People don't seem to really comprehend the magnitude of what just happened. The government has effectively nationalized huge portions of the financial industry, which in turn, can control huge portions of the rest of the economy.
This means the government - who knows what branch yet, but lets assume the executive - now has the means to carry out policies without constitutional consent and outside the normal structure of government.
the wonders of financial turmoil...of course, its a quote from someone else:
"I fear the government has passed the point of no return. We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams. It’s pure crisis management. It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight," - Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian
From Dean Baker @ Beat the Press:
Surprised Economists Urge People Not to Panic on NPR
NPR had a segment on Morning Edition which featured several economists urging people not to pull their money out of money market funds. All three economists told people that money market funds are still very safe, even though some did report losses due to the recent turmoil in financial markets.
It is worth noting that the expert crew on NPR were all caught by surprised by this financial turmoil. Listeners should keep this in mind in assessing their current perspectives. This is one reason why NPR and other media outlets should seek our non-surprised experts for their assessments of the situation. (For the record, I would largely concur with their assessment of money market funds, although I would say the risk is not zero.)
George Bush has nationalized the largest portion of the finance industry since FDR. He has expanded the government and spending in like proportions that will only get worse. So what, exactly do the Republicans stand for?
On July 31, in The Heretical 2: Asylum Seekers the Refugee Industry Won’t be Fighting for, I wrote of two Englishmen, writer Stephen Whittle (pen name Luke O’Farrell), 41, and his publisher, Simon Sheppard, 51, both of whom were convicted in July in England of“publishing racially inflammatory written material.” On September 11, I wrote on the case of 19-year-old Jeremiah Munsen, an American who on Monday began a four-month federal prison sentence in Louisiana for engaging in symbolic speech that is protected by the First Amendment. Monday’s VDARE.com mailout asked,“Why is Obama’s Friend Bill Ayers Free and Jeremiah Munsen in Jail?” Until fairly recently, the English-language world was a beacon of freedom of opinion. Today, however, the “land of the free,” England, Canada and Australia are increasingly indistinguishable from EU, Communist, and Third-World tyrannies. Whittle is guilty of having written essays variously excoriating and mocking Jews, Moslems and blacks (and Jews), Jews, blacks (and Jews), Jews and their Gentile “useful idiots”, homosexuals (and Jews); and Sheppard of having published them, which in England are crimes. (In England, it is not a crime to write anti-white, anti-Christian screeds.) Yes, folks, we’re in Alex Linder country. While free pending sentencing, Whittle and Sheppard fled to America, where they immediately sought asylum and were arrested. Since then, America’s MSM have kept their existence a more closely guarded secret than what Barack Obama/Dunham/Soetoro did on theChicago Annenberg Challenge. If only Whittle and Sheppard were belligerent Moslem Bantu, HIV+, or Hispanic, illegal immigrant, gang-bangers, they’d by now be safely ensconced in the refugee-industrial complex. Writing from jail, Whittle and Sheppard asked a mutual acquaintance, who has requested anonymity, to pass along their letters and requests for political asylum to me. Note that the legal arguments used against them by the Bush Administration could transform the Internet from a tool of worldwide intellectual liberation to one of global enslavement.[VDARE.COM note: All links below were added by VDARE.com--the pleas themselves were written with a Bic pen.] 14 August 2008 REQUESTS FOR POLITICAL ASYLUM SHEPPARD, SIMON GUY and WHITTLE, STEPHEN SUMMARY The Applicants arrived at LAX on 14 July 2008 and made their asylum request to the first official they encountered. The basis for their asylum claim. Is a three-year claim of legal harassment by the governing British Labour Party,culminating in an unprecedented prosecution and subsequent conviction for internet web pages hosted in Torrance, California. Were the applicants to be returned to Britain they would face substantial prison terms.The Heretical 2: Requests for Asylum and Letters from Santa Ana Jail
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Stix nails it here- its not about whether you agree with Whittle and Shepherd (as he humorously alludes to concerning their Jewish conspiracy mongering) its the fact that those on the 'outer edge' of free speech are now being openly prosecuted and our government - republican and democrat - in collusion with European governments.
Once that standard is set, the next 'outer edge' can be prosecuted, and so on. Hate the use the tired holocuast cliche, but first they came for the communists... Though this time, it is the communists coming for us.
This isn't really about 'hate' as Stix points out - any wack theory can easily be debated and refuted. Its about suppression of thought.
Barack Obama really, really doesn't like people mentioning his past. From the Chicago Tribune: Now Obama's presidential campaign is increasingly using the list to beat back media messages it does not like, calling on supporters to flood radio and television stations when those opposed to him run anti-Obama ads or appear on talk shows. "The Action Wire serves as a means of arming our supporters with the facts to take on those who spread lies about Barack Obama and respond forcefully with the truth, whether it's an author passing off fiction as biography, a Web site spreading baseless conspiracy theories or a TV station airing an ad that makes demonstrably false claims," said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt. I've read Fredosso's book. If there are lies in it (and I didn't notice any), Obama should sue for libel. Lotsa luck with that, Barack. The emerging method of political power, as pioneered by Berlusconi in Italy, and imitated by Putin in Russia and by Chavez, less effectively, in Venezuela is to control what can be said on television and radio. Obama won't actually own the airwaves and there is still that pesky First Amendment, but it appears that his team is working out a plan to use mobs to intimidate media outlets. Think about it from a station manager's point of view -- We could interview some reporter who has spent months investigating Obama's relationship with Tony Rezko, and have all our advertisers receive countless fulminating emails forwarded from Team Obama threatening to never buy their products again ... or we could do a segment on Megan Fox. Sure, it's hard to sell books without doing publicity tour interviews, so there will be fewer books about President Obama, but the publishers can instead sign Megan Fox up to write her autobiography, so everybody's happy, right?The Obama Campaign's Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat.
The latest use of the database, called the Obama Action Wire, is proving yet another new and potentially powerful tactic in the closing weeks of a campaign that has already been dominated by Internet-based messages and media. ...
Sen. John McCain's campaign uses the Internet for fundraising and organization but does not have anything like Obama's alert system to bombard a specific media outlet in real time.
Obama's campaign says supporters have placed thousands of phone calls to TV and radio stations and sent even more letters to newspapers.
A page on the campaign's Web site, headlined "Hit 'em where it hurts," told supporters how to complain to advertisers at stations that ran a recent anti-Obama ad.
"We'll provide you with talking points on this maliciously false hit ad to help guide you through the process," the page said, citing a spot run by a conservative group called the American Issues Project.
The campaign says supporters sent roughly 100,000 e-mails in August to stations that aired the ad, which criticized Obama for his ties to former 1960s radical William Ayers.
WGN also was flooded with calls and e-mails shortly before and during an Aug. 27 interview with Stanley Kurtz, a conservative writer who has examined Obama's ties to Ayers.
"WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears," read the first message confronting the station, an e-mail that also provided detailed background information on Kurtz, Obama and Ayers.
The WGN alerts were sent primarily to Obama supporters in the Chicago area but were quickly posted to electronic message boards and Web sites, spreading them worldwide. Many of those who called to complain were from outside Illinois, and they flooded the station's switchboard in a way a WGN producer called "unprecedented."
On Monday night, Zack Christenson, executive producer of "Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg," said the response was about the same. "It's just constant, constant phone calls, and the e-mails are pouring in," he said, adding that the extra volume of calls made it more difficult to run the show.
Obama's campaign describes the system as a grass-roots truth squad that arms supporters with information. But others see an attempt to stifle free speech.
"If Barack Obama demonstrates this little regard for free speech from his opponents during the campaign, what could the American people expect from him as a president?" Ed Martin, president of American Issues Project, said in a statement.Further, considering how much the U.S. government suddenly seems to more or less own as of this week, all sorts of new possibilities are opened up. Matthew Yglesias is already salivating over what President Obama could do as the ultimate owner of the country's biggest insurance company:In November, there’s going to be an election. And in January, there’ll be a new President. And in the interim, progressive groups will probably come up with a lot of “ten ways to make everything awesome” proposals. And it’ll take 41 conservative senators to filibuster them all, and so they’ll all be filibustered. But if the government directly controls major financial institutions, that would give the new administration extraordinary leverage over the national economy. Suppose the new CEO of AIG decided he didn’t want to insure assets of companies whose executives make unseemly multiples of the national median income? There are all kinds of crazy things you could do. And of course not all of them woul dbe good ideas. But some of them would! And the smart folks on our side need to be figuring out which ones they are. It seems doubtful to me that a progressive administration would ever be able to get away with this much nationalizing of everything, but what’s done is done and I think it creates a real opportunity for “socially conscious insurance underwriting” or whatever you care to call it.
Fortunately, Obama has a trusted long-time adviser with decades of experience running socially conscious public-private partnerships. That man is otherwise occupied at the moment, but a President Obama has the Presidential Pardon to spring Tony Rezko out of the correctional facility and into the West Wing.
Put simply, the Man of Change doesn’t threaten the status quo in the least. Freddie and Fannie spent more than $200 million on lobbying over the past decade, most of it going to Democrats, and they were “re-nationalized” with bipartisan support. Lehman Brother, which Paulson thankfully resisted bailing out, has accounted for almost$400,000 in donations to the Obama campaign. It’s thus likely that Obama would have been more assiduous in helping out his Wall Street buddies than Paulson and the Bush administration.
....or our obsession with race/equality:
The Real Culprits In This Meltdown
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it's dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it.
Steve Sailer coined it the "diversity recession":
The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis
Posted by Steve Sailer on June 22, 2008
Uncovering the roots of the disastrous home mortgage bubble that popped last year will keep economic historians busy for decades. Yet, one factor has so far been largely overlooked: the bipartisan social engineering crusade to drive up the rate of homeownership by handing out more mortgages to minorities.
More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness.
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Yes the usual culprits:: greedy moneylenders and lax Federal Reserve that allowed banks to literally 'print' money are both major factors, but the race issue helped shield them from scrutiny.
The NYT Turns to the Arsonist to Analyze the Fire: Greenspan on Bank Bailouts Alan Greenspan is certainly in a position to know about the problems the financial system is facing. After all, there is no one who bears greater responsibility for today's events. But, it would be appropriate to remind readers that Greenspan was the arsonist here. He was the one who choose to ignore the abusive lending practices in the mortgage industry that became widespread under his tenure. He was the one who chose to ignore the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble. When he said that, "This is a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event," it might have been worth pointing out that he was the arsonist who created the conditions for the extraordinary set of events hitting Wall Street.
...here...Ishq - Love and the Veil is my favorite tune thus far.
you can download mp3s direct from six degrees or amazon.
10-bank emergency fund: In a bid to calm the markets, the Federal Reserve announced plans Sunday to loosen its lending restrictions to the banking industry. A consortium of 10 leading domestic and foreign banks, including Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), Barclays (BCS) and Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500), agreed to create a $70 billion fund to lend to troubled financial firms. The Federal Reserve, meeting Tuesday, could cut the fed funds rate, a key short-term interest rate, from the current level of 2%, analysts said.
link
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Yep, that's what we should do, loosen the lending even MORE, and put out MORE cheap money...because Wall Street was SO responsible and prudent....
SO what if it causes inflation and financial instability for middle class America, those investment bankers need our help.
I am not much of a fan of Ayn Rand, but with this weekend's head on train collision and impending black Monday, the result of corruption and socialized mortgages (everyone has the 'right' to own a home)it seems eerily reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. One "slight" detail Rand got wrong:: the 'Altas's would be going to the government for help.
for the last, oh 80 years, we have had policies that help wall street and hurt main street…anyone surprised?
One thing is for sure:: the repubs and free market loving (for main street that is) wall street types will NEVER be able to oppose socialization on idealogical grounds again. In other words the end result of this mess - created by the guys yelling ‘free market’ will be socialization as bad as FDR’s new de
Lehman races to find rescuerBy Jamie McGeever and Joseph A. Giannone NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Concerns that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc may not arrange a U.S. government-backed takeover quickly sent its shares down early Friday after reports the investment bank was in talks with Bank of America raised investor hopes of a rescue overnight.
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Hmmm the same people who flippantly told us globalization was good, it might hurt a little, but so what if middle America lost millions of jobs and saw declining standards of living...but now their own financial imprudence is catching up with Wall Street, there is surprisingly little 'free market' talk.. and lots of 'we need government help' talk.
Even though it was Greenspan /Clinton years that was largely responsible for this (though Bush and CO are too blame as well) the fact that the super rich bankers are being bailed out will mean that republicans will NEVER be able to oppose subsidies for the poor on any idealogical basis. In other words, coming and going, right and left, government will continue to grow -much like Atlantic yards, the very poor will be used by the very rich to break the back of and steal from, the middle class, the productive class, the civic class.
For global elitists it not only lines their own pockets, but fulfills idealogical goals as well. Wreck nations, displace peoples, break down borders.
A more polite DDDB asks:
What Does Mayor Bloomberg Know About Atlantic Yards?
In the aftermath of yesterday's NY Times article with a number of bombshells including confirmation that Ratner is lobbying government officials for $100 million more in taxpayer subisides, Mayor Bloomberg was asked at a press conference if the city would provide that additional subsidy. The Mayor's response:"The economics of building have changed -- they've gotten worse, not better. We desperately need to have development and that's a very big part of development in Brooklyn. I don't know that we have to put development money in, but we certainly will do everything we can to work with Ratner to get those buildings going. That's the future of this city. That's the jobs for your children. That's the taxes to pay our teachers, and police officers, and firefighters, today.""I don't know if we have to put money in...", the Mayor said.
Nicholas stixx that is (penname) I suspect, from his writing that we grew up in similar if not the same neighborhoods at the same time. On August 22, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal sentenced Jeremiah Munsen to four months in federal prison, to be followed by one year of supervised probation and 125 hours of community service, to be followed by five more years of unsupervised probation, after he accepted a plea bargain for committing a hate crime. We Americans like to fancy ourselves protected from such “star chamber”-type tyranny. “It couldn’t happen here.” Oh, but it could, and it did. Except for the reference to the “Canadian Human Rights Tribunal,” everything in my opening paragraph is true, Jeremiah Munsen was subjected to a malicious prosecution in a U.S. federal kangaroo court, by Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Grace Chung Becker, and U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana Donald W. Washington. On September 20, 2007 in Alexandria, Louisiana, the then-18-year-old Munson, accompanied by an under-aged friend, drove past dozens of black supporters of the Jena race hoax, with two extension cord Yeah, that guy. U.S. Attorney Washington piled on duplicate, unconstitutional and illegal felony and misdemeanor charges such that, had the penniless, despised Munsen fought them, he would have been summarily convicted on a “felony hate crime charge of conspiring to deprive the marchers of their civil rights by using a noose to intimidate the crowd,” and sentenced to up to 11 years in prison. Washington and Becker thereby coerced Munson, in April, into making a guilty plea “to a misdemeanor federal hate crime of interrupting protesters’ federal rights to travel.” For any slender, white teenager, serving 11 years of hard time on any charge with black and Hispanic felons entails racist gang-rape, sexual slavery and, ultimately, death from AIDS, in violation of the Constitution’sEighth (“cruel and unusual punishment”) and Thirteenth (slavery) amendments. Doubtless, the folks at Justice saw to it that Munsen knew what awaited him. His sentence begins on September 15. This was an American show trial. Never mind that Munsen engaged in symbolic speech that is protected under the First Amendment. Never mind that the two unarmed whites were in much greater peril from a throng of racist blacks, than the blacks were from them. The blacks were waiting for buses home to Tennessee after the Nuremberg-style rally they had just attended, in support of six black high school students who had with others engaged in a racist murder attempt on a lone white victim, whom the brave blacks had suckerpunched, and stomped as he lay unconscious. Such black-on-white gang attacks happen every day in schools across America. In the Department of Justice’s press release celebrating Munsen’s conviction, U.S Attorney Washington claimed, The defendant committed a federal hate crime by using a powerful symbol of hate to intimidate a group of interstate travelers because of their race. It is a violation of federal law to intimidate, oppress, injure or threaten people because of their race and because those people are exercising and enjoying rights guaranteed and protected by the laws and Constitution of the United States. Our civil rights laws protect the civil rights of all Americans, and they emphasize the reality that we are all members of one particular race — the human race. What about Jeremiah Munsen’s civil rights? Were Washington and Becker familiar with American constitutional law, or with the the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act (sections 202 and 301), they would know that that they were violating Munsen’s First Amendment right to engage in symbolic speech others deem offensive, and Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act rights to equality before the law, based on his race. It is Becker and Washington who belong in prison. You can have civil rights laws and their machinery of anarcho-tyranny, or you can have the Bill of Rights, but not both. And without the Bill of Rights, there is no America.O Canada!–Modern Show Trials
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In the introduction to tonight’s Peter Gadiel article, I wrote “As I said in 2007, I now think there’s no point in writing anniversary reflections on 9/11—nothing changed; America’s elites didn’t really care; they all just got on with their various agendas. “The Irrelevance Of 9/11, Continued
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What did fat-ass Ratner do after 9-11? Got his fat, greasy hands on Liberty bonds for projects in Brooklyn- in other words, soaking taxpayers and profiting off a tragedy. He went on to insult firefighters by commissioning a statue of this famous scene:
but changed the racial composition of the firefighters (one black ,one "hispanic", one white, gee weren't the asians angry?). Why? Bruce Ratner is a global elitist, one bent on destroying the American middle class and 'native' populations of America - if he were in England or France, or any western country he and his ilk would be pulling the same thing.
As with Atlantic yards he has cleverly made use of race and ethnicity and the tensions associated with it, to line his own pockets. How does he do it, one might ask, doesn't his conscience bother him? If he had one, it might. Rootless global elitists are utterly lacking in that one feature that helps make up cohesive societies.
Shocking that WP would publish this:
How Many Americans?
By Steven A. Camarota
Tuesday, September 2, 2008; A15
When the Census Bureau released its new population projections last month, most of the media focused on the country's changing racial composition. But this was almost certainly not the most important finding. The projections show that the U.S. population will grow by 135 million in just 42 years -- a 44 percent increase. Such growth would have profound implications for our environment and quality of life. Most of the increase would be a direct result of one federal policy -- immigration. If we reduced the level of immigration, the projections would be much lower. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to be a much more densely settled country?
Native-born Americans have only about two children on average, which makes for a roughly stable population over time. But with an estimated 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants settling in the country each year, and about 900,000 births to these immigrants each year, immigration directly and indirectly accounts for at least three-fourths of U.S. population growth.
An increase of 135 million people by 2050 is equivalent to the entire populations of Mexico and Canada moving here. Assuming the same ratio of population to infrastructure that exists today, the United States would need to build and pay for 36,000 schools. We would need to develop enough land to accommodate 52 million new housing units, along with places for the people who lived in them to shop and work. We would also have to construct enough roads to handle 106 million more vehicles.
Of course, our country can "fit" more people. But such a dramatic increase would affect many issues about which Americans are concerned, including the environment, traffic, congestion, sprawl and the loss of open spaces. Technology and planning could help manage this situation, but there is no way they could offset all of the impact of 135 million more people. This massive increase also would have implications for the size and scope of government; more densely settled societies almost always are more heavily regulated societies.
Another important finding in the census projections is that, even with record levels of immigration for the next four decades, the U.S. population will still grow significantly older. Immigration makes our society only slightly younger than it would otherwise be. (Consider that, on average, the overall fertility rate in the United States is about 2.1 children per woman. If immigrants are excluded from the data, it's still about 2.0 children per woman. This compares with 1.4 children in Western Europe. Immigration makes for a much more densely settled country; it does not make for a much younger country.) As the Census Bureau stated in its 2000 projections, immigration is a "highly inefficient" means for addressing the problem of an aging society in the long run. The new projections show the same thing.
Some people think that immigration creates large economic benefits. But the economic research is pretty clear: While immigration does significantly increase economic activity in the receiving society, almost all of that increased activity go to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits. The gain to natives is tiny. When the National Research Council, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, examined this question, it concluded that the benefits for native-born Americans were equal to only about one- or two-tenths of 1 percent of their income. The two economists who did the work for the council described the effect as "minuscule."
Moreover, this tiny economic benefit was entirely erased by the fiscal drain immigrant households imposed on taxpayers. Perhaps worst of all, the researchers found that to generate this small gain, immigration reduced the wages of the least educated and poorest American workers.
There is no question that immigrants benefit by coming here. But it is difficult to argue that immigration is a well-targeted way to lift up the world's poor. Many immigrants to the United States were not poor in their home countries. More important, although immigration causes an enormous increase in the overall U.S. population, it still represents an infinitesimal fraction of the world's low-income population. We can do more to help poor people in developing countries through trade policies and development assistance.
The United States may well decide to continue to allow the settlement of 1.5 million immigrants (legal and illegal) each year. But legal immigration is a federal program like any other and could be reduced below the 1 million currently allowed to enter annually. Greater resources could also be devoted to reducing illegal immigration. It's important to understand that the new projections show us one possible future. We must decide as a country if this is the future we want.
The writer is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.
div>Congratulations to Steve Camarota of CIS, who has managed to get through the PC filter at the Washington Post, and get an Op-ed piece published on the immigration issue (How Many Americans? September 2, 2008)
The article at first glance is focused on the issue of the impact of immigration on population numbers:
…projections show that the U.S. population will grow by 135 million in just 42 years — a 44 percent increase. Such growth would have profound implications for our environment and quality of life. Most of the increase would be a direct result of one federal policy — immigration. If we reduced the level of immigration, the projections would be much lower. The question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to be a much more densely settled country?
But, stealthily, it gets round to the key economic issue:
While immigration does significantly increase economic activity in the receiving society, almost all of that increased activity go to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits. The gain to natives is tiny…
Moreover, this tiny economic benefit was entirely erased by the fiscal drain immigrant households imposed on taxpayers. Perhaps worst of all, the researchers found that to generate this small gain, immigration reduced the wages of the least educated and poorest American workers.
When will the Pro- Immigration fanatics at The Wall Street Journal show similar fairness?
let's hope!, though he manages to slime through worse, courtesy of the taxpayer... from DDDB:Atlantic Yards: The Deal is Coming Undone
The New York Times reports that developer Bruce Ratner's stated Atlantic Yards groundbreaking date is a fantasy given numerous financial and legal obstacles. Despite the rather misleading headline,the Atlantic Yards deal is coming undone.
Three key issues are spread throughout the article.
The Atlantic Yards project is hanging by a thread, yet Ratner continues to demolish a whole section of Prospect Heights and spend taxpayer dollars on project-specific infrastructure work. It's time for that to stop. It's time to move forward with a new feasible and superior vision to develop the rail yards
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I still wonder, out loud why there has been no investigation of Ratner's undo influence. Like Iraq debacle or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, he might be so woven into the system that he's 'too big to fail'...or be prosecuted.
5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters By Rick Shenkman One thing both Democrats and Republicans agreed about in their vastly different conventions: The American voter will not only decide but decide wisely. But does the electorate really know what it's talking about? Plenty of things are hurting American democracy -- gridlock, negative campaigning, special interests -- but one factor lies at the root of all the others, and nobody dares to discuss it. American voters, who are hiring the people who'll run a superpower democracy, are grossly ignorant. Here are a few particularly bogus claims about their supposed savvy. 1. Our voters are pretty smart. You hear this one from politicians all the time, even John McCain, who promises straight talk, and Barack Obama, who claims that he's not a politician (by which he means that he'll tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear). But by every measure social scientists have devised, voters are spectacularly uninformed. They don't follow politics, and they don't know how their government works. According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a wide variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own. True, many voters can tell you who's ahead and who's behind in the horse race. But most of what they know about the candidates' positions on the issues -- and remember, our candidates are running to make policy, not talk about their biographies -- derives from what voters learn from stupid and often misleading 30-second commercials, according toKathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. 2. Bill O'Reilly's viewers are dumber than Jon Stewart's. Liberals wish. Democrats like to think that voters who sympathize with their views are smarter than those who vote Republican. But a 2007 Pew survey found that the knowledge level of viewers of the right-wing, blustery "The O'Reilly Factor" and the left-wing, snarky "The Daily Show" is comparable, with about 54 percent of the shows' politicized viewers scoring in the "high knowledge" category. So what about conservative talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh's audience? Surely the ditto-heads are dumb, right? Actually, according to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Rush's listeners are better educated and "more knowledgeable about politics and social issues" than the average voter. 3. If you just give Americans the facts, they'll be able to draw the right conclusions. Unfortunately, no. Many social scientists have long tried to downplay the ignorance of voters, arguing that the mental "short cuts" voters use to make up for their lack of information work pretty well. But the evidence from the past few years proves that a majority can easily be bamboozled. Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll. A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible -- and it still didn't absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time. 4. Voters today are smarter than they used to be. Actually, by most measures, voters today possess the same level of political knowledge as their parents and grandparents, and in some categories, they score lower. In the 1950s, only 10 percent of voters were incapable of citing any ways in which the two major parties differed, according to Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who leads the Pew-backed Vanishing Voter Project. By the 1970s, that number had jumped to nearly 30 percent. Here's what makes these numbers deplorable -- and, in fact, almost incomprehensible: Education levels are far higher today than they were half a century ago, when social scientists first began surveying voter knowledge about politics. (In 1940, six in ten Americans hadn't made it past the eighth grade.) The moral of this story: Schooling alone doesn't translate into better educated voters. 5. Young voters are paying a lot of attention to the news. Again, no. Despite all the hoopla about young voters -- the great hope of the future! -- only one news story in 2001 drew the attention of a majority of them: 9/11. Some 60 percent of young voters told Pew researchers that they were following news about the attack closely. (Er -- 40 percent weren't?) But none of the other stories that year seemed particularly interesting to them. Only 32 percent said that they followed the news about the anthrax attacks or the economy, then in recession. The capture of Kabul from the Taliban? Just 20 percent. Six years later, Pew again measured public knowledge of current events and found that the young (aged 18 to 29) "know the least." A majority of young respondents scored in the "low knowledge" category -- the only demographic group to do so. And some other statistics are even more alarming. How many young people read newspapers? Just 20 percent. (Worse, studies consistently show that people who do not pick up the newspaper-reading habit in their 20s rarely do so later.) But surely today's youth are getting their news from the Internet? Sorry. Only 11 percent of the young report that they regularly surf the Internet for news. Maybe Obama shouldn't be relying on savvy young voters after all. Rick Shenkman is an associate professor of history at George Mason University and the author of "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B05
Obama's "lipstick on a pig" blunder is a reminder that he needs to hire a jokewriter so he can poke some much-needed fun at himself. Over the last dozen days, the whole race has wandered off into old-fashioned American comedy (what could Frank Capra have done with a Sarah Palin character?), leaving the new-fangled Obama rattled. Jeez, when somebody makes a joke about the the stupid job you had when you were in your 20s, you make a joke back. You don't get all hurt, peeved, and self-righteous like Obama did about Palin's little "community organizer" witticism. Maybe his "lipstick" line wasn't aimed at Palin, but he ought to have expected that everybody would take it that way by now. Obama's Achilles heel has always been that his gimlet-eyed appraisal of human beings doesn't extend to himself -- he can't keep from feeling sorry for himself. It seems like a hundred years ago that I called Obama "a close student of other people’s weaknesses, a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh..." (Waugh could never stop feeling sorry for himself that he was born into a merely affluent, respectable family rather than a rich, aristocratic one. Obama's sad "story of race and inheritance" is more complicated, but still rather similar.) That's why Dreams from My Father reads like the Brideshead Revisited of law school application essays. The GOP brain trust (if such an oxymoronic body exists) will sooner or later figure that out and try to spend the rest of the campaign poking and prodding Obama's delicate self-image to see what happens. In one of his half-brilliant, half-wrongheaded insights, Spengler suggests: Sometimes, Obama reminds me of the persona Christian Lander invented for the narrator of Stuff White People Like: the mild-mannered but cold-blooded interloping observer/exploiter of upper-middle class Americans' self-delusions and status anxieties. (Perhaps Lander had Obama in mind?) Those traits can take you a long way, but Obama may have to show a little more to go all the way.Dear Sen. Obama: Don't try to sound folksy
"Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system."
From wikipedia:
Samuel Francis argued that the problems of managerial state extend to issues of crime and justice. In 1992, he introduced the word “anarcho-tyranny” into the paleocon vocabulary.[28] He once defined it this way: “we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that's the tyranny).”[29]
In one of his last essays, he explained the concept:
What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.[30]
Francis argues that this situation extends across the U.S. and Europe. While the government functions normally, violent crime remains a constant, creating a climate of fear (anarchy). He says that “laws that are supposed to protect ordinary citizens against ordinary criminals” routinely go unenforced, even though the state is “perfectly capable” of doing so. While this problem rages on, government elites concentrate their interests on law-abiding citizens. In fact, Middle America winds up on the receiving end of both anarchy and tyranny.[31]
The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites … or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and “pathological” elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms—people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible—not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.[32]
Francis argued that anarcho-tyranny is built into the managerial system and cannot be solved simply by fighting corruption or voting out incumbents. In fact, he says that the system generates a false “conservatism” that encourages people to act passively in the face of perpetual revolution. He concludes that only by devolving power back toward law-abiding citizens can sanity be restored. [33]
bbc:
.Spain struggles with race riots
 Protesters blocked streets with burning barricades |
Robert Spencer looks at the Closing Olympic Ceremonies.....
From Takimag:
......It’s also worth noting that when the city of London made its little “Cool Britainia” contribution to the closing ceremonies, it offered no gestures towards the glories of British history, but instead presented a bunch of brightly dressed hipsters doing a completely stupid dance while waiting for a bus.
Each ethnic group in multi-culti London got full representation—there was even a guy in a wheelchair! I was waiting for one dancer to depict the Islamicist Imam with ties to al-Queda who’s received official “refugee” status and is on public welfare. But then it’s also important to note that London didn’t find it fit to include a cockney among the dancers, nor a dandy, nor a working-class 5-pint-a-day guy, nor an aristocrat, nor a soccer hooligan, nor a tweed-clad Oxford Don—that is, all the colorful figures that make Britain British (or at least in this American’s imagination). Instead, on display was the Benetton world—one in which everyone is young and attractive, dresses in the same fashionable way, thinks the same tolerant thoughts, and differs only in skin tone. While China might have given us a mass, London offered nothing but conformist individuals. When the bus door opened and a little Indian girl popped out representing “London,” who was then handed a symbolic soccer ball by a Malaysian girl depicting “the children of the world,” I reached for the barf bag.
The Beijing Olympics was about triumphant nationalism, a people with that “rising feeling,” who see that their day is almost here. The London games, on the other hand, will offer us lots of images of global nowhere-ness and reminders of just how much the British nation is in decline.
A. If you had to choose just one, it would have to be population. . . . The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become. . . . We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say "I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration." It's just a fact that we can't take all the people who want to come here. And you don't have to be a racist to realize that. However, the subject has been driven out of public discussion because everybody is afraid of being called racist if they say they want any limits on immigration.
from Vdare:
Last week, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann(R-MN) called for Congress to reconvene so it could take out parts of the recent Freddie Mac bailout that give $500 million in unmarked grants to far-Left “community development” groups, such as the National Council of La Raza.
Bachmann’s stand is symbolic but admirable. The Treason Lobby’s tentacles are reaching out to seize the American taxpayer.
When the bailout bill was passed at the end of July, there was little public comment on the money going to La Raza. However, it’s not the first time they’ve tried this stunt. In May, Congressman Barney Frank earmarked $15 million to La Raza in his Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008. The bill was killed—but a number of people on the Hill have told me that they expect La Raza to end up with even more money in the act that subsequently passed.
To put this grant in perspective: even $15 million dollars is greater than the total assets of the three biggest immigration control groups—Numbers USA, The Center for Immigration Studies, and The Federation for American Immigration Reform—combined.
It’s not as if La Raza needs taxpayer money. It currently has over $100 million dollars in assets, along with its Raza Development Fund, their “community development lending arm” that has another 53 million. This is before they got their housing bailout money, along with $1.3 million dollars it got from HUD earlier this year, and $16 million dollars that The Wachovia Foundation, associated with the Wachovia Corporation bank, pledged to them in June.
Occasionally I get a call from supporters who suggest we organize a boycott of different companies that contribute to La Raza. The name I hear most is State Farm Insurance.
I tell them that as much I’d love to boycott them, right now there is pretty much nowhere to go. I looked up the sponsors La Raza’s last annual conference—there were over 200 of them—and just about every major insurance company was there including, Aetna, Nationwide, Geico, Sharp Healthcare, and Prudential! In addition there were over two dozen government and military agencies; the Republican Party (!); and, most shockingly, a number of charities. The March of Dimes, Foundation for the Advancement in Cancer Research, National Eye Institute, and Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and Paralysis Resource Center all were sponsors of the conference.
Many of these organizations will no doubt claim that their sponsorship was used for the purpose of recruiting affirmative action hires—not that it makes it any better. The government will insist that the money given to La Raza is given for specific projects like setting up Spanish Language Charter Schools or giving housing assistance to illegal aliens. Again, not like it makes it any better.
Besides, all funds are fungible.
So before La Raza get new grants, voters, consumers, and donors should ask what exactly La Raza is doing with this money from the U.S. taxpayer, big business, and the March of Dimes?
One of its major projects is a new website called “We Can Stop the Hate” designed to blacklist anyone who opposes their agenda. According to the New York Times, La Raza wants to silence haters “even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment rights”. La Raza’s president Janet Murguia justifies this because
“Everyone knows there is a line sometimes that can be crossed when it comes to free speech. And when free speech transforms into hate speech, we’ve got to draw that line.” [ A Call to End Hate Speech, By Ariel Alexovich, February 1, 2008]
So who has crossed the line? La Raza’s main institutional targets are the aforementioned immigration control groups: FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA. Astonishingly, La Raza’s mode of attack is to go after them for their source of funding.
We Can Stop the Hate recently posted a YouTube video which opens with an ominous score and text asking “what if all the leading anti immigration groups...were founded by the same man…funded by the same organization…and have ties to white supremacy?” The video proceeds to the lovely Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (which, by the way, has assets exceeding $219 million) who suggests that all the organizations are both funded and controlled by…Dr. John Tanton!
Of course, Beirich does not quote a single word from any member of the organization saying anything “racist”. In fact, she actually claims the lack of overt “hate speech” is what makes them so dangerous. Their whole purpose, she says, is “to present a moderate face that is disconnected from [the extremists], but in reality isn’t.”
So for La Raza and the SPLC, the line between “free speech” and “hate speech” is crossed before opponents of mass immigration even open their mouths.
As for Dr. Tanton, he deserves a great deal of credit for helping out fledging immigration reform groups. But he is not even close to being the main benefactor of any of the groups, and isn’t associated with any besides FAIR. Furthermore, far from being a right wing extremist, he is a conservationist concerned with sustainable growth. (Which is why he is attacked by writers like Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal as a liberal population controller.)
As frustrating as these baseless smear attacks may be, they should be heartening to patriotic immigration reformers. With a little bit of money, groups like FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA, along with groups with even less money like VDARE.COM, have managed to halt the agenda of La Raza and many other organizations with income and endowments in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Imagine what we could do with a little bit more!
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