Happy holidays.

Happy holidays.

Locust Blog

Credit, Pensions and the Browning of America

(Editors note: The Holiday’s are way to busy for everyone so normal, # posts resume on January 1, 2011)

http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/

The browning of America is not economically viable for anyone

Credit reports and credit scores are firmly in the ranks of Stuff Black People Don’t Like. Low credit scores are a clear indicator to mortgage lenders and banks that a great risk of not being paid back and defaulting on a loan is associated with the person applying for such money.

This is the primary reason Black people get turned down for loans and force mortgage brokers to create high interests loans to ensure that they get the opportunity at home ownership (this is also the reason payday loan stores, title shops and Aaron’s rentals are found so prominently in Black areas).

A much celebrated fact by Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) is the browning of America, though these white liberals enjoy this moment safely from white enclaves far away from where the racial transformation is occurring. A county outside metro Atlanta highlights this change, as Gwinnett County once served as the fastest growing white county in America. Now, it’s majority-minority:

By the middle of this century, maybe as early as 2041, the U.S. population will no longer be a white majority; it will be a minority majority — blacks, Hispanics, Asians — and when that  happens Gwinnett County will be standing at the finish line, waiting.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census said on Thursday that Gwinnett County is now minority majority, an oxymoron that translates into 50.8 percent of the population as non-white and 49.2 percent as white.
The numbers, based on 2009 census estimates, were a long time coming, said demographers who have been watching as the county, with a population of more than 800,000, has become one of the most diverse in the nation.

In 2000, Gwinnett’s population was 67.3 percent white and 32.7 percent minority. Since then, the black and Hispanic populations of the county have more than doubled.

That’s no shock to Lisa Neidert, a senior research associate the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. She said Gwinnett, with its booming population, was bound to join the more than 300 counties in the U.S. that are now minority majority.

“If you’re in an area of the county that’s growing you’re going to be a minority majority,” said Neidert. “Gwinnett is just reflecting what’s happening nationwide.”

The nation’s minority population is steadily rising and now makes up 35 percent of the U.S., according to census estimates.

This glorious transformation from a boring, prosperous white enclave into a multiracial paradise means what in the literal sense? A higher foreclosure rate then even Clayton County, that’s what:

The decay of the neighborhood tracks closely behind the collapse of the housing market. Gwinnett Countyhome sales in 2009 were bank sales — and that foul wave washed over Quinn Ridge Forest, too. At the moment, three of the 12 houses on the market there are bank sales. has become the foreclosure capital of metro Atlanta — 44 percent of its 10,301

The county looks no better in 2010: with 26,502 foreclosure notices for the year, Gwinnett surpassed Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Clayton counties, according to Equity Depot, which tracks foreclosure and other real estate trends in metro Atlanta.

Yet, even with the rise in distressed residential properties countywide, Gwinnett’s appraised values are still above fair market value, in some cases way above, as Carlson’s case illustrates. Carlson and her husband bought their three-bedroom house for $82,000 in 1991. Now, she said, they’d be lucky if the house fetched $70,000. Yet the current tax appraisal values the house at $134,500.

As whites move away from the wondrous diversity peddled by DWLs and gobbled up with equal intensity by Duplicitous White Conservatives (DWCs), they leave behind multiple crises that festers like an untreated open wound: collapsing home values,  deteriorating schools (their white sons and daughters the reason the schools were good in the first place) and an eroding tax base to pay for police, firefighters, other government employees and improvements to the city and upkeep of the infrastructure. Worse, pensions are in jeopardy for city employees long retired and expecting money for their services rendered.

Blame white flight:

Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.


So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.

“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”

Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.

Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.

Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases; retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up like Prichard.

Driving down Wilson Avenue here — a bleak stretch of shuttered storefronts, with pawn shops and beauty parlors that operate behind barred windows and signs warning of guard dogs — it is hard to see vestiges of the Prichard that was a boom town until the 1960s. The city once had thriving department stores, two theaters and even a zoo. “You couldn’t find a place to park in that city,” recalled Kenneth G. Turner, a retired paramedic whose grandfather pushed for the city’s incorporation in 1925.

The city’s rapid decline began in the 1970s. The growth of other suburbs, white flight and then middle-class flight all took their tolls, and the city’s population shrank by 40 percent to about 27,000 today, from its peak of 45,000. As people left, the city’s tax base dwindled.

Prichard’s pension plan was established by state law during the good times, in 1956, to supplement Social Security. By the standard of other public pension plans, and the six-figure pensions that draw outrage in places like California and New Jersey, it is not especially rich. Its biggest pension came to about $39,000 a year, for a retired fire chief with many years of service. The average retiree got around $12,000 a year. But the plan allowed workers to retire young, in their 50s. And its benefits were sweetened over time by the state legislature, which did not pay for the added benefits.

For many years, the city — like many other cities and states today — knew that its pension plan was underfunded. As recently as 2004, the city hired an actuary, who reported that “the plan is projected to exhaust the assets around 2009, at which time benefits will need to be paid directly from the city’s annual finances.”

Prichard is currently 84 percent Black. The browning of America isn’t exactly cause for celebration when you get down to crunching the numbers and looking at the balance sheets.

Currently 72 percent of Black children are born out-of-wedlock and with single Black women having an average net worth of $5 dollars, one is left wondering who will fit the bill for the social programs that keep these families afloat once white people are gone?

Black people don’t save for the future, utilizing credit to pay for many extraneous items that impulses for instant gratification require immediate pacification. Many banks and mortgage brokers are worried about lawsuits brought on by Black people for being denied loans (another future SBPDL), so they find ways to grant these people high interest loans to insulate themselves from accusations of racism.

Such financial institutions, called predatory for having excessively high interest rates, will inevitably be sued by Blacks because they will default on these generous loans as well (claiming the loans were saddled with interest and hidden no honest person could pay, though their poor credit necessitated these elaborate loans), thus proving that attempts to insulate a bank, corporation or mortgage lender from accusations of racism are rendered moot.

One of the rules of SBPDL is simply this: Anytime Black people fail (whether it be poor academic  performance on LSAT, MCAT, ACT/SAT) racism can be the only culprit. Discrimination is always to blame.

Conversely, another rule is this: Anytime a vocation has a noticeable shortage of Black people employed in the field, a crisis of unimaginable magnitude is afoot.

There is no bias in mortgage lending, as many mortgage companies tried to insulate themselves from cries of “racism” by becoming champions of minority lending (looking at you Ameriquest). Minorities have worse credit scores – because of poor decision with that credit – making loans difficult to come by and when they do, rarely are they repaid.

What does the browning of America mean? Perhaps this link will show you what is to come.

It is time to admit what is upon us and what the browning of America really translates into: A racial paradise free of turmoil is not around the corner; a catastrophe of Biblical proportions appears to be in the offing.

Black Run America (BRA) is on its last legs. Where will you be when those legs buckle?

Shape of the Future

http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-shape-of-the-future/

The “Secession is a Bad Idea” post certainly got the pot boiling over here at TOQ.

But I would like all of you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

We all react powerfully to the videos of helicopter gun ships blasting groups of supposed “terrorists” on the ground in central Asia. We react equally to videos of very expensive munitions fired from drones that slaughter groups of these supposed “terrorists”.

I say “supposed” for the simple reason that the men being slaughtered happen to be half way around the World from us, and have no visible means of getting to our shores unless we provide the means. Indeed, if the population of the U.S. were entirely homogeneous and light skinned, there would be little fear of terrorism simply because we could not see any of these central Asian Muslims around us.

Thus, the fear of terror would be implausible, and support for trillion dollar expenditures to support a vast anti-terror bureaucracy is very much at risk, unless that anti-terror bureaucracy—coincident with the bombings and slaughters—imported relatives of the victims to circulate among us and make the threat of domestic terror visible, and hence support for the anti-terror machine and its trillion dollar budgets plausible.

As usual, multiculturalism is always and everywhere a means by which a minority can impose its will and its system of social control by pitting one group against another.

But the key to survival in this modern world is to see the pieces of the puzzle that are in plain view right in front of you and from their shape, accurately deduce the shape and nature of the pieces of the puzzle that are not visible.

For example: is it necessarily true that the regime would use helicopter gun ships and air to ground rockets fired from drones to exterminate domestic revolutionaries? Would the regime need to “go loud” like this and risk alarming the neighbors and waking them from their stupor?

So what is it about the populations that do get bombed and strafed that might differentiate them from us. After all, while they get bombed and strafed, racialists in the U.S. are free to fly unhindered; we are treated with extraordinary courtesy during traffic stops; and are typically let go with a smile and a warning (no snickering or winks and nods from the Cat 3 peanut gallery please!). Despite early attempts to shut down racialist web sites, the powers that be are allowing them to multiply like mushrooms in spring rain during recent years.

In similar fashion, there is a huge commerce in firearms—mostly assault rifles—that the regime tolerates with total equanimity.

Is there a unifying characteristic of those differing people who get bombs dropped on them from safe altitudes? Anything beyond the simple fact that they hate the regime because they supposedly “hate our freedom”, while we hate the regime because of our loss of freedom?

Let me make a radical suggestion.

The populations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia do share a common characteristic. And it is obviously not the Muslim religion or brown skin color. Serbia is the “Ethiopian in the fuel supply” that tips us off to the shape and nature of the puzzle pieces that are not visible.

Serbs are as White as Austrians, and they are Eastern Orthodox Christians, heroes who for centuries have repelled invasions of numerous Asian and Muslim hordes seeking to invade Europe.

But at the time of our most excellent adventure over the skies of Serbia, they maintained an autarchic economy and did not participate in the Western banking system. In short, while Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan may have had local banks, and while varying percentages of their populations may have had bank accounts and credit cards—scaling from perhaps a majority in Serbia, to a minority in Iraq, to a miniscule number in Afghanistan—neither the Serbian, the Iraqi nor the Afghan banking arrangements were within the reach of Interpol or the FBI (which, curiously, seems to operate worldwide).

One day several years ago I walked into a branch of Wells Fargo and sat down to chat with the branch manager. I asked her whether the FBI could simply erase my checking account, and if so would they have to notify the bank first. She said that the FBI has a direct electronic connection to the accounts at that bank and every other bank that is a member of the Federal Reserve System and they can delete or freeze an account at any time without ever having to notify the bank.

Then I said, “How about my investment account with your brokerage subsidiary? Same answer. They can delete or freeze it electronically and they do not need to tell us why. (Same with your credit card and debit card, by the way.)

If they were to do that, the victim could not sell his house and collect the proceeds, and he would not have the means to hire a lawyer and file for relief in Federal Court. He would be immobilized, unable to purchase an airline ticket, and unable to fill the gas tank in the car or buy food.

What could a fellow do under those circumstances? Go complain to the neighbors that all his accounts have been deleted by the government and risk getting himself committed to a mental institution? From the regime’s perspective it sure beats having a helicopter gun ship scare the crap out of the neighbors by strafing and demolishing someone’s house, killing him with 20mm cannon fire!

Lets back out for a larger look at the numbers.

In the U.S., we have approximately 55 million adults who are on welfare and we have another 30 million adults who are receiving and are dependent upon Social Security/Old Age benefits. This group is completely under the thumb of the regime. A cancellation of the automatic deposit or a failure to reload the plastic food card would cast any individual revolutionary in this group into the hedge rows to starve. And the government knows exactly who these people are.

Next, look at the number of people with credit card debt. Odds are overwhelming that these people are loyal “consumers” and have no stash of cash or precious metals that could see them through an account deletion. Again any dissident individual in this category could be immobilized and would starve in the hedge rows.

The gold dealers and gold bug websites estimate that only one half of one percent of the population owns physical gold or silver. All large purchases of gold or silver must be made by wire or credit card, so the regime has a pretty good handle on who has substantial stashes of the metal. There may be some extraordinarily disciplined savers that buy a few hundred dollars worth of silver rounds every month with cash, but those are almost certainly confined to those who have no credit card debt, narrowing the pool in which to search for suspects.

Similarly, cash withdrawals from banks are monitored, and any sudden large cash withdrawals must be reported as suspicious by the teller. An army fights on its stomach, as the saying goes, and it would take massive amounts of cash or sales of precious metals in order to finance the movement of a few thousand men to the Pacific Northwest. Why do you think that in the latest “Patriot” Act the government required 1099 filings for sales of precious metals back to dealers?

They are watching for this, and any sudden pattern of cash withdrawals or physical metal sales would be detected and correlated with lists of known dissidents and with the individuals who show up on the carefully mapped neural networks of persons who call or email these known dissidents. The regime doesn’t care what you say, they only need care who you are saying it to.

So it seems completely clear to me that the reasons for the helicopter gun ships, the missile launching drones, and the bombs falling from safe altitudes half way around the world are two-fold.

First and foremost, Iraqis and Afghans are not “consumers” tied to the credit system, and therefore there is no way of controlling them other than by armed force. And second, the broadcast of carefully selected videos of these slaughters serves to impress upon the public mind the terror that the regime, in all its majesty, can inflict upon those who are not addicted to cable TV and going into debt to buy expensive toys and expensive vacations. These slaughters serve the same purpose as was served by the Coliseum in Rome and the gladiatorial amphitheaters constructed throughout the Roman Empire and are, in the eyes of the regime, worth the trillions that the videos cost.

Given the new tools that modern technology and modern consumer behavior have bestowed upon the regime, it seems clear that they can control us without violence, and I would bet big money that they have no intention of ever blasting us wrong-thinking “consumers” with helicopter gun ships or missiles fired from drones.

Even if we were to begin funding a mass movement of men and arms, we would be picked up quietly, most likely on the road or outside a store with little or now show of force and most likely with the same solicitude that Cat Threes are greeted on the highway. After all, there is no way the regime would be stupid enough to start a panic and trigger copy cats by using our pathetically inadequate movement of funds and men to signal that an armed revolution is afoot. To do so would be to allow us to leverage their resources to our purposes.

What would lead any of us to believe that the regime has not learned the lessons of Ruby Ridge and Waco? Americans are not going to be entertained by videos of neighbors who have always left them alone being burned to death or shot to pieces by helicopter gun ships. As long as you are not a “public figure” and have no swastikas or rebel flags on the wall, the regime is unlikely to sacrifice its image by frying you or chopping you into hamburger meat in public. Unlike the helicopter gunship videos from Afghanistan which show the targets only at a distance, such a slaughter on U.S. soil would result in close up cell phone videos of the corpses all over the Internet.

Dead veterans wearing their old dog tags would be a deeply troubling propaganda disaster for the regime.

Now let us back out and look at the puzzle pieces before us from an even more distant perspective.

Each new layer of complexity designed to increase efficiency and reduce costs in our economy increases its fragility and renders it more vulnerable to black swan events. Our just-in-time delivery systems give us about five days worth of food and about ten days of gasoline. Bernanke’s loss of control over long term interest rates—that QE-2 was intended to lower—could lead to a series of financial catastrophes that destabilize our society and leave our population cold and hungry.

The real danger to the regime is a military coup as a result of one or more of these catastrophes.

But a coup by the military would only capture and disable the facade of government—the elected and appointed officials in Washington. In fairness to the military, they do know that they would have to get control of the radio and TV stations, turn off the satellite feeds, and get control of the broadcasts.

But it is very unlikely that the the officer corps would have any idea how to identify and capture the real government of the U.S.—the people in New York and Los Angeles who would oppose their takeover, turn their coup into a propaganda disaster, and likely defeat them unless quickly deprived of their power—which would almost certainly require our help. We are the only ones who could identify the moles who would do everything in their power to subvert the coup and topple the military.

Once we were given access to the computers of the surveillance state, a few well designed database queries would give us a list of the real government, and all of them could have their bank, brokerage and credit cards erased or frozen, which would then immobilize them and cast them back into the lowly and dependent “consumer” status that they have so carefully crafted for us while avoiding a bloody mess and the feelings of revulsion that would turn the people against the military.

Few would have to be detained. For a coup to succeed, one must understand the levers of power that inhere in the surveillance apparatus of the state.

A far more likely scenario is a slow withering away of the regime’s resources, and a gradual abandonment of functions it can no longer afford.

Secession happens slowly, by degrees.

First there are the noticeable stresses and fissures that become visible: rising unemployment, falling real incomes for our children, and government policies that deprive us of secure savings opportunities.

In this case we would be wise to stay where we are and make ourselves useful to local officials: the county sheriff and the elected state representatives, those with the power to quietly and unobtrusively reverse the policies which unfairly burden our people, as we transform ourselves from an educational charity to a welfare organization that helps our people through rough times, provides teachers and schools for the gifted (when these programs are canceled for lack of funds), organizes medical care as the insurance system collapses, and provides emergency food and shelter for those most likely to rebound and contribute. These are all activities that, through selection of recipients, provide help in ways that reverse the wildly dysgenic effects of the welfare state on the fitness of our people.

Already serious strains are showing up in state and local finances that put the local authorities at odds with the Feds. Most of the states have elected representatives who actively solicit educated, unpaid volunteers to serve as legislative analysts. Since most of the TOQ crowd have college degrees, and many have graduate degrees, we are particularly qualified to take advantage of these stresses by helping our elected state legislators.

If you have a Republican state representative, call him or her and volunteer. With every analysis you are asked to do, you prepare an estimate of the impact of the proposed legislation on Republican voters, a useful proxy for Whites capable of being salvaged. This will condition your Republican representative to actually think about the interests of their Republican voters—something which Republicans generally are not inclined to do. Of course, you never mention WN, but you should constantly remind them that a Republican must motivate the base, and that real political motivation requires not just remote benefits to a universalized “everyman”, but benefits us and not the identifiable “them” who oppose us and our interests.

In Texas, we have a part time legislature and those elected to serve in the Texas House (as opposed to the Senate) have no budget for staff beyond a lone secretary/receptionist. It will be the same in most other states. So the opportunity for meaningful activism is there. Carpe diem!

Now is also the time to declare independence from the consumer culture:

• We cancel our cable subscriptions.
• We stop watching professional sports.
• We sell the big house and trade down to a smaller house (and do it early to beat the rush).
• We cut up our credit cards, start saving money, and begin buying silver rounds for cash as insurance against a total collapse of the monetary system.
• We boycott brand-name goods in favor of generics.

In short, we starve the beast.

The good news is that millions of Americans are canceling their cable, and millions more have stopped watching pro sports (the NBA has begun playing White basketball players even though any idiot can see that the black players do what they can to avoid passing them the ball).

We need to recognize and ride these trends. We need to pace our fellow Whites and encourage the above behaviors.

Most of all, we must be good and useful neighbors to our fellow Whites, building awareness and understanding,  always making ourselves helpful and useful.

Is secession a good idea for whites?

 

Is secession a good idea for whites?No.

A good way to see this is to analyze the military, political and social problems that Harold Covington’s Pacific Northwest secession movement would face. He suggests that Whites gather in Idaho, Oregon and Washington and use guerrilla warfare to form an independent homeland that is free of non-Whites.He describes the homeland and the guerrilla warfare, in The Brigade, a tense, suspenseful thriller (Harold A. Covington, The Brigade [Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris Corporation, 2008]).

The first critical problem with the homeland is that it would be too weak to survive. There are several test cases for this. These are small countries, not much different in size from the Pacific Northwest homeland.

The three Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have a combined population of just over 8 million people, similar to the number that the Pacific Northwest homeland would have. (Today the combined population of Idaho, Oregon and Washington is under 12 million.)

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia once were parts of the Russian Empire. They seceded after the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, during the period of confusion, weakness and disorganization that the Russian Revolution caused. Joseph Stalin annexed all three of these countries in 1940. All it took him was a few meetings and phone calls. See Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Finland is another good test case. Like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, it was part of the Russian Empire until it collapsed. Then Finland seceded, too. Finland, a larger country than Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, was able to hold off a Soviet invasion for a while during the Winter War of 1939-1940.

Finland started with some big advantages. It had a large territory. It had deep snow and dense forests that confined Soviet invaders to roads. It had soldiers who could travel cross-country on skis, surround road-bound columns of Soviet troops and kill them. It had an excellent submachine gun which its soldiers used against Soviet invaders armed with outdated bolt-action rifles. It had an army with great courage and patriotism. Plus, Stalin had recently annihilated his army officer corps in a bloody purge.

Finland still had to sue for peace after a few weeks.

So, how powerful must a secessionist movement be in order to survive? How much industrial power must it have? How much territory? How many people?

Here in North America, the Northern conquest of the South is a definitive test of the possibility of secession.

By 1860 the South had lost control of the Presidency. It had also lost control of the House of Representatives because the voting population of the North was larger than the voting population of the South. The South still retained control of the Senate by a narrow margin, because the number of senators depended on the number of states.

Southern planters feared that, if they lost control of the Senate, the North would prevent them from expanding slave agriculture to any new states. They also feared that the North would outlaw slavery, once it took control of the Senate. See Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

Southern plantation agriculture wore out the land. Planters abandoned worn out land and resettled new lands, further west. This made it very important to them that they could freely bring their slaves to new states.

Unable to solve this political problem, the South seceded. Lincoln decided that he must have his tariffs, so he called for 70,000 volunteers and launched what is so far the bloodiest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. The South was enough weaker than the North that it could not afford to make political or military mistakes. But it made them.

Four years of bloodshed proved that the South was not strong enough to secede without the permission of the North. It steadily and gradually lost, militarily, a battle that it had already lost politically before it seceded. Had the South been strong enough to secede without permission, it would also have been strong enough to defend its political interests without seceding.

Secession is an attempt by the politically weaker of two parties to solve, by leaving the field, a political problem that it is too weak to solve, either politically or militarily.

Only the weaker party in a political conflict would want to secede. Only the stronger party would be strong enough to secede without the permission of the other. However, the stronger party would not want to secede because it could force the weaker party to do whatever it wanted.

Covington suggests that military disaster at some distant part of the empire might make the United States too weak to hold on to the Pacific Northwest in the face of guerilla warfare. Maybe so. But this would give the homeland the kind of temporary safety that a Thanksgiving turkey enjoys.

Any place where a secessionist might want to live would be too valuable for the larger, stronger party to give up.

The Pacific Northwest, in particular, is far too valuable to secede in peace. It has valuable hydroelectric power, in a world hungry for cheap energy. The Columbia, its most important river, is 1,243 miles long. Puget Sound gives the Pacific Northwest well-sheltered, world-class harbors. It has a major naval base. Nuclear submarines silently travel its waterways.

What tactics would the United Sates use to keep anyone from forming any independent homeland in such a valuable place, without its permission?

Anything.

Writing in a neocon publication, US Army Colonel Ralph Peters (Ret.) said, “The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.”

Anyone who hopes to secede from the United States should expect it to use the same tactics that it has used before, whichever ones promise to work, whatever they might be.

What are these tactics?

Guatemala is a model case. Niall Ferguson, writing in The War of the World, described what happened there after a carefully-planned CIA coup d’etat that overthrew a democratically-elected Guatemalan government. (Niall Ferguson, The War of the World Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West [New York: Penguin, 2006], 610-617.)

Paramilitary death squads, the Mano Blanca, roamed the cities and countryside. In the 30 years after the 1954 coup, some 40,000 people disappeared. Mayan Indian tribes were relocated and forced into “strategic hamlets.”

Ferguson says hundreds of villages identified as ‘red’ were obliterated and their inhabitants tortured, raped and murdered. Surrounding forests were burned. He says there was mass slaughter of civilians. By the end of the 1990s the death toll had reached around 200,000. Because there were so many Mayan victims a UN commission deemed that these deaths were genocide.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are two more models that we can use to predict what the United State government would do to secessionists. Eric Margolis, writing in World News Daily Information Clearing House, said that “Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pushtun tribesmen of North-West Province . . .”

He said, “The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.” Pakistani armed forces used heavy artillery and gunfire from helicopters to kill Pushtun civilians.

Results came quickly.

Andrew Buncombe, writing in The Independent, said that as many as 2.4 million people fled Swat Valley. One man, aged 90, said that,” because there had been no warning to leave, when the gunfire erupted around them they gathered what they could carry and fled.”

The speed of the displacement, as helicopter gun ships fired on civilians fleeing the Swat Valley, reached 85,000 a day.

This terrorist tactic-firing heavy artillery at little villages and then pursuing fleeing villagers with gunfire from helicopters-could empty out every village and small town in the Pacific Northwest in a few weeks.

Where would refugees go after they were driven from secessionist villages and towns? They would go to camps, drawn there by promises of food, shelter and safety.

Most of these camps would be open-air prisons like the Gaza Strip, or the city of Fallujah, in Iraq, or the concentration camps where the British Army put Boer women and children during the Boer war. There would be harsh control of the perimeters of these camps, using earthen or concrete walls, razor wire, guard dogs, electrified fences, towers, mine fields and high-powered search lights.

All of these tools have been perfected and used. Any guerrilla fighters who remained outside the camps would be pressured to surrender when the women, children and old men in the camps began to die after being deprived of food, water, medicine and sanitation.

Torturers and assassins would visit the camps to cull interesting prisoners. They operated this way during the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. The founder of the Phoenix program, CIA officer William Colby, told a Congressional committee in 1971 that the Phoenix operation had killed 20,587 Vietcong suspects in two years (Hayden, 2008).

Writing in Small Wars Journal, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen advocated a world-wide Phoenix program. He went on to become chief strategist in the State Department’s counterterrorism office in 2005 and 2006 and was chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations to General Petraeus, in planning the 2007 US troop surge in Iraq.

Justin Raimondo reported that high officials at the top of the United States Government have operated an assassination ring. He says that Defense Secretary Gates, acting under the authority of President Obama, has appointed the operational leader of this assassination ring, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to head U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

It is a huge piece of good luck that government strategy and tactics would make secession impossible. Secession would be a terrible, self-inflicted disaster.

Secession gives the enemy the location of a small, compact target where it can land a fatal blow. It lets the enemy organize its own territory without interference and then use all of the resources of that territory for aggression.

Secession always means the voluntary loss of valuable territory. It loses strategic depth for fighting a war. It loses rivers, ocean front and harbors. It loses road grids and railroad networks. It loses power stations and hydroelectric dams. It loses minerals and arable land. It loses defensible terrain features such as mountain ranges. It loses industrial plants and built up areas.

Secession also loses people. For example a Pacific Northwest homeland would leave out most members of the largest White ethnic group — Germans. They mostly live in a huge semi-circle of land in the middle of the United States, with its diameter on the Canadian border. Their key cities are Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.

A Pacific Northwest homeland would also leave out most of the next-largest white ethnic group–the Irish. Oregon and Idaho are not even mentioned on the Wikipedia list of the twenty states with the largest population of Irish-Americans. Washington State has the 20th largest number of Irish-Americans.

And so it goes with all whites, whether they call themselves just plain Americans or mention descent from a specific white ethnic group. All whites are important. So any population transfer to implement any secession plan, of any sort, would be impossible. And that’s a good thing because secession would create hostile borders that would splinter families, kindreds, and ethnic groups.

There are three good, recent models for this: Berlin was partitioned into East- and West Berlin. Germany was partitioned into East- and West Germany. Korea was — and still is — partitioned into North- and South Korea. All of these have had — or still have — hostile borders that featured guard towers, road barriers, barbed wire, death strips enforced by mines, machine guns and guard dogs, passport & visa requirements, body searches and other snooping, as well as confiscations, arbitrary arrests and mysterious disappearances.

Borders destroy social capital. Population transfers from one place to another also destroy social capital. There are two different cases here. In the first case, a border partitions an area, leaving a population divided in two, with large numbers of people passively staying in place. In the second case, numbers of people respond to special appeals to move to an area that plans to secede.

People who would be willing to move, as single individuals, to some distant place where a movement is afoot to secede are especially likely to be loners, High Plains drifters — people not tied down by strong emotional commitments to others. They are especially vulnerable to exploitation by agent provocateurs, because so many of their interactions are with strangers.They can be entrapped by honey pots. Their social networks are likely to be relatively impoverished and easily penetrated by malicious strangers. Collections of them are likely to lack small unit cohesion.

People who stay in one place for several generations are likely to be embedded in a rich network of social relationships. Groups of these people have Einheit, the mutual trust and common outlook built by shared experience. They have agreed frameworks for doing things. They have a capacity for deep emotional attachments to each other. Their social arrangements are based on ancient acquaintance, so they are hard for malicious strangers to penetrate and exploit. People who stay in one place have rich mental maps of their physical and social territory. The value of their social networks is very high.

This makes them difficult for a social parasite to exploit.

A lot of thought and effort has been spent to destroy the social networks of American whites, to ruin our Einheit, make us flee from the centers of our cities and turn us into atomized individuals or tiny nuclear families. The key to this destruction has been alien control of the mass media.

Decades of hate speech about whites, in the mass media, has enraged Negroes and made them more and more bold in attacking whites. Mass media participated in these attacks by motivating them, giving them ideological cover, and carefully concealing their nature and full extent from whites. Monopoly ownership of mass media made it impossible for whites to organize a hue and cry to prevent further predation.

As a result, unorganized, individual white families fled from violent crime near the centers of cities to suburbs on the distant outskirts. They abandoned center-city land worth as much as a million dollars an acre, in today’s dollars, for land at the outskirts worth ten-thousand dollars an acre today. The economic loss to whites from this one factor alone is in the trillions of dollars. Typically whites sold sound, sturdy old houses on extremely valuable center-city land and bought brand-new houses on small parcels of nearly-worthless semi-rural land. Then their new houses began to depreciate to zero, while the land that they had abandoned in the center city skyrocketed.

The loss of social capital shows up in the reduced roaming radius that parents allow their children. A while ago, I talked with an older white man who probably was 65- to 70-years-old at the time we talked. He said that, as a 12-year-old boy, he rode his bicycle four or five miles to a hardware store. There he bought a 12-gauge shotgun for himself. Then he held it on his bicycle’s handlebars and rode home. Nobody thought anything about it, he said.

This would never happen now.

The loss of social capital also shows up in the loss of informal play. Mothers drive their children from one carefully-protected, formally-scheduled activity to another.

White flight — the individual search for safety from ethnic cleansing — has spread from cities to whole states. For example, whites are fleeing ethnic cleansing in California.

Secession is white flight extended to multi-state regions. Flight to a promised Pacific Northwest homeland, for example, is white flight to a multi-state region.

No matter how large the region to which whites flee, it cannot work. A key reason is that white people are wealth, like herds of cattle or flocks of sheep. White people provide valuable habitat and nourishment for parasites of all kinds. So these parasites follow us everywhere.

South Africa is a fine example. The first major permanent white settlement anywhere in Africa started in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company built a supply station for its ships in the vicinity of present-day Cape Town, South Africa. At that stage the nearest Bantu tribes were more than 1,000 kilometers from the Cape.

By the time the British occupied the Cape for the first time in 1795 it had a white population of about 26,000, an estimated Cape Colored population of 20,000 and a slave population of around 30,000.

During the lifetime of the Republic of South Africa Bantu colonists also flooded South Africa, drawn by labor contracts.

South African farmers — the Boers — fled from British control. Everywhere they went, the British followed them and annexed their territory as soon as they had done the hard, dangerous work of settling it. The Boers and their territory were too valuable for the British to leave alone.

In the beginning South African whites had a chance to create an all-white country of their own. However, relying on non-white labor gave white habitat away to non-whites. It gave non-whites a chance to out-breed whites and displace them.

The very slow, slow growth of the white population in the pre-Revolutionary thirteen colonies, of North America, is a measure of how hard and dangerous it is to convert wilderness to urban, improved habitat.

It took 150 years, from 1650 to 1780, for the population of the 13 colonies to grow from 4,600 to 2,780,000.That is an increase of only18,502 a year.

It took just 30 years, from 1970 to 2000, for the Hispanic population of the United States to grow from an estimated 9.6 million to an estimated 35.3 million. This is an increase of more 856,666 Hispanics a year, a mark of how free, easy and safe their increase is. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hispanic/hispanic.html

Early America offered slim pickings for Jews, except in the slave trade. There were an estimated 1,243 to 3,000 in the United States in 1790. When Whites finished the difficult, dangerous work of settlement, the Jewish population suddenly leapt from 230,000 to 280,000 in 1880 to 1,508,000 to 2,349,754 in 1910. This was just three years before they took control of the United States banking system with their Federal Reserve system. (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/usjewpop1.html)

None of these millions of newcomers paid their share of the cost of developing a high technological civilization in North America. None had built any roads, laid any railroad tracks, or built any bridges, dams or tall sky scrapers.

We Whites have helped non-whites dispossess us by giving our habitat away for free, after developing it at such cost. If we keep doing this, we will be extinct.

We must stop helping non-whites dispossess us. We must stop running away. We must stop giving free habitat to those who seek to dispossess us. We must take back our land.

This essay was originally published on Sep 3, 2009

Too Fat to Fight

by Jeff Davis

Thanks to hundreds of channels of Satellite entertainment, countless Internet websites and addictive games like Halo and Facebook farming, people are sitting glued to their chairs in front of a glowing screen more than ever. The result has been an increasing problem with obesity plaguing everyone from school children to senior citizens. One of the worst affected groups is the US Army.

Fox News reports: “US soldiers are going to extremes — taking diet pills and laxatives, even starving themselves and getting liposuction — in order to meet the military’s weight standards, the Army Times reported Monday. More than a third of uniformed men and women do not meet the Army’s weight standards, according to a 2009 military fitness report, and those officers are subjected to dreaded tape measurements to determine body fat percentage. If soldiers exceed the body fat limits, they cannot earn leadership roles or promotions, the paper said. Officers can even lose their jobs if they do not shed a significant amount weight in two months — a very real threat, considering about 24,000 soldiers were discharged between 1992 and 2007 for failure to meet weight standards, according to a report published in Military Medicine.”

Of course, the Army mess halls no doubt continue to serve high-starch and high calorie meals, as indeed they should since combat soldiers who are properly fit and performing do in fact need a high daily calorie intake. But more and more American soldiers actually never see the battlefield, or if they do they see it from behind a computer screen in an air-conditioned Forward Operating Base or from behind a desk.

According to one famous analysis, in the United States Army it now requires 70 support personnel of various kinds to support one actual combat soldier in the field. The most prized military skills these days are not learned on the rifle range or the obstacle course but in offices. The majority of serving soldiers are now basically uniformed administrators and bureaucrats and techies of various kinds. Like their civilian counterparts they live largely on a diet of American junk food, they don’t exercise, and so they become fat very early in life.

A problem our enemies, who live on rice and goat meat, don’t seem to have. Anybody ever see a fat Taliban?

Venezuelan Dictatorship for Dummies

Our South American correspondent BG suggested that we republish the following post by Miguel, the founder of the Venezuelan Resistance blog site The Devil’s Excrement.

Hugo Chavez is building up his Dictatorship one step at a time

December 24, 2010 — from The Devil’s Excrement

(Thanks @inti for sending the cartoon and Rodrigo @sin_mordaza for making it)

Slowly Hugo Chavez is building up his Dictatorship. He has been planning ahead all the time.

Lost the Constitutional referendum? He quickly had himself an Enabling Law that allowed him to legislate in 2008 everything but his own reelection by decree, thus voiding what the “people” had voted for. He dealt with his reelection by holding an illegal referendum that would allow him to run in 2012 and forever if necessary, he had the Supreme Court ready to approve it in an another subtle but illegal decision that denies the very essence of our Constitution and democracy.

Then, in the face of the 2007 referendum defeat, he rearranged electoral districts so that he could win the National Assembly even in defeat. It almost worked, except that he did not cheat enough and lost more popularity than he imagined he would in the intervening two years. In the end, he did not manage to obtain the super majority that would have allowed him to have the Assembly approve him any Bill he wanted.

Thus, he made a three step maneuver, one for the present, one for the immediate future and one for a year and a half from now.

For the present, he had the lame duck National Assembly approve a succession of Bills that change the social landscape in a dramatic fashion, from the Banking Bill, to the Science and Technology Bill, to the Telecom Bill, to the Media Bill, to the University Bill, Chavez legislated precisely what the majority that voted against him did not want. It was undemocratic, unfair and much of it illegal.

Read more »

A Tiny Minority

It’s All Your Fault

 

Dedicated to the millions of comatose White Americans who simply refuse to see themselves.

by John Kaminski

http://johnkaminski.info/

You are the cause of the Iraq war, because you knew the newspapers were lying when they trumpeted that yellow cake uranium from the landlocked African nation of Niger was a reason to go to war, that Iraqi drones could bomb Long Island on an hour’s notice, and that the dictator Saddam was hiding “weapons of mass destruction” all over his oil-rich country. You are the cause of that war and its three million dead because you didn’t call them on their lies, you just turned away and said something like “That’s just the way the government works . . .” or “That’s just the way it is.” When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell brought “intelligence” before the world — yes, this is the famous Downing Street memo that everyone ignored — intelligence that was later proved to be a plagiarized, ten-year-old anonymous graduate school student’s thesis, revealing the U.S. government once again to be exposed as a liar to the whole world, you just turned your head away and said, “I have to go to work now.”

So now you’re wondering why your reality is vaporizing faster than your bank account, and I’m here to tell you — Look no further! We have found the cause. And it’s definitely you. In the opinion of those who study what people know, chances are much better than average that you’re comatose intellectually and you don’t know it. When’s the last time you heard the words “honor” and “loyalty” on TV? The answer is never. When’s the last time you thought of this question? The answer is years ago.

All of this stuff going on in the world is your fault, because you haven’t said a word when you saw things that were wrong. You can make any defense you want, but the fact remains you didn’t do it. None of us did, until the proverbial obituary — it was too late to do anything about it. But even that excuse won’t wash.

And don’t say you weren’t in on it. Or go intellectual on us and say you protested this or that, and that was the best you could do. None of that stuff worked. It was a dog and pony show to vent the societal pressure so we could all go on ignoring the scam. Ignoring the mass murder for profit, which we, when we salute our flag, endorse . . . with tears in our eyes, even.

You are the cause of a young mother, Vicki Weaver, being shot in the head while holding her baby by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, who later received a commendation for his work. If you have never heard of Ruby Ridge, you simply are not fit to vote.

You are the cause of federal officials blowing up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an explosion supposedly happening OUTSIDE that blew the building OUTWARD, or toward the exact direction of the blast. But hey, physics never gets in the way of a good false flag op.

You are the cause of the barbecuing of women and children at Waco, when the government demonstrated that it could make up any story, avalanche it on the public, and get away with mass murder entirely on its own provocation.

You are the cause of the millions of American dead and billions of other categories of corpses because you supported a government without really knowing what it was doing — and you still do, in your own distinctive, seemingly critical and ultimately slavish way.

And all because, as you refused to turn away your gaze from the TV while you sipped on your beer, you refused to do the right thing, and instead chose to be the obnoxious animal, concerned with only your own titillation, that the forces of commerce and education had shaped you into being.

Hardly anybody ever noticed that that’s what happened to us, and they still don’t. They’re too busy absent-mindedly munching popcorn and wondering how they’re going to pay their dental bills.

But the beast goes on, as they say, and each day it creeps closer to your house, inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, chemtrail by chemtrail, and pill by pill.

You have failed to tell the truth when it mattered most.

This is the correct answer that you have failed, in your cowardice, to vocalize anywhere except in that dark secret place of your own fear.

The government’s explanation of what happened on 9/11 would get a failing grade in a high school theater class, simply for all its clumsy non-answers. The question then poses itself: Who exactly are all those people who believed that story? What kind of people are they really? Do they believe what they say they believe, or are they just saying it? And more importantly, who were the people who didn’t believe that now-discredited official story, but kept their mouths shut, for one reason or another?

Answer? It was all of us. In those rocky days when Dubya in his bomber jacket stood in the rubble of the Twin Towers and said, “We gonna git them tirrirists,” the entire world stood in awe of Americans all lining up behind the flag like the melon people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But the entire world soon averted its eyes when the U.S., with absolutely no evidence at all except the lame documentation assembled by its spinmasters, started bombing everything in sight, or, at least the places that had something the U.S. wanted to steal.

Those other terrorist “incidents” — London, Bali, Madrid, Yemen etc. — we’re all engineered by the new worldwide vigilante network, which is

1. Jewish bankers;

2. Jewish mobsters.

3. Jewish politicians.

4. Jewish media icons.

5. Jewish movie stars.

6. Jewish appointees, such as judges.

7. Jewish musicians.

8. Jewish counterculture leaders (now on the Supreme Court).

9. Jewish “educators.” and

10. Jewish sayanim, who have infiltrated every group on the planet and are flawlessly connected to the satanic succubus known as the worldwide Jewish crime network, a.k.a. B’nai B’rith and all the other demonic acronyms.

Because you have not been a patriotic American and seen this creeping encroachment on the American reality throughout the 20th century, this inexorable slide into filth, disease and betrayal on the part of the people whom we ourselves have chosen to lead us reveals a deep flaw in the beliefs we hold.

This is all your fault for not standing up for what you knew was right, at all times.

In my book, you’re a punk, not to be relied upon by anyone who seeks the higher truths, and you richly deserve the fate of the cannon fodder they’re about to turn you into.

posted by The Old Man

NY Gov. commutes sentence of black man who shot white teenager.

During a racially charge confrontation a black man in New York City shot and killed a white teenager standing at the edge of his yard.

From CNN…

John White, an African-American, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon in the shooting death of Daniel Cicciaro, 17, who was white.

White was serving a sentence of up to four years in prison when Paterson commuted his sentence Thursday.

…

White had served approximately five months in prison before Paterson allowed his release Thursday, according to Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas J. Spota.

…

But the move was criticized by prosecutors who helped put White behind bars.

“I strongly believe the governor should have had the decency and the compassion to at least contact the victim’s family to allow them to be heard before commuting the defendant’s sentence,” said Spota, whose office prosecuted White.

The shooting occurred in August 2006 in the Long Island town of Riverhead, after a group of teenagers went to White’s home over a dispute with his 19-year-old son.

White said he was protecting his family from a white lynch mob and the gun discharged accidentally.

Prosecutors said White should have called police instead of deliberately choosing to confront Cicciaro and a group of his friends with a .32-caliber Beretta.

Riverhead police said the incident started with an internet prank sent by another person from the MySpace page of White’s 20-year-old son.

John White was a habitual 911 caller. Often for extremely petty things. Yet that night he walked out of his house with a loaded gun and shot a teenage kid to death without ever dialing 911. He has also made his dislike of white people very clear in media interviews.

Not to be outdown by Marvel, DC Comics launches new Islamic French-Algerian Batman.

From breitbart.com

Reality isn’t always very fun. Because of that many people turn to comic books for a little escapism. But there’s escapism and PC indoctrination. Sadly, it appears that DC Comics’ Batman is angling for the latter and not the former. You see, Batman has decided to hire a Muslim to “save France.”

First the reality. The country of France is having serious domestic problems between its immigrant Muslim community and those natural-born, European Frenchmen. Immigrants have been rampaging across the country for several years now. Clashes between police and large groups of rioting Muslim youth have wreaked havoc on the Gallic nation. Violence is all too common — it is woefully common for hundreds of cars to be lit afire in these riots and dozens of arrests to be made. It has the country split and frightened.

It has gotten so bad in France that in some parts of its cities, those parts controlled by marauding gangs of Muslim youths, whites never enter for fear of their lives. Not only that but not even police dare enter these areas. This dangerous situation does not seem anywhere near being solved. In fact, it’s just getting worse.

Now for the fantasy: enter The Batman.

DC Comics recently launched a series called “Batman Incorporated.” Essentially, Bruce Wayne (well-known as Batman’s alter ego to comics fans) is cruising the world setting up a “Batman” for major cities across the globe. These Batman figures, though, will not be vigilantes. They will be sanctioned by whatever local police force is in charge of the area in which the new Batman is operating. In the case of Detective Comics number 12 (Part one) and Batman Annual number 28 (Part two), Bruce Wayne has come to Paris, France to find a “French savior.”

The story reveals to us a cult-like group that is assassinating France’s fringe political figures. The cult’s goal is to cause unrest and riots to be led by the murdered political figure’s followers. This group hypnotizes its members to kill and then to commit suicide so that the cult cannot be discovered.

First a “popular” French union activist “with ties to the French Communist Party” is murdered. Next the leader of a “break-away Neo-Nazi Party” is killed. Then Batman discovers that a “minor diplomat” from Saudi Arabia is targeted. Batman tries to stop the assassination but is too late.

Batman turns to a man that he helped police arrest earlier in part one. When first encountered the young man was dressed in a skin-tight, black costume and sported a face mask. Batman arrested him when this man tried to involve himself in some rioting. Batman didn’t know the young masked man was actually trying to stop the riot but later learns of his good intentions. Consequently the Dark Knight decides to put this man to work to help stop the cult that is assassinating French political figures and causing riots.

In the course of this story Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, decides that this man should become the French representative of Batman Incorporated. As Wayne styles the man, he’ll be the “French savior.” He ends up calling himself Nightrunner.

Mein Obama vouches for Mein Vick

http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/

Heroes for a different country.

Black people are fiercely loyal. The whole world is collapsing on Mein Obama and yet Black people still approve of his performance (as do Disingenuous White Liberals) though he has yet to do anything to improve the lot of the majority of his most ardent supporters.

Michael Vick is a name that needs no introduction here. In a sane society an individual that mistreats animals with the cruelty of Mr. Vick would have been politely shunned or sent with a one-way ticket to a psychiatric ward. Abusing defenseless animals is a sign of an individual harboring psychological issues that require the attention of trained professional, and keeping these type of people out of the limelight would be axiomatic in a healthy nation.

We do not live in such nation (quick thought experiment: when you look at many white criminals that appear in the news, it is quite obvious that they possess an IQ well below the average of white America – 100 – and perhaps have some sort of mental retardation, but when you see a Black criminal it is impossible to utilize a similar thought experiment. Black people in America have an average IQ of 85, but almost all Black people – including criminals – look alike).


Michael Vick is loved by Black people the nation over. He is another individual who deserves the “Mein” title, just as Barack Obama is still beloved by Black people and any criticism of him will always be considered “racist” by his devoted followers.

Vick might be on another level though. Criticism of Vick is not allowed and if it transpires will always have the odoriferous stench of “racism”:

Get ready to count your losses, Eagles fans, because your team has no shot this year without your black Negro, dog-killin’, prison-serving quarterback.

Yeah, you’re reading it right.

The Vick description occurs because despite time served for whatever crime he committed in a dogfighting scandal, despite community service, and despite a thousand repentances, he never will receive forgiveness by PETA-peddlers (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) nor the millions of Americans who place poodles before humans, especially black homo sapiens.

America, land of the free and home to Native American genocide, slavery, gender persecution, segregation, and a litany of other indiscretions that affected millions, appears hell-bent on repeatedly lynching Vick, retelling his dogfighting connection until he screams Uncle Tom.

All this talk about America turning some invisible corner because 53 percent of Americans elected our first black president is just that — talk.

Race still matters, will always serve as the No. 1 issue in America, because we can’t live without that single controversy that erupts torrents of anger and hate.

These flashbacks to Vick are not at all about developing a quality quarterback because Philadelphia suffered through a similar controversy when Randall met Ronny and Coach Buddy Ryan inserted his lanky future star on third down and never.

You can’t criticize Black people in Black Run America (BRA) and Michael Vick is one of the most highly regarded Blacks in this nation right now:

As a white man with a column and radio show, I have been vilified for taking strong stances against a disgusting human being — Michael Vick.

Why?

Because he happens to be an African-American — a fact that is inconsequential to me. If the ex-Falcons quarterback was a fellow Irish-American, none of my beliefs would change one iota.

I don’t hate Michael Vick because he’s black and I certainly don’t think I am better than him because I’m white. I pity him because he hanged and drowned dogs, and I think I am better human being than him because I have the moral compass to understand that’s wrong.

And while logic often flies in the face of ignorance, too often the ignorant rule.

Take Stephon Marbury and Roy Jones, who felt the need to defend the indefensible.

“I think it’s tough that we build Michael Vick up and then we break him down,” Marbury said after the Vick story broke. “I think he’s one of the superb athletes, and he’s a good human being. I just think that he fell into a bad situation.”

Jones went even further…

“People tend to talk so hard against people. They make it such a bad thing, like dog fighting is worse than killing someone,” Jones said in Newsday.

“I’m not a dog fighter. I’ve never been to a dog fight. But just because they have the animals doesn’t mean they are fighting the animals. Michael Vick doesn’t have that kind of time to train and raise dogs… I like bulldogs and I like their mentality.”

“They are making this so bad, but really two dogs fighting can happen in anyone’s backyard or on the street. It happened in my backyard, two of my dogs fought and one died.

Mein Obama, hoping to show Black people that he still cares about them, recently praised the Philadelphia Eagles owner for giving Vick a second chance after his prison stint:

NBC’s Peter King reports that Barack Obama called Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie earlier this week to congratulate him for giving Vick a second chance after his release from prison. According to King, the president said that released prisoners rarely receive a level playing field and that Vick’s story could begin to change that.

Forget your political allegiances or feelings about Michael Vick and take a step back to think about this. The sitting president of the United States went out of his way to publicly praise a man who, 3 1/2 years ago, many thought would never play again in the NFL. Even the most ardent believers in Vick couldn’t have fathomed a turn-around like this.

Black people take notice here: with more than 2 million Americans behind bars, Black people comprise nearly 1/2  of those currently serving time. Since 1 in 10 Black people serve behind bars, this means a substantial number of Black people will serve jail time in their lives (the number is roughly 30 percent). It should be noted these numbers closely correlate wherever Black people can be found in a predominately white nation.

We are reaching a point where nearly a third or more Black males will be convicted felons and make it quite difficult for employers to find suitable vocations or positions for them (considering only 50 percent of Black males finish high school) to hold down as barber shops can only employ so many and the military can’t keep lowering standards.

With a 72 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate, the rate of criminality will only rise.

Not all Black people can be athletes, so the question must be asked: What will the majority of Black males be doing in the coming decades?

Michael Vick is the perfect role model for what America has become. He is the face of modern football for a reason, but he better encapsulates the face of modern America.

It is Stuff Black People Don’t Like opinion that 2011 will serve as The Tipping Point for the idea of Black Run America.

For the meantime, Black people will doggedly defend Michael Vick and Barack Obama from all critics and denounce anyone who dares opine that their heroes are with fault.

More black people jailed in England and Wales proportionally than in US

 

More black people jailed in England and Wales proportionally than in US

New study finds seven times more black people per population are in prison – in the US number is just four times as many

The number of black people jailed in England and Wales is seven times larger than the amount they make up of the population. Photograph: i love images / Alamy/AlamyThe following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 14 October 2010

A headline and the first paragraph of a story that examined the numbers of people of African-Caribbean and African descent in the prison system in the UK and the US wrongly stated, owing to an editing error, that black people in England and Wales were more at risk of jail than black Americans. The rest of the story, based on a new report, accurately reported that the proportion of black people in jail in the UK was almost seven times their share of the population, whereas in the US the proportion of black prisoners is four times greater than their population share. The expression of the figures was extrapolated from the Equality and Human Rights Commission report How Fair is Britain? The report drew on a 2008 Ministry of Justice document, footnoted as the source of the EHRC statement that stated: “Black prisoners make up 15% of the prisoner population and this compares with 2.2% of the general population – there is greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than there is in the United States.” According to a range of sources, including the US justice department, about 12% of the US population is black and about 40% to 45% of the US prison population is black. According to Roy Walmsley’s World Prison Population List 2009, the US jails 756 of every 100,000 of its population. The corresponding figure for England and Wales is 153. Based on the figures above, America jails 3% of its black population, and England and Wales 1%. This means that a black person in the US is three times as likely to be imprisoned as in England and Wales.

 

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The proportion of black people in prison in England and Wales is higher than in the United States, a landmark report released today by the Equality and Human Rights Commission reveals.

The commission’s first triennial report into the subject, How Fair is Britain, shows that the proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated here is almost seven times greater to their share of the population. In the United States, the proportion of black prisoners to population is about four times greater.

The report, which aims to set out how to measure “fairness” in Britain, says that ethnic minorities are “substantially over-represented in the custodial system”. It suggests many of those jailed have “mental health issues, learning disabilities, have been in care or experienced abuse”.

Experts and politicians said over-representation of black men was a result of decades of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and an overly punitive approach to penal affairs.

“People will be and should be shocked by this data,” said Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust. “We have a tendency to say we are better than the US, but we have not got prison right.”

Lyon said that although there had been “numerous efforts to address racism in the prison system … we have yet to get a better relationship between justice authorities and black communities. Instead we have ended up with mistrust breeding mistrust.”

Evidence of this damaged relationship can be found in the commission’s report. On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an “excess” of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3% of the population, yet made up 15% of people stopped by police.

The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two thirds. The commission says that the total number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite “a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s … the volume of indictable offences has fallen over this time”.

A quarter of the people in prison are from an ethnic minority. Muslims now make up 12% of the prison population in England and Wales.

Some on the left of the Labour party blame its policies while in power. Diane Abbott, who raised the alarm over the growing numbers of jailed black men as a backbencher, said she “very much regretted that the last Labour government swallowed [former home secretary] Michael Howard’s line that ‘prison works’.”

“There was never a serious examination of the consequences of locking up a generation of young black men. The result is there are some prisons in the south east which are now virtually all black. Many are converting to Islam.”

The problems may start at school. The commission points out that black children are three times as likely to be permanently excluded from education.

“We are reaping the effects of criminalising a community in the 1970s,” says Ben Bowling, professor of criminal justice at Kings College London and a former adviser to the home affairs select committee.

“The question is how you break the cycle when young men experience custody. Three quarters simply re-offend. We have to intervene with families more effectively to stop kids going to prison. That means looking at school exclusions. You need to deal with issues like mental health and substance abuse. It is not enough to throw our hands in the air.”

The policies implemented in the last decade mean incarceration levels in Britain are now among the highest in western Europe. England and Wales have an imprisonment rate of 155 per 100,000 and Scotland of 149 per 100,000 of the population. This contrasts with rates of less than 100 per 100,000 for most of Britain’s neighbours.

The commission also warns of the rising numbers of women in jails. It says that the “number of women prisoners has nearly doubled since 1995 in England and Wales, and since 2000 in Scotland – currently around 5% of prisoners are women”.

The Ministry of Justice said that the government would not comment on individual portions of the report.

No Way Out

By Paul E. Gottfried

 

Jim Kalb’s critique of competing views of modernity is rather thorough, and like him, I find much to criticize in what is dissected. Most of the alternatives posed to the present liberal tyranny, Jim points out, are flawed or unworkable. Glorifying the wills of some superior individuals or an ideal community based on biological similarity or working class élan may be to retreat into wishful thinking or else to open the door to alternative forms of tyranny. And the liberal hedonism on which the current democratic managerial order is built enhances control by “social professionals” and “scientific administrators,” as soon as we recognize that hedonistic egalitarianism cannot provide equal gratification for everyone. What this eccentric but now prevalent ideology produces is having “experts” and “human rights” priests decide on whose claims to gratification are to be satisfied. The others will have to go to the back of the line.

Although Jim is accurate in his comments on these late modernist schemes, he is nonetheless short on solutions. It is all good and well to mention the soul and Christian transcendence, but it is hard to see how these ideas could be made to work in the present situation. Are we to command the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview? And even if they all converted to the religious position Jim advocates, would the people follow?

Somehow I doubt it. By now the people are habituated to the present political class, and they believe they live in the happiest and freest society that has ever existed. Also Americans learn from movement conservatives and Republicans as well as from conventional leftist sources that what we’ve achieved, thanks to wise leaders, is so marvelous that it must be defended everywhere and at all times. There is also no indication, as far as I can tell, that Hollywood entertainment is about to stop distributing its noxious products or that Americans will plunge into such dire poverty that they’ll be forced to rethink their social and existential premises.

And even if real disaster struck, I’m not sure the populace would be screaming “crux, ultima spes.” They would simply look for new masters who would promise them material gratification and the possibility of discovering new expressive freedoms, at the cost of older liberties. Jim may be going too far in believing in the educability of the mass of people, something I would describe as the “rationalist fallacy.”

Finally I’m not sure that Christian institutions could do much good, given their present state. Mainline Protestant denominations belong to the Left, while traditional Protestants often regrettably identify themselves with the Religious Right and its politics. Would a form of Christianity identified with a neoconservative foreign policy and with such “conservative Christian” political figures as Mike Huckabee bring about the kind of changes that Jim has in mind? Pardon the rhetorical question!

As for the Catholic Church, there seem to be two distinctive groups within it. One is the conventional Catholic Democrats, who abound in my work place. Many of these attend Mass at least once a week and claim to believe in some vaguely defined religious doctrine. But for the most part they are indistinguishable from liberal Protestants, except for their resentment against Protestants who it is claimed paid low wages to their ancestors or kept them out of universities and snobbish clubs.

The second group of Catholics is more devout and has a restraining influence right now on the Supreme Court. But some Catholic traditionalists are harming the cultural Right, when they go about bashing Protestantism in a predominantly Protestant country. Such name-calling has become ritualistic among some Catholic zealots on the right and one is given the impression that some of them yearn to re-fight the religious battles of the sixteenth century. If only Catholics could successfully counter the theological errors and pernicious effects of Luther and Calvin, one is led to believe, our society would then be open to the proper Counterreformation thinking. This would supposedly help us to get a grip on things.

But I should not exaggerate the evil caused by such gripers. Their harm is less widespread than what has come from the Protestant Palin-ites and GOP boosters. Among such Protestant advocates we hear empty chatter about “family values” identified with Republican candidates, and we learn about Christ as a teacher of global democracy. Such types have been around since the Abolitionists and the Crusaders for Democracy in World War I. I doubt they’d be more useful for Jim’s project than the egalitarian hedonists who are now helping to shape American politics and culture. One must therefore conclude that while Jim underlines real intellectual and cultural problems, he has not provided cogent solutions. On the other hand, neither have I. There are situations in which one has to respond “nescio” or in colloquial English “dunno.”

Stuff Black People Don’t like #43. The Reality of Prince George’s County

Stuff Black People Don’t like

#43. The Reality of Prince George’s County

In the United States, one city is known as the Black Mecca – Atlanta. Though the demographics are changing rapidly, the rampant corruption found throughout Hotlanta won’t go away anytime soon. A massive scandal in the city school system – led by Black principals – is threatening the accreditation of that district.

Once you go Black…

What other county in Georgia recently lost its accreditation? Clayton County, a once thriving suburb that is now the mortgage default capital of the United States:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s analysis of hundreds of thousands of county tax appraisals across metro Atlanta, compared with actual home sales prices, turned up an extraordinary phenomenon in Clayton: Of the 1,302 sales last year, 581 were “bank sales” — transactions in which a lender has taken back a home and resold it.


The county’s chief appraiser, Rodney McDaniel, said the declines in Clayton’s 2010 property valuations surprised even him.


“I didn’t think we could go much lower than we did last year,” McDaniel said. “But the foreclosure sales are really driving the assessments this year.”

For property owners, the plague of foreclosures has injected even more uncertainty into an uncertain market, particularly when it comes to county tax appraisals.

Clayton County is a Black county, run by Black people, who – upon taking power- fired all of the white police and had snipers on the roof of the police precinct as they were being escorted out. This was in 2007, an updated look at what Jim Crow must have been like only in reverse.

Atlanta is home to what many people claim to be the top county for Black people to live in, in all of America – DeKalb County. We have covered the status of that county before and, well, it’s not exactly a shining example of a thriving community.

Other majority Black areas (here is Wikipedia’s list of cities with the largest percentages of Black residents) fair about the same, with the sad news of Camden highlighting the growing problem of Black people relying on the government for jobs and what happens when the money runs out:

His family was a sample of the bloody consequences being felt in the Black and Hispanic families in minority communities throughout New Jersey as a result of the scorched earth policies of the Republican governor, and former New Jersey U.S. attorney.

Christie had suddenly transformed the streets and corridors of cities like Camden, Newark and Trenton into killing fields of minority dreams. Through his brutal programs Christie was rapidly shaping himself into a Republican and tea party presidential contender as well as a feared governor in New Jersey. He was considered by some in Camden to be a “bully,” using the weak to ram through his budget cuts.

The impoverished city of Camden, located in one of the wealthiest states in the nation, has long been a subject of futile revitalization efforts by a long line of Democratic and Republican governors before Christie. But now its head was on the chopping block along with the necks of numerous other urban areas.

Council President Frank Moran argues that the governor should give Camden authorization to implement a wage tax for the thousands of outside workers who come into the city each day to work at the numerous state, county, religious and nonprofit institutions. He said because of these facilities that are tenants in Camden, close to 56 percent of the city’s real estate is tax exempt, leaving the city with no way to expand its revenue income.

To make matters worse, much of the city’s shortfall resulted because Camden’s political establishment miscalculated pension obligations.

Moran points out Newark and other larger municipalities than Camden have wage taxes and that a special exception should be made for Camden because of all the governmental, religious and nonprofit facilities it hosts…


Moran suggested that Delgado and other Camden residents direct their protests to Gov. Christie. The price tag is $69 million in so-called “transitional aid.”

Williamson, leader of the rank and file of the police department, FOP said that the city as well as minorities were being made whipping boys by the Christie administration to make it appear that they are taking aggressive action and resorting to austere measures.

He said the cuts will only make the city’s plight worse by making outsiders afraid to come into the city to do business or set up business.

“The attack on public safety and the educational system will not make anyone more comfortable to move into the city to help jumpstart the city’s economy … It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that most of the cities hit are Black, Hispanic and Asian.”

It is sad that Camden is forced to make these cuts and that, like DeKalb and Clayton County, the citizens of the city have few businesses capable of squeezing taxes out of and few employment opportunities (save the post office, government and barber shops).

Perhaps Detroit provides the best glimpse of the future for these three areas with the city beginning a complete rollback of all government services (with a 25 percent graduation rate, the city schools long ago stopped providing academic services). A town without a major chain grocery store is being allowed to go back to the wild.

We’ve discussed Newark – a town that cherishes the celebrity of its mayor to bring in donations to keep that city solvent – but one area that has escaped an honest look at SBPDL is the penultimate Black place to live in America: Prince George’s County.

Prince George’s County epitomizes the problems that are obvious in the aforementioned cities (and ones found in the archives), but the primary problem afflicting the county is a reliance on high-paying government jobs to fund their version of the American dream. What happens when those jobs go away?

Sadly, the majority of residents in this thriving Black area rely on high interest home loans to fund their dream. These loans mean a lot of these residents are saddled with debt:

Residents of majority-black Prince George’s County are much more likely to be saddled with high-interest home loans than residents of predominantly white areas in the rest of the region, placing them at greater risk of financial distress and foreclosure.

About 43 percent of Prince George’s County residents who refinanced their homes in 2005 received high-cost loans, compared with 24 percent of homeowners regionwide, according to Federal Reserve data compiled for The Washington Post by the Consumer Federation of America. Similarly, 43 percent of people buying homes in the county in 2005 financed their purchases with high-cost loans, compared with 20 percent regionally.

High-cost loans are a large slice of the subprime mortgage market, called such because the loans’ terms are less desirable. Fears about escalating problems in the subprime market have shaken broader financial markets in recent days and raised concerns that if foreclosures rise significantly, it could hamper economic growth. The government defines high-cost loans as those with interest rates 3 percentage points or more above a certain market rate…

Housing and civil rights advocates have long said that blacks are pushed to costly loans by mortgage brokers who mislead them into believing those are the only loans they can qualify for.

“It’s sad, but I’m not surprised,” Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, said of the Prince George’s data. “It’s the same issue all over the country.”

Lending industry trade groups deny race is the only reason for high rates. Doug Duncan, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said people pay more for loans if they have poor credit, large student loans or want to make a lower down payment. Wright Andrews, a lobbyist for subprime lenders, has acknowledged differences between loan rates but has blamed them on underlying “economic disparities.”
Industry officials have acknowledged that predatory lending exists and have urged uniform national lending laws.

People can find themselves with high-cost loans for many reasons. Prince George’s County is the nation’s wealthiest majority-black jurisdiction, and housing costs there are high. If homeowners also have high car payments, student loans or credit card balances, that could raise their debt-to-income ratio, forcing them into costly loans. Overspending or paying bills late can also hurt people’s credit.

Credit and credit standards are both included in SBPDL (along with paying back student loans, both upcoming entries) and maintaining good credit to ensure that home loan rates will be low is a risky, acting white proposition. Paying bills in a timely manner is a move that only the token Black dares make, thus why the mortgage crisis has been a minority fueled meltdown.

In a country governed by the rules of Black Run America (BRA), forcing Black people to take riskier loans because they have, on average, worse credit scores and represent a higher probability of defaulting on loans is merely perpetuating racism:

“Federal officials launched an investigation Wednesday to determine whether 22 mortgage lenders have been discriminating against qualified African-American and Latino borrowers by denying them government-insured loans.


The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said the inquiry is in response to complaints filed Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition accusing 22 banks nationwide of violating fair housing laws.

The coalition said the lenders denied Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to borrowers with credit scores that met the federal standard of 580 to be eligible for the insurance against default, but the lenders set higher credit score thresholds.

The Washington-based NCRC claims those requirements disproportionately harm black and Hispanic communities, since many minority borrowers’ credit scores fall between the federal threshold of 580 and the higher benchmarks set by the banks.”

We have seen the future and it will be. The mortgage crisis brought on by aggressive attempts to increase home ownership to Black people and the subsequent failure of these same Black people to pay the mortgages (many times with no down payments, low interest rates and small monthly payments) is actually the fault of evil white male bankers, who were secretly plotting to bring down AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

Now these banks are being sued by Black people, whose poor credit regrettably made them ineligible for low-risk loans.

Tea Party enthusiasts must understand that the principles they promote run directly anathema to those of BRA. There is a reason the Tea Party is monochromatic; a lot of Black people rely on the state for their well being. Cutting that off, as we see in Camden, is grounds for nothing but nasty words toward the Republican governor of the state.

Prince George’s County, long the destination of mobile Black people, relies on a steady supply of government jobs to maintain the growth and keep its citizens employed. Even this isn’t enough:

“Back in the 1970s, Woodley Timberlake was part of the mass migration of black Washingtonians to Prince George’s County, an exodus fueled by the quest for the American dream — a home with a back yard, quality schools and a safe neighborhood.

Timberlake, now 65 and a retired federal worker, felt proud as blacks captured political and economic power in the once-majority-white county. But two years ago, when his daughter and her husband planned to return to the area with their baby girl, Timberlake urged them to move to a safe community with good public schools — not Prince George’s. His daughter chose Fairfax County.

A generation ago, civic leaders and scholars cast Prince George’s as a rising mecca for middle-class African Americans, a place where they could pursue an affluent suburban lifestyle that had long been the province of whites…

Prince George’s is also recovering from a recession that has driven foreclosures to the highest levels in Maryland. Although county leaders are hopeful about rising math and reading test scores and last year’s dramatic decrease in crime, Prince George’s public schools remain among the worst-performing in Maryland, and the number of homicides, robberies and car thefts rank near the top in the state.”

Cities rise and fall. They can be burned to the ground, rebuilt and a mighty conflagration can bring ruin yet again. But once a city changes hands from the population that built and sustained it, and turned over to a different population, the results are simply as outlined above.

Mall envy exists for a reason. Public transportation is failing for a reason. And a lack of retailers in predominately Black areas happens for a reason:

Prince George’s County – sometimes derisively abbreviated as “PG” – is the undisputed Mecca of the Black middle class.  It holds the largest concentration of affluent and educated African Americans in the nation, well ahead of Black cultural hot spots like Atlanta, Philadelphia or Chicago.  Income is high due to a settled federal workforce in a Washington, D.C. suburb and countless government contractors with job stability.  In recent years, before recession took hold, Prince George’s County was in the midst of economic revival from the explosion of town centers showing off name brand retailers to the ambitious development of an awe-inspiring National Harbor on the Potomac.  It is where many professional Black folks move.


Most recently, Prince George’s finally got its wish: the opening of a brand new, fully-stocked Wegmans grocery store.  Residents had, understandably, complained for years about the lack of prominent, organic food retailers in the county, citing a pattern of racial redlining that forced the county’s majority Black population to travel miles into predominantly White counties to shop at spots like Whole Foods, Wegmans and others.


When the County seemed to move forward, even as unemployment and foreclosures gripped it, news of an unfolding political scandal took it two steps backward.  Federal prosecutors accuse County Executive Jack Johnson of engineering sophisticated kickback schemes with various developers and businesses in the county.  It got worse when Johnson and his wife were caught on wiretap allegedly flushing a $100,000 check down the toilet when FBI agents knocked on the door of their Mitchellville home.  Leslie Johnson, federal court documents allege, stuffed nearly $80,000 in her bra.

It tells you all you need to know about the state of Black America when the top county for Black people (Prince George’s) can’t even get a major retailer to set up shop within its borders. It tells you something about the state of Black America when the top Black county has a population with such poor overall credit that special loans had to be made in an effort to ensure home ownership in the first place.

It tells you all you need to know about the state of Black America when Prince George’s has schools that consistently put up poor marks and ranks as one of the worst academically in all of Maryland.

Poverty isn’t the cause of crime, though conversely, a cities well-being does reflect its demographics.With segregation at a purported all-time low, one would expect a nation living in harmony. Such is not the case. Stuff White People Like (SWPL) white people live highly segregated lives far away from Black people.

Here is an awesome Web site that breaks down the top cities for SWPL white people and points out how few Black people are to be found.

Black areas – as we have learned today – aren’t a hotbed for thriving economies.

In many cities, Black people rarely live in areas with white people.

So here is the ultimate question we can ask from the information available to us: does a majority Black city or county exist that is thriving? If not, is this why cities or counties that see massive white flight eventually turn into facsimiles of Clayton County?

As the nation becomes increasingly brown, white people surreptitiously look for areas with little diversity. Mobile Black people look for safe places to raise families and frequently select former whitopia’s.

In time, those whitopia’s become just as unappealing as the cities those mobile and economically viable Black people escaped from, only perpetuating the cycle of ruination.

Perhaps this is why that joke from The Boondock Saints resonates so deeply…

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes the reality of Prince George’s County. If the best county for Black people in America isn’t that different from a place like Clayton County, then what does that truly mean?

Watch a video on Prince George’s County here.

Taxation with Manipulation

http://americanfederalist.blogspot.com/

Why is the United States tax code so complicated? One might think that our elected representatives could manage the chore of taxing people with a few relatively simple and easily understood words. Instead Americans are subject to thousands of pages of ever changing regulations. What possible use are all those regulations?

There have been several calls in the recent past for simplification of the tax system in America. They seem to have boiled down to two options: the fair tax and the flat tax. The fair tax (HR 25,/S 296) is a sales tax. It is paid once, at the point of purchase. The flat tax is a system whereby everyone is taxed the same percentage of their income. The rich would pay more because they make more. Both plans contain provisions by which those below the poverty level would receive a refund. There are a number of concerns with both of these plans, mostly regarding changes to the status quo and how those changes will affect the nation.

Will America see either one of these proposals come to a vote, much less enactment? It’s doubtful for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that the tax code is being used to influence the behavior of American citizens. The tax code is used as both the carrot and the stick. It rewards “good” behavior and it is used to punish “bad” behavior. The definition of “good” and “bad” is often dependent upon whomever is in power at the time. How much would a beer or a pack of cigarettes cost you without the “sin tax”? Would you really donate as much to that charity if it wasn’t the end of a year in which you needed another tax write-off? How about installing those new, energy efficient windows-they ones approved for the tax break?

Another reason the tax system hasn’t been simplified is because the current tax system isn’t just being used as a way to collect revenue for the government and influence behavior. It is a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every American citizen. It is one of the largest and most effective law enforcement tools the government has. How can individual Americans scrutinize the thousands of pages of tax code that are changed and amended every single year to be sure they have done everything as they should? What American does not feel the least bit of trepidation when the time comes to sign their tax returns certifying that “to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are true, correct, and complete”?

Is this really an appropriate use of the tax system? Do the words ”to promote the general welfare” grant authority to the government for this kind of social engineering, experimentation and tyrannical oversight of our personal finances? Common sense and the most cursory of readings of our founder’s writings indicate otherwise. And yet, should any of the current healthcare proposals be passed, Americans will all be making healthcare choices determined by the fact that we will all be subject to being “taxed” for not obtaining “government approved healthcare.” We may even go to jail for non-compliance. Not to promote the general welfare, but to implement the policies of a president and administration who believe that the fruits of our labor should be “redistributed” according to their values, not ours.

Belanne Pibal is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer.

Christian Rout in the Culture War

By Patrick J. Buchanan

A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services.

Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.

Remarkable. The least respected of American institutions, Congress, with an approval rating of 13 percent, is imposing its cultural and moral values on the most respected of American institutions, the U.S. military.

Why are we undertaking this social experiment with the finest military on earth? Does justice demand it? Was there a national clamor for it?

No. It is being imposed from above by people, few of whom have ever served or seen combat, but all of whom are aware of the power of the homosexual rights lobby. This is a political payoff, at the expense of our military, to a militant minority inside the Democratic Party that is demanding this as the price of that special interest’s financial and political support.

Among the soldiers most opposed to bringing open homosexuals into the ranks are combat veterans, who warn that this will create grave problems of unit cohesion and morale.

One Marine commandant after another asked Congress to consider the issue from a single standpoint:

Will the admission of gay men into barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island enhance the fighting effectiveness of the Corps?

Common sense suggests that the opposite is the almost certain result.

Can anyone believe that mixing small-town and rural 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring Marines, in with men sexually attracted to them is not going to cause hellish problems?

The Marines have been sacrificed by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the homosexual lobby, with the collusion of no fewer than eight Republican senators.

This is a victory in the culture war for the new morality of the social revolution of the 1960s and a defeat for traditional Judeo-Christian values. For only in secularist ideology is it an article of faith that all sexual relations are morally equal and that to declare homosexual acts immoral is bigotry.

But while this new morality may be orthodoxy among our elites in the academy, media, culture and the arts, Middle America has never signed on and still regards homosexuality as an aberrant lifestyle, both socially and spiritually ruinous.

To these folks, homosexuality is associated with a high incidence of disease, HIV/AIDS, early death, cultural decadence and civilizational decline. And no sensitivity training at Camp Lejeune is going to change that.

Behind these traditionalist beliefs lie the primary sources of moral authority for traditionalist America: the Old and New Testaments, Christian doctrine, natural law. Thomas Jefferson believed homosexuality should be treated with the same severity as rape.

And 31 consecutive defeats for same-sex marriage in state referenda testifies that Middle America sees the new morality as the artificial invention of pseudo-intellectuals to put a high gloss on a low lifestyle.

Not until recent decades have many in America or the West argued that homosexuality is natural and normal. As late as 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Today, anyone who agrees with that original APA assessment is himself or herself said to be afflicted with a mental disorder: homophobia.

The world has turned upside down. What was criminal vice in the 1950s—homosexuality and abortion—is not only constitutionally protected, but a mark of social progress.

Yet, just as busing for racial balance led to violence, white flight and the ruin of urban schools, this social experiment is not going to be without consequences. And it is the military that will endure those consequences.

Yet, again, if we believe our armed forces to be the best in the world, why are we doing this, against the advice of countless senior officers and NCOs? What is the motivation other than the payoff of a campaign debt?

What happens now to Evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic chaplains who preach that homosexuality is a sinful and shameful practice? Will they be severed from the service as homophobes?

That cannot be far behind when the Family Research Council, a respected organization of religious and social conservatives that has fought the homosexual agenda from same-sex marriage to gay adoptions, has now been declared by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a “hate group.”

The advance of what was once a radical agenda has accelerated.

In 2004, John Kerry may have lost Ohio and the presidency because same-sex marriage was on the ballot in almost a dozen states, bringing out committed social conservatives to the polls. Six years later, the gay rights agenda is imposed by Congress and Obama on the 82nd and 101st.

Let the reader decide if the direction America is headed in is toward those “sunny uplands,” or straight downhill.

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.