilities for male and femalestudents. Schools may, however, provide a student access to a locker room facility that corresponds to the gender identity that the student consistently asserts at school. If there is a reason or desire for increased privacy and safety, regardless of the underlying reason, any student may be provided access to a reasonable alternative locker room such as:

1. Use of a private area (i.e., a nearby restroom stall with a door, an area separated by a curtain, a P.E. instructor’s office in the locker room, or a nearby health office restroom).

2. A separate changing schedule (either utilizing the locker room before or after the other students).

Mike Pechar at The Jawa Report writes in response:

Levity aside, the legislation is a serious attempt to blur the lines between male and female and thereby attack the cultural institutions of America through redefinition. The delineation of sex on a birth certificate becomes meaningless as society waits until children grow old enough to voice a pronoun of preference.

Yep. I’ve talked about the dangers of redefining traditional definitions before in posts about gay marriage, like this one:

So here we are now, trying to change the definition of it. Let me ask this: in marriage, can there be no absolutes in how it is defined? Seeing as that marriage has traditionally been defined throughout history the union between a man and a woman, who’s to say that once gay marriage is legal in this country everywhere that the definition won’t change soon there after for couples who want more than one wife or husband? That’s one of the problems with the idea of changing the definition of anything, especially something like marriage. Once you start changing the definition, there’s no way for you to stop it and on down the road the term “marriage” as we know it is essentially diluted to where it has no traditional meaning outside of “two people together in a committed partnership” or “multiple people who care for each other in a loving relationship” both of which could encompass many things.

Words have meanings. Why even define something if you’re going to keep changing the definition of it? Once you start, you really can’t stop.

Same same with respect to whether or not someone is born a boy or a girl. Number one, unless you are born a hermaphrodite, you are clearly a boy or girl at birth. It’s not even a question. Even worse than redefining marriage is “allowing” children to “choose” which sex they are. Not only is this dangerous from a social stand point, and not only will it lead to bunches of confused kids, but it also brings about a whole new set of problems, as inevitably some boy or girl who is not “gender challenged” (or whatever they call it) is going to assert they identify more closely opposite sex, and act like it for a while, solely to be able to join the opposite sex in the locker room and/or restroom. This will create even more problems, and sets up the opportunities for various types of inappropriate behavior/contact that shouldn’t be tolerated within the school system.

This is what SB77 is bringing to California public schools statewide. Not only that, but check out what they’re ok with teaching as “normal” in the classrom:

SEC. 29. Section 51500 of the Education Code is amended to read:
51500. No teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity that reflects or promotes a discriminatory bias against any person because of a characteristic listed in Section 220.

SEC. 30. Section 51501 of the Education Code is amended to read:

51501. No textbook or other instructional materials shall be adopted by the state board or by any governing board for use in the public schools that reflects or promotes a discriminatory bias against any person because of a characteristic listed in Section 220.

SEC. 32. Section 60044 of the Education Code is amended to read:

60044. No instructional materials shall be adopted by any governing board for use in the schools that, in its determination, contains:

(a) Any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of a characteristic listed in Section 220.

Just what are those characteristics listed in Section 220?

220. No person shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic that is contained in the definition of hate crimes set forth in Section 422.55 of the Penal Code in any program or activity conducted by an educational institution that receives, or benefits from, state financial assistance or enrolls pupils who receive state student financial aid.

Section 422.55 of the Penal Code reads as follows (emphasis added):

422.55. For purposes of this title, and for purposes of all other state law unless an explicit provision of law or the context clearly requires a different meaning, the following shall apply:

(a) “Hate crime” means a criminal act committed, in whole or in part, because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim:

(1) Disability.
(2) Gender.
(3) Nationality.
(4) Race or ethnicity.
(5) Religion.
(6) Sexual orientation.
(7) Association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics.

(b) “Hate crime” includes, but is not limited to, a violation of Section 422.6.

422.56. For purposes of this title, the following definitions shall apply:

[...]

(c) “Gender” means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.

[...]

(h) “Sexual orientation” means heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality.

422.57. For purposes this code, unless an explicit provision of law or the context clearly requires a different meaning, “gender” has the same meaning as in Section 422.56.

Once you’ve sorted through all the various sections and codes, you’ll see that California schools have been given the green light to teach that it is “normal” to have a sex change, cross dress, love both sexes, or the same sex.

I hear all the time about how one day California is going to fall into the Pacific Ocean due to all the earthquakes and fault lines. If California does indeed fall into the ocean, it won’t be due to earthquakes – it’ll be because the state has shifted so far to the left that it has nowhere else to go but the ocean.

Bibi and Israel at Dead End

Bibi and Israel at Dead End

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If there are no peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state, war next year is inevitable.

So King Abdullah II of Jordan has told the London Times: “If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12 to 18 months.”

Whether the king’s timetable is correct, endless cold war, erupting into hot wars, seems the fate of Israel if “Bibi” Netanyahu holds to his pledge never to allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

For, as John Mearsheimer, author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” writes in the May 18 American Conservative, if there is no Palestinian state, there are only three possible alternatives.

All involve “creating a ‘greater Israel’ … that effectively controls the West Bank and Gaza, or all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine.”

What are Bibi’s three remaining options?

The first is annexation of the West Bank. But this would bring 2.4 million Palestinians into Israel, giving her a population 40 percent Arab. With a higher birth rate, Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews and vote to abolish the Jewish state, thus creating a bi-national state.

That would mean the end of the Zionist dream.

The second option is the Meir Kahane solution. The late rabbi urged the expulsion of the Palestinians from the occupied territories. But the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands or millions of Palestinians would mean innumerable casualties, a severing of all ties to the Arab world, the moral isolation of Israel and a break with the United States. America could not stand by and let such a human rights atrocity take place.

The third option is the Netanyahu option: no annexation, no ethnic cleaning, no Palestinian state — but permanent control of the West Bank to assure the “Hamastan” in Gaza is never replicated on the West Bank.

What is wrong with the Bibi option?

It requires permanent control of Gaza, with Israel holding its 1.5 million people in what amounts to a vast penal colony with no access to the outer world by land, sea or air, except by permission of the Israeli military.

On the West Bank, this means permanent control of the 2.4 million Arabs through confinement in enclaves bordered on the west by the Israeli wall, on the east by the Jordan, bisected by roads set aside for the exclusive use of Israelis and dotted with checkpoints. Travel inside and outside the West Bank would be by sufferance of the Israeli military.

It is this prospect that caused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to blurt, “If the two-state solution collapses,” Israel will “face a South African-style struggle.” It is this prospect that caused President Carter to warn of Israel’s becoming an “apartheid” state.

For what other comparison comes to mind if the 4 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are to be confined to such Bantustans, with no country to call their own, their economy and movement subject to Israeli authorities and the Israeli military?

There is another and fatal flaw in the Bibi option.

According to the U.N. Population Division, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) will be home to 4.4 million Palestinians in 2010, but 10 million by the centennial of the Jewish state in 2048. Palestinians in the occupied territories alone will equal the population of Israel, and Israel’s population of 10 million will itself be about 30 percent Arab. By mid-century, Palestinians west of the Jordan will outnumber Israeli Jews two to one. And there will be 6 million more Palestinians in Jordan.

Moreover, according to Mearsheimer, since 2007, more Jews have left Israel than have come in. Some 700,000 to 1 million Israeli Jews live abroad, and a 2007 poll reportedly found that nearly one-half of all young people are considering leaving.

Yet Netanyahu’s case is not uncompelling. We left Gaza and got Hamas. Never again! And as Hamas is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, we will never negotiate with Hamas.

Which means no negotiations and no peace. For, in any free election, Hamas will win 35 percent to 65 percent and control or be part of any government coalition. And there will always be the possibility that Hamas will be voted into power in a new Palestinian state.

Netanyahu wants Obama to commit to go to war if necessary to denuclearize Iran, but he cannot force Obama to fight a war he cannot want. Obama wants Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, but lacks the clout in his own country and Congress to force Netanyahu to comply.

Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

In the short run, we shall find out if the King of Jordan is right.

In the long run, demography is destiny.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

As California Goes, So Goes The Nation – Straight To Hell

As California Goes, So Goes The Nation – Straight To Hell
Start Thinking Right ^ | February 23, 2009 | Michael Eden

Posted on Monday, February 23, 2009 3:03:13 PM by Michael Eden

There’s an old saying, “As California goes, so goes the nation.” That’s because California has a massive population (over 38 million, which is the combined population of the 22 smallest states) to go with the society-transforming megaphone of Hollywood (you know, where gay marriage – not Sean Penn – wins the Best Actor award).

Well, back on October 12, 2003, Fred Roe said:

Liberalism is a disease, and as a trend that will destroy California, so goes the nation.

Here, here, Freddy. As California stares into the face of bloated-budgetary doom, we who watch our lawmakers do everything imaginable to avoid making meaningful budget cuts salute you. Or perhaps it’s more like a toast raised from the tilting deck of the Titanic.

Today California passed a budget. Part of the problem was dealing with a $42 BILLION shortfall. Part of the problem will continue to be the fact that our massive debt grows by $1.7 million every single hour.

And Californians with the means to do so are leaving California the way rats leave sinking ships.

The Wall Street Journal has an article titled, “California’s Gold Rush Has Been Reversed: Entrepreneurs are fleeing heavy taxes in the state.”

The LA Times has an article titled, “Plan raises taxes on the state’s wealthiest: California’s tax rate is the nation’s highest, but budget woes are prompting proposals to raise it further. Tax foes say it could backfire by driving businesses and top earners out of the state.”

And the state – already the most heavily taxed in the nation – just raised its taxes again.

Colorado smells the blood-red of red ink in the water:

Colorado goes after California workersby Rob Schmitz, Friday, February 13, 2009

Kai Ryssdal: According to the Los Angeles Times this morning, California officials are expecting about $26 billion in stimulus spending to come their way. That still won’t be enough to fix a whopping budget deficit and a state government that’s gridlocked even on a good day. And it’s not going to make it any easier to do business out here. The high cost of running a company in the Golden State has been driving firms away for a while. And now other Western states are trying to capitalize. From KQED, Rob Schmitz reports.

Rob Schmitz: Tomorrow, 400 of California’s top CEOs — at companies from Google to Amgen — will receive Valentines from the state of Colorado. This morning, an airplane circled over L.A. with a banner proclaiming “Colorado Loves California.” It’s all part of a $100,000 campaign to court heart-broken businesses looking for a better suitor. Tom Clark is with the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation.

Tom Clark: We’re not going in to steal companies, we’re going in and offering an option for folks who have cost issues, that they need to get into a new market. Because if we lose California, the entire West gets hurt.

Last year, a billion dollars’ worth of venture capital flowed into Colorado. Half of it from California. The state of Nevada has spent millions to lure businesses across its border. Nevada Development Authority’s Somer Hollingsworth, says he’s heard from quite a few California CEOs lately.

Somer Hollingsworth: People have finally said, “I can’t be here. No matter what happens, I’m going to be sunk, so maybe I need get out of Dodge.”

And it’s not just businesses looking for a way out. Public Relations manager Heather Clisby recently moved to Denver from San Francisco, initially for a boy. A week later, the relationship was over.

Heather Clisby: Well, once I stopped crying, I looked up, I’m like, ‘Oh! Mountains! And, I don’t want to say anything bad about California, but I also felt it was just getting really, lifestyle-wise, it was just getting very crowded.

And expensive. Now she’s got her own business, and she’s saving money. And she’s so over her fling with the debt-ridden Golden State.

Californians can beg their elected leaders – “Please don’t screw us” – all they want, but the pleas fall on liberalism-deafened ears. The state is a socialist people’s republic, and lusts for more and more money to spend for all of its many redistributionist programs. Nancy Pelosi lives here, you know.

California could have had $5 billion of free money and created a ton of good paying private sector jobs, but that aint the California way:

California blocks state waters oil project By OGJ editors HOUSTON, Feb. 11 — The California State Lands Commission voted not to approve an extended reach drilling project that would have recovered nearly 100 million bbl of oil and brought as much as $5 billion to the financially insolvent state.Plains Exploration & Production Co., Houston, had proposed in 2005 to drill 17 wells from shore and from existing Platform Irene to develop the Tranquillon Ridge prospect. Drilling was to start in 2009 and continue 5-6 years, and production would last 14 years.

Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, commission chairman and a former deputy Interior secretary under former US President Bill Clinton, said the plan “would signal that California wants to open offshore drilling.” Garamendi also said US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of the California congressional delegation had concerns the lease would have undercut their attempts to reintroduce a federal moratorium on offshore drilling.

Oh, well. Who needs oil or gasoline, anyway? We’d just drive around and waste it on things like going to work, shopping, and heading off to spend money on recreation. And businesses would waste it on about a quadrillion different products, goods, and services to help “lubricate” the economy. Thank God those Democrats saved us from that demon-juice oil!

I wrote an article the day Democrats – after fighting against any oil production for more than a quarter century – finally blinked against an onslaught of public pressure and agreed to allow an offshore billing ban to expire. In my concluding paragraph I predicted:

If you want to put gas in your car’s gas tank, and if you don’t want to keep paying OPEC $700 billion every year for the privilege, you have to vote Republican. Don’t think that Nancy Pelosi won’t still try to save the planet, or that Harry Reid has stopped thinking that oil is ruining our world. After the election, you can rest assured that they will be right back to their old tricks.

Democrats are lying weasels. That’s the one thing about them that you can depend upon.

California’s unemployment rate is 9.3%, third worst in the nation behind other liberal socialist peoples republics Michigan and Rhode Island. And it’s the highest it’s been in 15 years – you know, when Republicans clobbered Democrats back in 1994.

And California is one of five states (Michigan, Florida, Nevada, Arizona being the others) with the highest rate of foreclosures. And thanks to Obama’s subsidizing of bad and stupid behavior, you’ll be seeing more foreclosures in your own state real soon. Spreading the misery is at the heart of socialism.

Ignore the economic solutions that work; and instead turn to failed socialist policies dictated by ideology rather than reality. That’s the California way.

As California Goes, So Goes the Nation…Hmmmmm, I don’t hear anyone LAUGHING!
Email | 10/19/06 | Sgt. L. Ernie Foucault, San Diego PD (retired)

Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 4:25:08 PM by lancer

I respectfully submit the following commentary on illegal immigration for your benefit and consideration. I was not only born and raised in California, but was a San Diego police officer from the late 60′s through the early 90′s. More specifically, I was a police supervisor from 1976 on, and was head of the police department’s anti-gang unit during the latter 70′s.

There is a saying, “As California goes, so goes the rest of the country.” In the matter of illegal immigration, Pennsylvania’s leaders would better serve its citizens by not following California’s lead. It would be my pleasure to discuss any of these issues with you or answer any questions you may have.

In the mid-70′s the City of San Diego ordered all its police officers, me included, to stop detaining – or even questioning – the illegal aliens we frequently encountered in the course of our duties. Ignore the issue of illegal immigration altogether, the directive said. The reason for this new order? The city had come under ferocious attack for its long-standing, reasoned policy towards illegal aliens. Along with the threat of lawsuits, such words as “racism”, “xenophobia,” “bigotry” and “discrimination” were being bandied about by shadowy, strangely-aligned illegal alien advocacy groups from both sides of the border. The common denominator linking these leftists was their alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union. And they all kept to the same script, as they do even today; they would never acknowledge that the only issue on the table was illegal Mexican immigration. None of the city’s leaders at that time – or since then, for that matter – had the stomach for the vitriolic, in-your-face gutter fight these belligerents were looking for. Against all common sense, the city put its head in the sand and capitulated to the inflammatory rhetoric of a few, loud militants….to the detriment of its own citizens’ best interests.

By the late 70′s, the unabated flow of illegal aliens into San Diego resulted in the melt down of its criminal justice system. The jails were filled beyond capacity, and – because of an ACLU lawsuit – under a court order to start releasing criminals, including illegal aliens, into the streets. Prosecutors and the courts were overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the load. Mexican street gangs comprised of illegal aliens were on the rise in all parts of the city. The police department responded to this crisis, in part, by instituting a policy wherein only violent offenders and felony suspects actually went to jail. Those arrested for misdemeanor crimes, including illegal aliens with no local address or identification, were issued “citations” on the spot and told to appear in court at a later time. That policy, of course, only served to exacerbate the already sky-rocketing crime rate. And though there was indisputable proof that the root cause of the crisis was illegal immigration, none of the city’s leaders had the personal courage to actually do anything about it for fear of being tagged “racist” or “bigot.” It was around that time San Diegans were beginning to hear those slurs from a new quarter – the Mexican Consulate’s office.

In the early 80′s, San Diego taxpayers learned that Mexican children were entering the United States daily to attend local public schools. At the end of the school day, these children would walk across the border and return to their homes in Mexico. Outrage over the fact California taxpayers were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the public education of foreigners was lost to those now familiar screams of “racism,” “bigotry” and…because they were children…”mean-spiritedness.” The local school boards said it wasn’t their problem to address, that laws prevented them from asking such intrusive questions as, “Who are you and where do you live?” when enrolling students. And, they added, what harm was there really in educating those poor Mexican kids. They also said they needed a lot more tax money to hire new Spanish-speaking teachers because, inexplicably, more and more of their students didn’t speak a word of English.

By the late 80′s, the illegal immigration crisis brought San Diego’s tax-paid social services programs to their knees. Local tax money earmarked for indigent emergency health care – money set aside as the last safety net for those resident citizens who needed it most – was being spent almost exclusively on the flood of illegal aliens now in the city. Compounding the problem was the U.S. Border Patrol’s new policy of “unarresting” in-custody illegals when they needed medical care, and dropping them off at the entrances to local hospital emergency rooms. This new practice, of course, was the federal government’s ingenious way of avoiding its legal responsibility for medical bills incurred by in-custody illegal aliens. As the tax money dried up, hospitals received less and less government reimbursement for the medical care given to illegals – who had no money, no health insurance, and no means whatsoever of ever paying their medical bills. Politically savvy hospital administrators weren’t about to take the steps necessary to remedy the situation, and risk incurring the public wrath of the illegals’ advocacy groups. They chose instead to artificially inflate medical care costs across the board for everyone. That prompted the health insurance companies to raise premium rates for their policy holders, and it was once again demonstrated to San Diegans the many ways in which they were going to pay for the presence of illegal aliens in their city.

By the early 90′s, San Diego’s long-running illegal alien crisis had become California’s nightmare. Public policy regarding illegal immigration degenerated into theater of the absurd throughout much of the state. Because of fraudulent voter registration schemes concocted by those leftists, illegal aliens were now voting in both local and federal elections – and in one case, actually making the difference in a congressional district race. Many communities witnessed the collapse of entire medical care systems under the weight of illegal immigration alone. Billions of public dollars were being spent annually just for the medical care and education of illegals. It was driving the state ever closer to bankruptcy, and severely strained the bounds of civil discourse on the issue. It was time to draw a line in the sand, and millions of California citizens did just that in 1994. Through the state’s initiative process, a grass-roots proposition was put on the statewide ballot which would finally and absolutely put an end to “business as usual.” It sought to end all government subsidies to illegals in the state, including public welfare, public housing, public education, and all medical care except in the cases of true emergencies. In spite of the leftists’ rabid campaign of slurs and name calling, common sense ruled the day and Proposition 187 overwhelmingly passed on a two-to-one vote.

The victory was short-lived. The ink had barely dried on the governor’s signature when the leftists found a single sympathetic federal judge to claim the new law unconstitutional. Since then, California’s illegal immigration nightmare has blossomed to become this nation’s cancer, and it’s destroying the very fabric of our society. No matter how you slice it, there is nothing benign about immigration fraud, identification fraud, welfare fraud, voting fraud, social security fraud, and tax evasion. It all boils down to deceit and theft. Illegal aliens in our country today are committing these crimes on such a massive scale it boggles the mind, and no community in this nation will survive the scourge. There is nothing an illegal alien can bring to a community by way of beneficial productivity which will compensate for his/her drain on that community’s social services, criminal justice, educational, and medical care systems. It’s never happened and it isn’t going to happen. Local tax dollars are a community’s life-blood and are not infinite. History has shown that illegal immigration bleeds that critical supply dry. In spite of these facts, and against all logic, politicians across the country are seriously debating whether to give illegal aliens the “right” to vote, the “right” to higher education, the “right” to state-issued drivers’ licenses, and even the “right” to accumulate social security credits while using stolen or counterfeit identification. The leftists’ mantra, “immigration (illegal immigration, if you please!) is the sole responsibility of the federal government,” is a lie. The federal government has proven over the past 30 years it isn’t capable of, or even willing to, control illegal immigration. The ugly fact of the matter is – the feds alone will not, and cannot, do it. This is precisely why the battle against illegal immigration is an absolute and moral responsibility of every elected official in this country, including county commissioners and local township supervisors.

I’ve been a student of illegal immigration since the late 60′s, when I was a rookie cop assigned to the police department’s border sector adjoining Tijuana, Mexico. During those early years, and over the span of my police career, I witnessed events and had first-hand, personal experiences with illegal immigration few other Pennsylvanians have had. And I’ve seen the devastating consequences illegal immigration can have on a city, a region, an entire state. These are the lessons I learned and my advice to anyone concerned about the presence of illegal aliens in their community:

§ Be suspicious of public officials – with control over tax dollars – who claim illegal immigration isn’t a crisis….or worse yet say, “it isn’t MY crisis.” Hold on to your wallet if you see that happening!

§ Be skeptical of any media that reveals a transparent leftist agenda in support of illegals. You’ll recognize this when the editorials and reporting are slanted and one-sided, and when illegal aliens are continually referred to as “undocumented workers” and characterized as victims rather than suspects.

§ And be very, very wary of those self-appointed, self-proclaimed “community activists” who profess to be the guardians of ethnic sensitivities – but whose real motives for involvement are murky and self-serving. These will be the ones who seem to be afforded a little too much legitimacy and garner a little too much attention by the media. These will be the only ones spewing personal insults and slurs, and threatening lawsuits at township meetings.

Finally, if nothing you’ve read here has hit a familiar chord or raised a flaming red flag, consider this scenario – which isn’t all that implausible, believe me….There is only one tax dollar left in the government treasury which is to be used for the public good. You are an honest, law-abiding American citizen and desperately need that dollar just to survive the day. So does the criminal illegal alien who just snuck into your country and is standing in line next to you. Your only witness to this event is your personal sense of decency and fair play. His witnesses include an ACLU attorney, several “community activists” holding inflammatory placards, and a few media types with cameras rolling. And the bureaucrat, about to decide who gets that last dollar bill, tells you the law forbids him from acknowledging the obvious in making a decision.

L. Ernie Foucault, Sergeant (Retired)

San Diego Police Department

California heading towards collapse, auditor warns

posted at 10:55 am on May 8, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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On the eve of a series of referendums proposed to increase taxes on Californians, the Golden State’s legislative budget analyst warns that both the legislature and the governor have seriously underestimated the budget shortfall.  The state has a $23 billion gap even after the legislative compromise earlier this year supposedly eliminated the red ink and could default by July:

California could run out of money as soon as July, the Legislature’s chief budget analyst warned Thursday, as a new poll showed voters poised to reject five budget-related measures on the May 19 ballot.

If the propositions do not pass, the state could find itself as much as $23 billion short of the money it needs to pay its bills over the next year, according to a new forecast by Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor. The poll, from the Public Policy Institute of California, found that even as voter interest in the ballot measures rises, all are trailing except the sixth one — Proposition 1F, which would bar pay hikes for lawmakers in deficit years. …

Adding to the fiscal woes, the Obama administration is threatening to pull $6.8 billion in stimulus funds from California in a dispute over an earlier state budget cut.

“The Legislature is going to need to act promptly,” said state Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer. “We have a fairly short window to get a lot done.”

Predictably, the political class has exploited this by warning of criminals running free in the street:

On Thursday, the administration advised law enforcement officials that it was preparing plans to commute the sentences of 38,000 state prison inmates, including all illegal immigrants. It also is considering closing some prisons and sending inmates to county jails, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by The Times.

Under the plan, 19,000 illegal immigrants — 11% of state prisoners — would be turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency after having their sentences commuted. An additional 19,000 “relatively low-risk offenders” would have their sentences commuted as well.

Earlier in the week, the administration warned local officials that it may raid their budgets for $2 billion and close firehouses.

Ah, yes, because California doesn’t spend money on anything but police and fire departments.  The Governator didn’t pledge six billion dollars for stem-cell research, for instance, or other non-essential nonsense.  This is a typical, extortive, dog-in-the-manger ploy by Schwarzenegger and the Sacramento elite.  Either give us your money, they warn, or we’ll sic the criminals on you.

Instead, California should concentrate on ridding themselves of the excess spending and regulation that the state has built over the last several decades, and concentrate on sustaining growth.  The state could rake in billions in leases and taxes and create tens of thousands of jobs by allowing oil exploration and production off its coast, for instance.  Arnold could lead a charge to lower business taxes in order to encourage investment, including the sky-high sales taxes that depress consumption.  Most importantly, they could start getting serious about trimming non-essential spending from the state budget and start shedding bureaucrats instead of driving business out of state.

Instead, the state prefers to set criminals free to punish its citizens for telling Sacramento that they spend too much money.  Maybe Escape from LA wasn’t so far-fetched after all.

CA Collapse Proves Obama Ideology Unsustainable
oldmantom Regular Contributor	cutting off all the bums legal and illegal would help alot,shoot my state even pays them to learn english while charging Americans to learn spanish. this handout problem here is huge if you count every illegal alien with kids getting handouts along with our own bums,let natural selection take its couse
05-16-2009 11:56 PM

	Re: CA Collapse Proves Obama Ideology Unsustainable
barnrob Frequent Contributor	There is a wall of diminishing returns and California has hit it. They can’t raise taxes as they are among the highest taxed states in the Union.They will run off existing business. Their tax base is shrinking as real estate crashes. They are loaded with debt and the politicians are in denial. The state was wealthy for so long they thought it would continue indefinitely.
05-17-2009 12:02 AM

	Re: CA Collapse Proves Obama Ideology Unsustainable
madisonmoments Frequent Contributor	California is actually seventh nationally in taxes as a % of income, has one of the lowest energy costs per capita in the nation, and gets back only $.80 for every dollar federal tax dollar they send in. [before they go bankrupt they may ask the Feds to even this out by taking dollars back from some of those states thinking about leaving the union.]
05-17-2009 02:11 AM

	Re: CA Collapse Proves Obama Ideology Unsustainable
barnrob Frequent Contributor	Already has been done with the stimulus. No states are leaving the union California bet big on real estate and they lost and dragged the rest of the country in with them. madisonmoments wrote: California is actually seventh nationally in taxes as a % of income, has one of the lowest energy costs per capita in the nation, and gets back only $.80 for every dollar federal tax dollar they send in. [before they go bankrupt they may ask the Feds to even this out by taking dollars back from some of those states thinking about leaving the union.]
05-17-2009 02:15 AM

Re: CA Collapse Proves Obama Ideology Unsustainable

Thirdbase Regular Contributor

You are correct to sound the alarm, but there is one class of assets that should be sold. They are the schools. Private enterprise should be used to break up the governments monopoly on education. Imagine competition for students, resulting in a superior education for our young skulls full of mush. The proceeds should be protected and used to support education funding and remove this burden from the states budget. This alone would allow California to balance the current budget. Ironball wrote: Schwarzenegger proposes selling State properties Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today will propose selling San Quentin Prison, the Los Angeles Coliseum and other state-owned properties in a bid to raise cash to counter the state’s daunting budget shortfall.The proposal to sell off state assets is part of the governor’s revised budget plan being released today. Besides the Coliseum and San Quentin, the properties he’s eyeing for sale are the Cow Palace in Daly City, the Orange County Fairgrounds, Cal Expo in Sacramento, Del Mar Fairground, and the Ventura County Fair. The sale of those properties would generate upward of $600 million and possibly more than $1 billion for the state, according to a copy of Schwarzenegger’s proposal. But proceeds from those sales would not arrive for another two to five years. California’s collapse: California’s woes—high taxes, costly energy, burdensome regulations, and more—are all symptoms of government run amok If the future happens in California, we all should tremble at its ever-expanding debt, falling credit ratings, crushing pension obligations, suffocating regulation, and rising taxes — with environmentally preening, ill-considered restrictions on carbon emissions thrown on top. Ah yes…..so goes California, so goes America..…………. The very same irresponsible spending, kow towing to unions and other special interests, unsustainable ever growing entitlement programs, that the Obama is bestowing on the country are the very things that got California in this unimaginable predicament. The only difference being that California cannot go begging to the Chinese for a bailout to postpone the inevitable…………………….. Wonder how much the Chinese would pay for the Golden Gate? Or how about Yosemite Valley? Gawd forbid the State cut entitlement programs or deal with the powerful unions……………………………..