Venezuelan Garbage From the New York Times

I admit to being mystified by this New York Times article about the latest elections in Venezuela. All of the articles I have read so far said that the elections were a win for Chavez.

Bizarrely, this weird NY Times piece seeks to cast the elections as a crushing blow to Chavez. I haven't the faintest idea how they are justifying that, other than sheer blatant propaganda. They are seeking to turn what was a smashing victory for Chavez into a humiliating defeat.

Chavez' forces won in 17 out of 22 states in Venezuela. That means they won 72% of states. Somehow, a crushing 72% victory is being spun as a disastrous defeat. The article states that this defeat is the second for Chavez in less than a year. The previous defeat was for an overly ambitious attempt to rewrite the Constitution that was nevertheless only narrowly defeated by less than 1% of the vote.

How was this a loss for Chavez? Because Chavez only won 17 out of 22 states, and not 22 out of 22 states, that means it was a devastating blow for Chavez. Propaganda or what?

Truth is that Chavez' party, PSUV, won about 60% of the vote and the opposition won about 40%. That is about the way it has been going for some time now. Furthermore, the PSUV gained 1 million votes over their last election and the opposition lost 300,000 votes.

It is true that the opposition now controls 6 states, as opposed to 2 states before. The real reason for that is that the idiots finally started contesting some elections. They only won 2 states last time because the morons decided to boycott the elections.

This time around, the opposition won Zulia (long the opposition stronghold), Miranda (a wealthy state) and Neuva Esparta (the wealthy tourist island of Margarita). They also won the mayor's office in Caracas. However, this was more of a parochial campaign about Caracas issues and not a referendum on Chavez. The voters seemed to feel that the opposition candidate would do more to fight crime.

The PSUV candidate in Miranda was a very weak compromiser, and not a real revolutionary supporter of Chavez. There are plenty like that in the party, and it's high time they took off. I'm happy to see him go. The opposition also won Carabobo, an industrial state and Tachira, on the Colombian border. Much has been made of the fact that the opposition now controls Caracas and "won the cities", but the truth is that 81% of the mayoral races were won by the PSUV.

Furthermore, winning opposition candidates used such socialist rhetoric in their victory speeches that one wonders why they don't just join the PSUV. The fact that rightwing rhetoric is so unacceptable in Venezuela nowadays that even the rightwing opposition must at least campaign as socialists is itself a victory for the Chavistas.

This already is being spun as civilized and modern (urban) people versus backwards and I guess uncivilized (rural) folks. The PSUV tended to win rural areas, while the opposition made some gains in the urban areas, in contrast to the situation in the US.

Truth is the election was pretty much of a wash for both sides.

Chavez' opponents won in Zulia state, long a stronghold of the opposition, where opposition-linked death squads have killed scores of peasants throughout Chavez' reign.

The article is full of negatives.

Venezuela has inflation of 30%. Indeed, this is due to an overheating economy with the highest growth rate in Latin America. Sure there's inflation. What do you expect?

However, unlike previous governments, Chavez' government has tried to soften the blow by providing low-priced foods for the poor. Further, part of the inflation is being caused by asshole producers, such as milk and egg producers, who are deliberately withholding their products from the market to create artificial shortages and drive up prices.

The NY Times direly warns that Venezuela may soon fall on hard times due to crashing oil prices. Yes, and this is true in all oil states.

The article points out that there is a serious crime problem, especially with violent crime. Caracas has a violent crime rate four times that of Bogota, Colombia. This figure is a bit of a lie. Colombia has a far worse crime rate. By dishonestly focusing on capital cities, the Lie York Times hopes to fool readers into thinking that crime is worse in Venezuela than in Colombia.

Crime, even violent crime, like corruption, is a very long-standing problem in Venezuela. There was horrible crime before Chavez, there is horrible crime under Chavez, and it will doubtless continue after Chavez leaves. The opposition has not offered the slightest evidence that Chavez has somehow caused crime or violent crime.

One of their arguments is that by helping the poor and railing against the corrupt oligarchy, Chavez has helped fuel class war. Played out on the streets, this means poor people robbing rich people in a form of revolutionary direct action masquerading as crime. The problem with that is that there is no truth to it. Most of the crime is in the poor areas. It's poor preying on poor, like all over the damned world.

Chavez has dramatically improved the lives of the poor majority in Venezuela (80% of the population was poor when he took office). One would think that would reduce crime, but Venezuela's poor still do not live well. There is only so much one can do. What exactly is Chavez supposed to do to reduce crime. What exactly is the opposition going to do to reduce crime?

Chavez supporters control the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government. Pretty good for a defeated party reeling from crushing blows.

An former official with the PDVSA, the state petroleum company, is quoted making statements against Chavez. The PDVSA is the favorite of the US media (Amazing how US elites suddenly fall in love with state-owned businesses sometimes.)

In truth, their union, beloved by the US ruling classes (Don't you love it how the ruling classes can suddenly become "pro-union" sometimes?) was nothing but an organization of crooked middle-class office workers.

The PDVSA was an incredibly corrupt company. Much of the money produced by the oil company was simply siphoned off by the corrupt PDVSA. The workers in the union were the criminals who were involved in this theft of the patrimony of the Venezuelan people. These were no downtrodden proletarians.

The article also focuses on some of the admittedly heated rhetoric in the election. What's not said is that the opposition routinely uses rhetoric that is just as bad as Chavez' supporters do. It's more a reflection of a profoundly polarized political environment in a country full of Latin hotheads.

It is true that the opposition won in some of Caracas' slums. This is most unfortunate. Chavez has dramatically increased people's expectations. For decades, the corrupt ruling parties had never done the slightest damned thing to help the people, so people lost hope. Now Chavez has stirred people's hopes and lit a light in their hearts. If you can't deliver on the voracious demands that flicker stirs, that can be a dangerous thing.

More along the same lines from the New Lies Times again here, by the same liar, Simon Romero.

Much more sensible analysis here, here and here.

Schipper On Jews, Modernism and the Left

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated December 6:

Astute commenter James Schipper comments on the Statement on Jews and Antisemitism post:

Another intellectual flaw of anti-Semites is overgeneralization. Jews live in dozens of different countries and Judaism varies from superorthodoxy to reformism, but they see all Jews as the same. That's only possible if Jews are seen as a race and if their race explains their behavior.

I don't think that Jews created modernity. It is the other way around: modernity created the post-ghetto Jew. Starting with revolutionary France, Jews in Europe were emancipated, that is, their separate legal status was abolished and they became ordinary citizens.

Since they still were outsiders to some extent, most of them were attracted to leftism, which, being the ideology of change, obviously would be preferred by outsiders. Conservativism is the ideology of those who are well-integrated in and happy with the status quo.

The fact that Jews are overrepresented among leftists has nothing to do with Judaism but everything with their minority status and their historical situation as often persecuted outsiders. We need sociological, not theological or biological explanations for Jewish behavior.

Biology explains only Jewish over-representation in intellectually demanding professions because there is every reason to assume that Jews have on average more innate intelligence than Gentiles.

My view is that Jews in Palestine were not smarter than the people around them, but that it was the smartest ones that in Roman times were expelled from or left Palestine in disproportionate numbers. Those that stayed behind were eventually assimilated.

Surely there is nothing in the genes of the Jew that creates "the Jew". When you delve into anti-Semitism, pretty soon, you find that most rightwing White racialist anti-Semites believe that the evils of the Jew are located in the genes. I consider this to be nonsense, but we shall await the findings of modern genetics. I doubt if anything will turn up.

Hyperethnocentrism along with tendencies towards insularism, clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia and and even racism tend to occur across all types of Jews. I feel this is due to culture. As evidence, I note that many converts to Judaism quickly develop all of these characteristics, often in spades. That seems to seal the case for cultural Jewishness right there.

Schipper neatly sums up why the Jews have been attracted to the Left. In all this time, I have never heard anyone say it quite so succinctly. Outsiders are attracted to the Left, so Blacks and Hispanics in the US vote Democratic. Those satisfied with the status quo are conservative, hence Whites in the US are conservative.

Schipper's analysis also probably explains the new emergence of a considerable movement in the US of conservative Jews. Antisemitism in the US has been reduced to a shadow of itself, and Jews are more successful than any other ethnic group.

When they were still getting barred from country clubs, and when signs said, "No Jews or dogs allowed," Jews had a great reason to vote liberal, whatever their economic fortunes. Now that they've got life dicked here in the US, a number of them are well-integrated in and happy with the status quo and the phenomenon of the rightwing Jew has appeared.

I doubt if the Jews who left Palestine were any smarter than the ones who stayed, but I don't have a lot of proof.

I suspect that Talmudic culture, which developed in Europe after 900 with the solidification of the Babylonian Talmud, with its emphasis on learning (Jewish men who could not learn the Talmud left the ghetto and converted to Christianity), along with the smartest Jewish men being seen as the best marriage partners for Jewish women, had a lot to do with selection for intelligence and high Ashkenazi IQ, though I realize that this ought to also predict high IQ in Mizrachi Jews, and their IQ is not notably high.

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Great Video About Socialism

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated October 24:

This is a video of a lecture by Richard D Wolff, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on the latest economic chaos and recession in sweeping the world.

Wolff is a Marxist, and the lecture is from a Marxist POV. However, it is interesting in many ways.

One thing that is clear to most sensible folks with an understanding of economics is that Marx's analysis of capitalism is one of the greatest ever done by anyone. For a long time, it was taught in all economics departments. With the advent of crazy Friedmanite neoliberalism in the past 30 years or so, Marx may not be being taught so much, but that's a mistake.

It's sometimes said that Marx is great for analyzing either what capitalism does well or poorly, but not the opposite. Not true. Marx is great for analyzing capitalism both when it is doing well and when it is doing poorly.

In my opinion, where Marx has problems is in proposing alternatives to capitalism, and history has born this out to some extent. Capitalism, with all of its chaos and problems and horrors and deaths, may just be the only way forward for the time being. Like death, disease and taxes, it may be a necessary evil.

Wolff describes how US workers saw 150 straight years of growth and improvement in their living standards, from 1820 to 1970. This is correct. He doesn't lay out how this happened, but there are many explanations for this. He also says that this scenario was rare to unheard of in the rest of the capitalist world.

After 1970, things changed. Productivity kept going up, but wages went flat or even went down. A US worker in the late 1970's made more per hour than a worker working today. As productivity rose and wages went flat, capitalists began raking in incredible profits.

This is what has happened to the US economy over the past 35 years, as neoliberalism took hold and 80% of the population saw its wages stagnate or go down. The top 20% of the population, and especially the top 1%, saw its income explode. But the vast majority of workers of every race got screwed.

As workers got more and more screwed and the capitalists, the owners, those who lived off the labor of others, saw their incomes skyrocket, confused workers began advancing all sorts of explanations about why this was happening. Anti-Semites, as usual, blamed the Jews. White nationalists and White Supremacists blamed Blacks and Browns. Lots of middle class and working class Whites blamed Big Government.

The truth was that the culprits were the business owners who were reeling in superprofits while workers got the shaft.

As this process continued, capitalists found more ways to keep the cost of labor down. They began importing massive amounts of legal and especially illegal immigrants as labor to drive labor costs down even further. They began moving many enterprises offshore and later, began offshoring work via the Internet.

Confused workers scrambled to keep up their standard of living. Others in the family, often the wife, began taking a job, bringing in a second income. Then one or more persons in the household began to work second and third jobs. Americans worked more and more hours, setting new records for workers in the West.

The despicable US media extolled this fact, and praised US workers for working themselves nearly to death, taking pains to point out how tough and hard and slaving-away Americans are compared to pampered, wussy, "soft" Europeans kicking back under socialism.

It's true - part of the US war against European social democracy has been to declare that Europeans are soft, wimpy, sissified and woosy. How did they get this way? Socialism turned hard self-reliant European men into soft, pampered girlymen. Americans were hard, tough and macho. They didn't need no nanny state to help them out. They could do it on their own. The American worker as Marlboro Man.

Wolff points out that that extra workers did not necessarily fix matters, as when the wife started working, it turned out that she needed many things, for instance a vehicle to get to work in.

Working more than one job didn't seem to work very well, nor did having others in the household go out and work, but it did the trick for a while.

After some time, Americans would have to turn to some new tricks to try to keep up their standard of living. They turned to loans. At first they ran up their credit cards. Americans were setting records for going into debt on credit cards and were among the Western world's poorest when it came to saving money.

This isn't really very good personal economics, but the vile media cheered it on nonetheless. Silly, wimpy Europeans and Japanese saved their money for a rainy day, presumably because they were too neurotic to enjoy life. Americans went for the gusto! They spent ever nickel they earned and then went in debt up to their waders! Cheers, cheers, cheers!

After the credit cards were maxed out, there was an explosion in US housing prices. Call it a housing bubble. This came at a propitious moment, for it enabled Americans to use as collateral the biggest asset they owned, their homes. Americans borrowed on their homes, refinancing them, taking out second mortgages and using the money like a credit card to continue to pursue the standard of living to which they had become used.

The capitalists continued to reel in the dough from the leveling of wages, now via outsourcing and use of immigrant labor, and now the capitalists found a new tool - debt.

They loaned money to their own workers! It was like the old days when you lived in a company town, bought at the company store and ate at the company diner, all deducted from your check. Not only will we pay you a crap wage, we will snag every dollar you spend on food, rent and shopping too.

These same capitalists were now swimming in ultraprofits with the money they were making off loaning money to workers and home mortgages (just another type of loan). They had so much money they did not know what to do with it. They threw it into the stock market, and the market for high-end goods of all sorts went through the roof.

Conspicuous consumption came back with a vengeance, and the scummy media once again sang and danced the praises of the most idiotic and obscene ways the rich chose to blow their unneeded and often unearned cash.

A whole new financial industry, a parasitic industry on the economic body of the nation, sprung up, an industry that created no products and no real wealth. It was nothing but a gigantic casino on Wall Street.

All sorts of funky instruments that no one understood were dreamed up - derivatives, CDO's, mortgage securities and all sorts of other stuff that probably shouldn't even be legal. Almost no one understood these things and no one seemed to understand what they were worth.

The inevitable bubble came and the party crashed, as it always does when capitalist bubbles go bust.

The root causes were the destruction of the regulations put in in the 1930's, during the Depression, in order to prevent another Depression. As soon as these regulations were put in, the capitalists began plotting and working to get rid of them.

Over the next 80 years, the capitalists created a Gramscian cultural hegemony that attacked socialism, government and regulation and exalted free market capitalism. Socialism, government and regulation were described as possibly good ideas, but doomed to failure. The only way to avoid the inevitable failures of socialism, government and regulation was to completely deregulate the economy. Anything less was the road to ruin.

With their money, the capitalist interests bought up all the media and most of the politicians. They used this to get rid of the Depression-era regulations and create the manipulate US culture to where your average worker thought that was a great idea, if he understood it at all.

There are various proposals for how to deal with this economic mess. As discussed in a previous post, conservatives, reeling and increasingly discredited, have tried to blame the catastrophe on too much regulation, not too little. Even the slimy media that normally goes along with this crap is finding this too much to buy.

White racists are promoting the racist notion that liberals (via affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws), niggers* and beaners* are the ones that destroyed the US economy. The Republican Party has to some extent bought into this, as has the business press, their amen corner in the mass media, and their academic hacks, but the argument is too slimy and racist for most decent people, plus there isn't an ounce of truth to it.

Steve Sailer, an excellent writer who is widely read, is the latest to promote this racist travesty, much to his shame. Sailer is looking more and more like a Republican Party hack than a really deep-thinking, independent and empirical author.

Furthermore, Sailer has been skating on the edges of racism for some time now without really going over. More often, he seemed to be giving the racists lots of nice talking points. Now he's finally pushing an explicitly racist discourse, and it's not even true. Too bad.

Rate of subprime mortgage defaults by race:

Whites       19%
Blacks       19%
Hispanics    19% 

End of discussion!

Liberals, Leftists and social democrats have proposed re-regulation, but the problem here is that we are probably going to re-do the 1930's experience all over again. We will put in a bunch of great regulations and as soon as we put them in, the capitalists and their mass media machines will start plotting to get rid of them.

Then the capitalists and their media machines will launch a jihad, for as many decades as it takes, to reverse all these regulations and get back to total deregulation again. In time, workers will forget why they put the regulations in in the first place, and they will go along with it.

The capitalists will buy most of the politicians all over again, and the politicians will vote to deregulate again. The capitalists will work to recreate their Gramscian cultural hegemony, and the average worker will once again think deregulation is the smart thing to do. The economy will blow up again and we will be right back to 1929 and 2008.

Wolff suggests that there is a third alternative. He describes a paper done by a colleague that describes Silicon Valley workers who hated their jobs. They had to dress up, sit in a cubicle and take orders and crap all day from a bunch of assholes. Can they pay anyone enough to put up with that? With the destruction of the Silicon Valley workforce, these workers were laid off.

A number of them got together and formed IT worker-run cooperatives, a non-capitalist form of ownership along the lines of anarcho-syndicalism. The study found that these workers said that they had never been happier. They were manufacturing software, selling it to buyers and dividing up the profits among themselves. The workers themselves were the new owners.

Wolff said that as a condition of the bailouts to the financial industry, we should mandate that they staff their board of directors with workers, not management, as a first step towards workers democracy.

Wolff also said that he had been giving speeches like this for 25 years now and he has had more interest in the past five weeks than in the previous 25 years.

That's ending on a hopeful note for now. Enjoy the video.

*Used sardonically

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The Decline of Modern Capitalism's Traditional Advantages

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated October 24:

Modern capitalism seems to be losing a lot of the advantages that it had over Soviet style Communism, and the Net and computers seem to be at the root of this decay.

It's as if the capitalists don't care anymore. They don't care if their product works or not, they don't care if they rip you off or not, they won't give you a refund, they sometimes won't even give you the product after you buy it, they have eliminated customer service, and, most insane of all, sometimes they even make it almost impossible to even buy their product.

They said the Net and computers were going to make our lives better, but I don't see how they have. If it has anything to do with the Net, it seems like it sucks. What has the Net done for workers? Nothing. It's allowed people in India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to compete with Americans by outsourcing work. Great!

Some examples:

There's plenty of work out there writing junk copy for websites that only exist to somehow make money (not sure how). You're just writing filler. A lot of it is in porn. I got approached by someone the other day about writing this junk copy, but the pay was $10/hour, so I said forget it. That's junk for writing prose on the Net. I told him to walk.

Turned out I was competing with writers of "English" from Eastern Europe, India and the Philippines. They were mostly working for $5/hour or even less. So even writers now are getting screwed down in a race for the bottom. Who's next?

There's a lot more ways the Net has helped create World O' Crap. Look at how many ways a brick and mortar store is better than e-commerce. The main problem with e-commerce is that it sucks.

E-commerce merchants have a right to bitch about it, but they have created this Shitworld of e-commerce. In their mad insistence that the Net not be regulated, the world of e-commerce is full of more sleazeballs and slimers than you could count for the rest of your life.

It's so easy to rip people off over the Net. I have purchased several things off the Net, including website memberships, that were total ripoffs. Quite a few software programs sold over the Net are absolute crap.

There are more problems. In a good number of cases, you try to buy something off the Net and the e-commerce site fucks it up. It will only let you order 3 packages, not 10. After you order, it gives you a database failure page implying the transaction failed, then sends you a mail congratulating you on the sale.

I bought a spyware killer program that it turned out I did not even need from a ripoff website. They quickly took my $30, but then they tried to bill it to my address as my name - for instance, "Thank you for your purchase, Mr. 35889 West Jones Street." There was no way to go back and change my name from my street address to Robert Lindsay. No way would that happen in a brick and mortar.

Then I could not even download the program. I kept trying over and over for two days, and they kept sending me links that didn't work.

Can you imagine that happening in a brick and mortar? First they take your money, then they tell you to come back in an hour to pick up the product. You come back in an hour and it's not there. They give you a new address to pick it up at. You go there and it's not there. This goes on for two days, you running all over town to pick up your product, but it's never there.

One great thing about brick and mortars is I can always get a refund. And I can always speak to a human being. Try getting a refund off the Net via e-commerce. Almost impossible. The worst thing about e-commerce is that they have managed to get rid of human beings altogether.

A lot of times, online stores do let you order by phone, but when you dial the number, no one is ever there. When you can't deal with humans via phone, it's hard to get anything done. They do often end up emailing you back and forth, but that doesn't work very well.

I bought a software program from a large company that refused to install on my system. I'm so discouraged by this Shit E-Commerce World that I haven't even bothered to call the company up to complain. I just wasted the $30. At a brick and mortar, if something doesn't work or its a rip-off, you just take it back. I've never had a problem yet.

Customer service is just one more thing that has been destroyed by the Internet and computers.

A lot of website memberships are just ripoffs. Quite a few software programs just don't work. One more thing wrecked by computers and the Net - product quality.

Capitalists at least used to be able to say that customer service was pretty good under their system. Customer service was often bad under Soviet style Communism. You went into a restaurant in Russia, and the help was rude. If you complained, you got a shrugging shoulder. There was no way to fire anyone.

Now capitalism, along with all its other disadvantages, increasingly has customer service as shitty or nonexistent as it was under Communism.

One more thing you could always say about capitalism was that product quality was often good. If not, if you had the money, you could buy something worthwhile. There was cheap crap, but for a bit more money, you could get something decent.

Under Soviet style Communism, it is true that there were often crappy products. Now it seems that capitalism is even losing this advantage. Product quality is declining under capitalism to where we cannot anymore say that capitalism at least produces good products.

Another advantage of capitalism is that the products are always available. No lines, no shortages, plenty of stuff on the shelves. Shortages and lines have long been the bane of Soviet-style Communism. But under capitalism now, at least on the Internet, there are quite a few e-commerce sites whose stores are so broken it is almost impossible to buy their product. I never thought that I would see that under capitalism.

As we can see, in addition to all of the negatives that capitalism has in relation to socialism (read any socialist critique of capitalism to learn what those are), modern capitalism is even starting to lose some systemic advantages that it has often had recently.

And computers and the Net are at the core of a lot of this system decay in the quality of the modern capitalist system.

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East Germans Getting Nostalgic For Socialism

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated October 24:

Although there were reportedly some serious problems with East German socialism (the Trabant, the ubiquitous vehicle, was a piece of junk), with the recent chaos in world capitalism, many East Germans are now saying that they would rather have socialism than capitalism. A recent survey found that 53% felt that the free market was "unsuitable" and 43% said that they wanted a socialist system rather than a capitalist one.

Sales of Marx's Das Kapital have tripled since last year and increased 100X since 1990, although sales as a whole remain low. The publisher expressed amazement and said that he never thought the book would sell well again. He said that even bankers and managers are reading it to try to figure out what's going in with the turmoil in capitalist economics.

The switch from socialism to capitalism has not worked out very well in the East. Unemployment and poverty are very high. The outskirts of Berlin, Leipzig and the Baltic shore and doing well, but the rest of the region is doing poorly. It's actually suffering depopulation.

One of the problems with East Germany was that the factories were really not competitive by Western standards. After reunification, they were bought by Western competitors and shut down. That seems devious. The Left Party, a genuine Leftist party, now has 30% support in the East and is the most popular party.

One serious problem with Communism has been that, although in general it got rid of poverty, it was unable to provide more than a low standard of living. Nowadays, for better or worse, people want stuff. They don't want empty stores, lines, shortages and crappy products. Social capital only goes so far with people. This is going to be a real challenge for modern socialists.

In addition, there was often great economic growth for decades, but then it all bogged down into bureaucracy. Another vexing problem to be dealt with.

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Is The Political Spectrum Linear or Circular?

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

If you want to take the time, can someone please tell me where this guy is coming from? A lot of it looks like good Left progressive stuff, but then there seems to be this kind of Far Right Ron Paul populism too. I don't get it. What is it? Some kind of marriage between Far Right and Far Left? I'm seeing more and more of this crap nowadays on progressive and Left sites and I must say, I don't really like it.

While we are at it, where the Hell is Jeff Rense coming from anyway? Same place as this guy? He can write about Bigfoot and UFO's all he wants, and there are usually lots of good articles on the site, but his politics seriously creeps me out. For one thing, he's leaking anti-Semitism out of his pores.

My Mom has been telling my whole life, "Well, you know. It's like a circle. When you go so far to the Left and so far to the Right, you don't have two polar opposite ends of a huge ruler. The ruler starts bending and becomes circular. It's a circle. Far Right and Far Left meet, and you just have a nut, a fanatic." I always figured that was just Left-trashing, but now I'm starting to wonder.

There were some people marching against the war in Oakhurst the other day and my brother went to talk to them. Some of them handed some really weird brochures full of all this conspiratorial shit. I went to the site and it was the same thing. Anti-CIA, anti-militarism, anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War, ok, that's good.

Then it starts taking off into all this weird conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, the New World Order, Ron Paul, black helicopters, chemtrails, bla bla bla. Kind of like this guy.

Hard economic times really brings this stuff out bigtime.

Is this what the new radical US populism is going to look like? Some Far Right - Far Left mix? I don't mind the Far Left part, but whenever anyone starts talking about "marrying Left and Right", I get the creeps. I hate to say it, but that tends to end up in some weird kind of fascism of one species or other. One of the favorite fascist lines was about "getting rid of Left and Right".

Yuck.

Color me perturbed.

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Bill Ayers, Rapist

Evidence here (Hat tip Entitled To An Opinion). I realize he's unrepentant about the bombings (Good for him!) but I sure hope he's repentant about this nefarious act.

It was long known that the New Left was full of a bunch of guys who spouted all the feminist bullshit when on prime time but when the doors were shut, were complete sexist pricks. "The best place in the movement for the women is on their backs." Geez, that's really crappy.

I still get chills thinking about Eldridge Cleaver, who was just nothing but a Black rapist criminal who especially loved to rape White women like so many Black rapists, defending rape (of White women) as an "insurrectionary act" in Soul on Ice. Oh, screw you, Eldridge. It's sad that books like that even got famous.

"I'm a Black criminal, I love to rape women because I'm evil, but the racist system made me rape White women." Nothing but criminals seeking to justify their behavior like they always do. Cleaver changed his name and calmed down.

Recall that I was a hippie back in the 1970's, when California dopers and longhairs looked up to a lot of these radicals like heroes. My friends were in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in Laguna Beach where Timothy Leary and his pals cooked up huge doses of Orange Sunshine LSD and distributed it to the world. These guys were living in treehouses in Laguna Canyon in the 1970's and selling vast qualities of acid.

We ran around quoting Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and believing that pot and psychedelics would transform mankind for the better.

I remember once I opened my top drawer and there were 1,000 hits of LSD in there. I ran around with pounds of psilocybin mushrooms in my briefcase, disguised as an office worker, or in my gym bag, disguised as a yuppie going to the gym. I never got caught and it was all in good fun. My friends knew Timothy and Rosemary Leary and used to hang out at his house in the Hollywood Hills.

I've known that Ayers raped a woman for some time now. I don't think I've ever done anything that evil.

I did support the Weathermen bombings though, and I still do. They only did property damage, they gave warning calls, and no one got hurt. In Summer 1980, I was riding around Long Beach, California on my bike, stoned out of my mind, with Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and a big red star scrawled on my t-shirt, pissing off rednecks.

Other than that, they were a bunch of New Left ultra-wackos. I recall a Weatherman standing up at some party meeting and saying that all White women must abort their White babies in order to drive the White race into extinction. This is where these clowns were really coming from. They were in with the really radical Black Separatist Black Power crazies from Day One.

One of their 1970's splits was called the George Jackson Brigade. All of the communiques of the George Jackson brigade are here (cool link!). I think that the GJB is nothing but the WU in the mid-1970's. As you can see, these nutjobs were allied with the Symbionese Liberation Army insane people. Patty Hearst and all that. It was a great time to be a Californian.

Note also where they say that 50% of the women in the movement were lesbians. Well, of course. That's one more reason these idiots leave me cold.

Jackson was some Black criminal who got sent to prison for armed robbery. While there, he turned into a radical and decided it was all the system's fault. Later, Angela Davis helped smuggle guns into a courtroom, and a judge got murdered. She got off, too, and so did her radical White attorney who smuggled the guns in in a wig or something.

Later, after more splits, the remains teamed up with Black Liberation Army separatist assholes, robbed a Brinks truck and murdered a cop and seriously wounded the Brinks driver.

As an aside, I used to subscribe to the journal of their above ground journal, called Breakthrough, published by the John Brown Book Club, in the late 1980's. The journal was actually OK. I subscribed just to piss off as many people as possible and as part of my ongoing effort to act as evil as I can legally get away with.

These guys were funny. I would write them a check for $6, and it would never clear. I would wonder what happened, until finally, 10 months later, they finally cash the $6 check. I guess they're a bunch of Commies who don't care about money.

PFOC is apparently still active in Seattle politics.

This interesting, but extremely radical blog seems to be coming from a similar point of view. They call themselves Maoist-Third Worldists. They often see workers in the First World as a de facto pro-imperialist grouping that is actively attacking Third World workers. I would not exactly put it that way, but sadly there is a bit of truth to that.

These characters are also some of the only folks out there anymore who will ferociously take on nationalism itself, not ultranationalism, not national-chauvinism, but, yes, nationalism itself, as a load of reactionary crap. There are times when I find myself nodding sadly.

They also say that what needs to be done is to get the Third World together and smash the First World. It's First World versus Third World, and it's a war, dammit. You find a lot of White nationalists on the Right insisting that this is the real Commie agenda, but I've been around Left circles for years and at least hardly ever heard anyone come out and say it. These guys are the real deal.

Does the Third World need to smash the Third World. As a 1st Worlder, I'm obviously biased. Um? I don't know? Camp of Saints, anyone?

Anyway, these guys are raising some pretty interesting questions, at the very least!

Just because someone is a radical doesn't mean he always has his head up his ass. Sometimes a radical is the just the only one nuts and ballsy enough to say what's really true. Everyone else has been brainwashed by whatever the Zeitgeist of the culture is.

In case they are still in business, here's where you order. Fight Republican dirty tricks! Become a Weather Underground supporter today! Haha.

Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

Breakthrough
PO Box 14422
San Francisco, CA 94114

$6 per year (4 issues)

Also: John Brown Book Club

Self-Description: Supports liberation of internal Black colony

Comments: Armed Struggle now. Descendant of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO, "The Weathermen").

References

Jacobs, Ron. 1997. The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London & New York: Verso.

Equality is Not a Prerequisite For Liberalism

On a White nationalist blog that linked to me, I noted that it was possible to be a race realist and a socialist. This provoked the following objection:

...That makes no sense. A fundamental principle of liberalism is that of equality, of human beings being equal and interchangeable. It's false of course, but take it away and all sorts of other leftist and liberal ideas crumble by implication.

I don't see how one can be a race realist without that leading naturally to some sort of white supremacist / white nationalist / white exclusiveness position.

First of all, I would like to say some things about White Nationalism. I've finally concluded that White Nationalism is nothing but White racism and often White Supremacism.

It's just White racism and White Supremacism repackaged with a fancy new name called White Nationalism to make it seem like it's not those nasty things that we know of as White racism and White Supremacism, the latter being largely discredited. Well, if a philosophy is discredited, just invent a fancy new word for it and say it's not the bad thing it really is.

It also explains why White Nationalists are so sensitive about the word racism and always put it in quotes like this: "racism". Of course, they only do this when referring to White racism. Black racism, Hispanic racism, and all the other kinds are quite real; it's only White racism that is phantasmagorical.

It's also interesting how White Nationalists project. While they are denying their own racism, they are often fulminating about Black racism and Hispanic racism and whatnot. That's clearly denial and projection.

There does seem to be a trend now with a lot of White Nationalists to come right out and admit that they are racists. This is to be encouraged. If you're racist, what the Hell, just admit it. It's not like you're alone in the world - the world is full of racists. And it's not like it's the worst thing in the world to be anyway - as White Nationalists note, there are sure plenty of Hispanic and Black racists out there.

White Nationalists think they have excellent reasons to be racists - they've had bad experiences with Blacks and Hispanics and want nothing more to do with them. If that's the case, then just admit it and make your case to an inquiring world.

There are a few White Nationalists who don't seem to be racists, but I would say that 98% of them are.

No, onto this fellow's rejoinder. This is a typical White Nationalist position. To them, one is either a silly race-denying liberal or one is a White Nationalist racist.

It doesn't work that way. I know a number of White liberals and even Leftists who feel that there are intrinsic differences between the races; they just don't think the question is very important. They date, befriend and even marry non-Whites. You might be surprised how common this type of thinking is.

One thing that always bothered me about the race realist crowd is that they insist that there are intrinsic differences between the races, and then proceed to blame races and ethnic groups for various average shortcomings and higher rates of pathologies.

But if those shortcomings and pathology rates are indeed genetic (This is what almost all race realists insist) then it follows that those groups should not be blamed for their shortcomings or pathologies. After all, it's genetic and nothing can be done, right?

So, first of all, they accuse a group of being the equivalent of handicapped, then they throw the crutches away, kick the wheelchair to the side, throw the person into the gutter, all the while cursing them for being a cripple. How cruel can you get? Why does a realization that humans are not intrinsically equal automatically seem to lead to the cruelest sort of Social Darwinism, at best?

And by the same token, if the superior races are only superior through the luck of the dices, what on Earth do they have to feel proud of anyway? Nothing, really. Have they done anything to earn their superior status? Hardly. They just lucked out in the genes crapshoot. Big deal.

If humans are not equal, then it would be up to the state to equalize things. If Blacks, on average are always going to fall behind due to lower IQ (I am beginning to fear that this may be the case), then that is no fault of their own anyway, and it's cruel to force them to suffer the ravages of the market, which is what most White nationalists seem to perversely want to do.

If Blacks were on average the same as we are, and the failures of their group were just due to their being a bunch of willful, perverse and deliberately wicked and stupid pricks, I would just say the Hell with them. But I honestly think that they can't help it.

Nor can Amerindians, Polynesians, Hispanics, Aborigines, or any other group that is going to tend to fall behind. It's really not their fault. Therefore, they should not be punished with failure for things that they can't help.

If Black income is always going to be a lot lower on average than, say, Whites, due to an IQ deficit that they have no control over, then it is the duty of the state through redistributive taxation to equalize things a bit and make it more fair for Blacks who fail through no fault of their own.

Humans are not necessarily equal at all. Even within a race, we are born with wildly differing IQ's and whatnot. I think most liberals would agree with that.

Even from a White Supremacist point of view, libertarianism makes no sense. Libertarianism is not only perverse for conscious White nationalists, it's downright cruel.

If you really love your own people so much, why throw them into a Roman-type pit where they consume each other alive while you cheer on the deadliest and most homicidal of the White cannibals? Only via some form of socialism can Whites really work together to help each other and have real solidarity.

I'm not interested in supremacism or chauvinism or nationalism or any of that. What are you looking for in your acquaintances? There are smart or good or kind, or any combination of many other great qualities, Blacks, Hispanics, Amerindians, Arabs, East Indians and all sorts of other non-Europeans. Just as smart, good and kind as your European White friends.

I love my people finally (after decades of self-hate) but Whites are not the end-all and be-all. I think Whites are a bit cold, for one. Hispanics and Blacks are much warmer and friendlier, and it's much easier to befriend them. Of course, their lower-income neighborhoods also have some big downsides too. There's good and bad with all groups, including Whites.

If people are not equal, that's no argument against liberalism. It actually implies we need it even more.

It means we need affirmative action, progressive taxation, humane prisons and all sorts of things you would never think of.

Split Emerging Between CA Liberals and Left on Illegals

Here in California (Ground Zero of America's Mass/Illegal Immigration Nightmare) there is getting to be a serious split between some California liberals and the PC California Leftists over the issues of illegal immigration, Sanctuary Cities and other symptoms of major mental illness.

Take San Fransisco. You can't get much more insane than Sanctuary Cities, but SF did just that. Not only do they hide illegal alien criminals from the law, they used to hide illegal alien felons, so long as they were underage! Turns out almost all of them ran away from the silly group homes they were dumped in, as we might expect.

Turns out some of them afterward went out and murdered people, as we might expect. Turns out a lot of others were really adults who lied and said they were minors, as we might expect. With blood on the sidewalk, three Italian native San Fransiscans, a father and two sons, dead, the mayor and his Leftist colleagues are incredibly holding their ground.

If you go to the comments on the SF Chronicle page dealing with these issues, you will see that there is an emerging split between SF liberals and SF Leftists. Probably 90% of San Fransiscans are Democrats, and probably 80% of the City are liberals.

Well, over and over on those pages, you see these SF liberals saying, "Hey! I'm a liberal San Franciscan, but this Sanctuary City crap has gone too far! Count me out! Up with liberals, down with PC Leftists!" And a lot of them are also saying, "And by the way, down with illegal aliens! Get the Hell out of my country!"

Keep in mind California is Ground Zero for Mass/Illegal Immigration madness. If that reality doesn't turn any native Californian sensible on this issue, nothing will.

Being liberal was never supposed to be about being nuts or being stupid. From any logical point of view, a pro-illegal immigration (defending an invading army of lawbreakers), Sanctuary City (shielding the invader army from the law trying to arrest the criminals), viewpoint is both dumb and nuts.

Socialism On Trial

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

This really is a delightful video. It highlights the fight of the Liverpool Labor Councilors fighting to defend Labor socialism in Liverpool in the mid-1980's during Thatcherism. What I found so heartwarming about it was seeing the majority of the White working class in this city rallying in the streets with red flags and signs saying socialism.

Here in the US, that sight is almost incomprehensible. No way will any group of White working class Americans anywhere march in the streets with red flags defending any kind of socialism. The interviews were also very uplifting. These working class Whites defended the Labour Party and its socialist project.

Why? Because they lived in a totalitarian Communist state and had to say that? No, because the socialist Labourites on the council had actually been making their lives better in real and tangible ways for decades.

This didn't happen by accident. The Labourites finally started winning big after WW2, possibly because the Right in the UK was discredited by the defeat of fascism.

Over 60 years, a very strong socialist movement, in the Labour Party, built its own Gramscian cultural hegemony in the UK. This succeeded to the point where your average Brit is a social democrat. There are large papers such as the Guardian, run by corporations, that are pro social democrat. Publicly financed broadcasting in the BBC is also probably pro-social democrat.

It is hard for non-Americans to understand how incomprehensible this is. The notion of huge broadcasting stations and newspapers supporting social democracy in the US is comical. The notion of your average American supporting socialist anything is a product of science fiction. The White working class in particular is irredeemable hostile to anything with the word socialist in it.

But this video shows that it is possible in the West for a socialist political party to win the hearts of White working class people. That notion right there shows that there is hope after all.

This interesting website highlights something else about US culture. Since Reagan in 1980, we have had almost 30 years of hardcore Gramscian cultural hegemony working like madmen to inculcate the market virus in our brains and make us hate anything government with Pavlovian unthinkingness.

In particular, an effort has somehow emerged, apparently cultivated by the Republican Party, that Democrats are fags, wussies, sissies or metrosexuals, and only Republicans and conservatives are real men. The Democrats are for the niggers, the Mexicans and the faggots*.

In White working class communities in rural and suburban California, it seems most of the young men vote Republican. If you're White, working class and say you vote Democrat, people will say, "Well you're not Black or Mexican, so what is your problem? Are you a queer?"

If you're a real man, you're a conservative. You love capitalism, you hate environmentalism, you hate towelheads, Islam, Europeans (especially France) and foreigners in general. You love global warming and plans to stop it are a Democrat socialist faggot plot against capitalism.

If you're a Democrat, your masculinity is suspect. If you're not a queer, at least you're not much of a man. Maybe you're a metrosexual. Reagan was real man. Jimmy Carter was a wuss. Bill Clinton, despite all the bimbos, was some sort of faggy not real man type. George Bush is a man. His father was supposedly a man too, but Bush Sr. actually has a pretty wimpy voice and mannerisms.

Basically, any Republican is automatically a big man and any Democrat is automatically a wussy metrosexual possible faggot.

You love globalization because it's capitalism on steroids, but say buy American (don't ask for coherence). You hate Palestinians for being dirty fighters and love Israel for fighting like real men. You love imperialism and colonialism for their manliness and cynical, real-world hardened views of the globe. And it's very manly and studly to be a neoconservative. You hate health food and love meat, especially red meat.

Socialism of any type, either in health care or social security, is for pussies and fags.

The love of capitalism is because all real men can supposedly become "successful" and "make good money" in the US, or, I guess, anywhere. Assuming 100% of US men decided to become he-men and make it to the upper middle class, how all 100% of them could somehow manage to squeeze into the top 20% is not explained.

If you're a liberal or a Democrat, you're not only a queer, but you're also a loser. If you're a liberal or a Democrat and you have some money, you're considered to be an insane person, working against your own interests.

Money is very much tied in with masculinity in our culture. American women, despite all the feminism, continue to judge a man's masculinity on his earnings. Somehow feminism managed to push equal pay for women while still winking at "take the man for everything he's got" game, giving "oppressed" women the best of both worlds.

An American woman's contemptuous, snarky, "You don't make enough money" is another way for her to call you a faggot or a pussy. So in addition to being called a loser, a low-income man is also told he's not a man. No wonder so many guys go postal.

Since money is equated with masculinity, the new conservative White guy does the same. He may not make much, but some day he will. Or he envies the guys who do. Or something. Or whatever.

It's interesting that in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Arab World, the Muslim World, and Asia in general, an identity has been constructed in which a socialist man can be as real of a he-man that ever existed.

The ultra rightwing macho man is very much a US invention, but US politics cannot be understood these days without taking it into account.

*used sardonically

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US Drug Companies Abuse US Consumers

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 6:

In the comments section to the The Market Virus post, James Schipper notes:

Drugs are not a natural monopoly, so why are pharmaceutical companies making such large profits? Answer: patents. Once a pharmaceutical company has a patent on a drug, it has a monopoly for several years. The reason for this patent system is that it is thought to encourage research and thereby allow consumers to gain access to new drugs.

There is no doubt that a lot of new drugs are coming on the market, but whether the patent system ultimately has more advantages than disadvantages is hard to say. What is certain is that it keeps drug prices high and also encourages wasteful research for near-duplicates.

If company A develops a new drug against, say, headaches and acquires a patent on it, then company B can't compete directly against it by selling the same drug, so it will try to produce a drug that is very similar but different enough to circumvent company's A patent.

In part it is patents, true. And it is true that the patent system encourages totally wasteful drugs that do nothing for consumers but fatten the wallets of corporate slimeballs.

Once again we see that capitalism is great at making money, but often little else. In what sense is a costly waste of a drug good for the "productivity" or "growth" of the nation. It's not. It's wasteful. Again we see the inherent wastefulness and stupidity of capitalism.

Europe and Canada have socialist health systems that negotiate low prices for drugs. The drug companies do it for the business, and they still make tons of money. Here in the US, the state thinks that drug companies have a right to superprofits at the expense of people. It's corporations versus humans, and in the US, corporations win and humans get screwed every time.

There are now movements afoot to extend patents beyond their very long life. This will go on as long as they have legislators by the balls. One of their loony arguments is that they need super-profits in order to reinvest money in new drugs. However, they are denied super-profits in Europe and still come up with lots of new drugs.

It's apparently just a great big gigantic lie. This nonsense reached a crescendo when the US government forbade the re-importation of cheap drugs from Canada into the US so that US consumers could get better deals.

Amazingly, there was no hue and cry from US consumers stuck with vast drug bills that are completely unnecessary, because the corporate media refused to show them how they were getting screwed. How many Americans so love the "market" that they would joyfully pay twice as much for drugs so fat cat drug companies could rake it in? I guess your average libertarian is that insipid, but no way is your average American.

US capitalism fucks the worker, consumer, society and the environment day in and day out without end. This is the magical "market". It's making all of our lives so much better every single day, they say. Really? It is? Why does it seem like it's screwing us instead? You're for the corporations or for the humans. I'm for the humans. Down with the corporations.

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Is Semco Socialism?

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 2:

Is this socialism?

A Brazilian company, Semco, has adopted an anarcho-syndicalist style of organization and has been growing for decades. Workers hire and fire management and agree on management's salaries. Workers set their own salaries and hours. 25% of profits go back to workers. Workers hire and fire their own. There are no job titles. Every worker gets to see the company's books.

It's supposed to be anarcho-syndicalist style of management, but I'm not even sure what anarcho-syndicalism is, even after reading this article.

Even if it's not socialism, it sounds like it's a heck of a lot better than what we have.

From Monday Memo, a management website. Hat tip Entitled To An Opinion. TGGP, at ETAO, asks if this works so great, why don't profit-maximizing corporations adopt it.

In the comments, Kevin Carson says the corporations are not really profit-maximizing, they are out for short-term profits and care nothing about the long term health of the company. The company may as well be sold off to some junk bond guy who strips the assets, fires everyone and pockets the cash. Or it's going to get bought out by someone else down the road.

You have to wonder if capitalism is such a wonder machine, why do capitalists wreck their own companies for short-term profits and Wall Street gains while ruining the long-term profits of the enterprise?

Why do they seem to care nothing about the long term interests of the company such that they would just as soon sell it to someone else to do God knows what with, or auction it off in an LBO to some junk-bond guy who specializes in cannibalizing companies and leaving piles of bones? What's so great about this "magic hand of the market" crap anyway? It's good for making money. So? So's slinging crack on the corner.

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The Market Virus

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 2:

In the comments section, huy notes that, while he is a social democrat, he still sings the praises of the free market system. He points out drug companies and IT as two great industries.

I disagree:

Private drug companies are crap! Have you ever seen a more horrid bunch of gangsters and criminals? Here in the US they are all just crooks.

They keep harmful drugs on the market and refuse to pull them. The only way to pull them is to sue them over and over, and even when we do that, they still keep them on the market a lot of times. These people are just flat out murderers. And when they get too pissed about being sued, they get their bought and paid for Congressswine to legislate "tort reform", which means no more suits.

Or SLAPP suits, in which you get sued for suing the POS corporation! They fake their studies, lie on their data, and buy and pay for doctors to lie for them. The whole medical field is becoming seriously corrupted by the big money behind these scum companies, and the # of doctors going corrupt as a result is really frightening. It's a serious problem as even our best medical journals are in danger of being corrupted.

Furthermore, it has been conclusively proven that we pay much higher prices for the same drugs that other nations in the West get for much cheaper. What advantage do we get from these high prices? Much higher profits for drug companies on US sales! I'm sure your average US consumer is delighted by that! Or maybe, if his mind is truly market-infected, he is delighted by that.

The IT companies? It's hard to say. Microsoft is an illegal monopoly, was one, and will be one into the foreseeable future. It's hard to imagine how much damage they have caused to computing.

Intel is a monopoly on CPU's with similar major issues for consumers, notably outrageously high prices and forced install of Intel chips by computer makers.

On the ground, there is no competition in broadband. The glorious days of dialup competition are gone forever. You have the cable monopoly or the phone DSL monopoly. They are both evil, and neither has any competition but the other.

The cable monopolies are not regulated at all, and cable is insanely overpriced.

The phone monopolies are barely regulated at all anymore, but some are better than others. The worst of all are the huge ones like ATT, which desperately needs to be regulated.

An unregulated private monopoly is pure evil and needs to be smashed or at least heavily regulated.

Capitalism in the US has created a Gramscian hegemony whereby a vast number of folks identify with the capitalists and the market. Once you do that, all regulation and control by the state is out the window. Very rightwing capitalists own all of our media and use it try to slam pro-corporate, pro-monopoly bullshit into our heads 24-7.

A lot of workers and consumers, especially once they start getting some money, "go corporate" in their minds and essentially support the whole human-hating, society-hating, worker-hating and consumer-hating agenda of the corporations.

Our lack of government involvement in broadband and cell phones has meant that we spend outrageously high prices for shit service.

Other nations have involved the state heavily in their cellular and broadband systems. They pay dramatically lower prices than we do and get dramatically faster speeds and more features.

We're just sitting here in the US getting screwed because we worship these corporate pigs who are reaming us. Why? Because the ideology of "the market" has infected every aspect of American life. Even the people who should be protesting getting screwed by these corporations are singing their praises even while they are getting reamed.

Their minds have been colonized by a virus. The market virus.

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Socialism Wastes Money, Capitalism Wastes Humans

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated November 16:

There has been a lot of talk, even by socialists, of the profound "wastefulness" inherent in various Communist economic systems. As I'm not an economist, I don't really understand what they are talking about.

However, I can give you a few ideas.

In recent years, Cuba has revolutionized organic agriculture to where they probably have one of the most highly developed organic ag systems on Earth. For starters, Cuba has more agronomists per capita than anywhere else on Earth. During the Special Period, they were put to work devising organic solutions to problems that were previously solved by industrialized agriculture.

Right now, in the intensive organic farming collectives all over Havana, crop yield has reached some of the highest levels on Earth per unit of land. And that's with a 100% organic system. Now, who ever said that socialism could not produce?

However, interviews with collective farmers reveal that the system could not be replicated on a capitalist model. It is "wasteful", that is, it has to either spend too much money to get that yield, or it pays too many farmers as workers to get the yield. It's pretty much the same argument.

A similar complaint has been leveled at Cuban enterprises. In some office jobs, it seems as if there are four or five workers for every real job. They rest are screwing off or shuffling papers or engaging in make-work.

I suppose all of these examples are of "waste", right? Waste of money! Well, Cuba is a poor country dedicated to 100% employment.

In most of the Third World, college grads just don't have any jobs. The state has no jobs for them and the private sector doesn't either. So there are vastly more applicants than positions. A lot of these places have much more wealth than Cuba.

Cuba's not going to go that route. It has enough money to hire workers even for jobs that barely even exist, and it wants everyone to have a job, figuring that's better than sitting on your ass. 3rd World capitalism creates armies of over-educated young unemployed men with no income to start a family. In the Muslim World, lots of them are going in for radical Islam and blowing themselves up.

I suppose that Cuba has a similar problem, but they just dealt with it by creating make-work jobs and at least giving folks an income and something to do with their time. There's waste of humans in one case (3rd World capitalism) by lack of jobs for them, and waste of money in the other case (Cuba) for creating make-work jobs.

I would point out that the Cuban organic collectives are run by the workers themselves. They hire other workers to join on. If you don't pull your weight and slack off, you're fired. They have to sell some of their produce to the state, but there's plenty left over for farmers' markets. There are many people clamoring to get into these collectives, as it's seen as a good job with a good income.

As a collective economic form, it's also non-capitalist. Right now, only 6% of Cuban agriculture is in state farms. Most is in farming cooperatives. Much is made of the very high productivity levels of the private farms (they are limited to 150 acres), but they do this by using vastly more than their share of labor, so perhaps they are not so productive after all.

Here in the US, a lot of very smart people are just completely wasted by capitalism. I'm not talking about myself here, because I'm not healthy enough to work in a regular job, so I just live off a meager trust fund.

But I know two people with IQ's over 140 who are not doing much productive. One works at low-level jobs and the other is on disability, but could work if they wanted to. What puzzles me is why this wonderful market is not beating their doors down trying to hire our most valuable citizens (cognitive elite)?

If the stupid market can't utilize their brains in any way, why doesn't the state? The very same thing happens in 3rd World capitalism. Very bright people, with degrees and advanced degrees, have nothing to do.

If aliens landed on the Earth and saw a bunch of the smartest people around being wasted by society, wouldn't they say that was insane? The capitalists would explain to the aliens that these folks are useless for making money, so they are a waste of air, and that capitalists don't give a damn about talent or brains or anything.

I guess that's what it boils down to? Capitalism is good for creating wealth, that's it. Hell, even Marx said that. Read The Communist Manifesto. He praises this greatest wealth-creating engine to the skies.

What else is capitalism good for? Nothing. It ain't good for fuck-all else. I assure you that Cuba would find something to do with everyone in the land who had a 140-150 IQ.

I guess the market feels it can't use the smartest people in society to help it make cash, so it has no use for them. Capitalism and the market is just a fucking money-generating machine. It's in business to make money, nothing else.

That's what all this crap the market-fetishists go on about in terms of "generating wealth" is all about. Making money. "Generating wealth" means making money. Big deal. Since when is that a value worth anything of importance?

I hate capitalism and the damned market. Looking at the failure of socialist models (For example, when Albanian leader Hoxha died in 1985, there were shortages of even the most basic foodstuffs.) I'm willing to acknowledge that it may be necessary, but it sure sucks.

Have you ever noticed the contempt that capitalists have for professors in universities, our finest minds at work in various sciences and fields, advancing the knowledge of our species? They sneer and call them eggheads and talk about how their tax dollars are wasted on these guys. They brag about how they never went to college.

There's no money in a lot of these fields of study at the university (probably, or at least at the moment, or from what we can tell), so capitalists figure it's all a total waste. If there's no money in it, it's worthless. That's your glorious market.

Fuck the market.

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Cool Page On Social Democracy

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 2:

This is a really cool page on the Social Democratic Party of America. There are several social democratic parties in the US, and no, rightwing fuckwads, they are not much like the Democratic Party at all. A lot of them don't even like the Democratic Party. Social democracy means a lot of things all over the world.

There is a Socialist International of socialist parties all over the world, and I support that organization. Even a lot of Communists don't necessarily hate it. A lot of us on the Left support all sorts of socialist models, from Communism to social democracy even all the way to the US Democratic Party.

Your average US rightwing shithead can't seem to figure that out, but then, they subscribe to a philosophy that is narrow-minded and stupid in both intent and praxis.

Truth is, as you can see by this page, there is not a lot of love lost between at least this social democratic party and Communists. To say that they are one and the same just shows that you are a stupid rightwing asshole. No serious political scientist would make such a statement.

I don't necessarily agree with this party in their critique of Cuba, Belarus and other countries ruled by Communist-type regimes, but hey, it's a big tent here on the Left.

There are all sorts of social democratic parties all over the world. As you can see, they are major parties in Slovenia, Japan, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Iceland, Austria, Serbia, Poland, Paraguay, Portugal, Finland, Cameroon, Guatemala, Tajikistan, Macedonia, France, Italy, Sweden, Belarus, Denmark and all sorts of other places.

I have varying opinions on how well they are doing; I think that the ones in Europe have done a pretty good job. But I have a pretty low opinion of Lula's PT in Brazil, Bachelet's Socialist Party in Chile, the UK Labor Party (An imperialist socialist party?), and I doubt if this new Guatemalan party is going to get much done.

The Peruvian social democrats have a particularly horrible record. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua will not be able to get much done either. Cristina Merkel is having a hard time getting a lot of her agenda through in Argentina.

Social democracy seems to work best in highly developed and wealthy countries, as you can see above. In the poor Third World, they haven't been able to do much to change the reactionary and backwards nature of society, nor to alleviate poverty, nor to do much of anything.

I think in a lot of cases there may be a necessity for revolutionary change, either via the way of the gun, or possibly peacefully in a more civilized society via the Hugo Chavez model.

In Europe, the ruling classes and the Right were completely destroyed in World War 2, which left millions of rightists and fascists dead and left the whole rightwing movement scattered and discredited. Hence social democracy was able to make a lot of headway with a defeated and more or less rendered-civilized and neutered Right.

Further, society itself changed in that even the wealthy, the upper middle classes, the middle classes, and corporate executives began to support social democracy.

In part this social pact was due to massive pressure from the Left which caused the European Right and business classes to sue for peace via a Social Compact. Also, society itself changed and social democracy became the dominant model for all classes.

Something similar occurred in Japan. The Right was destroyed by the war, and those that were not dead were discredited and humiliated.

In Eastern Europe, decades of Communism may have left a distaste for Communism but not for social democracy. Once again, most of the rightists were simply slaughtered, the rest were in jail or discredited, and society itself was well-molded along socialist lines for decades.

In Latin America, faced with a much more backwards, venal, dishonest, amoral, criminal, corrupt, and murderous upper class and upper middle class intent on staying in power at all costs, social democracy has had a really hard time getting much done. It's fascinating that the US has allowed social democracy to flower in Europe, but has smashed every glimmer of it in Latin America as "Communism" or "dictatorship".

Socialist parties in India (the Congress Party) have failed for similar reasons as the ones in Latin America. Social democracy in Sri Lanka has a good record.

In most of the Arab World, there is a more or less socialist model in place, no matter what the governments call themselves. Radical free market capitalism is contrary to Arab society and to Islam itself, hence it is not likely to succeed in any Arab or Islamic society.

Cambodia is run by a socialist party. So is Burma, but most socialists want nothing to do with them.

Contrary to rightwing bullshit, socialism in the form of social democracy has not failed at all. It is not a failed or discredited model or any of that.

Social democratic parties have sadly had a really hard time getting off the ground in the United States. For the most part, this is because America is extremely rightwing for a developed country. It is no exaggeration to say that the US is the most reactionary developed country on Earth, in both its leadership and in its citizens. This is 100% the fault of US Whites, and always has been.

There's been a decades-long propaganda war against socialism in which the word "socialism" was deviously married to word "Communism". Americans being a bunch of morons, and basically very rightwing in their natures, swallowed the whole thing. But in the mid-1970's, things were different.

We had had over a decade of fairly progressive politics, even under Republicans, and leaders of major US corporations got together, agitated and worried. They said that if something is not done now, we are going to have a European-style social democracy in the US. This began a years-long project to set up and fund a series rightwing foundations and think tanks in the US.

They are still going strong, and have tremendous influence on US politics due to their ability to churn out papers, speakers and conferences on issues almost immediately. They have deep ties to the reactionary corporate media and quickly popped onto TV and the front page and kept there as long as the Right wants or needs any issue to be spotlighted.

It is true that there is a tradition of radical individualism in the US, but that's only among White people. This may have been slightly reasonable at some point if you were Davey Crockett building a cabin in the woods, but those days are long gone.

One great thing about the loss of a White majority in the US (which will be both good and bad) is that US non-Whites, in particular Hispanics and Blacks, are much more sympathetic to at least Democratic Party politics and possibly social democracy.

On the other hand, reactionary politics have such a deep hold on this country that even some younger Blacks and Hispanics, once they start making some money, adopt some form of reactionary politics, typically nowadays along the lines of the faddish but ultra-rightwing libertarianism. This is discouraging, and shows that a non-Whites in the US are not necessarily a progressive bloc.

Another thing to note is that despite the hostile rhetoric some US social democratic parties take towards the Democratic Party, we already have a lot of social democracy here in the US, brought to us actually by both political parties.

The Right, meaning White America, has been savagely slashing away at this social democracy for decades now, but even so, it's a Hell of a lot better record than the social democratic parties in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Jamaica and Brazil, which in my opinion have failed to varying degrees.

If Americans were anything like Europeans, social democracy ought to be an easy play here in the US. But for one thing, White Americans' opposition to high taxation is going to make this a difficult project.

White Americans' opposition to socialism and social democracy is rooted in a lot of things, but one of the main things is race. It's all about taking the hard-earned tax dollars of White Americans and giving them to worthless gangbanging, welfare-addicted, drug-abusing Hispanics and Black criminals, scumbags and lowlifes.

Truth is that this simple-minded mindset has devastated a lot of hardworking working-class lower to mid-income Whites, but White America just can't see that.

White Americans don't have much in the way of racial solidarity. If there is anything, there is solidarity based on class and that's it. Whites in the suburbs think that low-income and working class Whites, whom they refer to as White trash, can fuck off. While White American politics are indeed often rooted in race, they are also rooted in class too, and the two can be contradictory.

Life is complicated.

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Demographics Augurs Well For US Socialism

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated August 23:

In the comments section, first psychologist Mort Goldman from The Family Guy, our only celebrity commenter, notes that Scandinavian socialism can never happen in the US because US Whites will oppose being taxed to pay for non-Whites. That's pretty much been the history of the US for the last 28 years or so.

But I argue that as Whites decline, and as they become a minority, we can move more towards a Scandinavian model.

Uncle Milton, another commenter, says:

"I think that when Whites get to be a minority, we can have more of a Scandinavian-style socialist society."

Why do you believe the US would have a Scandinavian style socialist society when Whites become a minority in the US..? Why wouldn't it be more like Brazil or Mexico..?

Here is my response to this very interesting question posed by Unc:

Good question Milton.

Minorities here in the US are pretty politically savvy and leftwing. Our society is already much more socialist than Brazil or Mexico and our ruling class is not as White as theirs is, nor is it as horrible, venal and ruthless. Brazil has death squads that roam around the land murdering uppity peasants. Any politician who goes after them is going to feel their wrath, possibly with bullets.

Also, the press down there is quite a bit more reactionary even than the US press. Under the Republicans in the last 14 years, US Whites have been trying to move towards a Mexico-Brazil type capitalism, but it hasn't been all that successful. These efforts have culminated under Bush, who has also started to actually steal elections, harass dissidents and move towards authoritarian rule, in line with the US Banana Republic model.

Those ruling classes down there in Mexico and Brazil will not budge an inch. The rest of the people, though they are getting royally screwed, are not politically savvy like the Venezuelans, Haitians or Bolivians. In other words, the system is already incredibly more rightwing down there than it is up here. It's hard to make changes in those hardcore reactionary societies without taking up guns or getting lucky like Chavez or Morales.

Since our society is already pretty socialist and the only people feverishly working to make it less so are a rapidly declining, desperate and increasingly unsuccessful White demographic, the future augurs well for socialism in the US. Blacks and Hispanics in the US are much more sophisticated politically than Mexicans and Brazilians, and it's much easier to add more socialism to an already quite-socialist society.

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