US National Debt Will Exceed GDP by 2012

by Dustin Stanley

In my last piece regarding the US financial situation, “Obama-Bernanke ‘Economic Recovery’ is Actually Dangerous Bubble”, I gave a rather dire, non-sugarcoated forecast of what the future holds for the US economy if the nation’s leaders don’t change direction extremely soon in a variety of areas (which they are still showing absolutely no intention of doing). One of the very worst consequences of US leaders’ fiscal recklessness is that soon the US national debt will exceed the nation’s GDP, imperiling its ability to continue receiving foreign loans at low interest rates, which is something that it has come to depend on. While I warned that it would be “only a matter of time” before this happened, I was unfortunately unable to say exactly how long this “matter of time” would be. That was because President Barack Obama had not yet released his fiscal year 2011 budget[1], including his advisors’ projections of the nation’s financial situation for this year and years to come. Now that he has, it is very clear from perusing it that the situation is, to put it bluntly, even worse than I feared. Obama’s FY 2011 budget is projected to leave a record-breaking deficit of $1.56 trillion, $0.15 trillion greater than his prior FY 2010 budget which itself is projected to leave a record-breaking deficit of $1.41 trillion. Furthermore, the budget for the fiscal year thereafter, FY 2012, is projected to leave a deficit of $1.27 trillion. These deficits together, combined with prior high debt and the ongoing global recession, will according to the projections of the President’s own economic advisors, push the national debt past 100% of GDP in FY 2012.

Once again, this has not happened to the United States in any other time in its history besides World War II. Even back then, the debt-to-GDP ratio remained above 100% for only 3 fiscal years before coming back down below 100% in FY 1948, whereas now it is projected that the debt-to-GDP ratio will stay above 100% for 8 fiscal years after reaching that level in FY 2012, and will stay above 100% indefinitely as projections end in FY 2020 with debt-to-GDP ratio at nearly 107% and climbing.[2] Back in the immediate post-WWII era, it was possible to get the debt back down to less than 100% of GDP in 3 fiscal years because it was really only a matter of paying off a war debt, and the government’s size and scope were much smaller then than they are now, thus the cost was much less per year than it is today. Some people, most notably libertarians and “Ron Paulians” indeed do posit drastically cutting down the current size of the government as the solution to our present predicament, but this is not as easy as it seems. For example, Greece (whose national debt is forecast to reach 120% of GDP by the end of this year) has already been forced to do that, but this has led to much civil unrest as so many of the numerous interest groups that expect their share of the pie each year are now coming up empty-handed. Now, Greece is indeed infamous for the sheer number of interest groups there tugging the government this-way-and-that for what they want, and this has certainly compounded the problem, but then again so is the United States, and it is very likely that our own interest groups, when they begin to be denied their share of the pie, will start acting in the same way as the Greek interest groups, including staging massive general strikes and other such events, and it may even unfortunately lead to more serious civil unrest as is happening currently in Greece.[3][4]

Material Consequences of Fiscal Recklessness

A recent study done by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (link here)[5] indicates that when nations reach a level of 90% debt-to-GDP ratio, they really start to lose their ability to grow their way out of debt, and instead have to rely upon more extreme measures, such as hyperinflation or currency devaluation, in order to solve their debt problems.[6][7] When the ratio climbs from 90% to over 100% and beyond, the problems can only get worse, both from a psychological standpoint and a reality standpoint, and the devaluation or hyperinflation that will eventually have to happen will only be all the more extreme, and the ensuing civil strife discussed in the preceding paragraph will be all the worse. So the option is clearly between a lot of pain now, and catastrophic disaster later. It is quite regrettable that America’s leaders are fecklessly sending it hurtling toward the second option.[8]

[1]The US Government’s fiscal years start on October 1st and end on September 30th. For example, FY 2009 started on October 1st, 2008 and ended on September 30th, 2009.

[2]These numbers could (and probably will) become even worse as there is a strong aftershock to this financial crisis waiting in the wings in commercial real estate. A February report by the Congressional Oversight Panel states that about $1.4 trillion worth of commercial real estate loans are due in the 2011-2014 period (a significant portion of these are loans for real estate that was built up during the aformentioned 2005-2007 housing bubble height) and nearly half of this money is wrapped up in loans that are currently “underwater”, meaning that the lendee owes more than the property is worth. It is estimated that this situation will result in about $300 billion worth of losses, which sounds relatively modest on its own compared to the numbers we’ve seen, but the problem is that these losses will not occur in a vacuum. Much of this money was loaned out by smaller and medium size banks which were not given the “stress tests” (to measure their ability to withstand another crisis) like the bigger banks were in the aftermath of the Lehman collapse. While this situation is not likely to (by itself) cause another Lehman-style collapse, it will nontheless wipe out many of these smaller and medium size banks, adding to the crisis that we are already in much more than simply having $300 billion disappear.

[3]It should be noted additionally that in Greece, which is in an even worse financial situation than the United States, even the big austerity cuts that are already causing all these strikes and civil unrest are only able to reduce the deficit a paltry amount from 12.7% of GDP in calendar year 2009 to a projected 8.7% of GDP in CY 2010. This isn’t enough to stop Greece, which was already at a 112.6% debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of CY 2009, from reaching a whopping estimated 120% debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of CY 2010. But the problem is that if Greece were to cut significantly more off of its government budget, because it’s come to rely so much on its public sector, it could throw the country into a depression and cause so much financial chaos (not to mention civil unrest) that it would defeat the purpose of any cuts in the first place. Greece is in a truly terrible situation, and it seems the only real way out is either an EU bailout or an IMF (International Monetary Fund) bailout, since devaluation or hyperinflation are not options as it uses the Euro. If an IMF bailout happens, it will be extremely embarrassing for the EU in many ways, so most EU elites seem to be gravitating toward the first option, which is going to anger a lot of EU voters who don’t want to be held responsible for Greece’s problems. But this leaves open the question of Spain and Italy, which seem also to be headed in Greece’s direction with regards to their finances. These countries have much larger economies than Greece, so it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible, for the EU to bail them out if they end up in Greece’s position. Even worse, bailing out Greece will send a message to these countries’ leaders that they don’t need to get their financial houses in order now while they still can, so they’ll keep heading in Greece’s direction rather than cleaning up their act, so there’ll be an even bigger problem only a few years down the road. If that ends up happening, the EU will have to bail them out, as the IMF doesn’t have the assets to bail them out, and that will be a big strain on the EU as many other major EU nations, in other words the ones that would be expected to foot the bill such as Germany, are starting to develop debt problems of their own.

[4]A critic might accuse me here of “comparing the current financial situation in the United States to the one in Greece.” Rest assured that I am doing no such thing, and I am well aware that the United States is the world’s largest economy, and can print its own money (the US dollar), which is also the world’s reserve currency, none of which is true in the case of Greece which is a smaller economy, and uses the Euro which it cannot print. But what people often miss is that once things start getting really bad here in the USA with the debt (and with other things), to the point where even our size and the fact that we hold the world’s reserve currency cannot save us, there is simply no safety net. Greece, as well as numerous other countries which have had weak or failing economies in this crisis such as Iceland and Ukraine, all have had either EU or IMF bailouts available to them should they need it, and some of them have indeed used that option. However, if US national debt were to somehow become unmanagable, to the point where we couldn’t tax our way out, couldn’t export our way out, there is no bailout machine in the entire world large enough to save us. None. Not the IMF, as it only carries $500 billion on hand, which is enough to bail out Greece, Iceland, or Ukraine, but is peanuts when it comes to US debt numbers. Not even China or the EU. China’s economy, even though that nation gets a lot of press as the “emerging superpower”, is simply not large enough as it is less than a third the size of ours. As for the EU, its economy is about 20% larger than ours, but the EU has its own debt problems, so if the EU attempted to bail out the US, it would simply transfer the problem over from the US to the EU. So the only option for the US at that point would be a “stealth default” (either that or an outright default, but a “stealth default” is much more likely to be what actually happens), which means having the Federal Reserve simply print whatever number of dollars is necessary to bring the debt back down to a managable level. The problem here is that this will not only seriously devalue dollars held by citizens here, but also the dollar assets of many nations all around the world who hold the dollar on account of it being the world’s reserve currency. This will cause problems all around the world, and may even push nations which were already on the brink totally over the edge.

[5]For those interested, investment columnist Jim Jubak has written an article on the Reinhart-Rogoff study that makes it and its real-world ramifications easier to understand for the layman. His article can be found here: http://www.moneyshow.com/investing/Jubak_Blog.asp?aid=Jubak_blog-18642

[6]The United States will cross the crucial 90% debt-to-GDP mark at the end of this fiscal year, FY 2010, which ends on September 30th of this year, reaching an estimated 94.1% debt-to-GDP ratio.

[7]Once again, an important exception to this rule is the case of the United States in the immediate post-WWII era. This was an exception because back then, the fact that the national debt rose above 90% of GDP (and indeed above 100% of GDP shortly thereafter) was caused almost solely by a war debt, rather than a much more fundamental set of problems with the system as is the case today.

[8]Again, rest assured that I am not simply a “doomsayer” that is preaching that “economic collapse” is going to happen tomorrow. What I am saying though is that even the United States, the world’s most powerful economy, has its limits, and governments controlled by both major parties (as well as the Federal Reserve controlled by various chairmen) have been pushing us farther and farther towards those limits for a long time now, and given our current situation, if nothing changes, it will eventually hit the wall, not tomorrow, not even next year, but in ten years, or fifteen years at the most, if this path does not change it will hit the wall. Right now we are seeing but the opening stages. (Perhaps the early-2000′s tech bubble burst, given that the loose Fed monetary policy that was meant to “repair” the burst created a fake bull market and helped build up the housing bubble, was the opening stages to the opening stages.) There is still time to turn things around and prevent the “closing stages” from happening, but if nothing is done, then they will happen given our current course, and it’s going to be a lot worse than this current crisis. That’s not a “doomsayer” prediction. That’s just common sense.

[9]Here are the numerical values for the US debt-vs-GDP chart.

Fiscal Year–GDP–National Debt–Debt to GDP ratio–as a %

2009	14237	11850		0.832338			83.23383
2010	14624	13760		0.940919			94.0919
2011	15299	15117		0.988			98.81
2012	16203	16308		1.00648			100.648
2013	17182	17426		1.014201			101.4201
2014	18193	18505		1.017149			101.7149
2015	19190	19656		1.024283			102.4283
2016	20163	20809		1.032039			103.2039
2017	21136	21984		1.040121			104.0121
2018	22087	23171		1.049079			104.9079
2019	23065	24424		1.05892			105.892
2020	24067	25751		1.069971			106.9971

Note: National debt and GDP numbers are in billions of dollars.
Again, these numbers are all from the President’s FY 2011 budget except for the debt-to-GDP ratios which I calculated myself based on the numbers calculated by the President’s economic advisors.

Posted by Dustin Stanley

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Whatever Germany does, the euro as we know it is dead

Angela Merkel’s ban on short-selling is just a distraction from the horror to come

By Jeff Randall
Published: 7:56PM BST 20 May 2010

Comments 366 | Comment on this article

Angela Merkel’s response to the euro crisis is ‘doomed to fail’ Photo: Bloomberg

“Money can’t buy you friends, but it does get you a better class of enemy” – Spike Milligan

For Angela Merkel, leader of the eurozone’s richest country, a queue is forming of high-quality adversaries. As she tips German Geld und Gut into the furnace of a rescue package for the euro, while going it alone in a misguided ban on market “manipulators”, the brass-neck Chancellor has infuriated domestic voters, angered her EU partners (in particular the French) and invited the so-called wolf pack of global traders to do its worst.

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In one respect, Mrs Merkel is right: “The euro is in danger… if the euro fails, then Europe fails.” What she has not yet admitted publicly is that the main cause of the single currency’s peril appears beyond her control and therefore her impetuous response to its crisis of confidence is doomed to fail.

The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man’s lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.

By any legitimate measure, Greece was unworthy of eurozone membership. That it achieved card-carrying status was down to the sleight-of-hand skills of its Brussels fixers and the acquiescence of central bank bean-counters. Now we know the truth, jet-hosing it with yet more debt makes no sense. Another dose of funny money will delay but not extinguish the need for austerity.

This is why the euro, in its current form, is finished. The game is up for a monetary union that was meant to bolt together work-and-save citizens in northern Europe with the party animals of Club Med. No amount of pit props from Berlin can save the euro Mk I from collapsing under the weight of its structural dysfunctionality. You cannot run indefinitely a single currency with one interest rate for 16 economies, when there are such huge fiscal disparities.

What was once deemed unthinkable is now, I believe, inevitable: withdrawal from the eurozone of one or more of its member countries. At the bottom end, Greece and Portugal are favourites to be forced out through weakness. At the top end, proposals are already being floated in the Frankfurt press for a new “hard currency” zone, led by Germany, Austria and the Benelux countries. Either way, rich and poor are heading in opposite directions.

When asked on Sky if, in five years’ time, the euro will have the same make-up as it does today, Jeremy Stretch, a currency analyst at Rabobank, the Dutch financial services giant, told me: “I think it’s pretty unlikely.” The euro was a boom-time construct. In the biggest bust for 80 years, it is falling apart.

Telegraph loyalists with long memories will be shocked by none of this. In 1996, Sir Martin Jacomb, then chairman of the Prudential, set out with great prescience in two pieces for The Sunday Telegraph why a European single currency, without full political integration, would end in disaster. His prognosis of the ailments that might afflict the eurozone’s sickliest constituents reads as if it was penned to sum up today’s turmoil.

“A country which does not handle its public finances prudently will find its long-term borrowing costs adjusted accordingly,” Sir Martin predicted. “Although theory says that default is unlikely, nevertheless, a country that spends too much public money, and allows its wage costs to become uncompetitive, will experience rising unemployment and falling economic activity. The social costs may become impossible to bear.”

Welcome to the headaches of George Papandreou. The bond markets called his country’s bluff. Greece is skint, but its unions don’t want to admit it. There is insufficient political will to tackle incompetence and corruption, never mind unaffordable state spending. But, locked into the euro, Greece cannot devalue its way out of trouble, so it relies on the kindness of strangers.

Dishing out German largesse to profligate Athens, with little expectation of a reasonable return, is a sure way for Mrs Merkel to join Gordon Brown as a political has-been. Fully aware of the revulsion felt by Mercedes and BMW employees at the prospect of their taxes being used to pay for a Hellenic car crash, she has resorted to creating a bogeyman – The Speculator.

By announcing a ban on the activities of short-sellers (those who bet to profit from falling prices in financial markets), she is hoping her decoy will avert German attention from the small print of Berlin’s support for Greece, which talks of developing processes for “an orderly state insolvency”. This sounds ominously like a softening-up process for a form of default.

Greece’s severe difficulties were home-made. The euro has come under pressure not from dark forces of speculation but respectable investors, many of them traditional pension funds, which, quite correctly, worked out that when the crunch came, the Brussels elite would sanction an abandonment of its no bail-out rule and cough up for a messy fudge.

In 1990, the late Lord Ridley, when still a government minister, caused a storm by telling The Spectator that Europe’s planned monetary union was “a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”. One knew what he was getting at, but it has not turned out that way.

Protecting the euro has become a project via which profligate states dip their fingers in Berlin’s till. Germany is taking on nasty obligations without gaining ownership of the assets. Germany’s version of The Sun, Bild Zeitung, feeds its readers a regular diet of stories about the way ordinary Germans are being taken for mugs. Trust has turned to suspicion. Next stop is divorce.

As for the United Kingdom, we must be grateful that those frightfully clever Europhiles, such as Lord Mandelson and Kenneth Clarke, did not get their way. Had they been able to scrap the pound and embrace the euro this country would be even closer to ruin. Without a flexible currency, the colossal deficit clocked up by Mr Brown would have crushed us completely. We have little to thank him for, but it would be churlish to deny that his decision to reject Tony Blair’s blandishments in favour of the euro was a life-saver.

Sterling’s devaluation has not been pretty, but it is helping to keep our exports competitive while the coalition Government begins rebuilding the nation’s finances. Siren voices from across the Channel, calling for closer integration between Britain and the rest of the EU, can be confidently rejected. As for joining the euro, I find it impossible to imagine any circumstances under which it would be in the UK’s interest to do so.

Face of medieval knight reconstructed by computers

The face of a medieval knight who was killed 700 years ago has been revealed through state-of-the-art forensic techniques.

By Nick Collins
Published: 10:51AM BST 19 May 2010

A team at Dundee University have used state-of-the-art techniques to construct a computer image of what he may have looked like Photo: Deadline Press and Picture Agency

The mysterious skeleton was uncovered along with nine other people’s remains underneath a chapel at Stirling Castle in 1997.

It is not known whether the man, who was killed during Scotland’s Wars of Independence, is English, Scottish or even French, due to the fact the castle changed hands several times.

But a team at Dundee University have used state-of-the-art techniques to construct a computer image of what he may have looked like, and hope to be able to uncover more details about his origins.

Tests revealed that the warrior was about 5ft 7in and in his twenties when he died, and that he was “a very strong and fit nobleman, with the physique of a professional rugby player”.

He is believed to have been killed by a sword which struck him through his nose and jaw, with the blow most likely coming as he lay on the ground.

Researchers also found evidence of wounds he had previously suffered in battle, such as the head of an arrow stuck in his chest and a dent to his skull, most likely caused by a blow from an axe.

Dr Richard Strachan, senior archaeologist at Historic Scotland, told the Daily Mail: “The facial reconstruction of the knight gives a powerful impression of what a warrior who died in the 1300s may have looked like.”

Some experts believe the skeleton, which was buried near the royal apartments of the castle in the early 14th century, was the English knight Robert Morley, who was killed in a tournament at the castle in 1388.

Historic Scotland has ordered further research into the skeletons, in the hope of finding out more about the origins of all the people buried under the chapel.

Dr Jo Buckberry, who will conduct part of the work, said: “This group is highly unusual, because of where and when the people were buried, suggesting that they might have been socially important and have died during extreme events such as sieges.

“One of my hopes is that we will be able to find out where at least some of them originated.”

• A documentary on the research, History Cold Case: Stirling Man, will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Thursday, May 20.

Time To Get Serious About Secession

By Wilton L. Strickland, Esq.

As America enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is becoming painfully apparent that her historical march of progress not only has ground to a halt, but has reversed course and is heading back to a place from which the founders struggled to escape. It is a place where government acknowledges no authority higher than itself, brandishing the sword at home and abroad for purposes not ordained anywhere in the supreme law of the land. Law itself has been stripped of its noble purpose to restrain both the government and the governed, now functioning as a weapon for government to transgress against our lives, liberty, and property.

Worse yet, every transgression begets more misery, and every misery begets more transgression. Government prosecutes unjust and undeclared wars abroad that provoke terrorism, then claims it must oppress us for our own safety. Government imposes pervasive controls that distort the mechanisms of the marketplace, then claims it must assert even more control because the market has “failed.” Government takes from the productive to subsidize (and thus foster) the unproductive, then claims it must do more to combat growing poverty. Government spends far beyond its means and its enumerated powers, then claims it must raise taxes and debase the currency to help pay the difference.

This feedback loop of lawlessness has become so shrill and terrifying that many Americans are finally taking notice. For the first time in a long time, America is asking serious questions about the legitimacy of the government’s activities. Secession is a serious answer.

There is a psychological hurdle, to be sure, in giving secession the consideration it deserves. The very word causes many people to flinch because it conjures up images of slavery and civil war. Even some of the fiercest critics of the federal government have not given up on the electoral process because they see signs of hope in the Tea Party movement, and they take heart that outsiders such as Rand Paul have proven they can compete at the ballot box. In truth, it may be the worst possible outcome if such outsiders make electoral gains, because it will lull everyone into believing that real change is upon us. It is not.

Think for a moment what would have to occur for the federal government to obey the Constitution and restore fiscal sanity. “Mandatory” spending on unconstitutional wealth transfers such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would have to be eliminated or at least phased out. “Discretionary” spending that legislators love to funnel to their constituents would also have to be deeply slashed, not merely to balance the budget but also to terminate unconstitutional wealth transfers to corporations, universities, farmers, and countless others who lobby furiously for this pork. Congress would have to cease legislating on roughly 70%-80% of the subjects it now arrogates to itself in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

The President would have to stop issuing “executive orders” that carry the force of law despite lacking congressional consent, and he would also have to suspend all war operations until securing a declaration of same from Congress. The Supreme Court would have to disavow precedent from the past three generations that, among other things, enables federal courts to interfere routinely in local matters under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment; that gives a blank check to congressional and presidential assertions of power under the guise of “interstate commerce” or “spending for the general welfare”; and that has distorted “judicial review” into a power of amending the Constitution rather than enforcing it.
And let us not forget the hordes occupying the bureaucracy, most of whom would have to quit their jobs and halt the printing presses from churning out tens of thousands of unlawful regulations that Congress never voted on.

To put it mildly, this is not going to happen. People from all walks of life have a vested interest in the unconstitutional status quo and will never vote to relinquish it. Welfare recipients, Social Security dependents, federal employees, high-flying banks, both major political parties, mal-educated college graduates, and the indolent majority will never budge. We could hold elections from now until doomsday without seeing reform that comes anywhere near to accomplishing what the Constitution requires.

Neither the Reagan Revolution in the ’80s nor the Contract With America in the ’90s made a dent in the federal juggernaut, and nor will the current fervor to re-take Washington even if it “succeeds.” Moreover, what does it say about a country when it requires a massive electoral effort to achieve even a modicum of lawfulness in the government? Constitutional compliance is where all political campaigns should begin, not where a few of them should end. Voting bestows unwarranted legitimacy on a system gone rotten.

The good news is that even if we cannot persuade most Americans into lawfulness, we can ignore them. This is secession, and it means simply that a group of people will thereafter govern itself rather than be governed by others. From a historical perspective, secession is legitimate because it is how America was born out of Great Britain, not to mention how the Constitution was born out of the Confederation – recall that nine states disregarded the Articles of Confederation and founded their own government, leaving the remaining four states to decide what to do next.

Modern secession is hardly unprecedented in the American experience, let alone radical. (The misnamed Civil War punished those who sought to exercise the right of secession; the war did not disprove the right itself, no more than censorship disproves the right of free speech.) From a logical perspective, secession is legitimate because all states are human creations that include some humans and exclude others — there is no reason that a state deserves less legitimacy simply because it is new or contains a different set of inhabitants.

From a moral perspective, secession is legitimate because government is only a means to achieve human happiness, not an end that requires sacrificing our happiness on a government altar. Even from a legal perspective, modern secession would be legitimate because it seeks to honor the Constitution and reject a renegade government that desecrates it. It is a fundamental principle of law that a party who breaches a contract may not demand contractual compliance from the other.

In the same vein, modern government clearly has breached the constitutional contract, so government has no legal argument to keep us from leaving. I venture that a new American republic carved from the old one would serve the Constitution’s ideals more faithfully than anything we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes.

Yet the psychological hurdle remains, largely out of the fear that a seceding territory will prove racist, corrupt, or oppressive. The strongest response to qualms of this sort is that secession creates more choices, and membership is optional. A new republic carved out of the old one would not compel anyone to join or penalize anyone for trying to leave (something that the current regime cannot say for itself). There are no slaves to liberate this time around, so idealistic rhetoric cannot prop up another war of conquest. Speaking of conquest, a seceded territory could never hope to match the federal government in terms of corruption, extortion, pillage, or plunder.

Such a territory would lack the raw materials necessary to inflict the magnitude of abuse that the federal government has made its stock-in-trade. Given the opportunity to exist, this new republic would likely prove more attractive than the old one, which is precisely why it will be resisted tooth and nail — governments are monopolistic and hate external competition, the only proven method of restraining political power. Internal restraints can be shredded or rendered meaningless by prosaic pronouncements from the judiciary, as we have witnessed time and again. It is thus absurd to fear what a small government might do when we already endure what a huge government actually does to us and the world on a daily basis.

One more reason for secession cannot go ignored: it is the wave of the future. The past few decades have witnessed the collapse of bloated centers of power, yielding a constellation of new nation-states with no need or desire to assert the global dominance that the American political class clutches to its chest. This sort of dominance is a relic that cannot withstand the new competitive environment or the onrush of technology that further empowers us to exchange ideas, goods, and money as we see fit. The financial crisis represents a collapse of the house of cards that our politicians have built, and all of their outrageous measures to sustain it reek of desperation.

Deep down they sense their legitimacy ebbing, and at least on that score they are correct. Ours is a world of decentralization, flexibility, and choice. To secede is to look forward; to support a Byzantine and unlawful empire is to look backward. Yes, my friends, it is time to get serious about secession.

Wilton L. Strickland is a Florida-born personal injury attorney that now lives in Missoula, Montana. He has written the books “Unlawful Government: Preserving America In A Post-Constitutional Age,” and “Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony.”

Article originally posted at www.LibertyDefenseLeague.com.

View from the Right: Black and other nonwhite violence against whites: a grim collection

View from the Right
The passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the traditionalist politically incorrect Right.

http://amnation.com/vfr/

Black and other nonwhite violence against whites: a grim collection

In recent weeks, I have posted a great many articles on the ongoing outbreaks of black on white violence in this country and elsewhere–and not just “ordinary” criminal violence, but violence of a specifically savage and threatening character. Collected in this entry will be articles about black on white violence, as well as about Hispanic (or Mestizo) on white violence, and Asian on white violence (and even nonwhite on nonwhite violence, such as the wilding of the brother of black author Carol Swain). Inseparable from the above is the white naivete and passivity in the face of these attacks–what I call the Eloi syndrome. Of course whites also kill other whites in horrific ways, as at Columbine High School. The Columbine Massacre and the Knoxville Atrocity are equally symptomatic of our liberal culture, but they are different types of phenomena, and need to be treated under different categories.

There is no pleasure in compiling this list of articles. Even to glance over the relatively small number of titles accumulated so far is a disturbing experience. But these terrible things are happening, they seem to be happening more and more frequently, and for our own safety and survival we need to know about it, instead of ignoring it and covering it up as the mainstream media with the compliance of whites have been doing for the last 40 years. Nonwhite violence against whites, whether the perpetrators explicitly express a racial motive or not, is not only a very bad thing in itself that has increased from virtually zero a half century ago to an unending, low-level intifida today, an intifada systematically ignored by mainstream media and society as a whole. It is the ultimate concretization of white America’s abandonment of its leadership position in its own land, and of its inclusion of, embrace of, and surrender to nonwhite and non-Western peoples. It is where the rubber meets the road on the path to national suicide.

Black on white savagery

Death penalty sought for black accused of murdering white co-ed [August 12, 2008]

In St. Louis, roving “wilding” gangs of up to 100 blacks attacking people at train stations [August 11, 2008]

Mob of black savages in Brooklyn beats three white men with bats when they try to rescue girl [August 11, 2008]

At least they weren’t killed [August 4: British couple tell of being attacked, the man severely beaten, the woman raped, in their Caribeean villa.]

Black savagery, white acceptance: the Biehl story [Jul 31, 2008. Kevin V. gives a detailed account of the savage murder of Amy Biehl and about how her parents later not only forgave her killers, but befriended them, had them as guests in their home, ate with them, employed them. It is the ultimate Tale of the Eloi.]

Five Dutch women raped in Kenya–I guess they hadn’t been reading VFR [Jul 31, 2008. In this entry I list 15 acts of horrifying black violence, in all but two of which the victims were white, and then I add: "These savage black attacks are in the news every week, almost every day, and the media never say, "There's a dangerous element within the black population, and it's especially dangerous to white people, there is a such a thing as black on white crime, therefore whites have got to take precautions when in black areas and when traveling in black countries." These simple statements of fact are never uttered, because they would violate the liberal orthodoxy that race doesn't matter and we can all live together as one. Instead, each incident, even when the respective races of the victims and perpetrators are mentioned, is treated as though it were isolated, having no relationship to any larger phenomenon. Since it is impossible for people who are under the influence of this liberal orthodoxy even to form the concept that blacks are particularly dangerous to whites, let alone to say it aloud, whites keep voluntarily, carelessly subjecting themselves to the black savagery."]

Mirror reports Antigua victims were “tortured” [Jul 30, 2008]

Honeymooning British couple murdered in their hotel cabin on black Caribbean island [Jul 29, 2008. How the media made the execution-murders look like the victims' fault, because they "confronted" the robbers in a "robbery gone wrong." Lively discussion about how white people should not visit black countries unless they can provide for their own security or stay in five-star hotels. Summed up by me as: "Security is possible in these black-run countries, in hotels run by international corporations with their own facilities, standards, and procedures different from the usual way of doing things in that country. Alternatively, security is possible by paying sufficient money for your own armed guards."]

Wilding in Charleston, October 1999 [July 21, 2008. White man bicycling through black neighborhood, knocked down by black mob, beaten about the head until brain damaged.]

Mob of blacks attacks police officers in London [Jul 20, 2008]

Another white family desolated [Jul 20, 2008]

At least apartheid is gone [Jun 24, 2006]

Black youth terrorizing white passengers in Portland, Oregon rail system [Jun 13, 2008. This entry segues into discussion of difference between barbarism and savagery and how Islam combines elements of both.]

The Morningside Heights atrocity, and a question for Obama [Jun 7, 2008]

Victim’s escape [What the Hamilton Height's torturer did to his victim, and how she escaped death.]

We must face the fact of black racist violence against whites [Link to Fred Reed's December 2007 article on the continuing reality--the systematically ignored and covered-up reality--of race-motivated black-on-white violence in America. It concerns the white woman who was set upon by a gang of black "youths" in a Baltimore bus and severely beaten about the head and face.]

What really happened in Jena [Sep 22, 2007]

Finally, a black speaks the truth about blacks [September 2005. A black female minister speaks about the savagery of much of the black population in New Orleans and the failure of the rest of the black population to do anything to stop it. The combination of black failure and black savagery--resulting, moreover, in black misery--is such a stunning indictment of black America that black and leftist opinion, including foreign opinion, is virtually compelled to blame the whole New Orleans disaster on white racism.]

What whites really don’t understand about blacks is not what they think they don’t understand [Whites' mistake is that they think blacks are rational, and so they admit them as equal participants in discussion. Includes account of my call to Bob Grant in 1995 about whites' cluelessness about blacks in the TV discussions following the OJ Simpson acquittal.]

America’s ongoing crimes against blacks, and what it needs to do to make up for them [Exchange with Kerry M. who lays out his case for what whites must do to make up for their oppression of blacks. "Kerry M. and millions of blacks who think the way he does believe that white America has never done anything for blacks, believe that whites are still oppressing blacks in the most horrible, conscienceless way, and that the black situation in America hasn't improved at all; they believe that whites are guilty, deeply guilty and deeply deserving of black racial vengeance, because of this ongoing white racial oppression of blacks! ... it is in white America's vital interest to acknowledge the existence of this permanent black hatred of whites, so vastly worse than anything Jefferson imagined, and then to act accordingly. ... if whites at least faced the truth about what many blacks really think about whites and what they want from whites, ... then whites could start acting in a rational way for their own safety and survival against nonwhite peoples who have an unappeasable hatred of whites and seek their destruction."]

Black couple murder pregnant white woman and cut open her body to steal her baby [In entry about a contemporary similar crime done to a black victime, commenter tells of 1995 case in which Fedell Caffey and Jacqueline Williams shot Deborah Evans, a white woman, in head and cut out her baby, also killing her two other children. Link to Time magazine article is included.]

20/20 on the Anne Pressly case [December 2008. The real lessons in the murder of Anne Pressly that ABC ignored. This entry contains links to other VFR entries on Pressly case.]

Guilty verdict in Anne Pressly murder trial [Nov. 2009. Includes account from first day of trial with description of the victim's injuries]

Mclauchlin murderer executed [December 2008. Sixteen years after the gang rape, torture, and murder of Missi McLauchlin. The entry links 2003 AR article with full account of what happened. It was an extreme case both of white female Eloi behavior, and of race-avenging black savagery.]

Before Anne Pressly, there was Christa Worthington [Fashion writer who lived alone in house in Cape Cod raped and murdered by black man in 2002. In this long unsolved case, about which a book was written before it was solved, all of her (white) male acquaintances and relatives were suspected, until DNA showed it was the black man. Many disbelieved it.]

A black-on-white rape and murder, which a movie changed into a white-on-white murder [Marcy Conrad, raped and murdered in 1981 by 16 year old Anthony Jacques Broussard, who bragged to his high school friends about strangling her, and over a period of two days brought them to view the body in the outdoor place where he had left it. News accounts, Time magazine, even a movie made about the incident, left out the killer's race or changed it to white.]

More on the Missouri woman who shot dead her rapist [A 57 year old Cape Girardeau woman was attacked and raped in her home by black man Ronnie W. Preyer; he told her not to tell anyone, but she did. On October 31, 2008, he broke into the house again.This time she had a shot gun and shot him dead.]

Black man comes up behind young white woman in liquor store and stabs her to death [Baltimore County, November, 2008].

The death of Hattie Carroll in reverse. [January 2009. Linda Stein, "The Realtor to the Stars," hired Natavia Lowery as her personal assistant, not knowing about Lowery's background of theft, and four months later, in October 2007, Lowery murdered Stein by repeatedly striking her in the face and neck with a wooden yoga stick, later telling police she did it because Steyn had repeatedly racially insulted her and mistreated her.]

White woman shows 22 year old black man her condo, and he kills her [Eugenia "Jeanne" Calle, a prominent cancer researcher in Atlanta, thought that a 22 year old black man she ran into in the lobby of her building was a legitimate person shopping for a condo. She brought him up to her apartment, and he bludgeoned her to death. February 2009.]

18 year old white girl gets into cab with black man who rapes and murders her [Posted March 2009. The death in July 2006 of Jennifer Moore of Saddle Brook, New Jersey, who went walking alone drunk in Manhattan streets in the middle of night after her friend had been taken drunk to the hospital. A black pimp picked her up, took her in a cab to his New Jersey hotel where he raped and sodomized her, then strangled her to death. The Times describes it as a "chance" event.]

Subsequent entries on Jennifer Moore murder: Reasons for the three year delay in the Draymond Coleman murder trial; and An alternative view of Weehawken

Mixed-race predator sentenced to life (14 years) for murdering white boy [In a suburban London baker's shop in May 2008, 16 year old Jimmy Mizen was murdered by 19 year old Jake Fahri who smashed a heavy glass bakery dish into Jimmy's face with such force it severed his jugular vein and his carotid artery and he bled to death.]

Black on trial for rape and murder of white co-ed [October 2007. University of Eastern Michigan student Orange Amir Taylor III raped and murdered Laura Dickinson in her dorm room in December 2006. The university covered up the crime, said she died of natural causes. Top officials at university were fired for the cover-up.]

Another black on white murder in London [June 2008. 16 year old Ben Kinsella, celebrating with friends in a pub at 2 a.m. after exams, was chased down by a gang of blacks and stabbed to death.]

Britain + Blacks = Ben Kinsella dead [June, 2009. Photos of Ben Kinsella and the three demi-humans who took his life. "What do I mean by the title of this entry? Do I mean that all blacks, or most blacks, or a large minority of blacks are killers? Of course not. Do I want white people to hate or even dislike blacks in general? Absolutely not. It nevertheless remains a simple fact that blacks are almost an order of magnitude more violent than other races when it comes to such crimes as murder, rape, and armed robbery. To import a black population into a previously all-white country is to consign a large number of whites in that country, year after year, generation after generation, to violent death at the hands of blacks."

Arrest in University of North Carolina murder [Demario James Atwater has been arrested for the murder of Eve Marie Carson, student body president at U of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill.].

Death penalty sought for black accused of murdering white co-ed [August 2008. Demario James Atwater and accomplice saw University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president Eve Marie Carson in her house though windows working at computer; abducted her, robbed her, and shot her dead.]

19 year old British model stabbed to death [November 2008. Amy Leigh Barnes. "An almost certain consequence of the Obama presidency will be that the number of young white women who get involved sexually with black men, perhaps with thoughts in their head of producing their own little Barack Obama, will increase. So will the number of young white women who get murdered by black men." Discussion of photo of Amy Barnes wearing bikini with blowing death's head on the bra, joining sex and death.]

Black ex-lover of Amy Barnes charged in her murder [Ricardo Morrison.]

19 year old English actress who was murdered by her black boyfriend had lived with him for a year–guess where [In her parents' house. Then, shortly before the murder, Amy Barnes and Ricardo Morrison moved to her grandmother's house, where the murder took place after she broke up with him. July 2009.

Death of an Eloi [Amy Leigh Barnes's dying telephone call played in court. Ricardo Morrison had stabbed her nine times.]

Group of blacks hold white couple prisoner in London flat, repeatedly raping woman, torturing man [June 2009. Story only reported in a couple of local papers, not in any major papers. Race of perps only identified from photos, not from text. "How many white people in the whole damned Western world will speak openly and publicly about the ongoing intifada of savage black on white racial violence? How many British and American "conservatives" will do it? How many self-described "to the right of Attila the Hun" American conservatives will do it?"]

Not wanting to seem racist, woman allows herself to be held up and raped [March 2009. A woman had just left a store in Bakersfield, California, and noticed a man lurking in the parking lot. She told detectives later she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn't want to seem racist. So, not wanting to seem racist, woman proceeded to her car, where the man held her up at gun point and threatened to kill her 11 month old daughter if she didn't do what he told her. He had her to drive to an ATM where he stole $500 from her, then he had had her drive to a junior high school parking lot where he raped her in front of her child.]

Sack dance [March 2009. Black kills four police officers in Oakland, California. Blacks hold parties celebrating. "What is it that many black people truly desire? What gives them pleasure and fulfillment? The tearing down and destruction of white people--whether in word, as in the sermons of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, or in reality. When black thugs murder whites, they are satisfying the desire, inchoate or explicit, of many many blacks."]

In Britain, the strong are as cowardly about race as the weak [June 2009. Columnist says strong men with guns, not social work, needed to stop violent crime, yet he remains silent about race. Comment at Telegraph expressing the truth is removed.]

Black-on-white serial rape and murder that has nothing to do with race [John Floyd Thomas, biggest serial killer in history of Los Angeles, is black man who exclusively killed white women, yet coverage about him says nothing about race. May 2009.]

Enough of man bites dog! It’s back to dog bites man. [Reader: "Right on the heels of the murder of black athlete Steve McNair by a 'Caucasian' femme fatale, which you described as a 'man bites dog' story, we get the news of one Mohammed H. Ali getting a new trial ordered by the awful Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the murder of football's Hall of Fame wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff's daughter Tracey. It's like the natural (dis)order of the World has been reestablished after a five day summer hiatus." July 2009.]

Another savage attack on whites on Caribbean island paradise [British husband Peter Green left paralysed and wife Murium loses part of her jaw in machete attack on Tobago. August 2009. Discussion of how authorities seek "motive" for savage acts done for the sake of savagery.]

17 year old girl kidnapped and murdered during errand to law school in downtown Los Angeles [Lily Burk, July 2009]

The murder of Lily Burk [L.A. Times says that a "collision of two worlds may have led to girl's death," and that "chance brought the two together on a quiet, tree-lined street." Editors and writers who produce such things deserve to spend eons in a very bad place.]

Housekeeping manager at luxury New York hotel stalks and slays beautiful resident [September 2009. Black manager of Jumeira Essex House in New York City enters beautiful businesswoman Andree Bejjani's room and stabs her to death in her bed with a ten inch kitchen knife. Police and New York Post describe the crime as a "sex attack gone awry." I write: "See, he intended to rape her, but it didn't work out, because she resisted him, so he 'lost it' and killed her instead of raping her. Of course rape turning into murder is one of the most common things there is, especially when the rapist initiates the rape with a 10 inch knife in his hand. But the NYPD and the Post would have the public believe there's no ordinary and predictable connection between rape and murder." Preceded by essay by me on why police and reporters describe murders as "a burglary gone wrong," and as "a random act."]

Andree Bajjani’s fatal passivity in the jungle of a New York luxury hotel [She had expressed fears about her safety at the hotel to several people. Yet she apparently hadn't done anything about her fears. In fact she seemed fatalistic... She didn't even secure her door with a chain lock! ... A beautiful woman, of pronounced liberal sympathies, residing in a hotel/condominium with a large nonwhite staff, at least one of whom (she knew) was preying on her, and she undertook no actions to protect herself. ... She was a typical Eloi.]

Blacks and Hispanics gang-rape white girl. Race had nothing to do with it. [Between seven and ten Hispanics and blacks plus a 15 year old white boy, with about ten others looking on, gang-rape a 15 year old white girl for two and a half hours on the campus of Richmond High School in Richmond, California during a school dance. Links to earlier entries on this crime, when the race of the victim was not known for sure, are listed in this entry]

Young white man is nearly hit by car. He yells, “Watch what you’re doing.” Two blacks get out of car and stomp him almost to death. [November 2009, in Kent, Ohio. "Here's the reality. Blacks are a danger to whites. More blacks are more 'empowered,' more angry, more violent, and more dangerous than ever. Whites need to be aware of these facts. They need to talk about them publicly. They need to make this a public issue and push media and politicians to acknowledge it. They need to change their own behavior so as not to put themselves needlessly at risk from dangerous blacks. And they need to be prepared to defend themselves."]
The Knoxville atrocity

Atrocity in Knoxville

Request to a reader for information on the Knoxville double murder

Racial murder and the fact-value distinction

What happened in Knoxville [This quotes a knowledgeable source in Knoxville whose statements were passed on to me via a third party.]

What happened in Knoxville, revisited [This links to Nicholas Stix's detailed account of what happened, published last May at American Renaissance. Stix read the actual police and prosecutor's reports filed with the court, which have not been made readily available and have never been reported in the media.]

Getting the facts about the Knoxville Atrocity to the mainstream media [summarizing the above and quoting from the Stix article.]
Black (and other nonwhite) on black violence

Black savagery, cont. [Oct 8, 2007. Black mob attacked black author Carol Swain's brother.]

Black woman cuts open pregnant woman to take her baby [July 2008]

The repeatedly arrested violent illegal alien who was never handed over to INS [And who then executed three young black people in Newark, New Jersey.]
Nonwhite (other than black) on white violence

Minnesota whites’ reaction to second “Asian” baseball bat assault in three days [About amazing article about Eloi whites having nothing to say about being threatened by Hmong savages.]

15 year old white girl murdered by Mexican illegal aliens; and thoughts on the unprincipled exception [Girl from Texas visiting her older sister in low-rent apartment complex in Oregon; Mexican illegal alien, who had previously pled guilty to drunk driving and been released, stepped on her throat to silence her while his cousin was raping her.]

Chandra Levy, eight years dead, the latest victim of nonwhite immigration [Includes quotations from 200 Washington Post article detailing Guandique's previous assaults on women in the same park.]

D.C. police incompetence in Chandra Levy case beyond the beyond [Investigators in Levy case didn't look into Guandique's previous attacks on women in the same park until 2008.]

Salvadoran illegal alien arrested in Chandra Levy murder [Including photos of suspect Ingmar Guandique and Levy with text, "When a society opens up its borders to people like this, lots of people like this end up dead," followed by my explanation why the photos and text are not inciting hate, but about the inevitable result of mass Third-World immigration. Also includes a response to the U.S. attorney in the case who called it a "random" attack.]

How Ecuadorian illegal alien murdered Adrienne Shelly

An Iranian immigrant who set out to murder white Americans, 1990 [Posted October 2009. "Berkeley, Calif.--A 'deranged' Iranian gunman with a hatred of blond Americans died in a burst of police bullets Thursday, seven hours after he stormed a bar, killed one man, wounded seven people and took 33 hostages."]

Financial Analysts Gasp When They Hear Any Investment Gains Will Be Wiped Out By a Currency That Does Not Hold Purchasing Power

Financial Analysts Gasp When They Hear Any Investment Gains Will Be Wiped Out By a Currency That Does Not Hold Purchasing Power

by Bill Sardi

Recently by Bill Sardi: Welcome To Fedville!

In separate articles The Wall Street Journal published profiles of two men who captain different investment groups, one a legendary investor who asks, after investors have reaped a seeming financial reward from investing in obvious hedges like commodities, foreign currencies and even gold, if their money will be worth anything; the other an investment chief who has his entire $2 billion bet placed on gold.

The first investment captain is Seth Klarman, president of Baupost Group in Boston that manages $22 billion, and author of Margin of Safety, an out-of-print book that now fetches $2400 for a used copy on the internet.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, Klarman’s words drew gasps from an audience of 1600 financial analysts at the CFA Institute (Chartered Financial Analysts) annual meeting in Boston. What caused the jaw-dropping response from this savvy audience? It was when Klarman compared the financial markets to a Hostess Twinkie and said: “There is no nutritional value, there is nothing natural in the markets. Everything is being manipulated by the government.”

Even more in the audience were left gasping again when Klarman said: “The government is now in the business of giving bad advice. By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an adequate return for the risks they are running. People can’t stand earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the investing public to speculate.”

Then, as Jason Zweig, the WSJ reporter, wrote: “You could have heard a pin drop as Mr. Klarman proclaimed, ‘I am more worried about the world, more broadly, than I ever have been in my career. That’s because you can make good investing decisions and still end up with bad results if you reap your profits in currencies that do not hold their purchasing power,’ he explained.”

Klarman was quoted to say: “All the obvious hedges” – commodities and foreign currencies, for example – “are already extremely expensive… especially gold. Near its all-time high, it’s a very hard moment to recommend gold.”

The alter-investor

Contrast the high-profile Mr. Klarman with the low-profile Mr. Thomas Kaplan, chairman and chief investment officer of Tigris Financial Group, who oversees an empire devoted largely to gold. Tigris’ $2 billion bet on gold is more than the Brazilian central bank’s bullion. The WSJ certainly captured the attention of online readers with its article on Kaplan entitled: “A Billionaire Goes All-In on Gold.”

Kaplan says: “You’ve got a perfect storm with no apparent solution. If the world does well, gold will be fine. If the world doesn’t do well, gold will also do fine … but a lot of other things could collapse.”

Online comments

These days, seekers of investment safety might want to read online comments from knowledgeable WSJ readers to gain some understanding after reading about two billion-dollar fund managers with opposing approaches to the markets. Here is what some savvy and not-so-savvy online commentators had to say:

Grant W. Levitan: The very concept of investing is on life support. … Markets are constituted principally of big program trades largely disconnected from long-term investment analysis.

Government’s ever-expanding role makes decisions based on non-investment criteria but rather bureaucracy, political expediency, or lobbying by the powerful a wild card undermining investment analysis and expertise.

Virtually nothing is proposed or will be legislated to effectively change this situation. The oligarch-government cabal against investors and citizens is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Sarah Starkey: I was in Investor Relations professional for a few years. If I sneezed in the wrong way while talking to a hyped up analyst, I could move the entire market. I’m not kidding. I have an MBA from a top school and have studied personal finance for 20+ years, and yet now, I’m stymied as to how to invest my own savings because investment fundamentals seem to mean absolutely nothing anymore.

We might as well all take our savings to Las Vegas and spin the wheel, the way things are going.

Arthur Grady: Re-inflate the bubble! Has there been any doubt over the last 16 months that that has been the plan. He’s really not saying anything new but simply reinforcing what we already knew. The question remains whether governments will really make the necessary and very painful budget cuts. And we really do know the answer to that question, don’t we?

John McLaughlin: The game has changed – the strategy has changed, the rules have changed, the players have changed (the winners, that is), and the point for playing the game has changed – from old school, old fool, investing to new school, new tools, day trading.

What’s it going to take for investors to get that their precious, yet obsolete game is over…
The game has changed, so have we, and so can you – so must you.

Parker Lyons: His (Klarman’s) comment on gold is very interesting with respect to currency. Seems to me to be a contradiction = hold fiat currency because gold is at all time high, but fiat currency is being manipulated and is not holding any value.

Warren Sanders: Why is he saying gold is at record levels if it’s still below its inflation-adjusted record price from 1980 or 82?

Owen Pirkle: Gold has no intrinsic value. You are simply hoping that you can find somebody at a later date that you can sell it to at a higher price than you paid. If the world economy goes to hell, good luck finding buyers.

Eric Kjellen: If one day all dollars are worthless like happened in post-WWI Germany it doesn’t really matter how many dollars you had to pay for those gold coins, you’ll just be glad you have them.

Gordon Arnold: You can’t take a gold brick to the Safeway to buy your groceries. They prefer cash.

Bob Baker: The world economy will not go away, but currencies will be inflated to ridiculous levels in an attempt by central bankers and government officials to hold on to their power. Currency collapses are not out of the question and when they happen, people all the sudden see the fallacies of fiat currencies. History holds no example of fiat currencies lasting much more than 100 years before collapse and a resetting of the order. Gold is to preserve wealth during that transition. Silver is for buying food and other necessities during that transition. Ammo is for obvious reasons. Read more history and less financial advice.

Paul Olmstead: …you should consider alerting the central banks of the world that their reserve asset is useless. The USA is the worst sucker with 8000 tons of the stuff.

My comments are as follows:

Whatever government does overshadows the markets. Government is now the wild card. Curry favor with Washington DC and your company’s stock will rise.

The stock market is totally manipulated, the reserves held by banks are all in the form of bailout funds, and demand for US Treasury’s are artificially propped by central bankers. The country is only pretending things will return to normal soon and that this is only an unforeseen recession when in fact it is a total collapse of worldwide banking, investment and currency systems, revealing their fraudulent underpinnings.

Virtually the whole country has become a Ponzi scheme – the earliest ones enrolled in the program receive rewards, the later enrollees, nothing. The charade cannot go on for much longer.

The Federal Government’s options are down to one. Government cannot default entirely on its debts and maintain order. Government cannot buy more debt from foreign lenders, primarily Asians, who are reluctant to loan and asking for higher interest rates. Government cannot print money incessantly without risking hyper-inflation. Government cannot meet all its obligations and promises by raising taxes on the wealthy. Its only option now is to officially devalue the dollar, probably by 30%.

The US government may be forced to devalue the dollar if (a) investment rating agencies (Fitch, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s) down-rate the value of US Treasury bonds as they should, or (b) the EURO continues to decline in value to the point where European goods will be cheaper in the world marketplace, crushing US exports, or (c) it cannot make interest payments on its huge $12 trillion accumulated national debt.

It’s not that the Federal Government doesn’t have other options – it does. But they are not on the table – namely deep cuts in military spending and Medicare totaling over $1 trillion, or conversion to a gold-backed paper money system. Both of these are anathema to politicians and central bankers.

Gold is a bellwether for the value of paper money

While gold is a current focus of large investors because of the crisis in currencies and markets, silver is undervalued, cheap and more practical to purchase groceries should a banking crisis or lack of confidence in paper money occur. You don’t want to go to the store to buy $100 of food with a $1000 gold coin and receive $900 in change in the form of debased paper dollars.

Silver is for survival, gold is to maintain wealth. The masses should be buying U.S. silver coins and selling their gold jewelry if needed to pay bills.

Regardless of what skeptics say, gold and silver do have some intrinsic value as they are used in industry and will always be in demand by women for adornment. Paper money relies upon the faith of the public in its value as a medium of exchange and has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It could only serve as confetti or fireplace fodder. Limited supply and unremitting demand suggest gold and silver have inborn advantages over paper money. That’s why gold and silver were once used to back paper money and why the Constitution describes gold as money.

Out of nowhere, financial counselors have been forced to suggest gold become 10% of a savvy investor’s portfolio. This signals a major change. Gold and silver have risen as an option in an era when all other investments appear to be risky. These precious and relatively scarce metals are the only time-tested way to put a halt to the printing of fiat paper money to cover for the debt run-up by government.

China, realizing the US may default on its $1+ trillion debt, has quietly begun to buy up gold mines so as not to drive up the price of gold by buying ingots or coins.

What fate for holders of 401k plans?

Small investors who have 401k accounts face the prospect of pulling their money out of these doomed investment plans before maturity and facing penalties, then facing further evaporation of their money with an impending devaluation of the US Dollar.

The government knows, when the economy collapses, that the masses will attempt to tap into their 401k plans to pay their bills. This would evaporate reserves banks must have to stay in business. This is why it is said that government will confiscate or prohibit premature withdrawal from 401k plans and other long-term tax-deferred investments. This time it will be confiscation of retirement accounts, not gold.

So what if the price of gold declines?

Imagine a scenario where the price of gold drops from $1200 to $300 an ounce because of declining demand, simply due to plunging incomes and a sell-off by gold owners to pay bills as paper money becomes confetti. So you have worth-less-and-less paper money and a few pieces or gold and silver in your hands. Which of these, gold or paper money, will likely be deemed valuable as payment in exchange for goods and services? What will a shopkeeper accept for a bag of groceries in a financial crisis, during a run on the banks?

In the very early stage of a crisis the masses will run to the banks to withdraw cash. Then the banks will be shut, ATM machines limited to providing $100 at a time. Shop keepers are going to fast learn that a silver US coin is certainly welcomed at their store.

Imagine

Imagine that an hour of your labor is deemed to be worth $10. Imagine that government prints more and more money, diluting its value until you must now charge $20 for your one hour of labor to buy the same amount of goods and services as $10 did before all the extra paper money was printed. Government keeps printing paper money till you must charge $100 for an hour of labor in order to survive. At this point, what is paper money worth?

A one-dollar bill in 1913 is worth 3-cents in purchasing power today, $100 is worth just $3. During this same time gold miners increased the supply of gold, but certainly not at the rate that paper money was printed, and the increased supply was balanced against an increase in the population. Which is more valuable, the shiny metal or the crinkled paper?

Against a 1980-high of $850/ounce of gold and $49/ounce of silver, the inflation adjusted value should be $2275/ounce for gold and $132/ounce for silver. Yet gold today (May 2010) is selling for ~$1200 and silver ~$18 an ounce. (The price of silver has seemingly dropped since 1980 because of the Hunt Brothers hoarding of silver to manipulate the market in the early 1980s. Prior to this market manipulation, silver was selling at ~$5.00/ounce.)

If you had paper money worth $2.60 in 1980 it would only be worth $1.00 today (2009). So gold and silver have risen in value, while paper money has declined in value since 1980.

This is against a backdrop where central bankers have covertly depressed of the price of gold and silver so they won’t pose a more lucrative alternative to the stock market, municipal bonds and US Treasury’s.

Investing in gold may be risky, but as Seth Klarman says, government is pushing investors to make more risky, speculative investments. If Klarman looks in the mirror and listens to his own tapes, he should be investing in gold. On a relative basis, gold and silver are far more valuable than paper money, a fact that would be realized if government and Wall Street manipulations were removed. It’s just that Wall Street controls government and the news media which the masses rely upon for interpretation of daily events.

In an inevitable future crisis, paper money will finally be exposed as a false god. We can only pray for its rapid demise. The money changers need to be rousted from the temple. The financial system needs a major overhaul, not papered-over reform that calls for more and more regulators and oversight. The problem is we have grown to rely on this false god for far too long. Stop the Wall Street/US Treasury/Federal Reserve Bank fraud and learn to embrace gold and silver. Put a stop to the erosion of your money.

May 26, 2010

Bill Sardi [send him mail] is a frequent writer on health and political topics. His health writings can be found at www.naturalhealthlibrarian.com. He is the author of You Don’t Have To Be Afraid Of Cancer Anymore. His latest book is Downsizing Your Body.

Copyright © 2010 Bill Sardi Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California. This article has been written exclusively for www.LewRockwell.com and other parties who wish to refer to it should link rather than post at other URLs.

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Property Rights, Liberty, and Immigration

by Glenn Jacobs
by Glenn Jacobs
Recently by Glenn Jacobs: The Fallacy of Equal Pay for Equal Work

Libertarian philosophy is based on the concept of self-ownership. Human beings own themselves. When we rightfully acquire property, either by making first claim to that property (homesteading) or through voluntary transfer with another person or persons, that property becomes part of our lives, and thus we lay claim to ownership of that property as we would our own bodies.

One of the problems that libertarians encounter when discussing various issues is determining ownership, or, in many cases, articulating the nuances of applying property rights to the issue. These problems are compounded when government is thrown into the equation since the same rules about property and ownership that apply to private individuals do not apply to coercive government. The hot-button issue of immigration is a great example, illustrating the complexities involved in applying property rights to an issue.

Ownership means that one not only possess something, but one also controls the thing. In other words, if you truly own something, you must be free to use the thing as you wish so long as doing so does not violate the property of others. You must also be free to transfer the thing to another person so long as the transaction is voluntary and consensual. When it comes to land, property rights, i.e. control over that land, include controlling who enters into the boundaries of the land.

When dealing with the topic of immigration, that is, the movement of individuals across political designations, this is where things get confusing. The State claims not only to be able to control who crosses the land that it owns, but also to control who enters land owned by private individuals. It also claims the authority to prohibit certain individuals from living within its borders, even if these individuals acquired their land rightfully (using the criteria above) by homesteading or through voluntary exchange. Those of us who believe that private property is the basis of a free society must ask: how was this authority engendered?

If we continue along this line of thinking, the logical conclusion must be that the State owned all the land within its borders a priori since it is the government which sets the conditions for how that land may be used, and to whom it may be transferred in the future.  The State continues to retain a high degree of control since the government has the ultimate authority to make the rules for all property, even property now in private hands.*

To the libertarian, or anyone who believes in the sanctity of property rights, these conclusions are quite troubling.  When it comes to land ownership in America, property rights are not at all secure; they are not really rights at all, but government granted privileges.

While our system of property rights is already imperfect, the current immigration policy leads to even greater infringements on these rights.  For example, if one owns property on or near the border, the government may claim the authority to build a fence or a wall on one’s property, and government agents may come and go as they please without the property owner’s permission.

These problems remain even if we move away from the border.  For example, if the government suspects that I am employing undocumented workers, it claims the authority to raid my business – to enter my property without my permission – with armed agents.

If one truly owns one’s property, how is it that the government can control who is allowed on this property in opposition to the wishes of the property owner?  In other words, why should my friend from Mexico beg for permission to enter the country in order to have dinner with me?  Shouldn’t free people be able to associate or not associate with whomever they wish so long as those interactions are voluntary, consensual, and do not harm a third party?

The same is true of economic activities.  So long as commercial activities are voluntary, consensual, and do not encroach upon other individuals or their property, what is the justification for the government prohibiting these activities or associations?

In the contemporary world of immigration politics, property rights and the freedom of association are trumped by the omnipotent State.  Is the State some sort of god before whom we must plead to recognize us as “official” persons?  After all, that is the crux of the immigration question – must the individuals coming to America have the sanction of the State?  As the State continues to lose legitimacy in the eyes of so many in the liberty movement, one wonders why many of these same folks still demand that individuals who peacefully come to this country seek the State’s approval above all else.  After all, it is the State that determines who is “legal” and “illegal.”

Now one may argue that despite all this, illegal immigration is a crime and as such must be punished.  The question is, who is the victim of this crime?  So long as the immigrant has not harmed another individual or violated another individual’s property, who has suffered injury?  Just like so many other “crimes,” this activity is a crime against the State, and should fall into the category of victimless crime.  While such activity may violate State edicts, it can hardly be considered a crime in the sense that no individual was harmed by the activity.

When dealing with laws restricting the movement of human beings, we should keep in mind Thomas Paine’s prophetic observation: “he that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”  Demanding that the government “do something” about illegal immigration will result in bigger, more intrusive government and less freedom for all of us.

Already efforts ostensibly aimed at illegal immigration undermine the ability of Americans to travel freely in our own country.  In the Southwest, the Border Patrol has built permanent checkpoints well inside the United States, located along major travel routes like I-35.  All travelers must exit the freeway and be processed by ICE agents, including questioning and possible searches.  Since federal agents operating in this geographic area are not constrained by the probable cause standard of the Fourth Amendment, there is no protection against arbitrary searches and seizures even for American citizens.  This fact has prompted the ACLU to declare the areas within 100 miles of America’s borders as “Constitution Free Zones.”

In addition, in some of the airports in this area including Laredo, TX and Tucson, AZ, travelers are subject not only to the indignities of TSA searches but also questioning by ICE agents about their citizenship.

To believe that a government program targeting a specific group of people will not affect everyone in general is naïve and contrary to history.  If nothing else, the government faces the problem of determining if an individual belongs to the target group.  No one, not even a government agent, has the magical ability to determine one’s nationality simply by looking at him.  For example, during the 1950s an aunt of mine, a third generation American, was denied service at a restaurant in New Mexico because she was dark complected and, despite her French and German ancestry, it was assumed that she was a Mexican.  If someone has dark skin and Hispanic features, are we automatically to assume that he is an illegal alien?  Likewise, what about light-skinned folks who may be here illegally?  Will they simply fall through the cracks?

For these reasons, the government will demand to know the legal status of everyone.  In other words, it will not be up to the government to prove that one is here illegally.  It will be up to you to prove otherwise.  That is why Senators Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham are proposing a biometric national ID card for all Americans. You see, the government has a compelling need to know who you are, to put your information into another database, and to determine if you are “eligible” to work here.  De facto work permits for Americans in America?!  Nice.  I’m sure it would never cross the mind of any politician to turn off the work permits of his political enemies.

The answer to the immigration debate is the same as it is to all other issues – more freedom, not more government.  Instead of asking the government to crack down on immigration, we should recognize that it is government programs and interventions that are the problem and demand that the government cease these activities.

Unfortunately, while recognizing the problems that government causes in so many other areas, many folks, especially conservatives, apply a double-standard when it comes to immigration.  For example, while conservatives rightly blasted ObamaCare pointing out that it will result in the nationalization of the health care system, these same people lament how immigrants are destroying “our” hospitals.  They are not “our” hospitals; they are, or at least should be, private businesses which should be able to exclude anyone from receiving their services, but are restricted from doing so by government edict.  Likewise, we hear that immigrants are overwhelming the public education system, yet conservative icon Ronald Reagan advocated disbanding the Department of Education and, at a federal level anyway, getting the government out of the education business.

Finally, we have social welfare.  It is the existence of government welfare programs that are much of the problem, attracting people to this country who wish to live off the labor of others.  Eliminate these programs and you eliminate this problem.

When you empower the government to do something, the government often ends up using these powers in ways that you do not foresee or intend.  And it may end up using these powers against you.  In the preface to her novel Anthem, Ayn Rand lambasted socialists for not recognizing or taking responsibility for the consequences of the policies that they advocated, ‘they expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps to escape the moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”’

As the United States continues its war on immigration, the government is building the infrastructure for a police state – internal checkpoints, national ID cards, work permits.  When we wake up in that police state, will the anti-immigration crowd cry: “But I didn’t mean this!”

*Unfortunately, there is much truth to these statements since land titles in the United States are based on a relic of the feudal system, fee simple, meaning that while one can have an “interest” in one’s land, the land is actually owned by the government, i.e. the government has dominium eminens or supreme lordship.

May 26, 2010

Glenn Jacobs [send him mail] is the actor and wrestler Kane. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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The Trouble With the ’64 Civil Rights Act

The Trouble With the ’64 Civil Rights Act

by Ron Paul

Recently by Ron Paul: More Blank Checks to the Military Industrial Complex

On June 4, 2004, Congress hailed the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Act. Only the heroic Ron Paul dissented. Here are his comments.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to explain my objection to H.Res. 676. I certainly join my colleagues in urging Americans to celebrate the progress this country has made in race relations. However, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

This expansion of federal power was based on an erroneous interpretation of the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. The framers of the Constitution intended the interstate commerce clause to create a free trade zone among the states, not to give the federal government regulatory power over every business that has any connection with interstate commerce.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business’s workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge’s defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.

Of course, America has made great strides in race relations over the past forty years. However, this progress is due to changes in public attitudes and private efforts. Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, while I join the sponsors of H.Res. 676 in promoting racial harmony and individual liberty, the fact is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not accomplish these goals. Instead, this law unconstitutionally expanded federal power, thus reducing liberty. Furthermore, by prompting raced-based quotas, this law undermined efforts to achieve a color-blind society and increased racial strife. Therefore, I must oppose H.Res. 676.

See the Ron Paul File

July 3, 2004

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable

How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable

The following is a modified and enlarged version of an article I posted here last September, which has now been published in The Citizens Informer. Its theme is that the transformation of the meaning of civil rights from equal individual rights under the law, as seen in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, into racial group equality of results, as seen in our current unconstitutional and anti-democratic system of racial preferences, could not be stopped, because the civil rights movement had the effect of morally delegitimizing the only group in America that could have stopped that transformation, namely the white American majority. I argue that the only way to turn back the group-entitlements revolution is through the remoralization of that majority.

How the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Made Racial Group Entitlements Inevitableby Lawrence Auster

Through half a lifetime of observing American conservatives–and neoconservatives–passionate and principled resistance to affirmative action (a resistance that notably waned after the 2003 Grutter decision), I many times heard them quote Hubert Humphrey’s famous pledge that if the 1964 Civil Rights Act required racial quotas, he would “eat the paper it’s written on.” Recently I looked up the text of Humphrey’s remark, which he made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on April 9, 1964:

If the Senator can find in Title VII … any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.

I was struck by these words because, being familiar only with paraphrases of Humphrey’s quote, I had always assumed that he had said something like: “If this bill brings about quotas, I will eat it.” But now I realized that he had said: “If this bill contains language mandating quotas, I will eat it.”

This changed the entire significance of the remark. Of course the bill did not contain language mandating racial quotas. In fact, it contained the very opposite: an amendment declaring that the bill could not be interpreted as requiring racial quotas. So Humphrey’s assurance, upon which conservatives in later decades have placed such weight, was meaningless. The question was not whether the bill required quotas. The question was whether, regardless of any anti-quota provisions the bill might contain, it would lead to quotas. And, of course, it did–and far faster than its critics had anticipated. Immediately after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal enforcement agency created by the Act, declared that the failure of an employer to have the same percentage of blacks in his workforce as existed in the general population was prima facie proof of racial discrimination under the Act. As a result of this regulatory fiat, the only way an employer could prove he wasn’t racially discriminating was to engage in racially proportional hiring. The era of racial preferences had begun. Yet Senator–and soon to be Vice President–Humphrey never ate the paper the 1964 Act was written on, nor was he obliged to, because his claim had been correct, if in a strictly narrow sense: the bill did not contain explicit language that mandated quotas. What the bill did was to create a federal agency that had the power to carry forward the bill’s real, though unstated, purpose.

What was this purpose? Contrary to neoconservatives’ dreamy thoughts on the subject, the true aim of the civil rights movement, of which the 1964 Act was the crowning achievement, was not to attain a universal, race-blind equality of rights for all persons. It was to advance the condition of black people, by any means that would work. Many leading civil rights leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, far from being liberals who believed in America’s essential goodness, were leftists. They saw America as an incurably racist society that would have to be manipulated and coerced into treating blacks decently. Mere equality of rights, they felt, could never overcome whites’ entrenched anti-black prejudices or the black inferiority that the left thought resulted solely from such prejudices. The civil rights movement therefore sought equal justice under the law for blacks, an ideal that mainstream whites would accept. But equal justice was only a step toward the real goal, which was, in President Johnson’s words, equality as a fact and equality as a result. The proof of this observation is that as soon as the principle of equal rights had taken blacks as far as it could take them (with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year), the civil rights movement abandoned equal rights as its defining ideal and replaced it with racial equality of outcome.

In saying this, I am not accusing leaders such as Martin Luther King of insincerity. I do not know what King’s real thoughts were during the earlier, legal-equality phase of the civil rights movement, and it doesn’t much matter what they were in any case. My point is that the civil rights movement, regardless of what its leaders–and followers–conscious purposes may have been prior to 1964, had an inherent tendency toward egalitarianism of result, and that once this tendency kicked in, those who belonged to the movement would support it one way or another, as, of course, happened with King himself.

The dynamics of racial power

Non-discrimination morphed so easily into equality of outcome because, as I’ve said, equality of outcome had been the real end of the civil rights movement all along. But that does not explain why American society failed to reverse this leftist revolution, which was carried out in flagrant violation of both the letter of the 1964 Act and the understanding of most of the legislators and ordinary citizens who had supported it.

Pro-individual-rights conservatives (who in the early 1960s were called liberals) have argued for decades that the proper, individual-rights meaning of the Civil Rights Act should have been insisted on from the start, regardless of the pressures to change it into a group-entitlements law. But these conservatives have never asked themselves a simple, practical question: who was going to insist on it? America]s white majority, perhaps?

The problem with this expectation was that the white majority, in signing on to the Civil Rights Act, had canceled out their own moral authority. They had conceded that they were responsible for the black inferiority that the Act was intended to cure. How then could whites in good conscience stand against further steps designed to help blacks? That would only be repeating the very racial sins of which whites had just collectively repented when they supported the Act.

Whites did not grasp at the time that they were making such an admission or putting themselves into such a bind. Their attitude was, “We acknowledge that our black fellow Americans have been treated unfairly in this country; now we’ll treat them fairly.” They felt that this would allow blacks and whites to move forward together on a more humane racial footing, as represented in the popular imagination by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. They naively thought that passage of the Civil Rights Act would lift a burden of guilt from their shoulders.

In fact, the opposite happened.

As the civil rights consensus unfolded following passage of the 1964 Act, it enunciated a utopian set of rules which said that the races were and ought to be completely equal in their abilities, qualities, and outcomes; that any vestige of racial discrimination in America had to be totally eliminated; that any failure to do so was further proof of white guilt; and that whites as the presumed discriminators were henceforth prohibited from acting in the interests of whites or even from thinking of themselves as whites. The prohibition extended to white defense against anti-white discrimination.

Through this assumption of white guilt, as well as through the outlawing of racial discrimination even in private areas such as businesses, the civil rights movement gave birth to a new America in which race and ethnicity (or rather white race and ethnicity) would have no legitimate place, an America that consisted only of individuals possessing equal rights (or, rather, an America that consisted only of individuals where whites were concerned, but consisting of organized racial groups where minorities were concerned). This new, liberal-individualist order (applied primarily to whites) meant that the white majority as the white majority could no longer play a leading and representative role in America, or, indeed, any role at all, except as the presumed source of horrific injustice that had to be corrected and purged. It also meant that the white-majority culture–meaning Western culture and civilization–could no longer be seen as a worthy ideal for our society.

Further, if these new rules and arrangements were morally right, then the previous social order, which tacitly recognized the importance of race and culture and greatly admired the historic achievements of the white race as the creators of that culture, had been horribly, inhumanly, and indefensibly wrong. All of American and Western history was now judged to be morally defective. These new attitudes led to moral relativism, at least where the inherited moral standards of whites were concerned; to cultural relativism, which said that Western culture was no better than any other, including primitive societies and pre-Columbian human-sacrifice cults; and to multiculturalism, which said that America consists of a collection of equal cultures with no majority or dominant culture.

Another factor in whites’ acceptance of minority group entitlements and multiculturalism was that blacks on average turned out to be much more different from the white majority than idealistic liberals had imagined. It soon became apparent that even in an America with a formal equality of rights, an America where many blacks had attained middle-class status (a phenomenon that had been progressing rapidly before the Civil Rights Act), the black population as a whole remained significantly behind whites in income, law-abidingness, family formation, intellectual achievement, and other social indicators. Since legal equality was not seen as leading to equality of outcome, the left sought to bring such equality about by intrusive and unjust means, including the trashing of society’s behavioral and educational standards, since under those standards blacks on average did far worse than whites. Again, given the white majority’s liberal beliefs, they had no choice but to surrender to this revolution. They had discovered to their shock that black-white racial differences were much larger than they had thought, which meant that mere non-discrimination toward black individuals would not close the racial gap. But since, in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, non-discrimination was now whites’ only officially approved moral principle, they could not simply abandon it. Instead, they redirected it, away from the individual black person, and toward blacks’ culture. Non-discrimination toward black individuals, in the name of blacks’ assumed sameness to whites, was changed into non-discriminatory acceptance and endorsement of the black culture (and soon of other minority cultures) in the name of its ineluctable differences from the white culture.

To criticize the profound harm done to our society by the civil rights movement and its aftermath is not to defend all of the South’s pre-civil rights racial policies. For example, the Jim Crow laws–which not only allowed discrimination against blacks, but mandated it, most notoriously in public accommodations–were an offense to the nation’s conscience and would have had to be eliminated one way or another. But the regime brought into being by the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not stop at correcting specific racial injustices such as those that came under Jim Crow. By attacking, in principle, all racial discrimination, including private racial discrimination, it in effect delegitimized all natural and historical human groupings and cultures, if they were white. It delegitimized white people’s most basic rights of free association and of property, since such rights were now seen as having only one end in view: the oppression of blacks. And, as pointed out above, it said that whites’ entire history as the American majority was a scandal. The ongoing functional and economic deficiencies in the black community were seen as the result of the same historic white sin, which thus seemed to be still operative in the present as well as the past.

So, to repeat the question I asked before: Having allowed the cosmic charge of racism to be heaped on their own heads, would whites find it in themselves to oppose further measures, such as racial group entitlements, seen as urgently necessary to improve blacks’ condition? Having lost their moral standing and self-confidence as a group, would whites have the will to uphold the written provisions of laws against powerful racial and political interests that wanted to use those laws for illegitimate and unconstitutional (though now morally sanctified) purposes? The answer is clear in the record of the past 40 years: they did not have the will.

The dilemma that America has never faced

Contrary to the hopes of individual-rights conservatives, a purely race-blind America was never possible, because once legal racial inequality had been removed, there was the expectation that substantive racial inequality would disappear as well. But enduring racial differences in abilities and behavior meant that substantive equality could not appear spontaneously by itself. That left two alternatives: the institution of race-conscious preferences for the minority, or the successful resistance to such preferences by the majority. Consider Hubert Humphrey’s stand in the Senate, which we discussed at the beginning. Why did he make his passionate assurances that the Civil Rights bill could not possibly mandate racial quotas? Why did he add a supposedly rock-solid amendment to the bill to stop such an eventuality? In taking those positions, Humphrey was tacitly acknowledging that the new law would lead to a call for racial group preferences, a call that, if the Act were to keep its integrity, would have to be opposed. Therefore someone would have to oppose it. Someone would have to insist on upholding the proper meaning of the law against the efforts of those who wanted to bend it into a socialistic shape. But who would that protector be? It wouldn’t be the organized black community; that was simply assumed, as they were gaining too much from preferences to give them up. It wouldn’t be the white civil rights advocates; that was simply assumed. The only possible defenders of individual rights who would have the numbers and political strength to win the battle would have to be white people who were not part of the civil rights movement. But, as we’ve seen, the white majority had been morally discredited, at least in the eyes of the ascendant liberalism, by the very passage of the Act, which implied that America’s entire history was tainted by white sin.

Pro-individual-rights conservatives have always harked back to the dream of Martin Luther King, the Golden Age of a race-blind society that was betrayed by affirmative action. But the Golden Age never existed. The dream is, literally, a dream, as proved by the brute fact that minority racial preference were instituted almost the instant that the 1964 Act–the epitome of the race-blind-society idea–was passed. Furthermore, not only did the race-blind society never exist, it cannot exist. This is because an America that declares itself to be, not just a race-blind government and legal system (which is both right and possible, within reasonable limits), but a race-blind society, can only do so by outlawing any group-consciousness on the part of the racial majority, which delegitimates the majority culture and ethos, which in turn liberates and validates the group-consciousness and will-to-power of minorities, which then begin to tear the society apart.

In sum, though the 1964 Civil Rights Act formally prohibited racial preferences, it turned blacks into a self-interested, aggrieved group that was expected to demand racial preferences, and it delegitimized the very group–the white majority–that was being tacitly depended on by the bill’s leading supporter to resist such preferences and enforce the bill as written. The Act made it impossible for the white majority to lead America, while it transformed blacks into sacred victims whose clamoring for group equality of results could not in good conscience be opposed.

These are the group-power dynamics that underlay the transformation of civil rights into a permanent system of racial privileges for blacks and other minorities in this country. Yet, as alluded to above, during the several decades of this controversy, mainstream conservatives seemed to believe that if they just kept invoking the ever-more-disregarded principle of individual rights, the principle, like an autonomous being, would somehow spring back to life and become once again the law of the land. This was a fantasy, born of the neoconservative view of America as a set of abstract ideas. The reality is quite different. In order for a society to maintain its principles, it must have actual people who are ready, willing, and able to defend those principles. An America whose historic white majority has been stripped of its moral legitimacy lacks such people.

Restoring what was lost

The problem I’ve described provides its own solution. The way out of the crisis is to retrace the steps that brought us into it. Under the impact of such phenomena as cultural leftism, mass immigration, and the group rights revolution, the white American majority lost the sense of its moral legitimacy to lead, while, at the same time, it stopped standing for individual equality under the law. The solution is to restore both of these principles. As paradoxical as it may sound, in order for our system of individual equality under the law to be revivified and preserved, whites must re-assume their historic position as America’s dominant majority group, simply because whites are the only group in America of whom a substantial number really believe in individual equality under the law–and they believe in it, not just for themselves, but for all groups. Also, as the historic and numeric majority, whites still have the inherent power to exercise moral and cultural leadership in this country, if they can find the inspiration and confidence to do so.

As whites re-discover and re-assert their natural status as America’s cultural majority that they gave up 40 years ago, blacks and other minorities will continue to enjoy legal equality of rights. The proper sphere of race-blind equality is in the state’s dealings with individual citizens. Government and law must not discriminate by race. But the same does not apply to society. Society consists of human beings, and race is a part of what human beings are, just as sex and family and nationality and religion are a part of what human beings are. Therefore society cannot be made race-blind, any more than it can be made sex-blind or family-blind or nationality-blind or religion-blind. The cost of trying to do so is the destruction of the legitimate liberty and cultural particularity upon which human flourishing depends.

What is needed, in short, is a balance between our traditional American culture and a liberal legal system operating within the parameters of that culture–a legal system that supports the culture and its values rather than, as at present, seeking to undermine and destroy them. The liberal equality of individuals under the law is part of the essence of America. But it must not be America’s primary value. Liberal values–the belief in free inquiry, the treatment of all citizens according to the same rules–have an indispensable place in our heritage. But liberalism, the ideology that makes the pursuit of equality the most important thing, spells the death of our heritage. If our nation is to survive, it must have ideals and goals higher than the liberal project of treating all people equally, and the leftist project of making all people substantively equal. Liberalism and leftism are unable to supply those ideals, which come from cultural, constitutional, and transcendent sources.

OK, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” Is Not Amnesty—It’s Worse Than Amnesty

OK, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”

Is Not Amnesty—It’s Worse Than Amnesty

By Washington Watcher

Advocates of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. amnesty have been driven underground by the great surge in public support for Arizona’s SB 1070. But they’ll be back. And the possibility that President Obama will be with them can’t be ruled out—after all, everything else he’s ever wanted in his life has been handed to him on a silver platter.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote, “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” There will be a lot of debate over whether or not the various “comprehensive” bills put forth can be classified as an “amnesty”. So I’d like to consider here the precise meaning of the word.

Merriam Webster defines amnesty as “the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals.”

Initially, immigration enthusiast politicians had no problem using the word amnesty.  During the 2004 Democratic primaries, John Kerry said,

“I supported and was prepared to vote for amnesty from 1986. And it is essential to have immigration reform. Anyone who has been in this country for five or six years, who’s paid their taxes, who has stayed out of trouble, ought to be able to translate into an American citizenship immediately, not waiting.” [Kerry on the Record: Amnesty is OK, By Dave Eberhart, Newsmax, March 4, 2004]

But, as it became clear that the American people were dead set against amnesty, pro-amnesty politicians began using different words such as “earned legalization,” “path to citizenship,” and “comprehensive immigration reform.”

This is especially crucial to the regrettably large number of pseudo-conservatives. They know their constituency—and donor base—is especially against rewarding lawbreakers.

Thus recently a group of conservative evangelical leaders including former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University Law School, and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement on “Just Assimilation Immigration Policy”. They claimed the answer to illegal immigration “is neither amnesty nor mass deportation,” but rather a path to “pursuing earned legal citizenship or legal residency” unless they are “undocumented felons.”  (I. E. guilty of crimes in addition to illegal entry.)

The evangelical leaders then condemned those who use the word amnesty, stating

“Let us be clear – an earned pathway to citizenship is not amnesty. We reject amnesty. And we ask those who label an earned pathway to citizenship as amnesty to stop politicizing this debate needlessly and to honestly acknowledge the difference.” [Evangelical Leaders Unite on Just Assimilation Immigration Policy, Liberty Counsel, May 11, 2010]

Strangely, they do not explain exactly what amnesty is, if it’s not a “path to citizenship”.

But others have given a bit more detail.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims that amnesty means “forgiving people, with no consequence,” while they will require the illegal aliens to jump through a few hoops. [Political Players: Sen. Graham Sees A "Schizophrenic" State of the Union, Brian Goldsmith, The Atlantic, January 29, 2010]

Alex DiBranco, an editor at change.org sums up this argument:

“Amnesty would just say hey, undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, you can all just keep hanging out, no fines, no background checks, no six years of conditions to be met before you can even become a permanent resident. The current and expected proposals in Congress are far from offering that…

“CIR ASAP [the 2009 Gutierrez immigration bill] would require undocumented immigrants that have contributed to the U.S. (through work, studying, and/or military or community service) to pay a fine and undergo a background check that shows up clean, with no serious convictions, in order to obtain a conditional legal residence. They would then have to wait a full six years before applying for a green card, during which time they need to demonstrate that they have continued to contribute to the U.S., chipped in with taxes, kept crime-free, learned English, and met certain civic requirements.” [Senator Graham: No, Comprehensive Immigration Reform Is Not Amnesty, Alex DiBranco, Change.org, February 1, 2010]

Here I will agree with Dibranco: OK, “comprehensive immigration reform” is technically not an amnesty: It’s much worse than amnesty.

Amnesties pardon illegal behavior, but they do not legalize that behavior.  When the IRS offers a tax amnesty, they allow delinquent taxpayers to pay the money they owe without any penalties, but people still need to pay their back taxes. Similarly, libraries allow patrons to return their overdue books without a fine. But they still need to return the books.

When Jimmy Carter issued an amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers, the draft had been over for several years.  The equivalent to “comprehensive immigration reform” for draft dodgers would have been if Carter had allowed them to return and not be subject for the draft, while law abiding citizens were still being drafted and sent to war.

The open borders lobby repeatedly creates a false choice between granting legal status to illegal aliens or mass deportations.

Yet from a legal perspective, a deportation is not a punishment.  It is an administrative procedure.  Every second an illegal alien is in this country they are guilty of “unlawful presence” under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and are here in the “improper time or place” under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The former bars an alien from legally immigrating to this country for 3 years if they have been here illegally for 180 days or less, and 10 years if they have been here longer.  The latter imposes criminal and civil penalties including fines and imprisonment of up to 6 months for the first offense and 2 years for subsequent offenses.

An amnesty properly defined, would still require illegal aliens to leave the country, but waive the criminal penalties.

In fact, the Main Stream Media has had no problem accepting an amnesty as such in foreign countries.  Malaysia was swamped by illegal aliens, with estimates ranging from 600,000 to over a million.  In 2004, the Malaysian government issued an amnesty of sorts: illegals had 3 months to leave—later extended due to the Tsunami—or else they’d be caned.

Reuters reported:

“Malaysia has given illegal immigrants one last chance to leave without punishment, an immigration official said on Wednesday, after an appeal from poorer neighbor Indonesia, the home of most of the immigrants.

“Malaysia wants to send home up to a million illegal immigrants, mostly Indonesians working in poorly paid jobs, despite fears many businesses might be crippled by the withdrawal of cheap labor.

“The crackdown would go ahead but each illegal immigrant caught in a national swoop would get a final chance to quit the country, said Ishak Mohamed, director of enforcement in the immigration department, who leads operations against illegal immigrants.

“‘The operation is in a ‘soft’ phase right now,’ he told Reuters. ‘The approach will be different. Rather than arrest the illegal immigrants, we will advise them to return to their countries of origin and apply for documents from there.’

“Immigration authorities checked 1,497 workers in their first soft operation on Tuesday night, Ishak added, and found that about seven percent had no valid documents at all.

“Facing the threat of jail, fines and, for men under 50, a whipping, nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants left Malaysia under an amnesty during the last three months, Ishak said.” [Malaysia dons velvet glove in immigrant crackdown, Clarence Fernandez, Reuters, February 2, 2005]

(Note that, in addition to providing a crystal clear example of a properly-defined “amnesty”, Malaysia’s policies show that illegal aliens will go home on their own if the government gets tough.)

All this being said, I am happy to call the policies of Gutierrez and Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention an amnesty.  Americans understand amnesty to mean something that allows the illegal alien population in this country to stay here legally.  Attempts to use the words “comprehensive immigration reform” or any other euphemism are designed to hide the actual policies rather than the technical English definition of amnesty.

With all due respect to Orwell, we can’t “bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end” in a Spanish-speaking country.

“Washington Watcher” [email him] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway.

The War Over America’s Past

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother.

And so we come to the battle over history books in the schools of Texas. Liberals are enraged that a Republican-dominated Board of Education is rewriting the texts. But is the rewrite being done to falsify history, or to undo a liberal bias embedded for decades?

Consider a few of the issues.

The new texts will emphasize that the separation of church and state was never written into the Constitution.

Is that not right? The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion. But, in 1776, nine of the 13 colonies had state religions established in their constitutions.

Thomas Jefferson‘s words about a “separation of church and state” were not written until 1802, when he responded to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association. Not until after World War II did the Supreme Court begin the systematic purge of Christianity from American public life.

Barack Obama may have declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” But Woodrow Wilson said, “America was born a Christian nation,” and Harry Truman wrote Pius XII to affirm, “This is a Christian nation.”

The Texas school board wants the U.S. economic system called “free enterprise” rather than the term Karl Marx used, “capitalism.”

Anything wrong with that?

The Christian Science Monitor cites one professor Phillip VanFossen [email him] as appalled the new history texts will put a “more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt.”

Witch hunt?

The FDR and Truman administrations were shot through with treason. Alger Hiss, who was with FDR at Yalta and Truman in San Francisco when the U.N. was founded, was a Stalinist spy, exposed by Whittaker Chambers and Rep. Richard Nixon.

Harry Dexter White, Treasury’s No. 2, who pushed the infamous Morgenthau Plan to turn Germany into a pastureland, was a Soviet agent, as was White House aide Laughlin Currie and State’s Laurence Duggan, whose treason was confirmed by the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables in 1995.

William Remington at Commerce was convicted of perjury for denying his ties to a spy ring. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for their role in betraying the secrets of the atom bomb.

The VENONA transcripts contained the names of scores of U.S. citizens assisting known Soviet agents during and after World War II.

By 1952, Truman, having been repudiated by his own party in New Hampshire, was down to 23 percent, and was the most unpopular president ever to leave office.

But Joe McCarthy’s approval, four years into this crusade in January 1954, stood at 50 percent, with only 29 percent disapproving.

And was that really a time of anti-communist hysteria?

Why, then, does not a single Gallup poll from 1950 to 1954 show even 1 percent of Americans giving anti-communist extremism or witch hunts or Joe McCarthy as an issue of concern?

Not only did Joe Kennedy Sr. admire and support Joe McCarthy, Jack Kennedy befriended him, Bobby worked for him, Teddy played touch football with him at Hyannis Port and the Kennedy girls dated him.

When, at a Harvard reunion, Jack heard a speaker say he was proud the college never produced an Alger Hiss or Joe McCarthy, JFK roared, “How dare you couple the name of a great patriot with that of a traitor?” and stormed out.

That 1954 was a year of disaster for Joe, with the Army-McCarthy hearings and censure by the Senate, is undeniable. But Joe is hated today not for what he got wrong, but for what he got right.

What is the purpose of teaching America’s children the history of their country? Few said it better than Ronald Reagan in his farewell address: “An informed patriotism is what we want. …

“So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important. … You know, four years ago, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, ‘We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.’ Well, let’s help her keep her word.

“If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”

Teaching American history to America’s children is done so that they will come to know and love their country. And while all nations have sins of scarlet, none has a greater, more glorious past than ours.

And if teaching that is what the Texas Board of Education is all about, ensuring that the children of Texas know both sides of every great American quarrel and come away loving their country all the more, then God bless ‘em.

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.

Norway/Sweden: When the Locals Become a Minority

More news stories on Scandinavia

Åse Brandvold, Islam in Europe, May 9, 2010

“Why is it racism is we call them ‘black’ and not racism if they call us ‘white’”?

“I never called anybody ‘Nigger’ or ‘Black’ or anything like that. On the other hand, those of us who were White were talked about derogatorily. It was negative to be White, Christianity and Norwegian culture was negative and there were many curses,” says Mari Morken (16) and rattles them off “Whitey, potato and white cheese”

Three years ago she couldn’t take it any more. She moved from a school in Groruddalen to a school on the west side. Every morning she takes the subway to the other side of the city to escape the curses and the bad class-environment. Where she goes now, it’s good to have good grades, and she doesn’t stand out because she’s light. Before she made dark stripes in her medium-blond hair. Now she dyes her hair a bit lighter. She’s in the process of ‘taking back’ her Norwegianity, and is happy to be blond without being branded ‘whore’ and cheap’.

“Ah, girl, blond whore!”

‘Josephine’ was met with these words on the first school day at a high-school in an immigrant-dominated suburb south of Stockholm. Josphine was quite baffled, since aside from her hair color there was nothing about her appearance that would indicate she was promiscuous. She didn’t use makeup and had completely neutral clothing. It was exclusively her hair-color that branded her a ‘whore’.

‘Josephine’ is one of the informants for researchers Maria Bäckman, who did an ethnographic field study in a suburb south of Stockholm, where ethnic Swedes make up about 20% of the population. They’re therefore a minority. Klassekampen met Bäckman this week when she visited the University in Oslo and the Culcom research program (cultural complexity in the new Norway). She’s the first in Sweden who researched ethnic Swedes as a minority. A similar study was not done in Norway.

“In the suburbs the invisible Swedishness become visible. Ethnic Swedes experience being defined and labeled by their culture and religion, similarly with minorities of a different background,” Bäckman told Klassekampen.

In her study she focused on ethnic Swedish girls. They experience being linked to the notion of free, Swedish sexuality, which in the densely immigrant suburbs is not necessarily linked with something positive. The strategy for the suburb girls was therefore to play down their Swedish identity.

“Several dyed their hair. Not necessarily because they wanted to look like immigrants, but because they didn’t want to look so Swedish,” says Bäckman.

“Yes, it’s typical, Exactly like that.” Mari Morken nodded vigorously to us from the other side of the cafe table when we repeated some of what Maria Bäckman has found out. “I was called a whore so many times, I became immune.”

We meet her and her mother, Kristin Pedersen, for a talk about why Mari changed schools. They tell of systematic bullying and harassment since Mari reached puberty when she was 10-11, till she transferred school when she was 13.

Pedersen is still upset at the school’s lack of handling of the case.

“They laid the responsibility for the situation on Mari. She just had to cope, because she was strong in resources, white middle-class. But Mari also has a right to a good and safe environment,” says Pedersen, who tried to address the harassment repeatedly without anything being done. She was told that the bullies had a very difficult time at home.

Mari says that now, after three years, she’s distanced herself enough to come forward with it. “I want to show that I won’t let it break me.”

Although school was a nightmare, they like their home area, and they have a good relationship with their Pakistani neighbors. Mari remembers her childhood as safe and nice. She also enjoyed school during the first years. In first grade a third of the students were of non-Norwegian background. When she left, barely a third of the class were ethnic Norwegian.

“At first all the Norwegian girls were active in class, but in the end we Norwegian girls sat in the back of the classroom and were silent as a mouse while the others made a racket,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen thinks it happens when the group of immigrant background becomes too big and dominating. Something which isn’t positive. The elementary school Mari started at, has just 5% ethnic Norwegians. Mari knows three girls who started there but then moved to a school with a smaller proportion of immigrants. All the girls are naturally blond, but had dyed their hair dark.

Althoguh Mari got negative attention from the boys, it was a girls’ gang made up of an ethnic Norwegian and three girls of Pakistani background who devastated her.

“the girls too on the boys’ role in a way. They were into fighting and conflicts,” says Mari, who was also physically attacked.

Once, the situation escalated so much that the teacher chose to calm the situation by asking Mari to go home. After school eight of the students trooped home with her.

For a long time Mari didn’t dare go to the local center. She knew that the girls had told older boys in the A and B gangs [ed: Pakistani gangs] that she had said nasty things about their skin color and religion.

“That’s what provokes them the most,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen says that boys who parents are assumed to be linked to the gangs, had for a long time acted threateningly towards Mari’s father.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mari was that when she was in 7th grade, she got the responsibility to teach the others in class choreography for a school play. Mari was mainly active in dance and the school therefore thought she could take the job. Of course everything went wrong when she was supposed to teach the bullies.

At that point, Pedersen and her husband got tired of the lack of response form the school and complained about it to the county, which agreed with them on several points. A few days after they lodged a complaint, the principal was put on early retirement.

Klassekampen has been in contact with the retired headmaster. She says it’s a positive thing that we’re dealing with the issues regarding how we live together, but thinks maybe we should take with somebody else. For reasons of confidentiality, she didn’t want to go into the specific harassment case. She didn’t want to comment on the decision of the county either.

“Before I always went in long pants and t-shirts, regardless of how warm it was,” says Mari.

She changed after transferring schools. She replaced the hooded sweater with tight clothes and makeup. This summer she will go with a singlet, which she didn’t dare do before. She was ashamed if her bra strap was showing. But now she’s decided not to care about the stares.

Maria Bäckman’s field work outside Stockholm shows the same trend. Girls dress neutrally and tone down their femininity, in order to avoid stares and attention. Another thing she found out was that several went with a cross. Not necessarily because they were so Christian but because it was embarrassing not to have a religious identity.

Mari nods vigorously again.

“I know people who go with a cross in order to be accepted. It’s a little like going with brand clothes. There are just some codes you need to follow.”

“Now I’ve been confirmed secularly, but I think it would be difficult to be accepted for that, if I had continued to go to a school in Groruddalen,” she said.

Though Mari doesn’t see herself as Christian, she sees Christianity as ‘her religion’.

“We learned more about the others’ religion than about our own.”

“We thought it was more exciting with other religions, but our religion never got the same positive attention,” she says.

Upbringing, education and living conditions are the key words for the government’s effort in Groruddalen, which will continue till 2016. Mother and daughter have noticed that there’s new recreational activities for the youth, but Mari has stayed away, both because she’s uncomfortable in the community, and because she feels foreign in those activities.

“They reach group who don’t have any activities today. It doesn’t unify. Many of the ethnic Norwegian don’t go to this. It actually reinforces the differences,” says Mari.

Kristin Pedersen thinks the problem is the attitudes of the responsible politicians and the professions who work with integration.

“They need to understand that were we live, we could all feel like a minority. Therefore it’s also necessary to have a minority perspective for the ethnic Norwegian parts of the population,” she says.

When it comes to the teachers and school administration in Groruddalen, Pedersen thinks that they should be trained in creating a positive environment.

“They are so afraid of being called racists. They fear getting involved with the difficult things, because they’re afraid it will be used against them,” she says.

Source: Klassekampen (Norwegian)

Original article

Email Åse Brandvold at ase.brandvold@klassekampen.no.

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

Hard Line on Immigration Marks GOP Race in Arizona

More news stories on Elections

Peter Slevin, Washington Post, May 22, 2010

J.D. Hayworth is a {snip} border hawk who called his book about immigration policy “Whatever It Takes.”

But [John] McCain, seeking his fifth term, is not about to be out-toughed this year. Once seen as more moderate on immigration, McCain has also endorsed the state law [SB 1070], which requires police to question people they “reasonably suspect” are here illegally. And he wants to send thousands of National Guard soldiers to the border.

McCain’s advertisements boast that he is “Arizona’s last line of defense.” In his newest spot, he walks the border with a county sheriff, who turns to McCain and declares, “You’re one of us.” {snip}

McCain’s repositioning has fueled Hayworth’s claim to be the “consistent conservative” while the incumbent is at best unpredictable. {snip}

Although McCain won the Republican nomination for president just two years ago, Hayworth pays little homage to his pedigree. He foresees an upset, thanks to the country’s anti-incumbent mood and the candidacy of a 73-year-old politician who ran an uneven presidential campaign and is distrusted by many conservatives.

Yet McCain remains the favorite with the Aug. 24 primary still three months away. He has money in the bank—$4.6 million to Hayworth’s $861,000 at the end of March—and a lead in the polls. Public Policy Polling showed McCain 11 points ahead in mid-April and the Rocky Mountain Poll showed him leading by 26 points. No top-tier Democrat has entered the race, which makes the winner of the GOP primary the favorite to win in November.

{snip}

“We’ve recognized correctly that we need to be aggressive,” said Brian Rogers, McCain’s campaign spokesman. “Immigration is the dominant issue. It’s that and the economy, and they’re connected in people’s minds.”

McCain is likely to benefit from the party’s decision to hold an open primary, allowing independents, who typically favor the senator, to cast ballots. He also won the endorsement of former running mate Sarah Palin and got a boost when Arizona’s four largest tea party groups decided not to endorse a candidate.

{snip}

Hayworth, too, was once more moderate on immigration, and he faces his own challenges, including ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. As a six-term congressman, he used sports skyboxes that Abramoff billed to clients, but did not report that fact to the Federal Election Commission until Abramoff’s criminal troubles became public. Hayworth’s campaign committee later repaid the Choctaw and Chitimacha tribes $12,800 for using the suites.

{snip}

In Sun City, where more than 100 people gathered under a golf course gazebo to hear Hayworth, he said to applause that when he served as a congressman, he took an oath “to the Constitution of the United States and not the charter of the United Nations.”

{snip}

Original article

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

On Immigration, Racial Divide Runs Deep

More news stories on Immigration Law

Mark Murray, MSNBC, May 26, 2010

White and Latino Americans are deeply divided over immigration, their allegiances to the nation’s political parties and their opinions about President Barack Obama, according to a new NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll.

And in the wake of Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law, the survey suggests that Republicans could get an immediate political boost, but may face a long-term problem among Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group.

{snip}

Breaking down the white-Latino divide

In the poll, 61 percent say they favor Arizona’s new anti-illegal immigration law, {snip}.

But there’s a divide among white and Latino respondents: 70 percent of whites support the law, versus just 31 percent of Latinos. In fact, 58 percent of Latinos say they strongly oppose it.

That’s not the only chasm between White and Latino America. While 68 percent of Latinos believe that immigration strengthens the United States, just 43 percent of whites think that.

And they differ in their perceptions about Obama and the political parties. Although the president’s job-approval rating sits at 48 percent overall, down two points from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month, only 38 percent of whites approve of Obama’s job, versus 68 percent of Latinos who do.

What’s more, 37 percent of whites view the Republican Party favorably, while just 22 percent of Latinos have a favorable impression of the GOP.

And although only 34 percent of whites hold a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, 54 percent of Latinos view the party in a positive light.

{snip}

Short-term and long-term political fallout

According to the poll, Arizona’s law could benefit Republicans in the short term if they choose to make it a campaign issue. {snip}

Forty percent of registered voters say they would side with a Republican congressional candidate who supports the law, compared with 26 percent who would back a Democratic candidate who opposes it.

In particular, Hart notes that women over 50 and white suburban women—who tend to support generic Democratic congressional candidates—are more inclined to vote for a Republican who supports the Arizona law.

{snip}

{snip} Latinos remain a sleeping—yet growing—political giant. In the poll, 23 percent of Latino respondents said they aren’t registered to vote, versus 12 percent of whites and 16 percent of African Americans.

In addition, Latinos under the age of 40 have a stronger attachment to President Obama (73 percent of them approve of his job) and a stronger dislike of Arizona’s law (75 percent of them oppose it) than older Latinos do.

And Latinos young and old think Democrats would do a better job than Republicans in protecting the interests of minorities (58-11 percent), in representing the opportunity to move up the economic ladder (46-20 percent), in dealing with immigration (37-12 percent) and in promoting strong moral values (33-23 percent).

The only advantage that they gave Republicans was in enforcing security along the U.S.-Mexico border (31-20 percent).

Early support for comprehensive immigration reform

{snip}

Yet the NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll shows early public support for comprehensive immigration reform, with 60 percent of all adults favoring it and 29 percent opposing it.

Also, supermajorities back the individual components of this reform.

For example: 73 percent support imposing new fines on businesses that hire illegal immigrants; 71 percent support increasing border security by building a fence along the border and training more Border Patrol agents; and 65 percent support allowing undocumented immigrants who are already in the country to pay a fine, learn English and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become U.S. citizens.

McInturff, however, cautions against reading too much into this early support—given that the poll didn’t test the language that opponents of comprehensive immigration reform would use. In addition, he points out that only 19 percent of all adults say they strongly favor the legislation, which suggests soft support.

{snip}

Other results

Here are some other results from the NBC/MSNBC/Telemundo poll:

{snip}

* And 49 percent say the U.S. should continue to grant citizenship to all children born in the United States, versus 46 percent who believe the law should be changed so that children of illegal immigrants are not automatically granted citizenship. (Among Latinos, a whopping 79 percent believe the country should continue to grant automatic citizenship.)

Original article

(Posted on May 26, 2010)

Locust:

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Lets cut the B.S. democraps and liberal progressives alike don’t want to secure the border because it would cut the flow of Latino voters coming from Latin America. Republicans only offer lip service and delay the inevitable formation of a white nationalist party. We can’t save this nation. Even if we militarize the border now, what about those already here? What about their anchor babies? What about those people who are citizens but whose parents came her illegal, that now vote in our elections, (anchor adults)? The nation is done people, all we can do now is prepare for the economic collapse and resulting ethnic war that is to come. Don’t join the tea parties, it will do little too late, buy land away from the major population centers, stock pile guns, ammo, food, water and anything else you will need to survive. We will retake our nation, and those who have destroyed our nation will be wiped clean from the earth.