Huge Santa Barbara County wildfire caused by marijuana farm; suspects at large in forest

Huge Santa Barbara County wildfire caused by marijuana farm; suspects at large in forest

August 16, 2009 |  8:26 am

A fire that has burned more than 75,000 acres in Santa Barbara County over the last week was started in an illegal marijuana growing area operated by a Mexican drug organization, authorities said.

Authorities said they confirmed that the blaze, which is burning out of control, started in a cooking area of the pot farm. They believe those responsible are still in the forest area trying leave the forest by foot.

“The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Narcotics Unit has confirmed that the camp at the origin of the fire was an illegal marijuana operation believed to be run by a Mexican national drug organization,” according to a statement from the Los Padres National Forest. “The Narcotics Unit has been working in the area within the last month eradicating other nearby marijuana cultivation sites.”

The location of those who ran the pot farm isn’t known, but forest officials warn “not to approach anyone who looks suspicious but to instead contact the nearest law enforcement agency.”

The fire, known as the La Brea fire, is now 25% contained. Vicki Collins, a fire information spokeswoman at Los Padres, said that although the La Brea fire was only 10% contained by Friday night, firefighters successfully charred some lines in front of the fire in the Tepusquet Canyon area, depriving the blaze of new fuel.

Since the fire started Aug. 8, about 234 residences have been evacuated. Collins said if firefighting efforts continue to be successful, residents might be able to get back into their homes within a couple of days. Progress has been slow on this fire because of the low humidity, 90-degree temperatures and remote terrain.

She said they still have no crews on the ground in some wilderness areas, such as the Sisquoc River area.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us yet, though things are looking fairly good on a couple flanks of this fire,” Collins said. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger met with firefighters in the Santa Cruz Mountains who have been battling the Lockheed fire.

That blaze, which started Wednesday, has burned nearly 7,000 acres. By this morning, the fire was 30% contained, officials said. About 2,400 people have been evacuated in areas including Swanton and Bonny Doon.

“I want the people here in these communities to know that we will do everything in our power in order to save properties, to save lives and to save their memories,” Schwarzenegger said. “The important thing is also to follow the evacuation orders.” Schwarzenegger said there are 11 fires currently burning across California. He defended the state’s investment in fire resources even though it is in a budget crisis.

Del Walters, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection director who spoke at the news conference with the governor, said he worried that the incoming winds and high temperatures in Northern California could worsen the Lockheed fire and also the Corral fire in San Joaquin County.

That fire has blackened about 15,000 acres and was 20% contained by this morning.

– Shelby Grad and Jia-Rui Chong

More in: Wildfires

Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals in All 50 States, Says Gallup Poll

Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals in All 50 States, Says Gallup Poll
Monday, August 17, 2009
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief

(CNSNews.com) – Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the union, according to the Gallup Poll.

At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative than have made that claim in any of the last four years.

In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.

Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”

Thirty-five percent of Americans say they are moderate.

During Republican President George W. Bush’s second term, the number of self-identified conservatives as measured by Gallup dropped, riding at a low of 37% as recently as last year.

According to new data released by Gallup on Friday, conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states–including President Obama’s home state of Illinois–even though Democrats have a significant advantage over Republicans in party identification in 30 states.

“In fact, while all 50 states are, to some degree, more conservative than liberal (with the conservative advantage ranging from 1 to 34 points), Gallup’s 2009 party ID results indicate that Democrats have significant party ID advantages in 30 states and Republicans in only 4,” said an analysis of the survey results published by Gallup.

“Despite the Democratic Party’s political strength– seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country–more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal,” said Gallup’s analysis.

“While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level,” said Gallup. “Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.”

Massachusetts, Vermont and Hawaii are the most liberal states, even though conservatives marginally outrank liberals even there. In Massachusetts, according to Gallup, 30% say they are conservative and 29% say they are liberal, a difference that falls within the margin of error for the state. In Vermont, 29% say they are conservative and 28% say they are liberal, which also falls within the survey’s margin of error for the state.  In Hawaii, 29% say they are conservative and 24% say they are liberal, which falls within the margin of error for that state.

In one non-state jurisdiction covered by the survey, liberals did outnumber conservatives. That was Washington, D.C., where 37% said they were liberal, 35% said they were moderate and 23% said they were conservative.

Even in New York and New Jersey, conservatives outnumber liberals by 6 percentage points, according to Gallup. In those states, 32% say they are conservative and 26% say they are liberal.  In Connecticut, conservatives outnumber liberals by 7 points, 31% to 24%.

Alabama is the state that comes closest to a conservative majority. In that state, according to Gallup, 49% say they are conservative and 15% say they are liberal.

In President Obama’s home state of Illinois, conservatives outnumber liberals, 35% to 23%.

Gallup’s results were derived from interviewing 160,236 American adults between Jan. 2, 2009 and June 30, 2009.

Even though conservatives outnumber liberals in all 50 states, in 21 of these states self-identified moderates outnumber conservatives, and in 4 states the percentage saying they are conservative and the percentage saying they are moderate is exactly the same.

The two states with the highest percentage of self-identified moderates are Hawaii and Rhode Island, where 43% say they are moderate.

For a ranking of all 50 states by the advantage that self-identified conservatives have over self-identified liberals see the Gallup analysis here.

Conservatives Now Outnumber Liberals Almost Two to One in America, According to Washington Post Poll
Friday, July 24, 2009
By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief

(CNSNews.com) - Americans who consider themselves conservatives now outnumber Americans who consider themselves liberal by almost two to one, according to a new poll by the Washington Post and ABC News.

In the poll of 1,001 adults conducted between July 15-18, respondents were asked: “Would you say your views on most political matters are liberal, moderate, or conservative?”

Thirty-eight percent said they were conservative, while only 20% said they were liberal.  Thirty-nine percent, meanwhile, said they were moderate.

The percentage of self-described conservatives has increased since President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January and the percentage of self-described liberals has diminished.  A Washington Post poll conducted in mid-January, shortly before the inauguration, showed 32% saying they were conservative, 24% saying they were liberal and 42% saying they were moderates.

The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3 points.

A Post poll done in late March also had 38% of respondents describing themselves as conservatives, but the percentage of conservatives dipped to 35% in an April poll and 36% in a June poll.

The highest percentage that conservatives have achieved in this poll since the beginning of the 2008 presidential election cycle (in January 2007) was 39%. That came in a September 2007 poll, several months before the first 2008 presidential primaries.

The highest percentage that liberals achieved in this poll during the same time frame was 25%, a mark they hit in both February 2008, in the midst of the presidential primaries, and July 2007.

_____

Here are the results from a Washington Post-ABC News Poll that asked respondents whether they considered their views on most political matters liberal, moderate or conservative.

Date                             Liberal              Moderate         Conservative

7/18/09                        20%                 39%                 38%

6/21/09                        22                    40                    36

4/24/09                        23                    39                    35

3/29/09                        20                    38                    38

2/22/09                        23                    38                    37

1/16/09                        24                    42                    32

12/14/08                      22                    37                    37

8/22/08                        22                    41                    33

7/13/08                        19                    43                    35

6/15/08                        21                    43                    33

5/11/08                        24                    39                    34

4/13/08                        24                    38                    35

3/2/08                          19                    48                    30

2/1/08                          25                    38                    34

1/12/08                        24                    36                    36

12/9/07                        24                    38                    36

11/1/07                        24                    41                    32

9/30/07                        24                    45                    30

9/7/07                          20                    39                    39

7/21/07                        25                    39                    32

6/1/07                          24                    36                    37

4/15/07                        24                    42                    32

2/25/07                        23                    40                    35

1/19/07                        23                    41                    33

12/11/06                      23                    42                    33

“Toward the White Republic” by Michael O’Meara

“Toward the White Republic”

Michael O’Meara

Editor’s Note: It is a great pleasure to announce the winning essay of the first annual TOQ Essay Contest: Michael O’Meara’s “Toward the White Republic.” We had 20 entries. One was subsequently withdrawn. Of the 19 remaining, I judged this the best, but there was close competition, and in the end I hope to publish nine other entries in TOQ, beginning with the Winter 2009-2010 issue. The prize essay appears below without notes. The full, annotated version will appear in the print edition. For information on the second TOQ Essay Contest, click here. Congratulations, Dr. O’Meara, and thank you.

“Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land.”
– Walter Scott

One.

Some time in the second half of the 1990s, a terminological change occurred in the racially conscious community.

Many who previously identified themselves as White Power advocates, segregationists, separatists, supremacists, survivalists, neo-Confederates, biological realists, etc. started calling themselves “white nationalists.”

At the time (and I didn’t know much about these things then), I thought this reflected a changing political consciousness.

For what began after 1945 as a “movement” to maintain the integrity of America’s racial character and prevent alien races from intruding into its various “life worlds” had, by the 1990s, ceased to be a realistic project — 30 years of Third-World immigration, “civil rights” legislation, and various measures imposed by the federal government to subordinate white interests to those of nonwhites had irrevocably transformed the American people so that it was increasingly difficult to characterize them as even a majority-white population.

As a consequence, “white advocates” in the late 1990s started making traditional nationalist claims for secession and self-determination because the United States, in their eyes, had become a threat to their people.

Two.

This interpretation was not at all unreasonable. But, alas, it didn’t quite accord with the facts.

I’ve since learned that those calling themselves “white nationalists” are not necessarily nationalists in the sense of wanting to secede from the United States in order to form an independent ethnostate. Most, I think it’s fair to say, are racially conscious conservatives who want to work through the existing institutions to regain control of the country their ancestors made — in order, ultimately, to dismantle the present anti-white system of preferences and restore something of the white man’s former hegemony.

By contrast, white nationalists in the strict sense (i.e., those favoring secession) have no interest in restoring the old ways, let alone regaining control of the central state, whose authority is already slipping and whose rule is increasingly dysfunctional. Indeed, the American state system, as its more astute supporters acknowledge, is now beyond reform.

Instead, white nationalists aspire to create a counter-elite to lead disaffected white youth in a movement to found a whites-only nation-state somewhere in North America, once the poorly managed enterprise known as the United States collapses in a centrifugal dispersion of its decaying and perverted powers.

Without an organizational presence in the real world and with a “public” largely of computer hobbyists, white nationalists at present have no hope of actually mobilizing the white populace in opposition to the existing anti-white regime. Rather, their immediate goal is to prepare the way for the development of a revolutionary nationalist vanguard to lead the struggle for white liberation. They aspire thus not to recapture the rotting corpse of the US government, but to free themselves from it — in order to be themselves, in their own land, in their own way.

White nationalists, as such, politically define themselves in wanting to create a sovereign state in North America. They endeavor, therefore, not to “put things back the way they were,” as conservatives wish, but to rid themselves of them completely.

A National Revolution, they hold, will alone restore “the white man to his rightful place in the world.”

Inspired by the birthright handed down by the blood and sacrifice of ancestors, their project, relatedly, is not about restoring the Third Reich, the Confederacy, or Jim Crow, as leftists imagine, but about creating a future white homeland in which their kind will be able “to pursue their destiny without interference from other races.”

Three.

White nationalism is a variant of historic ethnonationalism, what Walker Connor calls nationalism “in its pristine sense.”

All three — racial, ethno, and pristine nationalism — define the nation in terms of blood.

The creedal or civic nationalism of the present regime, which makes loyalty to the state, not the nation, primary, is “nationalist” only in a narrow ideological sense, confusing as it does patriotism (loyalty to the state or affection for the land) with loyalty to the people (nationalism). It thus defines the nation in terms of certain abstract democratic principles, seeing it as a collection of individuals, each more important than the whole.

Though ethnonationalists privilege the nation’s spirit above all else, they nevertheless define it organically, in terms of blood, as an extended family, an endogamous kin group, or a genetic commonwealth.

Unlike European nations, formed around long-established ethnic cores (which had developed in the Middle Ages, as Germanic and other tribal confederations evolved into larger political, regional, and cultural identities), American national identity was, historically, defined in explicitly racial terms.

As Sir Arthur Keith characterized it: “In Europe the stock has been broken up into local national breeds; in America the local breeds have been reunited.”

In both cases, a national identity grew out of a real or imagined blood relationship linking the nation’s members to inherited customs and institutions.

Because the American form of racial nationhood lacks the ethnic dimension distinct to European nationalism, it is a source of some misunderstanding, especially in its purely negative expression as anti-Semitism or Negrophobia.

For example, even Euronationalists who struggle for a continental nation-state tend to reject white nationalism — because it seems to imply the typical American leveling of cultural and other identities by subsuming them under a homogenizing biological concept that negates the particularisms of European nationhood and subjects them to Anglo-American hegemony.

In this, however, our European cousins misunderstand the aim of white nationalism, though some white nationalists in their one-sided reaction to nonwhites may, admittedly, have given cause to their misunderstanding.

White nationalism is a distinctly American (or, better said, New World) nationalism, not a European one, and the two are analogous only at the highest level, where the national community, defined ethnically or racially, affirms it right to control its own destiny.

This is not to say that American racial nationalism — which makes white European racial ascriptions the basis of American identity — has no ethnic or historic component.

The country’s original settlers were largely of Anglo-Protestant descent and this had a formative effect on American institutions and folkways.

The organic basis of the American nation, however, was less English ethnicity than “whiteness.”

Even before the War of Independence (the first American war of secession), more than a quarter of the population was of non-English, mainly North European stock: Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenots, etc. By about the mid-eighteenth century, the “American English” were increasingly referred to as “Americans,” a people “selected by a whole series of ordeals which [had] killed off the weak and worthless” and conferred a distinct vitality on their laws, attitudes, and local institutions

The bitterness of the War of Independence and the War of 1812, US-British acrimony and rivalry, which lasted late into the 19th century, in addition to the nationalist compulsion to celebrate an American identity independent of the English — all tended to minimize the significance of the colonists’ original national origins, as they were reborn as pure Americans. In fact, American nationalism arose on the basis of a certain popular revulsion against the English.

Nevertheless, English-Americans were the original native Americans, and all the rest of us have since become American by assimilating something of the ethos derived from their unique genos.

Though Anglo-Protestant ethnicity continues to animate the inner reaches of American culture, it wasn’t, however, the genotypical basis of American identity. Rather, it was the racial experience of transplanted Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia, then the “exotic far western periphery . . . of the metropolitan European cultural system.”

In the New World part of this system, the ever-looming presence of African slaves, considered “by nature vicious and morally inferior,” and “savage” red Indians, who posed an ongoing threat, could not but foster an acute racial consciousness.

Given that economic opportunities, vast expanses of virgin land, and new fortunes prevented the old European social hierarchies from forming, these racial bearings acted as the one fixed hierarchy ordering colonial life.

Forged, thus, in conflict with nonwhites, the colonists’ early racial consciousness served to mark the boundaries of the emerging American identity. The historian Winthrop Jordan claims that “Anglo-Americans” were already identifying themselves as “whites” rather than “Englishmen” as early as 1680.

National or ethnic differences in this racially mixed environment were simply less meaningful than differences between Europeans and non-Europeans.

These differences were institutionalized when the American colonists declared their independence, for they declared in effect their intent to become a self-determined people in the evolutionary sense, by becoming a nation, an organic body with its own sovereign state and its own laws of growth.

Then, following the revolution, as republican principles were gradually extended to all white males, the country’s Herrenvolk democracy posed an insurmountable obstacle to the extension of these principles to nonwhites — for the new, explicitly white nation was based not on the liberal fiction of “humanity,” but on the assumption that human nature is a product of blood and race.

Indeed, the white egalitarianism of the early republic, shaped largely in opposition to the Toryism of anglophile Federalists (who represented the bourgeois interests of liberal market society and its connection to British commerce) was premised on the Negro’s otherness and the primacy of white racial ascriptions, all of which further contributed to the nation’s self-consciousness, coherence, and communality, as British and European Americans, largely under the leadership of Indian-fighting, pro-slavery, and expansionist Southerners, came to share not just the same horizontal sense of right and identity, but the same vertical qualities and dignities of their stock.

Different in ways from ethnicity, race formed the psychological bonds that joined American whites and differentiated them from nonwhites, just as the language, customs, and early institutions of the original Anglo-Protestant settlers established the cultural-linguistic framework in which white Americans became a self-conscious nation.

Four.

The ethnogenic process that gradually imposed a common culture and identity on the former colonists, as they became Virginians and New Englanders, and more generally, Americans, was interrupted in the 1840s by the mass influx of Irish and German Catholics — the former seen almost as an alien race. Then, in the late 19th century, this was followed by a second great immigrant wave, from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Today the Third World invasion is taking the ethnogenic process to a new extreme, as the state, with its inorganic definition of the nation, endeavors to “transcend” the perennially white, Christian character of the American people for the sake of its oxymoronic “universal nation.”

At each nodal point in this demographic transformation, except the most recent, native Americans, however resistant to the newcomers, succeeded in assimilating them on the basis of their racial ascriptions, as the Anglo-Protestant character of American identity became progressively more “ecumenical.”

Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult today to talk of “hyphenated-Americans,” given that the different European ethnic strains making up the white population have so extensively intermarried that many now no longer know their ethnic origins. As one historian writes: “Ellis Island whiteness” has come to replace “Plymouth Rock whiteness.”

But there were obvious limits to assimilation. As Woodrow Wilson put it: “We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.” Against this view, many “new,” especially Jewish immigrants, advanced the cause for greater ethnic diversity, as if America’s vocation was to become a boardinghouse to all the world’s peoples. The Old America, though, would have none of this, and, in Stoddard’s words, dismissed such claims with the insistence “that America is basically ‘made’ — and that it shall not be unmade.”

When the post-1945 National Security State, armed with its newly acquired “mandate of heaven,” endeavored to turn Roosevelt’s liberal-managerial state system into a world empire, premised on the belief that it was based on an idea, not a people, it launched what amounted to an assault on America’s historic identity — an assault whose overarching aim has been to undermine the population’s racial consciousness and promote ethnocidal practices facilitating its “demographic” reconstitution. The state’s “anti-racism” came thus to serve as an instrument of its social engineers, who sought to turn whites into herds of “tamed sheep [who] care not in which flock [they] are driven.”

It was only natural, then, that once the shearing got under way the most racially conscious whites began to see themselves as an oppressed nation in need of their own sovereign state.

Five.

Racial conservatives have offered numerous criticisms of nationalists advocating secession from the United States. The most common of these — made in a period which has witnessed successful secessionist movements (in the former SU, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc.), as well as other popular movements resisting a despotic, leveling centralization in the name of regionalism, devolution, and the defense of historic identities — is that the prospect of creating a white ethnostate in North America free of the United States is totally unrealizable . . . a fantasy . . . pure and utter folly.

But this, they fail to realize, is hardly criticism at all.

For those with the courage of their convictions, it’s never a matter of calculating the odds and going with the winning side, but of doing what needs to be done — like that Roman soldier of Pompeii cited by Spengler in Man and Technics, whose Aryan sense of duty kept him at his post, as Vesuvius exploded in fire.

Six.

Viewed “objectively,” neither secession nor a white conservative reconquest has a chance, not one in a universe of infinite possibilities. Both are figments of a few white minds troubled by the prospect of their people’s imminent demise.

But that’s the way all great movements begin.

If a presently unattainable ideal is not first articulated as a mythic possibility, it remains unrealized, for its idealization is part of the process that quickens its realization.

In 1774, only a few believed in American independence. After 1776 it was a critical mass.

Secession, as such, cannot be submitted to the usual criticism, for it’s not a fact or even an idea so much as it is a way of being — or a wanting to be.

Central to its realization, therefore, is not the objective forces opposing it, but the subjective will seeking its triumph.

Many things, of course, would have to change before either secession or reconquest become remotely realizable (though our postmodern age, the Kali Yuga of the Traditionalists, is an age in which time and events have greatly accelerated, as all things hurtle toward the inevitable crackup, the Ragnarok, which precedes every rebirth).

The thought, nevertheless, of whites breaking free of the United States, in this period when the multi-cult empire has experienced the first of its death agonies, seems, from a secessionist perspective, somewhat less of a fantasy than trying to reform it, which sixty years of experience suggest is unreformable.

Seven.

Almost every criticisms that can be made of secession is to be found in Sam Francis’s “Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival” (1995).

Sam, who I have paid high tribute to in the pages of this journal, was an important transitional figure in the development of a white nationalist outlook.

Though one of his feet was solidly planted in the white nationalist camp, the other, however, was never quite freed from his former “new right” and paleocon beliefs. Divided, his critique of secession reflected an old-fashioned patriotism unwilling to break from the US — though, perhaps, if he had lived, he might feel differently, now that the dusky helmsman has begun steering the ship of state perilously close to the shoals of what promises to be an even more horrendous fate.

As an anti-secessionist, Sam considered separation from the United States tantamount to surrender — surrender of the country our ancestors created, surrender of its history, traditions, interests.

But Sam was wrong.

Secessionists surrender nothing but the slow death of their people. For among other things, secession is about survival — and the prospect of being able to fight another day.

To do that, one must live. But where, how?

For all practical purposes whites have lost the United States. Though still a near majority, we are surrounded by armed forces seeking our destruction; we are running out of ammunition, and the ground troops are being ordered in to clean up the remaining pockets of resistance. It looks as if we’re doomed.

Secession is a way of avoiding the deadly pincers closing in on white life.

In the last sixty years, absolutely NOTHING — not one little thing — has been accomplished to interrupt the programmed destruction of European America.
Nevertheless, the critics of secession drone on: “Why give up the country when you can take it back?”

These two-fisted patriots who think this is the most powerful argument against secession are likely to be singing the same song in the not too distanced future, when colored novelists start writing about “The Last of the Europeans.”

But even if feasible, what self-respecting white man would want to take back the United States, this monstrous, bureaucratic Leviathan whose Jewish, race-mixing, homophile, feminist, fraudulent, anti-Christian, and degenerate practices stand as an affront to everything his ancestors stood for.

The hard truth is that it’s gotten to the point where the US can no longer be defended as “my mother, drunk or sober,” only repulsed as an alien body-snatcher.

To this end, secessionists emulate the proud Danes, who said after the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1865, that “What has been lost externally will be gained internally.”

But more than refusing to abide the state responsible for their dispossession, secessionists see this “abomination of desolation” as their principal enemy. Only by freeing themselves from it and acquiring their own land under their own sovereignty do they see a future for their kind.

One might call this “surrendering large parts of the country to nonwhites” — though these aliens already occupy large parts of it and will continue to do so until whites are completely replaced.

The secessionists’ ultimate consideration, then, is not what will be lost, but what gives whites the best chance to survive.

“Any proposal for separation,” Sam argued, “would simply alienate the most patriotic and nationalist loyalties of American whites and lead them to see separatists as un-American.” Most whites would also “refuse to abandon their allegiance to the US or forsake its territory.”

Here Sam confused loyalty to the state with loyalty to the nation, paying tribute, in effect, to Caesar in his own coin. Given the logic of his argument, one might question what his position would have been in 1774, when secession from the Mother Country was originally proposed? Or what his position would be if the United States should start following in the footsteps of the former Soviet Union? And, finally, one wonders how patriotic most Americans are going to be once they discover that their grandchildren will be paying off the debts of the present US government — at a time when American citizenship will probably be little more than a form of Chinese peonage.

Secessionists don’t care if most whites would refuse to abandon “their” country. “Most” whites, de-Ayranized as they are, allowed a Negro to become president.
Only those who care for their kind and are willing to fight for them can possibly found a new nation.

The flag-waving, Constitution-worshipping types — who know nothing outside the ideology of liberal democracy, old (”conservative”) or new (”progressive”), and who believe that there is something sacred about the unholy United States — will never be mobilized for the sake of “racial preservation”; that ship has sailed.

In secessionist eyes, it’s better to lose a bit of territory and shed the race’s detritus than to lose whatever remains of the white nation — especially in view of the coming age, which is certain to be filled with cascading catastrophes, set off by the imploding contradictions of liberalism’s dystopian regime.

In the context of such a possible secession, Sam wondered how the races could possibly be separated and what would prevent them from “unseparating.” Here again he didn’t see what was coming. Since the end of the Second World War there have been numerous population transfers by partitioned states (the most important of which were sanctioned by the US). These transfers occurred in the recent past, will undoubtedly occur again, and already occur in little ways every day in the US, as the relocation of nonwhites forces whites out of their neighborhoods.

Secession implies both population transfers and territorial partition — historically justifiable measures, sanctioned by US precedent, and executable with a minimum of force, unlike the pipe dreams of anti-secessionists, whose imagined “reconquest” would be of a state with a hundred million nonwhite citizens, all with their hands out.

In its desire for cheap labor, Sam thought a separate white nation, would simply repeat the process that got whites into the present mess — as if the struggle for secession (and all it will entail) wouldn’t lead to an explicitly racial definition of nationality, to an inversion of the market’s primacy, and to a spiritual triumph over the materialism that has corrupted so many whites.

As a conservative, he couldn’t see that white secession (unlike the secession of the Confederacy) is a revolutionary project premised on a rejection not just of the illegal alienations of the federal government, but of the entire social, economic, and moral order sustaining its ethnocidal rule.

A white breakaway state, Sam also claimed, would be surrounded by hostile powers, vulnerable to invasion, and unable to defend itself against the rising demographic tide outside its borders. Again, these are non-criticisms. Any region seceded from the United States would have all the resources necessary for its survival. More crucially, the racially homogenous populace of a seceded white republic would be imbued with the nationalist fervor and irrepressible convictions that are the inevitable offshoots of newly forged nations.

To think that a mutilated United States, with its warring racial factions, welfare politics, and rubber-spine army would be able to crush an armed, autonomous white republic is to abandon the realm of logic. Even at the height of its expansionist powers, National Socialist Germany never thought of invading tiny, mountainous Switzerland, where every citizen was armed and ready to defend his nation. The US Army, need it be said, is no Wehrmacht.

Eight.

European Americans will not survive many more generations under the present regime.

Racially-conscious conservatives are counting on a future white backlash to mobilize in defense of white interests. Through such a mobilization, and a much talked about, though little practiced, “march through the institutions,” they hope to raise white racial consciousness, counter the demographic threat posed by nonwhites, and introduce political and legal reforms to curtail nonwhite power — all of which, of course, are totally desirable.

But they expect to arrive at this Utopia without explaining how they would counter a population half of which will be nonwhite in 33 years (2042); without explaining how they would challenge a government that criminalizes white dissent; without explaining how a system can be fundamentally changed without fundamentally changing the institutions and powers that govern it and make it what it is; without any of these things, racial conservatives mock the notion of secession, as if their own not particularly successful project is the sole conceivable alternative.

Nine.

Unlike their critics, secessionists have a plan, a simple, straightforward one, that offers whites an alternative to an unreformable system and an inescapable death.
This plan has the advantage of being (a) eminently political, (b) based on proven historical precedents, and (c) imbued with the power to generate a will to nationhood.

Given the increasingly totalitarian nature of the existing system, where the mere mention of “race” can be taken as an incitement to crimes against humanity, this aspect of secession, ought, perhaps, to be discussed in historical rather than explicitly programmatic terms.

Much of the history of European nationalism speaks to the American situation today, especially (in my admittedly partisan view) Irish nationalism.

In the 1870s and ’80s, a generation after the An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger), revolutionary and conservative nationalists agreed to be allies in the common struggle for Irish nationhood. The revolutionary Fenians, preeminently in the form of Michael Davitt’s Land League, which led the rebellion in the countryside, gave the constitutionalists in Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party the social leverage to force concessions from the English at Westminster — concessions that eventually won back many Irish lands. Then, once the constitutionalists had gone as far as they could, by about 1912 or 1914, the revolutionary, physical-force wing of Irish nationalism took over, completing the nationalist project.

We American secessionists want whatever works best for the future of our people. If our “constitutionalists,” perhaps in the form of a third party, can create dissension and vulnerability among the “English” in a way that promotes American interests, they are to be supported. But if they should fail, others are likely to turn, as did the Irish, to the methods of Connelly and Pearse.

Those who know Hibernian — or any other European — nationalist history also know the immeasurable power of the nation, especially the nation rising to nationhood.
This is the spirit we secessionists hope to stir in white Americans.

The situation today may be totally grim, but politically there is no more feasible or marketable of strategies to awaken our people, especially as they become aware of their approaching minority status and all it implies.

Imagine, then, for a moment, a white homeland in North America, free of the alien-dominated US government, with its colored multitudes and parasitic institutions: In my mind, this one image says everything, explains everything, promises everything.
The powerful imagery of an autonomous white nation also possesses the mythic potential that the General Strike has in the thought of Georges Sorel.

All great movements, Sorel saw, are driven not by rational arguments or party programs, but by their myths (which “are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act”).

For it is myth — and the memories and hopes animating it — that shape a nation, that turn a “motley horde” into a people with a shared sense of purpose and identity, that mobilize them against the state of things, and prepare them for self-sacrifice and self-rule.

A Sovereign Independent State, as the Irish called it in 1916 — the White Republic, as I call it — is the secessionist myth, symbolizing the determination of white men to assert themselves as a free people somewhere in an all-white America.

Why Are Internment Camps Being Built?

Why Are Internment Camps Being Built?

By Chuck Baldwin

The Internet is abuzz with news about the construction of internment camps all across America. Of course, “mainstream” media outlets refuse to touch the subject; or if they do, they pooh-pooh the story; they do what Glenn Beck recently did: try to debunk the story as fallacious and impugn people who speak of it as “conspiracy nuts.” The fact that the Becks, Hannitys, Limbaughs, and O’Reillys of the media circus refuse to deal with the construction of large numbers of internment camps does not make them disappear, however.

For starters, all anyone need do to begin a serious investigation of the subject of internment camps is Google the phrase “FEMA Camps.” There is more than enough evidence in that search engine alone to keep one busy with some in-depth private investigation of the subject for quite a while.

Another URL to check out is this one from the June 2009 Idaho Observer:

FEMA camps: Not just for April fools anymore

As people read my columns all across America, I have had numerous readers contact me, saying that they have personally witnessed the transportation of construction materials used for internment camps, have actually worked in and around them, or have personally seen such camps. These eyewitness testimonies have come from very credible people, including law enforcement and military personnel, as well as airline pilots and construction workers.

Just a few weeks ago, I was aboard a cross-country flight when the passenger I was sitting next to (a total stranger) asked me to take a look out the window. He asked, “Do those look like internment camps to you?” I was astonished that the man (1) would even know to notice such a potentiality, and (2) would be so bold as to ask such a question of a total stranger. I must say, I was extremely happy to make his acquaintance. And we had a very warm and invigorating discussion the rest of the trip.

We were flying over Colorado, over extreme wilderness terrain, and, yes, right in the middle of nowhere, the buildings and surrounding features that I saw sure looked like internment camps to me. Of course, flying at over 30,000 feet in the sky makes it difficult for any kind of detailed analysis to take place; that is for sure.

Then, a friend recently brought this URL to my attention:

http://www.nationalguard.com/careers/mos/description.php?mos_code=31E

This is an advertisement by the National Guard promoting the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) of “Internment/Resettlement Specialist.” Question: why does the National Guard need to recruit Internment/Resettlement Specialists? What do they know that we should know?

Furthermore, I have had military personnel tell me that many of the US military bases that have been recently “closed” are also being prepared as large-scale “holding areas.”

Obviously, the question that begs to be asked is, “Who is the US government planning to intern and resettle?” And another question is, “How many people are they planning to intern that would require the massive number of camps that are apparently being constructed?”

Some suggest that these facilities are being prepared for large numbers of illegal immigrants. This seems extremely doubtful, however, considering the propensity of the federal government to (1) do next to nothing to seriously curtail the flood of illegal aliens into America, (2) do virtually nothing tto apprehend illegals known to be in the US, and (3) do everything it can to facilitate the release of those illegals incarcerated by State and local authorities. To think that the federal government intends to place thousands of illegal aliens in internment camps borders on lunacy. If anything, the federal government (with either Democrats or Republicans in charge) has done everything it can to (1) entice illegals to come to America, and (2) provide every incentive for them to stay illegally in this country after having entered. I feel safe in saying that we can eliminate the possibility that these camps are being prepared for illegal aliens.

Others suggest that these internment camps are being constructed to accommodate “enemy combatants” from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet, the total number of these types of detainees is miniscule compared to the detention space being constructed. Can one really imagine the need to build facilities that could accommodate prisoners numbering in the tens of thousands to house a few hundred foreign troops? I don’t think so.

Then, of course, there are those who continue to deny that these internment camps exist at all. But then, were there not thousands of Germans who denied the existence of concentration camps during World War II? These types of people would refuse to believe the sun came up in the east if the government spinmeisters told them it didn’t.

That our federal government is building large numbers of “holding areas” or internment camps seems to be an established fact. The only questions that remain are “Why?” and “For whom?”

At this point, the imagination can take us anywhere, but it is not a little disconcerting when the same federal government that is building these internment camps begins categorizing Christians, conservatives, people who support the Second Amendment, people who oppose abortion and homosexual marriage, people who oppose the North American Union and the New World Order, people who oppose the United Nations and illegal immigration, and people who voted for Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin as “extremists,” or “potential dangerous militia members.”

Anyone knows that before a government can begin persecuting and imprisoning large groups of people, they must first marginalize them. As someone said, “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they really aren’t trying to get you.”

In fact, an argument could be made that by today’s politically correct definition, America’s Founding Fathers would be categorized as “paranoid,” “extremists,” or “potential dangerous militia members.” I would even go so far as to question the patriotism of anyone today that is not a little paranoid. This federal government has certainly earned whatever paranoia citizens feel.

Feelings of paranoia notwithstanding, why is the federal government constructing large numbers of internment camps, and who does the government plan on incarcerating in those camps? Those questions still need to be answered.

P.S. If you live within driving distance of Oklahoma City, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, I will be appearing at several events in this area this Thursday and Friday, August 13 and 14. I would love to meet any of my readers who could attend these meetings. For details, go here.

Dr. Chuck Baldwin is the pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. He hosts a weekly radio show. His website is here.

The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation is Likely

The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation is Likely

Webster Tarpley
Infowars
August 17, 2009

The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ..” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 – 1923.

	The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment.

During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency – and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff – strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.

TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931

Today, therefore, we are, so to speak, in the trough between the October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and banking panic of 2008) and the September 1931 wave, which this time around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?

The next wave is likely to involve a worldwide dollar panic. Using ballpark figures, we can say that there are about $4 to $5 trillion sloshing around the world in the form of hot money, US Treasury securities, Euro dollars, and various forms of zeno-dollars. Japan has about a trillion, China almost $2 trillion, and so forth. It is naturally very unwise for a developing country like China to hold so many dollars rather than using them to purchase needed infrastructure and capital goods, and the Chinese leaders are now very uncomfortable with their own foolish decision, which was of course taken under heavy US pressure. But the point is that this $4.5 trillion overhang is by its very nature exceedingly unstable. Every country that holds large sums of dollars or US Treasury bonds is nervously eyeing every other such country to see if they show signs of bolting for the exit. Up to now, so far as we know, no large holder of dollars has attempted to reduce its exposure to the battered greenback by dumping these dollars on the international market. If anyone did so, it would cause a true universal financial panic which would create chaos and mayhem not just in the United States and Great Britain, but in the vast areas of the rest of the world as well. This is concretely how hyperinflation could now very well arise: if one or more US creditor nations attempts to abruptly lighten up on dollars, the value of the US currency could undergo a catastrophic collapse, and that would spell runaway hyperinflation on the US domestic front.

World Dollar Panic Imminent?

We need to recall that the value of a modern currency is not determined inside the country, but rather on the international foreign exchange markets. This is where the fatal vulnerability of the US dollar is located. In the ruined form of the Bretton Woods system which has prevailed for almost 40 years since Nixon’s colossal historical vandalism of August 15, 1971, the US has emerged as the only country with a permanent license to finance imports by simply printing more of its own currency and sending those banknotes overseas. Every other country has to manufacture and export something that others want to buy in order to earn the necessary foreign exchange to pay for its own imports. The US license to print has made this country the buyer of last resort and the dumping ground for the unsold junk of the world, leading in the process to high permanent unemployment here. There are many signs that this inherently unworkable arrangement has now reached the breaking point.

International Currency Relations, Not Money Supply, Are The Key

Ms. Ellen Brown, who apparently supports the doctrines of the social credit movement of the 1930s, has recently argued that deflation is now on the agenda, and that hyperinflation can be ruled out. She bases this analysis on the fact that the private credit markets in this country have largely collapsed, and on the contention that the M1 and M2 money parameters have either declined or increased only slightly. But all of this is beside the point. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have so far provided almost $13 trillion of new loans to banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and other purely financial institutions.

This is being done in an effort to bailout the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble, of which something like two-thirds or more, meaning one quadrillion dollars, can be located inside the dollar zone. The world depression started when this derivatives bubble went into reverse leverage, meaning that super losses instead of super profits were generated at the apex of the speculative pyramid, as seen in the case of the $3 trillion AIG hedge fund located in London. The Obama regime is engaged in an hysterical attempt to restart derivatives production in the form of securitization, i.e. the creation of more and better asset backed securities derivatives. At the same time, the Obama regime has cynically and deliberately driven the Detroit automakers into bankruptcy, destroying hundreds of thousands of the few remaining industrial jobs here in the United States.

This means that US industrial production continues in drastic decline. The mere mention of production reminds us that the assorted Austrian, Chicago, and social credit schools are predominantly or exclusively concerned with money and banking, and pay little or no attention to industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural production, meaning of course that they neglect the creation of those tangible physical use values, capital goods, and related forms of real wealth upon which human existence depends. With bailouts increasing and all forms of commodity production declining, we have the classic situation of far too much money chasing too few goods. Internal pressure towards hyperinflation comes from the fact that the bailout and public debt lending, on top of the bloated, fictitious, and exponentially growing mass of kited derivatives, are all charges which must be added to the prices of commodity production.

Add this to the more important factor of looming dollar panic in the international exchanges, and the preponderance of the evidence points towards hyperinflation. “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke got his name from his famous recipe of throwing bales of dollars out of helicopters onto the lawns of bankers to stimulate the economy out of a depression, and this reminds us that the profile of the Anglo-American financial leadership from Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King to Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke is decidedly hyperinflationary. Ms. Brown’s belief that hyperinflation is impossible is therefore mistaken.

The German 1923 hyperinflation was generated internationally, not within Germany, as a campaign of economic warfare by Britain and France against their defeated rival. Germany had signed the Rapallo agreements with Soviet Russia, creating an economic combination which was more than a match for the Anglo-French. To abort the potential of Rapallo by creating chaos in the German economy, the Anglo-French systematically destroyed the value of the German Reichsmark on the international exchanges, taking advantage of the Versailles reparations system and the French occupation of the industrialized Ruhr area. The mark went down every day when the London exchange rate was announced. Today, it is the enormous international dollar overhang which threatens to annihilate the US greenback.

The one way deflation might actually come about is if someone like the self-professed Austrian school ideologue Ron Paul were to take power. Ron Pauls “libertarianism” alternative to Obama’s continued bailouts of Wall Street is evidently an immediate deflationary crash, which he asserts will be followed by an automatic recovery. Ron Paul is a modern representative of the so-called liquidationist school to which 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon belonged. Mellon demanded the liquidation of stocks, bonds, real estate, and labor. German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, another liquidationist, savagely cut German unemployment benefits (Ron Paul’s “nanny state”) at the height of the Depression, helping to bring on the debacle of January 1933. Liquidationists tend to be people who have money and who believe they will continue to have money even after an all-out crash, when they will be able to buy up distressed assets and desperate unemployed workers for rock-bottom prices and cash in. But liquidationism obviously cannot be a solution to depression of the entire society.

The recent meetings of the leaders of the expanded G-8 countries in L’Aquila, Italy were marked by a growing awareness that the US dollar, because of the criminally irresponsible policies of the Wall Street financiers who have dominated the Bush and Obama administrations, can no longer play the role of the single world reserve currency. Russian President Medvedev showed off a sort of future world coin to try to prod the Obama regime in the direction of serious world monetary reform, which is of course the urgent task before everyone.

Naturally, finance oligarchs like Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke want to continue to play the role of world currency dictators, and not be forced to negotiate the end of Anglo-American hegemonism. The world needs to go toward a new pro-growth world monetary system in which the euro, the yen, the dollar, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, a possible Latin American monetary unit, and a possible Arab monetary unit would all be included. It will be important to make the transition toward such a new system as orderly as possible, since a catastrophic collapse of the dollar in the short term would be to no one’s advantage, and would rather represent a sure path to universal ruin. World economic growth rates under the 1944 to 1971 Bretton Woods system were the highest in recorded history before or since. This was accomplished through statism and dirigism in the form of narrow bands of isolation among the currencies, combined with gold settlements of surpluses and deficits among the nations, which provided an indispensable reality principle to restrain the hyperinflationary tendencies of the Anglo-Americans. The new world monetary system should include the abolition of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their current forms, since these institutions have strangled the economic progress of the developing sector. Rather, the goal of the new monetary system should be to restart the export of high technology capital goods of the most modern type from Europe, Japan, and the United States toward the impoverished countries of Africa, South Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.

The Federal Government Should Stop Borrowing And Start Lending

Here in the United States, we need to wipe out the derivatives bubble with the help of a 1% Tobin tax or securities transfer tax, on all speculative financial transactions, including futures, options, stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, and so forth. A California Tobin tax would solve the state budget crisis. The top 16 Wall Street banks are zombie institutions that need to be seized and liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy at once, with all of their derivatives going into the shredder. Foreclosures on homes, farms, and businesses should be banned outright for five years or for the duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. To provide a credit supply, the Federal Reserve should be seized and nationalized, and used as a vehicle to issue 0% Federal credit for productive activities only, not for speculation.

To revive credit demand, state and local governments could then take out 0% Federal loans for such long overdue projects as the construction of 1,000 hospitals, the building of 50,000 miles of modern maglev rail systems, and 100 fourth-generation, high temperature, pebble bed nuclear reactors, plus the rebuilding of water systems and the interstate highway network. Idled auto plants should be reconverted for these purposes. Science drivers in the fields of space exploration and colonization, high energy physics, and biomedical research should also be fully funded in this way to provide technological modernization.

The social safety net needs to be expanded and developed, with larger Social Security pensions for a generation whose 401(k)s and IRAs have been largely destroyed, along with increased Medicare and Medicaid benefits for those whose insurance companies are insolvent, like AIG and The Hartford, which have been devastated by derivatives speculation. These are quite simply the requirements for the maintenance of human civilization in this part of the world. Until measures like these are carried out, the United States and the world will continue to sink deeper into the bottomless pit of economic depression.

Viral Success Of Obama Joker Posters Panics Authorities

Viral Success Of Obama Joker Posters Panics Authorities

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, August 17, 2009

Get the Obama as Joker for your own poster campaign. Please remember to post only in public commons spaces and not on government or private property.

The Obama Joker posters are still spreading virally across the country and the world as the authorities panic at the power of the grass roots to reach the masses almost in an instant, flying in the face of an establishment media which is controlled by a handful of powerful corporations.

The success of the Obama Joker poster campaign, started anonymously in Los Angeles and amplified after it was incorporated into an Infowars contest, can be measured against the achievements of America’s foremost contemporary street artist, Shepard Fairey, who was responsible for designing the Obama “HOPE” flyers that were posted in public places before the 2008 presidential election, an image labeled “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’” by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

Fairey admitted that he was in contact with the Obama campaign team following the release of the early versions of his poster, and that they directed him in creating new posters. The original poster carried the word “PROGRESS,” but this was later changed to “HOPE” on the insistence of the Obama campaign, along with two other versions which read, “VOTE” and “CHANGE”.

President Obama himself later wrote to Fairey expressing his gratitude to the designer for putting out the images and also lending support for people who were posting them in public, an action which attracted little attention from the authorities, who on the contrary reacted hysterically to the anti-Obama Joker posters and immediately sought arrests and denounced the flyers as “vandalism,” characterizing them as some kind of assault on “victims” of a dastardly crime.

Fairey was largely dismissive of the Obama Joker poster, rather pedantically arguing that it wasn’t grammatically correct because the word should have been “socialist” not “socialism,” but he was forced to admit that the posters sent a powerful message.

“The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly,” Fairey told the L.A. Times. “The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can’t be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama — bam.”

It took the best part of a decade for Fairey’s iconic “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” street art to go viral, but in the Internet age, the Obama Joker image has already trumped it in a matter of weeks.

The flyers have already hit Wall Street, Tokyo Japan, Berlin Germany, and hundreds of towns and cities across America.

Attempts on behalf of authorities and the media to propagate the contrived hoax that the majority of people are “disgusted” by the image have been proven fraudulent by polls showing that most people support the first amendment rights of people to post the flyers.

Likewise, efforts to chill free speech and intimidate people from exercising their first amendment have merely been met with an intensified effort to post more and more of the Obama Joker posters.

Early claims that the poster had racist overtones were shot down when images were unearthed of George W. Bush depicted as the Joker, as well as a blood-sucking vampire. Lazy attempts to play the race card in an attempt to dismiss the grass roots power of the Obama as Joker meme failed completely.

Indeed, caricatures of political figures have been part of the fabric of American society for hundreds of years. Satirical lampooning of authority figures by means of stylized cartoonish parodies is an American tradition, and has nothing whatsoever to do with racism.

The success of the Obama Joker poster campaign, concurrent with Obama’s rapidly sinking popular approval figures, is proof that even in the face of a locked down corporate media owned by a handful of interests, the people can still communicate with the masses and obtain instant recognition by means of viral campaigns coordinated through the alternative media and the Internet.

This Economic Depression is Just Beginning

This Economic Depression is Just Beginning

Economics / Great Depression II Aug 05, 2009 – 02:10 AM

By: Mike_Whitney

Too bad Pulitzers aren’t handed out for blog-entries. This year’s award would go to Zero Hedge for its “The ‘Money on the Sidelines’ Fallacy” post. This short entry shows why the economy will continue its downward slide and why the US consumer will not get off the mat and resume spending as he has in the past. The fact is the Net Wealth of US Households has “declined from a peak of $22 trillion to just under $12 trillion in early March.”

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Ouch!

The problem is compounded by the fact that Total US Household debt, as of first quarter 2009, amounts to roughly $13 trillion, and has stayed within that range for the last 3 and a half years.

Zero Hedge:

“From the end of 2007 through Q1 of 2009, household equity has declined by 94%. Is it surprising that today’s GDP number would have been a complete debacle if the consumer had been left alone to prop the U.S. economy, on whom 70% of the economy is reliant? Obama pulled a Hail Mary with the stimulus: without it there would be no debate America is in a depression right now.” (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/money-sidelines-fallacy)

What does all this mean?

It means the consumer is down-for-the-count. His credit lines have been cut, his home equity eviscerated, and his checking account swimming in red ink. That spells trouble for an economy that’s 70% dependent on consumer spending for growth….which brings us to another interesting point. The uptick in GDP last quarter was almost entirely the result of the surge in government spending; ie “fiscal and monetary stimulus”. How long can that go on? How long will China keep slurping up US Treasuries rather than let their currency rise? Here’s a clip from the Wall Street Journal on Friday:

“Shaky auctions of Treasury notes this week reignited concerns about whether the government can attract buyers from China and elsewhere to soak up trillions in new debt.

A fuse was lit this week when traders noted China’s apparent absence from direct participation in two Treasury bond auctions. While China may have bought Treasurys just before the auctions, market participants read the country’s actions as a worrying sign that China and other foreign investors may be ratcheting back purchases at a time when the U.S. is seeking to fund a $1.8 trillion budget deficit.

This week alone, the U.S. deluged the bond market with more than $200 billion in record-size sales. The U.S. has had little trouble finding buyers in recent months. But that demand is fading, and the Treasury market has become volatile.”

Uncle Sam is goosing the bond market just like he is the stock market. (more on that later) Take a look at Treasury’s latest bit of chicanery which appeared in the back pages of the Wall Street Journal in June:

“The sudden increase in demand by foreign buyers for Treasurys, hailed as proof that the world’s central banks are still willing to help absorb the avalanche of supply, mightn’t be all that it seems.

When the government sells bonds, traders typically look at a group of buyers called indirect bidders, which includes foreign central banks, to divine overseas demand for U.S. debt. That demand has been rising recently, giving comfort to investors that foreign buyers will continue to finance the U.S.’s budget deficit.

But in a little-noticed switch on June 1, the Treasury changed the way it accounts for indirect bids, putting more buyers under that umbrella and boosting the portion of recent Treasury sales that the market perceived were being bought by foreigners.” (“Is foreign Demand as solid as it looks, Min zeng)

Hmmmm.

So, someone doesn’t want you and me to know that foreign demand has gone to the dogs. That’s not encouraging. So, they move the shells around the table and “Presto”—central banks and foreign investors can’t get enough of those fetid T-Bills. What a racket.

This is what happens when monetary policy is handed over to bank-vermin and Ponzi-scam artists. Anything goes!

The Zero Hedge article shows that homeowners used the equity in their homes to fuel the soaring stock market.

Zero Hedge: “Most interesting is the correlation between Money Market totals and the listed stock value since the March lows: a $2.7 trillion move in equities was accompanied by a less than $400 billion reduction in Money Market accounts!

Where, may we ask, did the balance of $2.3 trillion in purchasing power come from? Why the Federal Reserve of course, which directly and indirectly subsidized U.S. banks (and foreign ones through liquidity swaps) for roughly that amount. Apparently these banks promptly went on a buying spree to raise the all important equity market, so that the U.S. consumer who net equity was almost negative on March 31, could have some semblance of confidence back and would go ahead and max out his credit card. Alas, as one can see in the money multiplier and velocity of money metrics, U.S. consumers couldn’t care less about leveraging themselves any more.”

You read that right! Only $400 billion of that fantastic 6 month “green shoots” stock market rally came from money market accounts. The rest ($2.3 trillion) was laundered through the banks and other financial institutions to create the appearance of recovery and to raise equity for underwater banks rather than forcing them into receivership (which is where they belong) Bernanke probably knew that congress wouldn’t approve another TARP-type bailout for dodgy mortgage-backed assets, so he settled on this shifty plan instead. The only problem is, the banks are still broke, business investment is at historic lows, consumers are on the ropes, the unemployment lines are swelling, the homeless shelters are bulging, the pawn shops are bustling, tent cities are sprouting up everywhere, and according to MarketWatch, Corporate insiders have recently been selling their companies’ shares at a greater pace than at any time since the top of the bull market in the fall of 2007.”

Face it; the economy is in the crapper and Bernanke’s trickery hasn’t done a lick of good.

It’s been two years since the crisis began and nothing… NOTHING has been done to fix the banking system or force the banks to write-down their shi**y assets to market. But the losses are real and no amount of Congressionally approved accounting hanky-panky (like suspending mark-to-market) will change a bloody thing.

So, how bad will it get?

Well, it depends on whether the FDIC decides to continue to allow financial institutions like Corus and Guaranty Banks to operate with “negative Tier 1 ratio” hoping that all the green shoots happy talk can turn insolvent institutions into thriving mega-banks. “Abrakadabra”.

Karl Denninger explains this latest hoax in a recent entry on his site Market Ticker:

“So what’s going on here?

Simple: An enormous number of banks are holding loans at or close to “par” that really aren’t. They’re holding mortgages at massively-inflated values, even on defaulted properties, and this is why you are not seeing more foreclosure sales – that is, why inventory is being held back. If they sell it the accountants will force recognition of the loss, which will render them instantly insolvent, but so long as they “extend and pretend” they are marking these loans way, way above recovery value. The upshot of this is that these firms’ balance sheet claims on asset values are massively inflated, regulators know it, and they’re intentionally ignoring it.”

Bingo! It’s all 100% fakery conducted right under the nose of the Fed, the Treasury and the FDIC.

How many hundreds of banks are being kept on life-support because the FDIC is down to its last few farthings and doesn’t want to ignite a panic?

Stay tuned.

The banking system is insolvent and the fact that the politically-connected big banks talked their their friends at the Fed into pumping liquidity into equities so they could access the capital markets, doesn’t change matters for the hundreds of local and regional banks that will be caught in next year’s downdraft. Prepare for massive consolidation with G-Sax and JPM left to pick up former competitors for pennies on the dollar.

FIRING UP THE PRINTING PRESS

Keep in mind that Wall Street veterans knew from the very beginning that Bernanke’s quantitative easing (QE) was a load of malarkey intended to justify keeping toxic asset prices artificially high while pumping trillions into the stock market. Here’s former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler’s analysis way back in May:

“On March 18, the Federal Reserve announced it would purchase up to $300 billion of long-term bonds as well as $750 billion of mortgage-backed securities. Of all the Fed’s moves, this “quantitative easing” gets money into the economy the fastest — basically by cranking the handle of the printing press and flooding the market with dollars (in reality, with additional bank credit). Since these dollars are not going into home building, coal-fired electric plants or auto factories, they end up in the stock market.

A rising market means that banks are able to raise much-needed equity from private money funds instead of from the feds. …..It’s almost as if someone engineered a stock-market rally to entice private investors to fund the banks rather than taxpayers.” (Andy Kessler “Was it a Sucker’s Rally” Wall Street Journal)

What a swindle.

Bernanke’s had a good go-of-it, juicing the market through the backdoor and concealing–as much as possible–who is still buying US Treasuries. (who knows; maybe it’s the Fed buying its own paper offshore?!?) But what good will it do? The US consumer is broke; the tank is on empty. Household equity has declined by 94%, jobs are scarce, personal savings are rising, and families are cutting back and hunkering down. It will take a decade or more before household debt is whittled-away to a point where people can consume at pre-crisis levels. Another stock market bubble won’t change a damn thing. This Depression is just beginning.

By Mike Whitney

Email: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Mike is a well respected freelance writer living in Washington state, interested in politics and economics from a libertarian perspective.

Entering the Greatest Economic Depression in History, More Bubbles Waiting to Burst

Economics / Great Depression II Aug 09, 2009 – 07:34 AM

By: Global_Research

Andrew G. Marshall writes: While there is much talk of a recovery on the horizon, commentators are forgetting some crucial aspects of the financial crisis. The crisis is not simply composed of one bubble, the housing real estate bubble, which has already burst. The crisis has many bubbles, all of which dwarf the housing bubble burst of 2008. Indicators show that the next possible burst is the commercial real estate bubble. However, the main event on the horizon is the “bailout bubble” and the general world debt bubble, which will plunge the world into a Great Depression the likes of which have never before been seen.

//

Housing Crash Still Not Over

The housing real estate market, despite numbers indicating an upward trend, is still in trouble, as, “Houses are taking months to sell. Many buyers are having trouble getting financing as lenders and appraisers struggle to figure out what houses are really worth in the wake of the collapse.” Further, “the overall market remains very soft [...] aside from speculators and first-time buyers.” Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington said, “It would be wrong to imagine that we have hit a turning point in the market,” as “There is still an enormous oversupply of housing, which means that the direction of house prices will almost certainly continue to be downward.” Foreclosures are still rising in many states “such as Nevada, Georgia and Utah, and economists say rising unemployment may push foreclosures higher into next year.” Clearly, the housing crisis is still not at an end.[1]

The Commercial Real Estate Bubble

In May, Bloomberg quoted Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann as saying, “It’s either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.” Bloomberg further pointed out that, “A piece of the puzzle that must be calculated into any determination of the depth of our economic doldrums is the condition of commercial real estate — the shopping malls, hotels, and office buildings that tend to go along with real- estate expansions.” Residential investment went down 28.9 % from 2006 to 2007, and at the same time, nonresidential investment grew 24.9%, thus, commercial real estate was “serving as a buffer against the declining housing market.”

Commercial real estate lags behind housing trends, and so too, will the crisis, as “commercial construction projects are losing their appeal.” Further, “there are lots of reasons to suspect that commercial real estate was subject to some of the loose lending practices that afflicted the residential market. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Survey of Credit Underwriting Practices found that whereas in 2003 just 2 percent of banks were easing their underwriting standards on commercial construction loans, by 2006 almost a third of them were relaxing.” In May it was reported that, “Almost 80 percent of domestic banks are tightening their lending standards for commercial real-estate loans,” and that, “we may face double-bubble trouble for real estate and the economy.”[2]

In late July of 2009, it was reported that, “Commercial real estate’s decline is a significant issue facing the economy because it may result in more losses for the financial industry than residential real estate.  This category includes apartment buildings, hotels, office towers, and shopping malls.” Worth noting is that, “As the economy has struggled, developers and landlords have had to rely on a helping hand from the US Federal Reserve in order to try to get credit flowing so that they can refinance existing buildings or even to complete partially constructed projects.” So again, the Fed is delaying the inevitable by providing more liquidity to an already inflated bubble. As the Financial Post pointed out, “From Vancouver to Manhattan, we are seeing rising office vacancies and declines in office rents.”[3]

In April of 2009, it was reported that, “Office vacancies in U.S. downtowns increased to 12.5 percent in the first quarter, the highest in three years, as companies cut jobs and new buildings came onto the market,” and, “Downtown office vacancies nationwide could come close to 15 percent by the end of this year, approaching the 10-year high of 15.5 percent in 2003.”[4]

In the same month it was reported that, “Strip malls, neighborhood centers and regional malls are losing stores at the fastest pace in at least a decade, as a spending slump forces retailers to trim down to stay afloat.” In the first quarter of 2009, retail tenants “have vacated 8.7 million square feet of commercial space,” which “exceeds the 8.6 million square feet of retail space that was vacated in all of 2008.” Further, as CNN reported, “vacancy rates at malls rose 9.5% in the first quarter, outpacing the 8.9% vacancy rate registered in all of 2008.” Of significance for those that think and claim the crisis will be over by 2010, “mall vacancies [are expected] to exceed historical levels through 2011,” as for retailers, “it’s only going to get worse.”[5] Two days after the previous report, “General Growth Properties Inc, the second-largest U.S. mall owner, declared bankruptcy on [April 16] in the biggest real estate failure in U.S. history.”[6]

In April, the Financial Times reported that, “Property prices in China are likely to halve over the next two years, a top government researcher has predicted in a powerful signal that the country’s economic downturn faces further challenges despite recent positive data.” This is of enormous significance, as “The property market, along with exports, were leading drivers of the booming Chinese economy over the past decade.” Further, “an apparent rebound in the property market was unsustainable over the medium term and being driven by a flood of liquidity and fraudulent activity rather than real demand.” A researcher at a leading Chinese government think tank reported that, “he expected average urban residential property prices to fall by 40 to 50 per cent over the next two years from their levels at the end of 2008.”[7]

In April, it was reported that, “The Federal Reserve is considering offering longer loans to investors in commercial mortgage-backed securities as part of a plan to help jump-start the market for commercial real estate debt.” Since February the Fed “has been analyzing appropriate terms and conditions for accepting commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) and other mortgage assets as collateral for its Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility (TALF).”[8]

In late July, the Financial Times reported that, “Two of America’s biggest banks, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo … threw into sharp relief the mounting woes of the US commercial property market when they reported large losses and surging bad loan,” as “The disappointing second-quarter results for two of the largest lenders and investors in office, retail and industrial property across the US confirmed investors’ fears that commercial real estate would be the next front in the financial crisis after the collapse of the housing market.” The commercial property market, worth $6.7 trillion, “which accounts for more than 10 per cent of US gross domestic product, could be a significant hurdle on the road to recovery.”[9]

The Bailout Bubble

While the bailout, or the “stimulus package” as it is often referred to, is getting good coverage in terms of being portrayed as having revived the economy and is leading the way to the light at the end of the tunnel, key factors are again misrepresented in this situation.

At the end of March of 2009, Bloomberg reported that, “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year.” This amount “works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.”[10]

Gerald Celente, the head of the Trends Research Institute, the major trend-forecasting agency in the world, wrote in May of 2009 of the “bailout bubble.” Celente’s forecasts are not to be taken lightly, as he accurately predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1998 Russian economic collapse, the 1997 East Asian economic crisis, the 2000 Dot-Com bubble burst, the 2001 recession, the start of a recession in 2007 and the housing market collapse of 2008, among other things.

On May 13, 2009, Celente released a Trend Alert, reporting that, “The biggest financial bubble in history is being inflated in plain sight,” and that, “This is the Mother of All Bubbles, and when it explodes [...] it will signal the end to the boom/bust cycle that has characterized economic activity throughout the developed world.” Further, “This is much bigger than the Dot-com and Real Estate bubbles which hit speculators, investors and financiers the hardest. However destructive the effects of these busts on employment, savings and productivity, the Free Market Capitalist framework was left intact. But when the ‘Bailout Bubble’ explodes, the system goes with it.”

Celente further explained that, “Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing … and producing next to nothing … defines the ‘Bailout Bubble.’ Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the “Bailout Bubble” pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another.” Celente elaborated, “Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war,” and that, “While we cannot pinpoint precisely when the ‘Bailout Bubble’ will burst, we are certain it will. When it does, it should be understood that a major war could follow.”[11]

However, this “bailout bubble” that Celente was referring to at the time was the $12.8 trillion reported by Bloomberg. As of July, estimates put this bubble at nearly double the previous estimate.

As the Financial Times reported in late July of 2009, while the Fed and Treasury hail the efforts and impact of the bailouts, “Neil Barofsky, special inspector-general for the troubled asset relief programme, [TARP] said that the various US schemes to shore up banks and restart lending exposed federal agencies to a risk of $23,700bn  [$23.7 trillion] – a vast estimate that was immediately dismissed by the Treasury.” The inspector-general of the TARP program stated that there were “fundamental vulnerabilities . . . relating to conflicts of interest and collusion, transparency, performance measures, and anti-money laundering.”

Barofsky also reports on the “considerable stress” in commercial real estate, as “The Fed has begun to open up Talf to commercial mortgage-backed securities to try to influence credit conditions in the commercial real estate market. The report draws attention to a new potential credit crunch when $500bn worth of real estate mortgages need to be refinanced by the end of the year.” Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Fed, and Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary and former President of the New York Fed, are seriously discussing extending TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility) into “CMBS [Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities] and other assets such as small business loans and whether to increase the size of the programme.” It is the “expansion of the various programmes into new and riskier asset classes is one of the main bones of contention between the Treasury and Mr Barofsky.”[12]

Testifying before Congress, Barofsky said, “From programs involving large capital infusions into hundreds of banks and other financial institutions, to a mortgage modification program designed to modify millions of mortgages, to public-private partnerships using tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to purchase ‘toxic’ assets from banks, TARP has evolved into a program of unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity.” He explained that, “The total potential federal government support could reach up to 23.7 trillion dollars.”[13]

Is a Future Bailout Possible?

In early July of 2009, billionaire investor Warren Buffet said that, “unemployment could hit 11 percent and a second stimulus package might be needed as the economy struggles to recover from recession,” and he further stated that, “we’re not in a recovery.”[14] Also in early July, an economic adviser to President Obama stated that, “The United States should be planning for a possible second round of fiscal stimulus to further prop up the economy.”[15]

In August of 2009, it was reported that, “THE Obama administration will consider dishing out more money to rein in unemployment despite signs the recession is ending,” and that, “Treasury secretary Tim Geithner also conceded tax hikes could be on the agenda as the government worked to bring its huge recovery-related deficits under control.” Geithner said, “we will do what it takes,” and that, “more federal cash could be tipped into the recovery as unemployment benefits amid projections the benefits extended to 1.5 million jobless Americans will expire without Congress’ intervention.” However, any future injection of money could be viewed as “a second stimulus package.”[16]

The Washington Post reported in early July of a Treasury Department initiative known as “Plan C.” The Plan C team was assembled “to examine what could yet bring [the economy] down and has identified several trouble spots that could threaten the still-fragile lending industry,” and “the internal project is focused on vexing problems such as the distressed commercial real estate markets, the high rate of delinquencies among homeowners, and the struggles of community and regional banks.”

Further, “The team is also responsible for considering potential government responses, but top officials within the Obama administration are wary of rolling out initiatives that would commit massive amounts of federal resources.” The article elaborated in saying that, “The creation of Plan C is a sign that the government has moved into a new phase of its response, acting preemptively rather than reacting to emerging crises.” In particular, the near-term challenge they are facing is commercial real estate lending, as “Banks and other firms that provided such loans in the past have sharply curtailed lending,” leaving “many developers and construction companies out in the cold.” Within the next couple years, “these groups face a tidal wave of commercial real estate debt — some estimates peg the total at more than $3 trillion — that they will need to refinance. These loans were issued during this decade’s construction boom with the mistaken expectation that they would be refinanced on the same generous terms after a few years.”

However, as a result of the credit crisis, “few developers can find anyone to refinance their debt, endangering healthy and distressed properties.” Kim Diamond, a managing director at Standard & Poor’s, stated that, “It’s not a degree to which people are willing to lend,” but rather, “The question is whether a loan can be made at all.” Important to note is that, “Financial analysts said losses on commercial real estate loans are now the single largest cause of bank failures,” and that none of the bailout efforts enacted “is big enough to address the size of the problem.”[17]

So the question must be asked: what is Plan C contemplating in terms of a possible government “solution”? Another bailout? The effect that this would have would be to further inflate the already monumental bailout bubble.

The Great European Bubble

In October of 2008, Germany and France led a European Union bailout of 1 trillion Euros, and “World markets initially soared as European governments pumped billions into crippled banks. Central banks in Europe also mounted a new offensive to restart lending by supplying unlimited amounts of dollars to commercial banks in a joint operation.”[18]

The American bailouts even went to European banks, as it was reported in March of 2009 that, “European banks declined to discuss a report that they were beneficiaries of the $173 billion bail-out of insurer AIG,” as “Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and a host of other U.S. and European banks had been paid roughly $50 billion since the Federal Reserve first extended aid to AIG.” Among the European banks, “French banks Societe Generale and Calyon on Sunday declined to comment on the story, as did Deutsche Bank, Britain’s Barclays and unlisted Dutch group Rabobank.” Other banks that got money from the US bailout include HSBC, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Banco Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland. Because AIG was essentially insolvent, “the bailout enabled AIG to pay its counterparty banks for extra collateral,” with “Goldman Sachs and Deutsche bank each receiving $6 billion in payments between mid-September and December.”[19]

In April of 2009, it was reported that, “EU governments have committed 3 trillion Euros [or $4 trillion dollars] to bail out banks with guarantees or cash injections in the wake of the global financial crisis, the European Commission.”[20]

In early February of 2009, the Telegraph published a story with a startling headline, “European banks may need 16.3 trillion pound bail-out, EC document warns.” Type this headline into google, and the link to the Telegraph appears. However, click on the link, and the title has changed to “European bank bail-out could push EU into crisis.” Further, they removed any mention of the amount of money that may be required for a bank bailout. The amount in dollars, however, nears $25 trillion. The amount is the cumulative total of the troubled assets on bank balance sheets, a staggering number derived from the derivatives trade.

The Telegraph reported that, “National leaders and EU officials share fears that a second bank bail-out in Europe will raise government borrowing at a time when investors – particularly those who lend money to European governments – have growing doubts over the ability of countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Britain to pay it back.”[21]

When Eastern European countries were in desperate need of financial aid, and discussion was heated on the possibility of an EU bailout of Eastern Europe, the EU, at the behest of Angela Merkel of Germany, denied the East European bailout. However, this was more a public relations stunt than an actual policy position.

While the EU refused money to Eastern Europe in the form of a bailout, in late March European leaders “doubled the emergency funding for the fragile economies of central and eastern Europe and pledged to deliver another doubling of International Monetary Fund lending facilities by putting up 75bn Euros (70bn pounds).” EU leaders “agreed to increase funding for balance of payments support available for mainly eastern European member states from 25bn Euros to 50bn Euros.”[22]

As explained in a Times article in June of 2009, Germany has been deceitful in its public stance versus its actual policy decisions. The article, worth quoting in large part, first explained that:

Europe is now in the middle of a perfect storm – a confluence of three separate, but interconnected economic crises which threaten far greater devastation than Britain or America have suffered from the credit crunch: the collapse of German industry and employment, the impending bankruptcy of Central European homeowners and businesses; and the threat of government debt defaults from loss of monetary control by the Irish Republic, Greece and Portugal, for instance on the eurozone periphery.

Taking the case of Latvia, the author asks, “If the crisis expands, other EU governments – and especially Germany’s – will face an existential question. Do they commit hundreds of billions of euros to guarantee the debts of fellow EU countries? Or do they allow government defaults and devaluations that may ultimately break up the single currency and further cripple German industry, as well as the country’s domestic banks?” While addressing that, “Publicly, German politicians have insisted that any bailouts or guarantees are out of the question,” however, “the pass has been quietly sold in Brussels, while politicians loudly protested their unshakeable commitment to defend it.”

The author addressed how in October of 2008:

[...] a previously unused regulation was discovered, allowing the creation of a 25 billion Euros “balance of payments facility” and authorising the EU to borrow substantial sums under its own “legal personality” for the first time. This facility was doubled again to 50 billion Euros in March. If Latvia’s financial problems turn into a full-scale crisis, these guarantees and cross-subsidies between EU governments will increase to hundreds of billions in the months ahead and will certainly mutate into large-scale centralised EU borrowing, jointly guaranteed by all the taxpayers of the EU.

[...] The new EU borrowing, for example, is legally an ‘off-budget’ and ‘back-to-back’ arrangement, which allows Germany to maintain the legal fiction that it is not guaranteeing the debts of Latvia et al. The EU’s bond prospectus to investors, however, makes quite clear where the financial burden truly lies: “From an investor’s point of view the bond is fully guaranteed by the EU budget and, ultimately, by the EU Member States.”[23]

So Eastern Europe is getting, or presumably will get bailed out. Whether this is in the form of EU federalism, providing loans of its own accord, paid for by European taxpayers, or through the IMF, which will attach any loans with its stringent Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) conditionalities, or both. It turned out that the joint partnership of the IMF and EU is what provided the loans and continues to provide such loans.

As the Financial Times pointed out in August of 2009, “Bank failures or plunging currencies in the three Baltic nations – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – could threaten the fragile prospect of recovery in the rest of Europe. These countries also sit on one of the world’s most sensitive political fault-lines. They are the European Union’s frontier states, bordering Russia.” In July, Latvia “agreed its second loan in eight months from the IMF and the EU,” following the first one in December. Lithuania is reported to be following suit. However, as the Financial Times noted, the loans came with the IMF conditionalities: “The injection of cash is the good news. The bad news is that, in return for shoring up state finances, the new IMF deal will require the Latvian government to impose yet more pain on its suffering population. Public-sector wages have already been cut by about a third this year. Pensions have been sliced. Now the IMF requires Latvia to cut another 10 per cent from the state budget this autumn.”[24]

If we are to believe the brief Telegraph report pertaining to nearly $25 trillion in bad bank assets, which was removed from the original article for undisclosed reasons, not citing a factual retraction, the question is, does this potential bailout still stand? These banks haven’t been rescued financially from the EU, so, presumably, these bad assets are still sitting on the bank balance sheets. This bubble has yet to blow. Combine this with the $23.7 trillion US bailout bubble, and there is nearly $50 trillion between the EU and the US waiting to burst.

An Oil Bubble

In early July of 2009, the New York Times reported that, “The extreme volatility that has gripped oil markets for the last 18 months has shown no signs of slowing down, with oil prices more than doubling since the beginning of the year despite an exceptionally weak economy.” Instability in the oil and gas prices has led many to “fear it could jeopardize a global recovery.” Further, “It is also hobbling businesses and consumers,” as “A wild run on the oil markets has occurred in the last 12 months.” Oil prices reached a record high last summer at $145/barrel, and with the economic crisis they fell to $33/barrel in December. However, since the start of 2009, oil has risen 55% to $70/barrel.

As the Times article points out, “the recent rise in oil prices is reprising the debate from last year over the role of investors — or speculators — in the commodity markets.” Energy officials from the EU and OPEC met in June and concluded that, “the speculation issue had not been resolved yet and that the 2008 bubble could be repeated.”[25]

In June of 2009, Hedge Fund manager Michael Masters told the US Senate that, “Congress has not done enough to curb excessive speculation in the oil markets, leaving the country vulnerable to another price run-up in 2009.” He explained that, “oil prices are largely not determined by supply and demand but the trading desks of large Wall Street firms.” Because “Nothing was actually done by Congress to put an end to the problem of excessive speculation” in 2008, Masters explained, “there is nothing to prevent another bubble in oil prices in 2009. In fact, signs of another possible bubble are already beginning to appear.”[26]

In May of 2008, Goldman Sachs warned that oil could reach as much as $200/barrel within the next 12-24 months [up to May 2010]. Interestingly, “Goldman Sachs is one of the largest Wall Street investment banks trading oil and it could profit from an increase in prices.”[27] However, this is missing the key point. Not only would Goldman Sachs profit, but Goldman Sachs plays a major role in sending oil prices up in the first place.

As Ed Wallace pointed out in an article in Business Week in May of 2008, Goldman Sachs’ report placed the blame for such price hikes on “soaring demand” from China and the Middle East, combined with the contention that the Middle East has or would soon peak in its oil reserves. Wallace pointed out that:

Goldman Sachs was one of the founding partners of online commodities and futures marketplace Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). And ICE has been a primary focus of recent congressional investigations; it was named both in the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy & Commerce’s hearing last December. Those investigations looked into the unregulated trading in energy futures, and both concluded that energy prices’ climb to stratospheric heights has been driven by the billions of dollars’ worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE—which is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.[28]

Essentially, Goldman Sachs is one of the key speculators in the oil market, and thus, plays a major role in driving oil prices up on speculation. This must be reconsidered in light of the resurgent rise in oil prices in 2009. In July of 2009, “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. posted record earnings as revenue from trading and stock underwriting reached all-time highs less than a year after the firm took $10 billion in U.S. rescue funds.”[29] Could one be related to the other?

Bailouts Used in Speculation

In November of 2008, the Chinese government injected an “$849 billion stimulus package aimed at keeping the emerging economic superpower growing.”[30] China then recorded a rebound in the growth rate of the economy, and underwent a stock market boom. However, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in July of 2009, “Its growth is now fuelled by cheap debt rather than corporate profits and retained earnings, and this shift in the medium term threatens to undermine China’s economic decoupling from the global slump.” Further, “overseas money has been piling into China, inflating foreign exchange reserves and domestic liquidity. So perhaps it is not surprising that outstanding bank loans have doubled in the last few years, or that there is much talk of a shadow banking system. Then there is China’s reputation for building overcapacity in its industrial sector, a notoriety it won even before the crash in global demand. This showed a disregard for returns that is always a tell-tale sign of cheap money.”

China’s economy primarily relies upon the United States as a consumption market for its cheap products. However, “The slowdown in U.S. consumption amid a credit crunch has exposed the weaknesses in this export-led financing model. So now China is turning instead to cheap debt for funding, a shift suggested by this year’s 35% or so rise in bank loans.”[31]

In August of 2009, it was reported that China is experiencing a “stimulus-fueled stock market boom.” However, this has caused many leaders to “worry that too much of the $1-trillion lending binge by state banks that paid for China’s nascent revival was diverted into stocks and real estate, raising the danger of a boom and bust cycle and higher inflation less than two years after an earlier stock market bubble burst.”[32]

The same reasoning needs to be applied to the US stock market surge. Something is inherently and structurally wrong with a financial system in which nothing is being produced, 600,000 jobs are lost monthly, and yet, the stock market goes up. Why is the stock market going up?

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which provided $700 billion in bank bailouts, started under Bush and expanded under Obama, entails that the US Treasury purchases $700 billion worth of “troubled assets” from banks, and in turn, “that banks cannot be asked to account for their use of taxpayer money.”[33]

So if banks don’t have to account for where the money goes, where did it go? They claim it went back into lending. However, bank lending continues to go down.[34] Stock market speculation is the likely answer. Why else would stocks go up, lending continue downwards, and the bailout money be unaccounted for?

What Does the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Have to Say?

In late June, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank of the world’s central banks, the most prestigious and powerful financial organization in the world, delivered an important warning. It stated that, “fiscal stimulus packages may provide no more than a temporary boost to growth, and be followed by an extended period of economic stagnation.”

The BIS, “The only international body to correctly predict the financial crisis … has warned the biggest risk is that governments might be forced by world bond investors to abandon their stimulus packages, and instead slash spending while lifting taxes and interest rates,” as the annual report of the BIS “has for the past three years been warning of the dangers of a repeat of the depression.” Further, “Its latest annual report warned that countries such as Australia faced the possibility of a run on the currency, which would force interest rates to rise.” The BIS warned that, “a temporary respite may make it more difficult for authorities to take the actions that are necessary, if unpopular, to restore the health of the financial system, and may thus ultimately prolong the period of slow growth.”

Of immense import is the BIS warning that, “At the same time, government guarantees and asset insurance have exposed taxpayers to potentially large losses,” and explaining how fiscal packages posed significant risks, it said that, “There is a danger that fiscal policy-makers will exhaust their debt capacity before finishing the costly job of repairing the financial system,” and that, “There is the definite possibility that stimulus programs will drive up real interest rates and inflation expectations.” Inflation “would intensify as the downturn abated,” and the BIS “expressed doubt about the bank rescue package adopted in the US.”[35]

The BIS further warned of inflation, saying that, “The big and justifiable worry is that, before it can be reversed, the dramatic easing in monetary policy will translate into growth in the broader monetary and credit aggregates,” the BIS said. That will “lead to inflation that feeds inflation expectations or it may fuel yet another asset-price bubble, sowing the seeds of the next financial boom-bust cycle.”[36]

Major investors have also been warning about the dangers of inflation. Legendary investor Jim Rogers has warned of “a massive inflation holocaust.”[37] Investor Marc Faber has warned that, “The U.S. economy will enter ‘hyperinflation’ approaching the levels in Zimbabwe,” and he stated that he is “100 percent sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation.” Further, “The problem with government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they will be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate.”[38]

Are We Entering A New Great Depression?

In 2007, it was reported that, “The Bank for International Settlements, the world’s most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood.” Further:

The BIS, the ultimate bank of central bankers, pointed to a confluence a worrying signs, citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.

[...] In a thinly-veiled rebuke to the US Federal Reserve, the BIS said central banks were starting to doubt the wisdom of letting asset bubbles build up on the assumption that they could safely be “cleaned up” afterwards – which was more or less the strategy pursued by former Fed chief Alan Greenspan after the dotcom bust.[39]

In 2008, the BIS again warned of the potential of another Great Depression, as “complex credit instruments, a strong appetite for risk, rising levels of household debt and long-term imbalances in the world currency system, all form part of the loose monetarist policy that could result in another Great Depression.”[40]

In 2008, the BIS also said that, “The current market turmoil is without precedent in the postwar period. With a significant risk of recession in the US, compounded by sharply rising inflation in many countries, fears are building that the global economy might be at some kind of tipping point,” and that all central banks have done “has been to put off the day of reckoning.”[41]

In late June of 2009, the BIS reported that as a result of stimulus packages, it has only seen “limited progress” and that, “the prospects for growth are at risk,” and further “stimulus measures won’t be able to gain traction, and may only lead to a temporary pickup in growth.” Ultimately, “A fleeting recovery could well make matters worse.”[42]

The BIS has said, in softened language, that the stimulus packages are ultimately going to cause more damage than they prevented, simply delaying the inevitable and making the inevitable that much worse. Given the previous BIS warnings of a Great Depression, the stimulus packages around the world have simply delayed the coming depression, and by adding significant numbers to the massive debt bubbles of the world’s nations, will ultimately make the depression worse than had governments not injected massive amounts of money into the economy.

After the last Great Depression, Keynesian economists emerged victorious in proposing that a nation must spend its way out of crisis. This time around, they will be proven wrong. The world is a very different place now. Loose credit, easy spending and massive debt is what has led the world to the current economic crisis, spending is not the way out. The world has been functioning on a debt based global economy. This debt based monetary system, controlled and operated by the global central banking system, of which the apex is the Bank for International Settlements, is unsustainable. This is the real bubble, the debt bubble. When it bursts, and it will burst, the world will enter into the Greatest Depression in world history.

Notes

[1]        Barrie McKenna, End of housing slump? Try telling that to buyers, sellers and the unemployed. The Globe and Mail: August 6, 2009:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/end-of-housing-slump-try-telling-that-to-buyers-sellers-and-the-unemployed/article1240418/

[2]        Gene Sperling, Double-Bubble Trouble in Commercial Real Estate: Gene Sperling. Bloomberg: May 9, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a.X91SkgOd8g

[3]        AL Sull, Commercial Real Estate – The Other Real Estate Bubble. Financial Post: July 23, 2009:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpmagazinedaily/archive/2009/07/23/commercial-real-estate-the-other-real-estate-bubble.aspx

[4]        Hui-yong Yu, U.S. Office Vacancies Rise to Three-Year High, Cushman Says. Bloomberg: April 16, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aegH6dXG8H8U

[5]        Parija B. Kavilanz, Malls shedding stores at record pace. CNN Money: April 14, 2009:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/10/news/economy/retail_malls/index.htm

[6]        Ilaina Jonas and Emily Chasan, General Growth files largest U.S. real estate bankruptcy. Reuters: April 16, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE53F68P20090417

[7]        Jamil Anderlini, China property prices ‘likely to halve’. The Financial Times: April 13, 2009:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9a36b342-280e-11de-8dbf-00144feabdc0.html

[8]        Reuters, Fed Might Extend TALF Support to Five Years. Money News: April 17, 2009:
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/financenews/talf/2009/04/17/204120.html?utm_medium=RSS

[9]        Francesco Guerrera and Greg Farrell, US banks warn on commercial property. The Financial Times: July 22, 2009:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3a1e9d86-76eb-11de-b23c-00144feabdc0.html

[10]      Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry, Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion. Bloomberg: March 31, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=armOzfkwtCA4

[11]      Gerald Celente, The “Bailout Bubble” – The Bubble to End All Bubbles. Trends Research Institute: May 13, 2009:
http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2009/05/gerald-celente-bubble-to-end-all.html

[12]      Tom Braithwaite, Treasury clashes with Tarp watchdog on data. The Financial Times: July 20, 2009:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab533a38-757a-11de-9ed5-00144feabdc0.html

[13]      AFP, US could spend 23.7 trillion dollars on crisis: report. Agence-France Presse: July 20, 2009:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iuL1HParBuO4WyHJIxw6rlOKdz-A

[14]      John Whitesides, Warren Buffett says second stimulus might be needed. Reuters: July 9, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressReleasesMolt/idUSTRE5683MZ20090709

[15]      Vidya Ranganathan, U.S. should plan 2nd fiscal stimulus: economic adviser. Reuters: July 7, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56611D20090707

[16]      Carly Crawford, US may increase stimulus payments to rein in unemployment. The Herald Sun: August 3, 2009:
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25873672-664,00.html

[17]      David Cho and Binyamin Appelbaum, Treasury Works on ‘Plan C’ To Fend Off Lingering Threats. The Washington Post: July 8, 2009:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/07/AR2009070702631.html?hpid=topnews

[18]      Charles Bremner and David Charter, Germany and France lead €1 trillion European bailout. Times Online: October 13, 2009:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article4937516.ece

[19]      Douwe Miedema, Europe banks silent on reported AIG bailout gains. Reuters: March 8, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5270YD20090308

[20]      Elitsa Vucheva, European Bank Bailout Total: $4 Trillion. Business Week: April 10, 2009:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2009/gb20090410_254738.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe+index+page_top+stories

[21]      Bruno Waterfield, European bank bail-out could push EU into crisis. The Telegraph: February 11, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/4590512/European-banks-may-need-16.3-trillion-bail-out-EC-dcoument-warns.html

[22]      Ian Traynor, EU doubles funding for fragile eastern European economies. The Guardian: March 20, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/20/eu-imf-emergency-funding

[23]      Anatole Kaletsky, The great bailout – Europe’s best-kept secret. The Times Online: June 4, 2009:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article6426565.ece

[24]      Gideon Rachman, Europe prepares for a Baltic blast. The Financial Times: August 3, 2009:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b497f5b6-8060-11de-bf04-00144feabdc0.html

[25]      JAD MOUAWAD, Swings in Price of Oil Hobble Forecasting. The New York Times: July 5, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/business/06oil.html

[26]      Christopher Doering, Masters says signs of oil bubble starting to appear. Reuters: June 4, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/Inspiration/idUSTRE55355620090604

[27]      Javier Blas and Chris Flood, Analyst warns of oil at $200 a barrel. The Financial Times: May 6, 2008:
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto050620081414392593

[28]      Ed Wallace, The Reason for High Oil Prices. Business Week: May 13, 2009:
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/may2008/bw20080513_720178.htm

[29]      Christine Harper, Goldman Sachs Posts Record Profit, Beating Estimates. Bloomberg: July 14, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a2jo3RK2_Aps

[30]      Peter Martin and John Garnaut, The great China bailout. The Age: November 11, 2008:
http://business.theage.com.au/business/the-great-china-bailout-20081110-5lpe.html

[31]      Paul Cavey, Now China Has a Credit Boom. The Wall Street Journal: July 30, 2009:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204619004574319261337617196.html

[32]      Joe McDonald, China’s stimulus-fueled stock boom alarms Beijing. The Globe and Mail: August 2, 2009:
http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090802.wchina02/GIStory/

[33]      Matt Jaffe, Watchdog Refutes Treasury Claim Banks Cannot Be Asked to Account for Bailout Cash. ABC News: July 19, 2009:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Politics/story?id=8121045&page=1

[34]      The China Post, Bank lending slows down in U.S.: report. The China Post: July 28, 2009:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/americas/2009/07/28/218141/Bank-lending.htm

[35]      David Uren. Bank for International Settlements warning over stimulus benefits. The Australian: June 30, 2009:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25710566-601,00.html

[36]      Simone Meier, BIS Sees Risk Central Banks Will Raise Interest Rates Too Late. Bloomberg: June 29, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aOnSy9jXFKaY

[37]      CNBC.com, We Are Facing an ‘Inflation Holocaust’: Jim Rogers. CNBC: October 10, 2008:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27097823

[38]      Chen Shiyin and Bernard Lo, U.S. Inflation to Approach Zimbabwe Level, Faber Says. Bloomberg: May 27, 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=avgZDYM6mTFA

[39]      Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, BIS warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree. The Telegraph: June 27, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2811081/BIS-warns-of-Great-Depression-dangers-from-credit-spree.html

[40]      Gill Montia, Central bank body warns of Great Depression. Banking Times: June 9, 2008:
http://www.bankingtimes.co.uk/09062008-central-bank-body-warns-of-great-depression/

[41]      Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, BIS slams central banks, warns of worse crunch to come. The Telegraph: June 30, 2008:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/2792450/BIS-slams-central-banks-warns-of-worse-crunch-to-come.html

[42]      HEATHER SCOFFIELD, Financial repairs must continue: central banks. The Globe and Mail: June 29, 2009:
http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090629.wcentralbanks0629/BNStory/HEATHER+SCOFFIELD/

Andrew G. Marshall is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is currently studying  Political Economy and History at Simon Fraser University.

Andrew G. Marshall is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Andrew G. Marshall

© Copyright Andrew G. Marshall , Global Research, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

Depression 2009 The Largest Train Wreck in Economic History

Economics / Great Depression II Jan 06, 2009 – 10:52 AM

By: Darryl_R_Schoon

Change is a constant whether perceived or not; but only when we see it do we believe it has occurred. Then, it is too late.

The phrase, speculative bubble, is used to describe the financial tumescence that characterizes the often manic unfounded rise of asset values. The phrase, however, is inadequate for it fails to convey the destructive aftermath that follows; for such purposes, train wreck, is a better description. In 2009, the largest train wreck in economic history is about to occur.

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Unfounded manic speculation, e.g. the 2002-2007 real estate bubble, is not new. Similar manic speculation occurred in internet stocks in the 1990s, radio stocks in the 1920s, as it did in railroad stocks in the 19th century and in tulip bulbs in the 17 th century. Manic speculation is as human as the markets.

THE DELUSION OF RATIONAL MARKETS

The first stock exchange in the world was the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, established in 1602. Amsterdam was also the site of the world first speculative bubble, Tulip Mania, which appeared shortly thereafter, 1621-1636

This is from Wikipedia’s recounting of Tulip Mania:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania :

.. traders signed contracts before a notary to purchase tulips at the end of the season (effectively futures contracts). Thus the Dutch, who developed many of the techniques of modern finance, created a market for durable tulip bulbs.

Short selling was banned by an edict of 1610, which was reiterated or strengthened in 1621 and 1630, and again in 1636. Short sellers were not prosecuted under these edicts, but their contracts were deemed unenforceable…

As the flowers grew in popularity, professional growers paid higher and higher prices for bulbs with the virus [a tulip-specific virus that caused more spectacular colored tulips] . By 1634, in part as a result of demand from the French, speculators began to enter the market.

In 1636, the Dutch created a type of formal futures markets where contracts to buy bulbs at the end of the season were bought and sold. Traders met in “colleges” at taverns and buyers were required to pay a 2.5% “wine money” fee, up to a maximum of three florins, per trade.

Neither party paid an initial margin nor a mark-to-market margin, and all contracts were with the individual counterparties rather than with the exchange. No deliveries were ever made to fulfill these contracts because of the market collapse in February 1637…

The contract price of rare bulbs continued to rise throughout 1636. That November, the contract price of common bulbs without the valuable mosaic virus also began to rise in value. The Dutch derogatorily described tulip contract trading as windhandel (literally “wind trade”), because no bulbs were actually changing hands. However in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt.

It is clear that today’s “complex and sophisticated” markets are not as unique as some would believe. What is new, however, are the circumstances and consequences of the current collapse. Today, financial markets are a global phenomena; and so, too, will be the consequences.

The invention of the stock market in Amsterdam in 1602 combined with the issuance of the Bank of England’s credit-based paper money in 1694 was to change the course of human history for the next three hundred years. That epoch is now ending.

The world that credit gave rise to is collapsing as is its credit-based foundation, turning like the proverbial carriage into a pumpkin at midnight, as the hoped for financial fairy tale turns instead into a nightmare of defaulting debt in 2009.

The collapse of global markets and global trade is a sign we have reached the end of this epoch. The current financial collapse is the beginning of its end. When it is over, so, too, will be the era it spawned. Human history moves in waves. Another is about to begin.

ON THE TRAIL OF JOHN LAW

Last year during the Christmas holidays, Martha and I toured the Bank of England’s museum on Threadneedle Street in The City of London, the original cistern of the global well of paper-based credit. Last year, the mood in London was still hopeful. It is no longer.

This Christmas holiday, we followed the trail of John Law from Amsterdam to Paris to Venice . John Law, a Scottish banker and economic theoretician was well acquainted with Amsterdam ‘s financial markets before introducing paper money and subsequent financial ruin to the nation of France on his way to escape, exile and eventual burial in Venice .

It is perhaps appropriate than John Law is buried in the Chiesa di San Moisè; a church in Venice now surrounded by fashionable stores such as Gucci, Fendi, Valentino, Prada, and Versace, luxury retailers who profited handsomely from the excesses of the recent global bubble.

But just as the speculative bubble of Tulip Mania presaged today’s markets, the story of John Law has particular relevance to the current collapse. The combination of financial markets and paper money is a volatile mixture and none was ever so destructively volatile as John Law’s introduction of paper money to the financial markets of France .

John Law believed it was not necessary that money possess intrinsic value such as did gold or silver, money could be fiat, paper notes issued by government edict, an idea resembling those later promoted by American economist Milton Friedman.

John Law’s disastrous experiment with paper money combined with his role in the Mississippi Land Company, a stock bubble on the scale of Tulip Mania, eventually transformed France and much of Europe into an economic wasteland leading eventually to the overthrow of the French nobility.

John Law’s destructive influence on France has been exceeded, however, by today’s extraordinary über- mixture of central bank credit-based paper money, excessive risk and leverage and the globalization of markets—a volatile mixture whose fragility, extreme size and combustibility are now about to destroy the 300 year old world built on debt and paper money.

ON THE SELF-CORRECTING NATURE OF IRRATIONAL MARKETS

In November 2006, Professor Antal Fekete addressed the 2007 class of MBA students at the University of Chicago , the then bailiwick of Milton Friedman, the well-known academic apologist for fiat currencies.

Professor Fekete was to deliver a scathing rebuttal of Friedman’s theories. The professor, a long-time proponent of the gold standard and its role in monetary affairs, believed that John Maynard Keynes on the left and Milton Friedman on the right had given intellectual comfort to policies responsible for today’s monetary problems—the elimination of gold from the international monetary system.

But Professor Fekete did not deliver his address criticizing Friedman. The day before he was to speak, Milton Friedman passed away. Instead of criticizing Friedman, Professor Fekete instead warned the students about the fragility of today’s paper markets, markets that had become an extraordinary inverse pyramid of derivatives (then $480 trillion, now $668 trillion) and potential defaults built on irredeemable promises.

The students gave little thought to the Professor’s warnings. They had prepared too long for their chance at the brass ring offered by Wall Street investment banks, the wealthy moneychangers in the temple of fiat currencies.

As about-to-be graduates of the prestigious MBA program at the University of Chicago , the students had much to expect upon graduation. When the Professor delivered his remarks, the August 2007 credit contraction was still nine months in the future; close, but still well outside the world of possibilities the students believed real.

One student asked:“Even if you’re right, won’t the markets self-correct?”

To the true-believers in paper money, paper markets and paper profits, self-correction was the accepted ideological panacea to whatever the markets would do.

That student never expected that the coming self-correction would wipe away his expected future. That instead of a large starting salary with significant bonuses at Lehman’s, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, or Morgan Stanley, he instead would be wondering how he could repay his student loans when the bank he believed would be his future home had collapsed or merged with another institution to avoid insolvency.

At the time, such possibilities appeared improbable if not outright impossible. Today, they have become the precursors of what is yet to be. A world so at odds with yesterday, that few can imagine what will happen next.

Dmitry Orlov is one of the few that can do so.

DMITRY ORLOV’S FIVE STAGES OF COLLAPSE

Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse; The Soviet Example and American Prospects (New Society Publishers, 2008), watched the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and predicted a similar crisis would later occur in America .

Buckminster Fuller had also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and America in 1981— the twilight of the world’s power structures— in his book, The Critical Path (St. Martin’s Press, 1981). Both nations crippled by excessive debt brought on by excessive military spending (what Bucky called killingry ) were fading behemoths whose passing would make way for a better world.

Orlov writes:

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers – the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this – I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it…

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm…

Stage 1 in Orlov’s scenario is well underway. The vast majority of investment and commercial banks are now insolvent, propped up and still in business only because of recently granted government guarantees designed to prevent workers from realizing their life savings are in imminent danger.

In Orlov’s Stage 1, savings and access to capital are lost. In modern economies, capital, i.e. credit-based paper, has been substituted for real money, gold and silver. Credit-based paper money is no more real money than an image/belief in god is GOD. Savings, in mature credit-based economies as the US and UK are now virtually non-existent.

Capital is but thinly disguised credit and credit is now rapidly disappearing, a condition that will be fatal for those addicted to its continuing presence, e.g. corporations, governments and workers, especially in the US , UK , Europe , etc. New loan activity has fallen 91 % year to year. The consequences will be unprecedented and extraordinary.

In 2009, the economic train wreck now in motion will occur. It will not be a one time event. It will be a successive series of protracted crisis in conjunction with continuing breakdowns in access to credit, goods and services, an escalating and cascading series of pre vio usly unimaginable events.

In today’s monetarily debased markets, credit has become essential for all commercial activity. This dream of bankers is the nightmare of producers and savers. Credit becomes compounding debt which becomes bankers’ profits also resulting in increasing defaults and bankruptcies. Modern economics is not rocket science. It’s an abomination on the economic body of mankind.

Stage 2 in Orlov’s scenario will follow in the wake of Stage 1. Stage 2 is closer today than it was yesterday. The end game predicted by some will now become the reality for all. The predicted events have no basis in recent memory for those who will be affected.

The three hundred year old world founded on credit-based paper money is ending. The world’s central banks which substituted paper for gold are finding themselves unable to solve the problems their fiat money has created. The consequences are far greater than people can imagine—a limitation that will not prevent them from happening.

GOLD, SCISSORS, PAPER

We who have grown up in the world of credit and debt have no memory or real understanding of the role that gold played in monetary affairs prior to the substitution of central bank credit-based paper for sound money. When the connection was cut between gold and money, few understood the consequences, consequences which are now upon us.

Uncle Milton and Uncle John
Gave much thought to what was wrong
But their bright ideas about the public purse
Have now made things so much worse

Discussion of the monetary role of gold and silver has been expunged from discussion in today’s universities. One of the world’s great economic thinkers whose writings consistently predicted today’s collapse, Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School of Economics was never accorded a paid position in an American university.

Although given the status of a visiting professor by New York University , Mises was not paid a salary and had to depend on outside assistance in order to survive. That far lesser teachers were salaried in America is an indication why today most American economists are unable to adequately explain or solve our economic problems.

PUTZES FROM PRINCETON

The influence of the US military-industrial complex over academic discourse, while exceedingly effective, has come at a considerable cost to the nation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of this possibility in his Farewell Speech to the nation in 1961. Freedom and intellectual inquiry are not unrelated—nor are tyranny and blind obedience.

Professor Fekete’s intended address at the University of Chicago was titled Where Friedman Went Wrong and included the following quote from Professor Walter E. Spahr, Chairman of the Department of Economics at NYU from 1927 to 1956:

What is the meaning of a gold standard and a redeemable currency? It represents integrity. It insures the people’s control over the government’s use of the public purse. It is the best guarantee against the socialization of a nation. It enables a people to keep the government and banks in check. It prevents currency expansion from getting ever farther out of bounds until it becomes worthless. It tends to force standards of honesty on government and bank officials. It is the symbol of a free society and an honorable government. It is a necessary prerequisite to economic health. It is the first economic bulwark of free men.

Professor Spahr’s eloquent words are a timely reminder of the importance of the gold standard and do much to explain how we have arrived at our current circumstances. The gold standard is the constraint upon bankers and government that would have prevented the disaster that is now upon us; and, now in 2009, it is too late to undo what they have done.

Professor Spahr understood that the essential role of gold in monetary systems is to prevent bankers and government from overstepping the bounds of sound governance and prudent banking, bounds, which if undone, will bring ruin to the nation and to its people.

When President Nixon severed the ties between the US dollar and gold—as encouraged to do so by Milton Friedman—the very fears of men such as Spahrs and Fekete were set in motion. Now, three decades later, the results are in.

Financial markets are frozen, global trade is slowing rapidly, governments have debased their now fiat currencies and the collective excesses of government and bankers have brought the world to the edge of another Great Depression.

The warnings of those such as Spahr and Fekete were not heeded. Indeed, they were not even heard. The suppression of open dialogue and issues contrary to the purposes of corporate, banking and government interests carried over into colleges and universities as well as the media. It has cost America dearly.

Only When Freedom Is Lost Do The Reasons For Its Absence Become Clear

For those interested in the critical role of the gold standard, Professor Fekete will be giving a series of lectures March 27, 28 and 29 in Hungary . The gold standard as well as the backwardation of gold and silver and the coming depression will be discussed. For information, contact GSUL@t-online.hu . I will also give a talk at the conference.

THE LEGACY OF JOHN LAW
VERSUS
THE FUTURISTIC VISION OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

I was fortunate to have met Marshall Thurber in law school in 1966, a friendship that has lasted far longer than my abbreviated tenure at law school. I am especially fortunate that Marshall later became a close friend and important supporter of Buckminster Fuller and his work.

In November, during a discussion about the current crisis which was predicted by Fuller more than 25 years ago, Marshall recommended I read Fuller’s final book, Grunch Of Giants (Design Science Press, 1983).

Out of print and offered at the time through Amazon at a collector’s price of $199, Marshall offered to send me his original signed draft if the book was not readily available. Fortunately, Marshall then directed me to the website of the Buckminster Fuller Institute where its price was $17.95, see http://bfi.org/?q=node/406 .

I finished reading Fuller’s extraordinary work, Grunch Of Giants , on Christmas Day as Martha and I crossed the Alps . At this time I will refrain from a personal recapitulation as the work stands on its own and readers are easily capable of reaching their own conclusions. Nonetheless, Grunch of Giants confirmed for me the greatness and breadth of Fuller’s vision.

After reading Grunch of Giants I could not help but see the clear distinction between two diametrically opposed visions/versions of our world: At one end of the spectrum is John Law’s “Scarcity Theory of Value” and at the other is Buckminster Fuller’s “False Assumptions of Scarcity”

The two assumptions and theories are diametrically opposed in intent and consequence and do much to explain the difference between today’s world of crisis (confirming John Law’s theories on scarcity) and tomorrow’s possible promise (Buckminster Fuller’s belief in abundance)

EMERGENCE THROUGH EMERGENCY

Because of Marshall Thurber ‘s friendship with Buckminster Fuller, I am aware of Fuller’s belief in “Universal Emergence Through Emergency”. It is increasingly clear that today’s crisis is rapidly approaching that of an emergency—the prerequisite for Universal Emergence.

Let us stand aside and help its birth. A new and better world is on its way. Gold and silver will help in the interim.

By Darryl Robert Schoon
www.survivethecrisis.com
www.drschoon.com
blog www.posdev.net

About Darryl Robert Schoon
In college, I majored in political science with a focus on East Asia (B.A. University of California at Davis, 1966). My in-depth study of economics did not occur until much later.

In the 1990s, I became curious about the Great Depression and in the course of my study, I realized that most of my preconceptions about money and the economy were just that – preconceptions. I, like most others, did not really understand the nature of money and the economy. Now, I have some insights and answers about these critical matters.

In October 2005, Marshall Thurber, a close friend from law school convened The Positive Deviant Network (the PDN), a group of individuals whom Marshall believed to be “out-of-the-box” thinkers and I was asked to join. The PDN became a major catalyst in my writings on economic issues.

When I discovered others in the PDN shared my concerns about the US economy, I began writing down my thoughts. In March 2007 I presented my findings to the Positive Deviant Network in the form of an in-depth 148- page analysis, ” How to Survive the Crisis and Prosper In The Process. ”

The reception to my presentation, though controversial, generated a significant amount of interest; and in May 2007, “How To Survive The Crisis And Prosper In The Process” was made available at www.survivethecrisis.com and I began writing articles on economic issues.

The interest in the book and my writings has been gratifying. During its first two months, www.survivethecrisis.com was accessed by over 10,000 viewers from 93 countries. Clearly, we had struck a chord and www.drschoon.com , has been created to address this interest.

Darryl R Schoon Archive

At what point does a liberal become a Stalinist?

At what point does a liberal become a Stalinist?

By James Lewis

The first adjective that comes to mind for “liberal” may be “touchy-feely.” The best adjective for a Stalinist might be “murderous.” That’s a pretty big difference. I would never want to mistake a well-meaning liberal for a nasty Stalinist. At the same time, I hope we don’t fail to spot any Stalinists who might be looking for mischief and pretending to be liberals. Certainly the mainstream media aren’t interested in the difference.

The term “Stalinist” is historically justified by undeniable evidence, including testimony from thousands of former Stalin collaborators.   So this is not a question to take lightly, as long as we are careful to separate undeniable facts from mere allegations.

I’ve started to gently question the beliefs of the liberals I know, without getting into any loud argument. Much to my surprise, some of the gentle-sounding people I know actually talk murderously at times.  I wouldn’t have believed it, because these are people I like a lot. They have a warm side. In their own minds they all believe they are driven by love and compassion. And yet, some of them — certainly not most — seem ready to hang the current media scapegoat from the nearest gallows.

I also know a lot of really sweet, dumb liberals, people who are so desperate to be loving that they rationalize all the nonsense they are fed by our media.

It helps to hang on to a pretty high standard of proof, so you don’t start seeing Stalinists at every meeting of the Unitarian Church.

I don’t think we are anywhere near a Gulag Archipelago in the United States. I do think it is important to know if there are real Stalinists around — as there undoubtedly were during Stalin’s bloody thirty-year reign (1922-1953).  We know historically that the Manhattan Project was penetrated by physicists who turned out to be Stalinists — like Klaus Fuchs, who turned over nuclear secrets to Stalin, and was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the East German Politburo.    I have the feeling that Saul Alinsky was very close to being a real Stalinist, as I will suggest below. These are not the imaginary Communists that are supposed to hide under every paranoid’s bed. These folks were and are real. I wish it weren’t so. Sometimes you have to face unpleasant realities.

About five years ago a sweet lady in her 60s openly expressed the hope that somebody would assassinate George W. Bush. That goes far beyond decent political debate. Expressions of murderous rage were not exactly unusual on the left during the Bush years. A lot of them were right out in the open. A lot of the European media freely expressed murderous rage toward the United States and George W. Bush in the last several years. Don’t imagine they have changed much; they are just quieter today.

I suspect that real Stalinists are different, though. If you look at the record of totalitarian murder in the 20th century, about 100 million murdered by Communist regimes, and another 40 million or so by the Nazis and other fascist parties, including war victims, there are those who kill for strategic purposes, and those who kill from rage. Stalinists killed strategically, because they thought mass murder was necessary to achieve Paradise on Earth. They were often intellectuals who simply came to the “rational” conclusion that a whole category of their fellow human beings must die, always for some “higher purpose.”

That is literally the argument we see from Karl Marx onward. Yes, the State can brainwash the children of the capitalist class, but you may have to kill their parents. No, there are kulaks who cannot be tolerated in the Soviet Union, and they just have to die.   No, there is no changing a Jew into a decent human being; it’s all in the genes, and you just have to kill them all to keep the poison from spreading.

Malcolm Muggeridge, who was Moscow correspondent for The Guardian in the 1930s, has written about such cold killer types in his autobiography. Many Stalinists were journalists, Muggeridge’s press colleagues in Moscow. They saw the Soviet-made famine in the Ukraine, but they simply lied and denied its existence to their readers in the West, and some of them justified the killing in their own minds. An astonishing number of “bloody-minded professors” in the West were just such kinds of “strategic” Stalinists — people who justified mass murder for what they believed to be rational reasons. Many of the Nazis were that way, too. Yes, killing all the Jews and Gypsies was a messy job, but somebody had to do it to purify the Master Race. That was a strategic vision, not a matter of rage or even hatred. (The strategic murder types manipulated rage and hatred to do the job, of course. But they were cold-blooded mass killers, many of them.)

Jean-Paul Sartre was that kind of Stalinist. Sartre was the most famous philosopher in Continental Europe in the last century. But he thought that Marxism was more important than Existentialism, his philosophical brand. Sartre edited a hard-Left magazine in Paris, and managed both to endorse Jozef Stalin when everyone already understood what he was doing, and to switch his editorial support to Mao Zedong when Mao began to kill tens of millions of Chinese in earnest. That was not just a happenstance. Sartre was not a sentimental Leftist. He wasn’t self-deceived. He just thought that mass murder was rationally justified to bring about the People’s Revolution. That was cold-hearted evil, an even lower Circle of Hell than the one Dante reserved for ordinary murderers.

When we talk about the leaders of totalitarian Communist or Fascist regimes, people like Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, we are mostly talking about strategic mass murderers. I believe Kim Jong-Il may be a strategic mass killer today. He is certainly playing the West for suckers in a very shrewd way. Nobody doubts that Kim has directly caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his own people by starvation, following the example of Mao and Stalin. For Kim, I suspect it was not sheer insanity. It was more likely to be strategic. After Pol Pot was finally caught, confessed, and was convicted, the New York Times reported that he confessed to killing millions of Cambodians, but that his “conscience was clear.”

Think about that. People like that exist and come to power. Napoleon had that mind-set — he could not have doubted for one moment that his desire to conquer Europe would end in millions of deaths. And yet he led a cheering French parade, and is still celebrated for it in French history. (In fact, Jacques Chirac’s Foreign Minister wrote a book glorifying Napoleon; which just tells you something about Europe’s socialist Ruling Class today).

Saul Alinsky sounds like a Stalinist to me, though we may never know for sure. For one thing, his Rules for Radicals are all tricks that have been used by lynch mob leaders throughout history to enrage people, target a victim, and have him or her be burned or hung. The Rwanda genocide was no doubt led by people who used those ancient demagogic tricks. In the South, white lynch mobs used a lot of Alinsky tricks to enforce Jim Crow, and before that to keep blacks terrorized in slavery. But Alinsky was  strategic in recommending his rules — they were all deliberately practiced “rules” to be used to destroy “the enemy.”

We don’t know what Alinsky might have done had he come  into real power, as his fellow agitators did in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, China, Indonesia and Cambodia. Don’t ever forget that tens of millions of people were killed within living memory, using precisely those mob techniques. We can still see them at work in numerous countries around the world.

As Alinsky wrote this in his Rules for Radicals:

“What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

That only makes sense if you believe that tens of millions of your fellow citizens are evil; that the world would be better off without them. Alinsky certainly didn’t sound like a touchy-feely liberal, but like a cold, strategic Stalinist. I can’t prove that — fortunately — because he never achieved the kind of power he sought  all his life.

Well, Alinsky mentored a whole generation of radicals, people who are now at the helm of the Democratic Party, in the US media, and in Western universities. It is a virulent plague infecting our body politic. We must hope to outlast them, and never to become like them.

I cannot read minds, and I don’t think anyone else can, either. I don’t know all the little inner wheels turning inside Obama’s mind, or in Axelrod and Rahm and Ezekiel Emanuel (who is apparently their “expert” source on the evils of American medicine).

I do have the impression that another Alinsky disciple, Hillary Clinton, has matured somewhat over her life. People do grow up, sometimes. People do let go of some of their harmful character traits. But I can’t tell for sure.

So I would not necessarily try to see Obama as a community organizer in the style of Saul Alinsky. But it would be irrational to deny that there are many close, lifelong relationships between Obama and far-Left radicals, people who are much colder and more strategic than your everyday touchy-feely liberal. They are true Alinskyites.

Stalin is dead. But Stalinism lives because that kind of cold, calculating, destructive “idealism” seems to appeal to a certain personalities. Stalinists don’t carry membership cards in the CPUSA any more. They don’t come with convenient labels — “Look, Mom, I’m a Stalinist!” Nor should we go around and loosely allege that so-and-so must be that way. We live under a Constitution that explicitly guarantees free speech and free thought, even if it is abhorrent. Millenarian fanatics are not so unusual in American history. They’ve been around from the beginning, and yet we have kept our freedoms, most of them, alive and well.

So we walk a fine line. Welcome to decency and civilization. We don’t condemn people for their thoughts. Welcome to the world of balance and sanity, where we constantly hope for the best — while not blinding ourselves to the human capacity to do the worst. We hold people responsible for their deeds, not their thoughts. Tolerance means not overreacting, even to rather freaky folk.

If we lose that fine balance between appropriate caution and overreaction we undermine our civilization. So we cannot overreact.

Don’t look for Communists under every bed, but don’t be foolish enough to ignore self-proclaimed Marxist Radicals who wish us ill. Keep your faith in the strength and common sense of the American people. Spread the truth, as you see it, and let others express theirs.

The Founders built well. We may have to shore up a few timbers in the ship of state. We need to rediscover the vigorous small press that marked American politics until the monopoly media took over, perhaps fifty years ago; but the New Media are now on the job.  Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin and Marshall were all personally acquainted with the same kinds of people we see today. Human nature hasn’t changed.

In the last two centuries the biggest power freaks have never enjoyed a permanent victory. This generation has its own meeting with destiny, as John F. Kennedy once said. Each generation has kept the country free, and passed a free land on to the next. That is also our job, and in that we will succeed.

on “At what point does a liberal become a Stalinist?“

Christopher Caldwell’s Reflection On The Revolution In Europe: Now He Tells Us?

Christopher Caldwell’s Reflection On The Revolution In Europe: Now He Tells Us?

By Steve Sailer

Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West is an important and surprising book.

Granted, VDARE.com readers won’t see much that’s new. In essence, Caldwell’s Reflections is a Brimelovian vindication of Enoch Powell, the brilliant Tory who warned against immigration in a prescient (and thus notorious) 1968 speech that began “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils”.

Caldwell points out in his opening pages (which you can read here):

“Although at the time Powell’s demographic projections were much snickered at, they have turned out not just roughly accurate but as close to perfectly accurate as it is possible for any such projections to be: In his Rotary Club speech, [November 16 1968] Powell shocked his audience by stating that the nonwhite population of Britain, barely over a million at the time, would rise to 4.5 million by 2002. (According to the national census, the actual “ethnic minority” population of Britain in 2001 was 4,635,296.)”

Readers who get their views from the MainStream Media, though, will be startled by how gracefully—yet bluntly—Caldwell delivers an intellectually cohesive assault on the conventional wisdom of the diversity dogma.

Reflections is also a model for how a working journalist can transform years of old articles researched on scores of trips to Europe into a stylish book. Caldwell’s solution is to enhance his prose style with aphorisms worthy of G.K. Chesterton.

For example, in Caldwell’s original February 27, 2006 Weekly Standard article on Nicolas Sarkozy, The Man Who Would Be le Président, he discussed Sarkozy’s call for affirmative action in France to appease riotous Muslims:

“It can be argued that France needs such measures desperately, … but, … Sarkozy shows a bit of the naiveté of, say, Hubert Humphrey in 1964 when he implies the program would be only temporary. … How long would the program last, then? Twenty years? ‘No, twenty years is too long.’”

In his book, however, Caldwell adds this memorable dictum in reply to Sarkozy’s Continental innocence about America’s experience:

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.”

(I suspect that when Sen. Lindsey Graham decided to vote for Sonia Sotomayor, he was saying something like this to himself, just less elegantly.)

Caldwell adds:

“This logic is not lost on white people in the United States, and it will likely not be lost on European natives.”

The courage that Caldwell displays in Reflections is unexpected. Among conservative literary intellectuals, Caldwell has pursued mainstream approval with perhaps the most success. For example, in a June 1998 Atlantic article, The Southern Captivity of the GOP, this Harvard English Lit major argued that the Republican Party appealed too much to white Southerners (whom he described as “U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches“.)

His dust jacket biography reads:

“Christopher Caldwell is a columnist for the Financial Times, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.”

(You can’t blame him; he and his wife, who is Robert Novak‘s daughter, have five kids.)

Unexpectedly, Caldwell takes the arrogant bluster of European intellectuals and patiently and quietly extracts the simple silly-mindedness at its heart:

“Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about restaurants.”

He points out the endless contradictions of the cult of tolerance:

“The policing of tolerance had no inbuilt limits and no obvious logic. Why was ‘ethnic pride’ a virtue and ‘nationalism’ a sickness? Why was an identity like ‘Sinti/Roma’ legitimate but an identity like ‘white’ out of bounds? Why had it suddenly become criminal to ask questions today that it was considered a citizen’s duty to ask ten years ago?”

And yet, as the Danish Cartoon Riots of 2006 showed, the absurdity of Europe’s ever-growing restrictions on freedom of speech about immigration—both legalistic (what Caldwell calls “the criminalization of opinion“) and vigilante (enforced by young Muslim thugs)—aren’t funny. As Caldwell explains, “Immigration exacts a steep price in freedom“:

“A new, uncompromising ideology was advancing under cover of its own ridiculousness—not as the Big Lie of legend, perhaps, but as something similarly ominous that might be called the Big Joke.”

Caldwell is extremely good at disentangling the ideological evolutions—the “He who says A, must say B“ thought processes—that got Europe into its Muslim mess.

“The Holocaust has in recent decades been the cornerstone of the European moral order. … Under the pressure of mass immigration, however, post-Holocaust repentance became a template for regulating the affairs of any minority that could plausibly present itself as seriously aggrieved. … Once on the continent, Muslims took up a privileged position in any public debate on minority rights: they, too, were ‘victims.’”

This, of course, is an unmistakable echo of VDARE.COM Editor Peter Brimelow’s opening to his much-denounced book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster back in 1995:

“There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965.

“And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.

“Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one. You can be for this or you can be against it. But the fact is undeniable.”

Brimelow, needless to say, goes prudently uncited in Caldwell’s book.

Europe’s elites needed a new minority in order to feel morally superior to European commoners. And the Muslims agreed.

“[M]any Muslims felt their community offered native Europeans a more appropriate object than the Jews themselves for moral self-examination and moral self-flagellation. An increasing number of Muslims saw themselves, in fact, as the ‘new Jews.’…”

Ironically, Europe’s obsession with the Holocaust has stimulated the outbreak of anti-Semitic violence by European Muslims in this decade:

“As the Jews accumulated ‘rivals’ with an interest in dislodging them from their position as Europe’s top victims, the system was suddenly turned inside out. The ideology of diversity and racial harmony … now became the means through which anti-Jewish fury was reinjected into European life. … If the Muslims were the new Jews, apparently, then the Jews were the new Nazis.”

Caldwell sums up with a quote from French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut:

“I think that the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. … And this anti-racism will be for the twenty-first century what communism was for the twentieth century: a source of violence.”

It would be interesting to know whether Caldwell was always a secret VDAREite regarding European immigration, but had his logic emasculated by his periodical editors.

Or did he not come to these logical conclusions until he tried to make sense of his research while writing this book?

In either case—welcome aboard!

[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

Angry White Men

Angry White Men

By Patrick J. Buchanan

To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount.

But is it wise for the White House to denigrate and insult scores of thousands with the fire and energy to come to town meetings in August, and who appear to represent millions? Is this depiction fair or accurate?

Most K Street lobbyists could not organize a two-car funeral. They don’t storm meetings. They buy friends with $1,000 checks. And if GOP operatives are turning out these crowds, why could they not turn them out for John McCain, unless Sister Sarah showed up?

The Obamaites had best wake up. Opposition to health-care reform is surging, and Barack Obama’s campaigning has gone hand-in-hand with collapsing support, just as George W. Bush’s barnstorming did for Social Security reform.

There is an anger out there unseen since Ross Perot was leading Bush I and Bill Clinton in the presidential trial heats in 1992.

Who are these folks? Why are they angry?

In his essay “Decline of the American Male“ in USA Today, David Zinczenko, editor of Men’s Health, give us a clue. “Of the 5.2 million people who’ve lost their jobs since last summer, four out of five were men. Some experts predict that this year, for the first time, more American women will have jobs than men.”

Ed Rubenstein, who has written for Forbes, National Review and the Wall Street Journal, blogs on VDARE.com that if one uses the household survey of job losses for June-July, Hispanics gained 150,000 positions, while non-Hispanics lost 679,000. Guess who got the stimulus jobs.

Going back to the beginning of the Bush presidency, Rubenstein says that “for every 100 Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 122.5. … (But) for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in January 2001, there are now 98.9.”

Since 2001, Hispanic employment has increased by 3,627,000 positions, while non-Hispanic positions have fallen by 1,362,000. For black and white America, the Bush decade did not begin well or end well, and it has gotten worse under Obama.

African-Americans remain loyal, but among white folks, where Obama ran stronger than John Kerry or Al Gore, he is hemorrhaging.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, which showed him falling to 50 percent approval, whites, by 54 percent to 27 percent, felt Obama behaved “stupidly” in the Sgt. Crowley-professor Gates dustup.

Fifteen straight months of job losses by non-Hispanics explains the anger, but columnist Lowell Ponte raises an issue that may explain who is protesting health-care reform and why.

Under the civil rights legal doctrine of disparate impact, used in the New Haven firefighters case, if tests for hirings and promotions consistently produce results disadvantageous to minorities, the tests are, de facto, suspect as inherently discriminatory, and the results are tossed out. New Haven canceled the promotions for firefighters when all but one of the firemen who passed the test were white, and not a single African-American made the cut.

The city argued that New Haven was acting true to the letter of the Civil Rights Act, which says that tests that consistently produce a disparate and unfavorable impact on African-Americans must go.

Ponte applies the disparate impact doctrine to the trillion-dollar health-care reform.

Who are the principal beneficiaries? The 47 million uninsured who will be covered. Who are the principal losers? The elderly sick who, in the name of controlling costs, are going to lose benefits, be denied care at the end of their lives and have their lives shortened. For half of all health-care costs are in the last six months of life, and cost control is priority No. 1.

Here is where the disparate impact hits. Among those who benefit most—the uninsured—African-Americans, Hispanics and immigrants are overrepresented. Among the biggest losers—seniors and the elderly sick—well over 80 percent are white. [Obamacare Imperils Caucasian Seniors, July 17, 2009] Ponte quotes Fox News’ Dick Morris:

“The principal impact of the Obama health-care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.” [OBAMA WILL REPEAL MEDICARE]

Under Obamacare, adds Morris, “the elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.”

America is already divided ideologically and politically on health-care reform. And with seniors having to sacrifice care, while the young are all insured, a generational divide is opening.

Now Nobel prize-winner and New York Times pundit Paul Krugman writes in his “The Town Hall Mob“ column that, as did Richard Nixon’s men, “cynical political operators are … appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.”

Pulitzer prize-winning black columnist Cynthia Tucker says 45 percent to 65 percent of all vocal opponents of Obamacare are motivated by racial hostility to a black president.

We are headed for interesting times.

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.

Obama Protecting Your Right To Vote—Unless You’re White

Obama Protecting Your Right To Vote—Unless You’re White

By Washington Watcher

After Gatesgate turned white voters off of Obama, some Republican Party apparatchiks have started doing something completely out of character—using common sense.

Instead of cowering from “racism” allegations, they are using the enormous unpopularity of Obama’s response to Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates’ arrest to pull the “post-racial” veneer off our race-obsessed president.

During the 2008 election campaign, the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee refused to bring up Rev. Wright’s anti-white rantings—even going as far as attacking the North Carolina GOP for mentioning it. But now the National Republican Senatorial Committee has put ads on Drudge Report asking visitors to sign a petition criticizing Obama’s response.

GOP strategist George Fletcher was quoted saying that Obama got “really close to losing the image he has as a post-racial president. For a few days, the question for a lot of people became, ‘Wait a minute. Is he the president of the United States? Or is he just the president of minorities?’”

Fletcher predicted lower black turnout rates in 2010, and promised: “Three to four percent of the white vote didn’t come out last time.  They’re coming out this time.”

Of course, as long as Henry Louis Gates keeps his mouth shut—not a sure thing—there may be little more mileage the GOP can get out of this particular story.  But, fortunately for the Republicans, Obama has provided plenty of other fodder—for example the non-response from the Justice Department to the New Black Panther Party’s voter intimidation.

On Election Day, three leaders of the New Black Panther Party, King Samir Shabazz, Malik Zulu Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, were videotaped in paramilitary uniformed wielding nightsticks outside of a polling station in Philadelphia intimidating poll observers and voters.  Poll watcher Bartle Bull signed an affidavit stating

“I watched the two uniformed men confront voters, and attempt to intimidate voters. They were positioned in a location that forced every voter to pass in close proximity to them. The weapon was openly displayed and brandished in plain sight of voters…

“Their clear purpose and intent was to intimidate voters with whom they did not agree. Their views were, in part, made apparent by the uniform of the organization the two men wore and the racially charged statements they made. For example, I heard the shorter man make a statement directed toward white poll observers that ‘you are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.’”

Like Gates’ nemesis Officer Crowley, who taught racial profiling classes, Bull has impeccable anti-racist credentials.  He worked as a civil rights lawyer in the 1960s where he filed lawsuits against municipalities in Mississippi that he said were disenfranchising African Americans.  Bull concluded, that the actions by the New Black Panthers qualified “as the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

The US Commission on Civil Rights filed a complaint against the New Black Panthers. They refused to show up in court or even respond to the charges.  Just as sanctions were about to brought, the Justice Department dismissed the USCCR’s complaint because “the facts and the law did not support pursuing” it.  Of course, Justice did not really give any elaboration as to what particular facts were missing and why the law wasn’t violated.

Initially, there was not a lot of noise about this outrage. But as conservatives and Republicans got emboldened by Obama’s blatant anti-white agenda, even mushy Congressmen like Frank Wolf have been demanding to know how high up the Justice Department the decision went, as well as calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to re-file the case.

Last week, the Washington Times broke the story that the dismissal went at least as high as Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the number three official at the Justice Department.  Perrelli incidentally raised $500,000 for Obama.

The USCCR—which acts independently of the Obama Administration—is not letting up on the Justice Department. It wrote a letter to Eric Holder on Monday once again demanding that he give a full explanation of why the complaint was dismissed. The USCCR accused his Department of being “non-responsive” as well as making “factual errors and … questionable legal claims”.  [Letter, August 10, 2009 (PDF)]

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler continues to give absolutely no defense or justification for the decision beyond stating that after a “thorough review of the allegations and the evidence”, it was decided to dismiss the complaint.  For good measure she added: “We are committed to vigorous enforcement of the laws protecting anyone exercising his or her right to vote”. ['Non-responsive' Justice Dept. pressed again on Panthers case, By Jerry Seper, Washington Times, August 8, 2009]

Just how “committed” is the Obama Justice Department?  While it is apparently fine for black thugs wielding weapons to call white voters and poll observers crackers, Justice takes a very, very broad definition of voting rights violations when the disenfranchised are minorities.  For example:

• it has gone after Fort Bend County, Texas for failing to “implement an effective bilingual election program for Spanish-speaking voters”, arguing that “the Voting Rights Act requires Fort Bend County to provide meaningful and equal electoral access to its Hispanic citizens who have limited English proficiency.”

Of course, all naturalized US Citizens are supposed to have learned English as a condition of citizenship!

• In another attack on white voters, the Justice Department filed a complaint in March against the town of Lake Park, FL.

As in much of South Florida, the town’s white population is aging, while large numbers of Haitian immigrants flood in.  The non-Hispanic white population was only 38% in the 2000 census, with blacks making up 48%, and Hispanics, Asians, and multiracials making up the remaining 14%.

But because whites are older and more likely to be US Citizens, they still make up 53% of the electorate, while blacks are only 38%—a fact that the Justice Department does not mention in its press releases.

The small town elects its four commissioners in an at large election.  For whatever reason, no blacks have been elected thus far. So The Justice Department is demanding that the town divide up its 9,000 residents into four gerrymandered districts where “black persons would constitute a majority of the citizen voting age population in at least one of the districts”.  [PDF] There are no allegations of disenfranchisement or intimidation against blacks. But according to the US Attorney’s office, the “elections are characterized by the use of practices that impair black electoral success”.

• The state of Georgia passed a common-sense measure requiring that new voters have their citizenship status checked among the Social Security and Driver’s license databases.  Predictably the ACLU and MALDEF filed suit.  And a Judge ended up passed the decision to the Obama Justice Department.  Sure enough it ruled that “this flawed system frequently subjects a disproportionate number of African-American, Asian and/or Hispanic voters to additional, and more importantly, erroneous burdens on the right to register to vote.” [Feds spike voter citizenship checks in Georgia, By Shannon McCaffrey, Associated Press,  June 1, 2009]

Just as in Florida, it’s not claimed that there is anything discriminatory about the rule. But because it “disproportionately” affects minorities—who of course make up a disproportionate number of illegal aliens and non-citizens—then it’s not allowed.

If the GOP has any brains, it would jump on this theme: Obama’s justice department will start witch hunts to get quotas for black elected officials, and give illegal aliens, non-English speakers, and non-citizens the right to vote, but it’s perfectly OK with weapon wielding black thugs telling “crackers” that they’re going to “be ruled by the black man.”

The GOP should consider (gasp!) actually, you know, protecting the voting rights of 90% of its voters.

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La Raza Starting To Sweat Over Patriotic Resistance To Open Borders Agenda

La Raza Starting To Sweat Over Patriotic Resistance To Open Borders Agenda

By Preston Blair

Last week (July 25-28) the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) held its annual conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place West. The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Kansas City, Missouri, but organizers moved it in order to “punish” that town after its mayor had the audacity to appoint one of the Minutemen to an official position.

I decided to pay our friends at La Raza a little visit. One of the workshops, “Lessons from Lucero: Overcoming Hate at the Local Level,” sparked my curiosity particularly. With Orwellian-style hate crimes legislation pending in Congress, I was interested to see exactly what “overcoming hate” meant.

Lisa Navarrete, [email] Vice President of NCLR, introduced each of the workshop’s speakers after lamenting the “wave of hate”(a La Raza catchphrase) against Latinos that she seemed to believe was sweeping the country and making it hard to pass “comprehensive immigration reform”.

The first speaker was Jose Perez [email him] of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the successor group to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Some readers might recall that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s connections to this organization were an issue during her confirmation hearings—a development that Perez spent some time deploring.

He expressed amazement at the idea that anyone could ever consider his organization a “hate group” and quoted a statement from its website:

“As the leading advocate for Latinos in New York and the Northeast, and known nationally for its work in educating the next generation of Latino lawmakers, LatinoJustice PRLDEF is well-positioned to bring attention to the need to cultivate more Latino leaders in professional fields and in decision-making positions.”

When he finished reading he lifted up his head and asked incredulously, “Now, does that sound like a hate group?”

Of course, Perez’s inability to imagine how anyone could ever call a group with such an agenda a “hate group” illustrates how deeply ingrained the double standard is when it comes to ethnic activism. Take the same exact paragraph and replace the word “Latino” with the word “white” and Perez would probably be among the first to decry it as the manifesto of “racists” and “supremacists.”

Indeed, Perez was quick to use exactly these words in describing another organization. A lawyer by trade, Perez spends a lot of his time locking horns with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). And he repeated the SPLC’s smears about FAIR being headed by “white supremacists” and “tied to the KKK”.

Perez condemned work place enforcement raids for creating a “climate of fear”. In the process he slipped and used the word “alien” to describe foreigners. He apologized immediately and told the audience: “I never like to use that word. We’re all humans on this planet”.

Perez spent most of his allotted time talking about the work he does investigating “hate crimes” against Latinos. If the stories he told happened as described, I wish him every bit of luck bringing perpetrators to justice.

However, it is a pity that Perez and LatinoJustice are nowhere to be seen when non-Latinos fall prey to racially motivated attacks—like the white family that was recently attacked by a black gang in Akron, an incident the police did not think fit to classify as a hate crime despite the fact that gang members shouted “this is a black world” as they descended on their victims.

Next up was Ellen Gallagher [Email her] of Welcoming America, a Massachusetts-based group that focuses on “building trust” between Americans and immigrants. Apparently, she and her pals go to towns where Americans have “clashed” with foreigners and hold events, such as “unity picnics”, where these two groups can talk about their “shared values” and Americans can learn how to be more “welcoming”.

One of the things they apparently do at these meetings is play the “immigration board game” Players can roll dice and go around the “undocumented loop” trying to land on squares with “good” news like “You take part in the Church sanctuary movement”, and avoid ones with “bad” news such as “You were detained in a raid. Go to detention”.

All of this, of course, is little more than psychological warfare against Americans, attempting to make them feel guilty and ashamed of defending their country and their culture from invasion and displacement—as though wanting to keep illegal aliens out of your country was any more “immoral” than wanting to keep strangers from camping out on your front lawn.

Last to speak was Stacy Burdett [send her mail] of the Anti Defamation League. She said that her organization would stand with Latinos on the immigration issue. “We Jews have spent thousands of years being the stranger, the other”, she said. “We know what it’s like when someone says: ‘you see those people? They’re not really one of us. They have their own agenda.’”

She said that the ADL would continue its fight for “comprehensive immigration reform” and that “this issue is at the top of our domestic agenda”.

The panelists then took questions from the audience. Many of these questions were actually quite heartening, revealing just how much good work we in the patriotic immigration reform movement have been doing.

One person asked about what they could do to change the anti-immigration attitudes they encounter. Gallagher told them to speak from their hearts, because “when you speak from your heart, people listen”.

Perez had a more sinister comment to make. Blaming much of the problem on talk radio and the media, he said that much of the problem comes down to “controlling, not controlling, attempting to influence” media discourse. Perez’s slip in word choice betrayed his totalitarian impulses. He went on to say that it is “irresponsible” for television networks to give a forum to people like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan and that Latinos need to work on getting those kind of people off the air.

Someone from Oklahoma complained to the panelists about the tough immigration laws passed in his state and how they seemed to have taken “any spark of hope away from Latinos who are undocumented”. He lamented the supposed cowardice of Oklahoma politicians. “Their constituency speaks louder than their heart speaks to them”, he said. (Heaven forbid politicians actually listen to their constituents!)

Lastly, a blogger asked about how to expand the pro-immigration movement’s online presence, because “we’ve been outnumbered online for a long time”.

All of the panelists took their turns deploring the many “offensive” comments posted online about immigrants. The ADL’s Burdett said it had been working on trying to get newspapers to stop allowing anonymous posting as a way to change the tone of online discussion on immigration.

When the Q & A was over, I decided to walk around the rest of the convention center to see what else La Raza had set up. The brief tour I took served to emphasize the vast disparity in resources between our side and theirs.

McCormick is a huge building with enough room to accommodate tens of thousands of people. Walking around the convention floor, I saw booths for virtually every major American corporation, all happy to donate millions of dollars to La Raza even while many of them struggle to make a profi t. Among others:

• McDonald’s
• Wal-Mart
• ConAgra Foods
• Microsoft Corporation
• Univision Communications Inc

And yet at the same time, all of that should make any American patriot swell with pride. Despite the other side’s corporate money, we’ve held up well against them over the past few years. The speakers at the workshop I attended repeatedly expressed their anger and frustration at how so-called “xenophobia” and “stereotypes” had worked to defeat recent attempts at granting amnesty.

The fact is that, because of us, wrecking America hasn’t been quite as easy as they thought it would be. Let’s try and continue to frustrate them.

The Expiring Economy

The Expiring Economy

By Paul Craig Roberts

Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government built in Baghdad, Iraq.

Hard times have now afflicted Americans for so long that even the extension of unemployment benefits from 6 months to 18 months for 24 high unemployment states, and to 46 – 72 weeks in other states, is beginning to run out. By Christmas 1.5 million Americans will have exhausted unemployment benefits while unemployment rolls continue to rise.

Amidst this worsening economic crisis, the House of Representatives just passed a $636 billion “defense” bill.

Who is the United States defending against? Americans have no enemies except those that the US government goes out of its way to create by bombing and invading countries that comprise no threat whatsoever to the US and by encircling others—Russia for example—with threatening military bases.

America’s wars are contrived affairs to serve the money laundering machine: from the taxpayers and money borrowed from foreign creditors to the armaments industry to the political contributions that ensure $636 billion “defense” bills.

President George W. Bush gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are entirely based on lies and misrepresentations. But Obama has done Bush one better. Obama has started a war in Pakistan with no explanation whatsoever.

If the armaments industry and the neoconservative brownshirts have their way, the US will also be at war with Iran, Russia, Sudan and North Korea.

Meanwhile, America continues to be overrun, as it has been for decades, not by armed foreign enemies but by illegal immigrants across America’s porous and undefended borders.

It is more proof of the Orwellian time in which we live that $636 billion appropriated for wars of aggression is called a “defense bill.”

Who is going to pay for all of this? When foreign countries have spent their trade surpluses and have no more dollars to recycle into the purchase of Treasury bonds, when US banks have used up their “bailout” money by purchasing Treasury bonds, and when the Federal Reserve cannot print any more money to keep the government going without pushing up inflation and interest rates, the taxpayer will be all that is left. Already Obama’s two top economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, are floating the prospect of a middle class tax increase. Will Obama be maneuvered away from his promise just as Bush Sr. was?

Will Americans see the disconnect between their interests and the interests of “their” government? In the small town of Vassalboro, Maine, a few topless waitress jobs in a coffee house drew 150 applicants. Women in this small town are so desperate for jobs that they are reduced to undressing for their neighbors’ amusement.

Meanwhile, the Obama government is going to straighten out Afghanistan and Pakistan and build marble palaces to awe the locals half way around the world.

The US government keeps hyping “recovery” the way Bush hyped “terrorist threat” and “weapons of mass destruction.” The recovery is no more real than the threats. Indeed, it is possible that the economic collapse has hardly begun. Let’s look at what might await us here at home while the US government pursues hegemony abroad.

The real estate crisis is not over. More home foreclosures await as unemployment rises and unemployment benefits are exhausted. The commercial real estate crisis is yet to hit. More bailouts are coming, and they will have to be financed by more debt or money creation. If there are not sufficient purchasers for the Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating checking accounts for the Treasury, that is, by debt monetization or the printing of money.

More debt and money creation will put more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value. At some point import prices, which include offshored goods and services of US corporations, will rise, adding to the inflation fueled by domestic money creation. The Federal Reserve will be unable to hold down interest rates by buying bonds.

No part of US economic policy addresses the systemic crisis in American incomes. For most Americans real income ceased to grow some years ago. Americans have substituted second jobs and debt accumulation for the missing growth in real wages. With most households maxed out on debt and jobs disappearing, these substitutes for real income growth no longer exist.

The Bush-Obama economic policy actually worsens the systemic crisis that the US dollar faces as reserve currency. The fact that there might be no alternative to the dollar as reserve currency does not guarantee that the dollar will continue in this role. Countries might find it less risky to settle trade transactions in their own currencies.

How does an economy based heavily on consumer spending recover when so many high-value-added jobs, and the GDP and payroll tax revenues associated with them, have been moved offshore and when consumers have no more assets to leverage in order to increase their spending?

How does the US pay for its imports if the dollar is no longer used as reserve currency?

These are the unanswered questions.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington;  Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Playing Racial Politics With “The Race.”

Playing Racial Politics With “The Race.”

By Tom Tancredo

Last week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy spoke out against critics of Sonia Sotomayor as playing “racial politics.” According to Leahy,

“You have one leader of the Republican party call her the equivalent of the head of the Ku Klux Klan… That’s what comes across. It comes across that if you belong to a group that tries to help Hispanics… somehow you’re suspicious.”

Usually confirmation hearings are supposed to be about getting specifics about the nominee. But Leahy chose to make vague accusations against unnamed critics of the nominee while defending an unnamed organization. It was apparent to DC insiders that the “group that tries to help” Hispanics is the National Council for La Raza (The Race) and the “Republican Leader” is me.

It isn’t surprising that he didn’t want to use our names. After all it’s difficult to defend someone belonging to a group called “The Race” by accusing her opponents of playing racial politics. The last thing the Democrats want is for the American people to know about the National Council of La Raza, their radical agenda, and Sotomayor’s association with the group.

Sotomayor was a member of La Raza and her comments about “Wise Latinas” being superior to white men appeared in the La Raza Law Journal. [A Latina Judge's Voice, 13 Berkeley La Raza L.J. 87 (2002).]The National Council of La Raza bills itself as “the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States” who works through “its network of nearly 300 affiliated community-based organizations.”

Among these affiliates are several chapters of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) who La Raza helps fund. Aztlán is what radical “Mechistas“—as they refer to themselves on La Raza’s website—call the American Southwest, which they claim still belongs to Mexico. Their slogan is “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada“ meaning “For The Race everything, outside the Race nothing.” One chapter says on La Raza’s site that their mission is “empowerment of our gente and the liberation of Aztlán.”

La Raza receives tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to set up charter schools like the Aztlán Academy of Tucson where they fly the Mexican Flag, but not the American Flag and teach students “Aztec Math.”

In 1994, La Raza gave their “Chicano of the Year” Award to Jose Angel Gutierrez who once said, “We have got to eliminate the Gringo, and what I mean by that is that if the worse comes to the worst, we have got to kill him” and that “our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.”

Of special importance when considering a Supreme Court nominee is La Raza’s position on a variety of policy and legal issues. They support driver’s licenses, in state tuition, and amnesty for illegal aliens. They say that virtually all enforcement of our immigration laws on the state level is unconstitutional. They filed amicus briefs in favor of racial preferences, and in favor of benefits for illegal aliens. They led the legal attack against Hazleton, PA for their Official English and anti-illegal alien measures.

At the very least, Sotomayor should explain where she stands on these issues.

While questioning her connections to radical left wing groups is off limits, attacking conservatives for belonging to mainstream organizations like the Federalist Society is fair game for the Democrats.

When Larry Thompson was up for Deputy Attorney General in 2001, Leahy questioned his role with the organization. Sen. Richard Durbin denounced the group as a “far right” group who he implied might want to bring back the Dred Scott decision upholding slavery.

The Federalist Society is nothing but a debating and social organization for conservative and libertarian law students and attorneys. In contrast to La Raza, it takes no position on legal cases or policy.

If membership in the Federalist Society is a problem for the Democrats, imagine how they would react if Samuel Alito or John Roberts belonged to a group called “The National Council of the White Race” who honored a man who once said “We have got to eliminate Latinos, and what I mean by that is that if the worse comes to the worst, we have got to kill him,” as “white man of the year.”

They wouldn’t pass the bar, much less become Supreme Court justices. But when a Hispanic or Black holds these views, we need to celebrate it for its diversity.

The Democrats support of Sotomayor and La Raza shows us what Obama’s “post racial” America really looks like. Designated minority victim groups are free to promote their anti-white racist agenda, while any whites who fight back are playing “racial politics.”

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo represented Colorado’s 6^th Congressional District from 1999 to 2009 where he founded and chaired the 100+ member bipartisan Immigration Reform Caucus. In 2008 he sought the Republican nomination for president. He currently serves as chairman of Team America PAC and honorary chairman of Youth for Western Civilization and president of the Rocky Mountain Foundation.

The Hypocrisy of Integration -The Lone Haranguer

The Hypocrisy of Integration

Since the Sixties liberals in government have forced white Americans to allow blacks and other incompatible species to intermingle with us in our society. They spew high sounding moral platitudes about equality, civil rights, and social justice. They try to make it sound as if they are our big brother who is teaching us to walk a higher road, as if there has ever been a group of politicians anywhere, at any time in history(other than our Founding Fathers), that were not desperately corrupt and immoral.

For that group of degenerates to teach us anything about morals is ludicrous at best. The truth of the matter is that they were pressured to institute civil rights and integration by those who run things behind the scenes, namely the Jews. And we all know their real agenda.

Always, always be suspect of any so-called “moral” action taken by our government. Those clowns couldn’t care any less about the welfare and happiness of blacks or anyone else for that matter. The only things that motivates any politician is self aggrandizement and enrichment. A politician by definition is a member of the elite of this planet, and they are a tiny minority that controls 93% of the world’s wealth, and all of its power.

They have no interest in you, other than as a tool to further those ambitions. They couldn’t care less what happens to you, or if you’re happy or even fed. They’d be just as content if you were in chains as slaves. In fact they’d find that preferable than having us calling and writing them all the time, demanding an accounting of their disgusting and evil actions.

As much as blacks and other muds are a threat to us, they don’t even represent a blip on their radar, because most politicians live in high security, gated areas where guards keep all riffraff out, and their servants even do the shopping for them, so they never have to associate with these lowlifes. In fact recently Biden had to send out an aid to find out the price of a gallon of milk because he hadn’t bought one himself in over thirty years. Anyone who thinks their leaders are actually in touch with their problems is a naive idiot.

Recently I read a report on prisons in this country, and the conditions in those cesspools. It was shocking to say the least. Our leaders are continually laying guilt trips on our mindless yuppies about how we treat our black brothers, never once mentioning the genocide of black-on-white murder, rape, and robbery going on in this country. They push the same crap about all the other dark races as well, telling us we’re all evil, racist, and bigoted if we don’t continue to look the other way while these animals perpetually fill graveyards with our loved ones.

And as a last-ditch effort to contain this epidemic, they’re tossing hordes of these apes in prison. The thing about prisons in this country is they’re a cross-section, a microcosm of our society. To visit one is to see a mirror image of the outside world, all crammed into one small place.

And the nice thing about these festering pits is that the truth about the races can’t be hidden. Not even political correctness, liberal propaganda, or government pressure have any effect on these people because they’ve got nothing left to lose. What are they going to do to them..toss them in prison? Consequently all masks are off and the real world is laid bare for all to see.

The inmates instinctively separate into the various races because it’s natural. What’s unnatural is forcing people to integrate. This practice is evil. It’s against the laws of man and nature, and even God for believers. There’s not one single scientific study that backs up integration…just the opposite in fact. But you’ll never hear or read about any of that in this age of liberal bullshit and propaganda.

Integration is a Jewish invention designed and instituted to destroy our race. But the Jews can’t reach into the prisons. Authorities quickly discovered that when they forced integration in the prison system, they quickly came up with a bumper crop of dead niggers.

That’s because niggers will behave like niggers wherever they’re at. And when they started stealing, raping, and robbing whites on the inside, they got killed. After all, the whites had nothing left to lose, and they couldn’t pack up and leave to get away from the maggots, like we can on the outside. No “white flight” for them. So they were forced to deal with them the only way left open to them..by sending them to DNS.

Now the prison officials no longer try to impose integration, but they also make a point of squelching this fact to the outside world. It wouldn’t do for the rest of America to know the truth about diversity, now would it?

Our schools are the same way. That’s where integration was first forced on America. And even though millions of nasty, worthless, trouble making blacks were bussed into white schools, white kids quickly gravitated into a separate group and tried their damnedest to stay away from these apes.

Of course the bucks just loved the move, because it gave them access to our white girls, which got a lot of black bucks stomped or killed for their efforts, and still do in most states, except for the several rabidly liberal cities, namely Jew York, San Fag-cisco, and Hollyweird.

Even here in California, where the parasites, queers, liberals, blacks, and invaders have all but taken over, white families have taken their kids completely out of the liberal school system and left the state. And I’m not talking about a few thousand, but millions and millions of whites.

In fact the exodus has become so bad that it’s causing a huge financial crisis in California for the liberal politicians. That’s because whites are their source of tax revenue. They are the producers. Without them, there’s no more money to support all the parasites that are still breeding like cockroaches.

They did it to themselves though, when in their arrogance they passed laws outlawing home-schooling, in an attempt for force parents to put their kids in the brainwashing programs the NEA has created in all public schools.

Well, all this did was anger whites to the point they gave their leaders the finger and packed up and left the state…with their kids, enraging the liberals who whined like all hell because they couldn’t stop them. And believe me, they even tried to keep them from moving. That’s how desperate these fiends are to warp our kid’s minds.

And it all started with integration. To this very day I am still astounded that America allowed that evil law to go into affect. That was the second worst mistake whites made in the last century. The first was allowing civil rights to take effect.

There are a lot of liberals and naive, brainwashed people out there that will eventually read this article and start foaming at the mouth in liberal indignation, because they don’t possess the knowledge or the mental capacity to realize I’m speaking the absolute truth. The bright side of that is the fact that there will always be a percentage of them that wake up enough to start questioning everything they’ve been taught, and
come to the truth eventually. And that will change their lives for the better..and those around them as well.

But what I’m waiting for is the day my people wake up and realize the hypocrisy integration represents and reject it completely. That will be a day worth celebrating.

-The Lone Haranguer