Let's see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon...William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch" (1959).
This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way. On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.
Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.
The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.
Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, "Comida, si. Dinero, no." In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.
US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.
One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.
After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.
All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.
Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?
Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.
Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!
File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.
Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!
We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.
The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!
The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.
But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?
Because capitalism doesn't necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it's sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that's all it is. That's the cause of your $4/gallon gas.
Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.
On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.
Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.
It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it's the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.
We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!
We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!
We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.
The line goes like this:
-Oil is high! -Why is it high? -Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)! -Why not? -Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They've made it impossible to build new refineries! -(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries! -Yes, yes, yes!
The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.
The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.
This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon - it is already - and it is not going to be pretty.
It's looking ugly and it's going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.
My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.
I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.
I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.
Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!
To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!
This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.
The Holocaust traumatized them, but they'd already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!
The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.
You can't understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It's not just his own death; that's bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.
Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.
How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.
Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to "destroy Israel" = code for kill all the Jews.
Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.
For Chrissake man, it's porn! It's Holocaust Porn! It's a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.
What's a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hard-on . Seems every year there's more and more Shoah tales.
I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean - Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria's nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.
This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.
Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he's under house arrest.
So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about "this close" to building a nuclear weapon.
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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.
The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.
As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.
It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.
It can't be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China's performance with Russia's in the 1990's.
The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.
I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I'm a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.
The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn't taken properly when some patients get worse.
Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.
Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at 5% interest and on the assumption that inflation for the coming year will be 0%. Instead, inflation is 20%. After a year, I get my 10,000 back, but their real value is only 8,000. I lost 2,000 and you gained 2,000.
It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can't just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn't be able to that either if I were privately insured.
There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.
I respond:
I really dislike capitalism, James, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far - people want stuff too.
My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.
Class war is continuous under capitalism.
Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.
Owners oppose increased % of profits going to workers since that means less for them, so they are always trying to cut down on the workers' % to get more for themselves. The tendency among capitalists would be to take 100% of productivity increases if they could get away with it. The only reason that workers get any % of productivity increases at all is when they organize to fight for it.
During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.
Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don't get much of anything.
I'm sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-80%. 100% of that vast surplus and probable productivity increase went into the hands of owners. Workers got less than zero. In a time of booming profits and probable productivity raises, instead of getting even a meager slice, they got a massive pay cut.
Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.
During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by 5% per year. During that same period, the % of the population living in poverty actually increased from 87% to 93%. 5% economic growth over 15 years equals a 75% increase in the size of the economy. 0% of the benefits of this economic growth went to the vast majority of the population.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work.
Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that - where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it's often a deadly fight.
I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn't seem to work very well.
I don't have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.
But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.
It's true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.
So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.
The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms - the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market - is what finally got the economy going again.
This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.
Finally, by the 1990's, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.
Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.
This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.
Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.
This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.
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James Schipper: There are two serious restraint on capitalism: competition and the need to make a profit.
Competition between capitalists insures that the power of capital over consumers and labor is limited. Capitalists have a common interests in the preservation of the capitalist system, but at the same time, capitalists compete against other for the favors of the consumer and to get the best employees.
Always remember that what makes capitalism work is not so much private property but competition. Private property without competition combines the worst of socialism and capitalism.
The need to make a profit sets a limit on what the corporate media can do. Newspapers have to find readers and radio and TV stations have to find listeners and viewers. This implies that they can't be too overtly propagandistic, otherwise the readers, listeners and viewers will stay away.
Commentators like Rush Limbaugh have a large following but only because they primarily discuss non-economic issues. If they spent most of their time defending business, their popularity would quickly plummet. Imagine the reaction of Limbaugh's fan's if he started to extol CEO's who make stratospheric incomes while their companies lay off workers. It is far safer to extol the uniformed heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Plutocracy is a cause that can't be truthful about its aims. That's why the Republicans want ordinary working Americans to worry about college professors who have an elitist lifestyle rather than about executives and capitalists who have an elitist income.
It is ridiculous to suppose that latte-drinking, opera-watching, Volvo-driving eggheads who read foreign novels and watch foreign films are somehow a danger to working stiffs. A party that represents the rich has to be deceitful or else condemn itself to insignificance. The Republicans are such a party.
Robert Lindsay: James makes some excellent points above, especially about how "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't even park their bicycles straight", as George Wallace famously put it, into a sort of populist enemy by the Republican Party, and also about how conservatism is always, by its very nature and necessarily, dishonest.
Here the Republican Party is playing into the anti-intellectual nature of US populism. We have never been a European-style cafe society, and probably never will be.
Also Republicans are taking an increasingly popular critique of their own sure elitism into a critique of fake elitists called "limousine liberals". Problem with limousine liberals being, I guess, that they are hypocrites. Similar diatribes have been launched against something similar called the "Hollywood Left".
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
Increasingly here we have what are more or less monopolies, James. We have cable and telephone monopolies that were supposed to be regulated, but the government has basically given up regulating them. We have computer monopolies in the form of Intel on chips and Microsoft in apps and OS's.
Starbucks comes into a town, sells at a loss to drive all competition out of town and then jacks up prices. Walmart comes into town, sells at a loss to drive everyone out of business, and then keeps on selling at low cost. However, Walmart mostly sells crap. Here Walmart is violating the monopoly principle of driving up prices while adhering to the monopoly principle of selling crap.
We are now having higher-end stores opening up that charge a lot more than Walmart but at least do not sell crap. As long as there is competition in a market, prices and quality are typically relatively good.
However, the government now operates in the interest of monopoly capital, and, insanely, "free market" economics is opposed to all antitrust regulation. Traditionally, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation.
The new bipartisan opposition to antitrust legislation is one of the legacies of Milton Friedman's "Chicago School of Lies" free market fundamentalism snake oil that has created a Gramscian cultural hegemony in US economic thought in the past 35 years.
The Friedmanites published all sorts of nonsense, lies and BS. They went down to Chile, used it as a testing ground for their insane theories, blew up the economy, and then covered their tracks and lie about it to this very day.
They published papers and books on antitrust that overturned nearly 3/4 of a century of perfectly valid economic and legal scholarship that showed unequivocally that prices rise and the quality of services and goods nosedives as markets become more consolidated. These works made up a bunch of fancy-sounding crap that made a dishonest case that all of this proven science was not true.
Monopolies do not produce high prices and crap service and goods. Everything we know is wrong. Instead, reality is inverted and monopolies cause low prices, great products and superb services.
What we are seeing in the US is the move to more and more consolidated markets and more and more monopoly-type markets. The moves by Yahoo and Google and Microsoft on the Internet foretell an Internet that is increasingly monopolistic.
The one good thing about capitalism is competition.
Capitalists love to talk about how much they love competition, but the truth is that they hate it. Competition only benefits the consumer. All businessmen secretly want to be monopolists. All of those businesses dishonestly taking Microsoft to court for being a monopoly actually want to be monopolies themselves.
There are natural monopolies. In the US, those include phone, cable, power, water and some others. Those natural monopolies must be regulated by the state, other wise they will turn into natural unregulated monopolies, which are disastrous for consumers and society.
It's highly dubious that corporations compete for the best workers anymore in the US, except at the highest levels. Corporations and business are perfectly happy to replace good workers with illegal aliens and H-1B and H-2B guest workers from other lands.
Both types of workers are usually much inferior to native US workers, but business no longer cares about quality in the US. Computer companies and homebuilders are perfectly happy to produce crap code and homes that fall apart in a few years. No one really cares about quality anymore in the US, and no one cares about workers either.
The whole culture is centered around getting rich, and that usually means being an employer and hiring labor. To be a worker is to be a schmuck, soon to be taken out by illegal aliens, machinery, a computer program or guest workers from India or Ecuador.
Fordism is progressive type of capitalism named after Henry Ford.
Ford found out his own workers could not even afford to buy his cars, and he was outraged. He resolved to pay his workers enough to buy his cars. This became a progressive strain in capitalism - to pay workers enough so that they would be well-heeled consumers able to buy plenty of products, while at the same time preserving high profits for business. Fordism is done and gone; it's history.
Everything is now globalized, and no one worries about whether or not people can afford to buy your stuff. If labor in one place costs too much, just outsource, move the plant overseas, hire illegals or bring guest worker scabs from India. If workers in one land can't afford your stuff, ship it to some rich people overseas. As long as enough people somewhere can afford your stuff, there's no need to pay workers enough to buy your stuff.
Furthermore, James misinterprets the degree to which Rush Limbaugh is a reactionary. I believe he does extol high corporate salaries. You now have the phenomenon of the low income, working class or middle class, White, usually younger, male, who will defend plutocracy and the politics of the rich to the hilt, despite the fact that it is against his interest.
In this way, the plutocrats have actually been honest about their project and have created a Gramscian cultural hegemony of "plutocracy is good" whereby tens of millions of suckers swallow this crap whole and spout it right back at you without thinking. They did this by saturating the media with pro-plutocrat messages and making it seem reasonable.
They also did it by creating a Lottery mindset, which was unfortunately always a part of US culture (see the Horatio Alger books). Your average White male working stiff will tell you that he too is going to become rich one day. Anywhere from 25-50% of Americans say that they will be millionaires one day. Fully 25% of Americans already describe themselves as "rich". Almost all of these people are White.
The problem with James' media model - that media outlets must compete for readers - is that there is no competition.
There is no Left alternative to Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report. On TV, there is the ultraright Fox News and MSNBC and the rightwing CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All of these are corporate-owned and spout one pro-corporate line.
It is true that CNN now has Lou Dobbs, who spouts a sort-of progressive populist line. It really is against CNN's interests to keep Dobbs on there, but I guess he is there because enough folks want to hear the message.
What you get instead is a pro-corporate message increasingly draped in fake populist clothing. On Fox News today, they went on and on with a fake populist message about lowering gas prices. Incredibly, they denounced speculation in oil prices, but of course, they did not offer the reasonable thing to do to remedy this - regulation of commodity markets.
Instead, they argued for massively increasing domestic oil production - in the ANWR, in the oil shale of the US Rockies and in offshore deposits. They said that the increased production would so glut the oil market (!) with new supply that this would force the commodity market to drive oil prices downwards, and this would "beat the speculators".
What is interesting is that Fox News was forced to admit that the problem in oil prices is almost entirely due to speculation. What they left out is that increased oil supply probably would not do anything to drive down prices, because the price is not being set by supply-demand anyway. So here you see the fake populism of the Republican Party - sell a fake populist but actually wildly pro-corporate message - "Open up the oil fields!"
Even if this project passed and we able to drill in all these new deposits, it would not put a dent in oil prices. But the US public is so stupid that they would have forgotten about that long ago. If a bunch of Republicans got into office on this fake promise, this is all that matters.
The US public is like a kid with ADD - no attention span. Politicians are never held accountable to promises or projects because no one ever follows promises through for years to see if they come through or not. Politicians get elected on a pile of bull, and then no one is ever there to call them on it later on.
Bush has substantially caused these oil prices by failing to regulate commodity markets (and they will never regulate those markets), but the Repubs are going to stick Obama with it. Bush caused the Iraq mess, but Obama will be stuck with that too. And both of those things are catch-22's with few non-painful ways out.
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I've always been opposed to public dishonesty, which is one of my problems with Communist states. They lied about so many things that now even when they tell the truth, people figure that "All Communists lie," so they are unlikely to be believed even when they are honest. You get a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome.
Well, capitalists are pretty much the same. Almost all capitalists will always lie to defend their own interests. That is why whenever a businessman or business interest is quoted in the paper on some controversial issue, they are almost always lying. So it seems that in order to be a businessman in capitalist society, one must lie continuously.
There are cultures, such as Arab, Japanese, Thai and Filipino culture, where lying is definitely a state of art. American society proscribes all lying as evil, and your average American will tell you that he never lies. The Japanese mindset, which I subscribe to, is, "Only an idiot never tells a lie."
So there is a time and a place for this sort of thing.
But in the sort of issues that we read about in our daily paper - controversial issues where two sides are sparring it out - you really want to figure out what's going on. If the business side can be counted on to lie in defense of its interests nearly 100% of the time, this is very confusing. Especially when the media is so corrupted and dishonest itself that it's not capable of sorting things out for you.
Fox News is a more or less 24 hour lie machine, but most Americans are too stupid to figure this out. American political campaigns are all about money and never-ending lying.
I can pretty much sort out the lies from the truth after a while, but it's quite an effort. I figure most folks either don't have the brains to do this, or they don't want to know the truth, or they don't care, or they don't have the time.
Let me give you an example.
It is very hard for schizophrenics to tell hallucinated voices from regular voices. After a while, some of them get to where they can tell the hallucinated voices from the real voices.
Well, that's what it's like for me to winnow out the truth from the lies in our media. The media doesn't' really help you too much. I can figure this stuff out after a while, but it takes a lot of time. Time I figure most folks don't have.
At any rate, elections that are nothing but waterfalls of money and lying are hardly exercises in democracy.
Under capitalism, typically the state is simply an arm of the business community. Some more progressive capitalist states (Europe, for instance) have gotten away from that somewhat, but it's never really easy. Furthermore, nearly the entire media is usually controlled by the top 1% of the population, who use it to push their class interests at the expense of most everyone else, and surely the bottom 60-80%.
You would think that these things would be obvious to anyone living in a capitalist society, but toss that idea out sometime in a crowd and watch the hostile responses come back. It's painful to admit that the media one loves so much is hostile and run by one's class enemies. That hurts, and it makes you feel stupid. You're reading your enemies' propaganda, you idiot! That's the message. People get their backs up.
In recent years in the US, the state has become more and more entwined with business interests, and hence has become more and more dishonest, just like the businesses that it is now essentially a part of. That is why the Bush Administration is a never-ending Lie Machine. That is why US administrations increasingly wage war on science - because under capitalism, businesses typically despise science.
Science is out to discover the truth, come Hell or high water. To the businessman, truth is whatever helps the bottom line and falsehood is whatever hurts the bottom line. If a businessman has to lie 20,000 times about 20,000 things to protect his bottom line, he will do it and not blink an eye. Then he will get up and start it all over again.
Since business sets the dominant cultural hegemony under capitalism, most capitalist societies will tend to be hostile to science.
So, living in a capitalist society, one is really swimming in an ocean of lies. Once you enter corporate culture, you need to become a lying sociopath like the corporation itself, or you are fired. The corporation is like an ant hill. Let us call this Lying Ant Hill. If the corporation itself is a sociopathic pathological liar, so must most of its component parts, the humans who make up the corporation.
An educated and aware populace is essential for democracy. Yet how is this possible in capitalism, where the elite-controlled media lies nonstop? Where the state itself is a lie factory for wealthy interests? Where business interests can never be counted on to tell the truth? You can be like me and try to get to the bottom of things, but it's frustrating and time-consuming. Most folks have better things to do.
Democracy in most capitalist countries has serious problems. As long as the media is completely controlled by the wealthiest capitalist interests, the truth will be difficult to discover. The state itself can no longer be counted on, as it is captured by business interests and finds itself lying constantly to defend those interests.
In short, the classic Marxist argument that capitalist democracy has serious issues has a lot of truth.
The way out of the tunnel is to get some of the money out of politics via campaign finance reform. As almost all politicians are completely bribed and corrupted (bought and paid for), this solution is generally a nonstarter.
Media democracy is another route out. But it's difficult due to high startup costs.
One solution would be to allow access to more of the radio band to local or pirate radio stations. The ferocity with which the government has attacked pirate radio shows how terrified the US state is of media democracy.
The TV band, which is mostly cable now anyway with up to 500 channels, should be in part licensed out to local entities. There should be channels available for all sorts of folks all across the political spectrum. If you've got the camera and the studio, do it yourself.
But the need to sell ads makes democracy in media under capitalism very difficult. Papers, radio, TV and magazines need to sell ads to survive, and hence necessarily become the mouthpieces of the business and corporate entities that advertise in their media outlets.
Progressive presses are usually only possibly via some wealthy benefactor who is willing to eat it on advertising in order to publish a Left or pro-labor paper. This is why public access channels are the only progressive and pro-people spots on the radio band - no ads. They are listener-supported, but listening to their endless fund drives makes you realize how tenuous their existence is.
Media democracy via licensing out the cable and radio spectrum to local outfits, however, is almost impossible because the government entities that license the spectrum out are completely controlled by corporate media interests.
Hence, our public airwaves, owned by you and me, worth billions of dollars, are given away to our class enemies for pennies on the dollar. The rest of us are then locked out of the band or even arrested if we try to break into the spectrum like the pirate radio guys did.
Even if public access is granted, the fact that we have allowed horribly abusive private cable TV monopolies everywhere in the US means that these companies would probably refuse to carry any progressive stations that somehow got on the air.
The Internet offered a breath of hope to this dismal state of affairs. The cost of publishing was down to just about zero, or at least nothing but time. The Communist dream (pure Communism, after the withering of the state) where media was so democratized that neighborhood media outlets sprung up everywhere and every man could be a journalist, seemed to be happening before our eyes.
The government and the big media are really scared. Progressive voices, anti-corporate voices (like this blog, for instance), could break into the media, and the circulation was limited only by how many readers you could somehow convince to come to the website.
Hence we see desperate efforts by the cable and telephone monopolies to create fast lanes on the Internet for big-money payers and slow lanes on the Net for everyone else, like for instance this site.
There is one important lesson here: capitalism never really tolerates dissent to its essential elite structures and business interests. They will allow dissent a lot of times, but the Hell if they will give it a voice or allow it any power.
Under capitalism, the elites and business interests have to control the media space, necessary to construct the Gramscian cultural hegemony.
In the Third World, dissenters against elite and business interests are regularly arrested, beaten, jailed, tortured and murdered. And if the voices get loud enough or strong enough, the capitalists will just launch a coup, overthrow the state, then launch an Argentine or Chilean style wave of terror to permanently shut folks up. If that doesn't work, they will make the economy scream.
That's "democracy" under capitalism in a nutshell. To put it mildly, it's got some serious issues.
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Forget it. This guy has just gone way too far for me. On the other hand, I absolutely hate the opposition, the country-selling traitors who are controlled by imperialism, specifically US and British imperialism, and I have nothing but contempt and hatred for the campaign that World Imperialism is waging on this poor nation.
It's beggared the country, destroyed the economy and driven the population to try to throw Mugabe out. In other words, it's the exact same thing that the US imperialist garbage did to Nicaragua under Ortega. But the Sandinistas never resorted to the terrible behavior that Mugabe has.
There is a tendency on the Far Left to support anyone who is opposing imperialism, and make no mistake about it, Mugabe is an anti-imperialist. His instincts are correct, he is trying to help his people by steering his economy in a more socialist direction, and he is right to seize the land of the criminal White farmers, whose ancestors stole it in the first place.
5,000 White farmers owned 50% of the farmland, and 100% of the good farmland. The teeming millions of poor Zimbabweans were crowded onto the remaining marginal land, which quickly became badly eroded and even more marginal. The land reforms were the right thing to do.
The pro-imperialist opposition advocates re-establishing US/UK imperialist control over Zimbabwe by allowing the imperialist World Bank and IMF to go back to destroying the country the way they were before Mugabe told them to go to Hell. The country-selling traitors also propose to halt the confiscation of White farms and possibly even to revert these farms back to their White owners.
It is for these criminal White farmers, all 5,000 of them, that US/UK imperialism declared war on Mugabe! Incredible. We really ought to note that Mugabe was going along with the World Bank/IMF crap for years and going along with the fake British "buy out the White farmers" plan, when his people finally had enough and started revolting.
The British buy-out plan was specifically designed to not succeed in order to keep the land in the hands of the White farmers. As his people started revolting, Mugabe went along by telling the lenders to buzz off and then finally allowing the seizure of White farms.
Mugabe did not start this seizure - his own people did, and at first Mugabe opposed it, going so far as to arrest those invading the farms and to protect the White farmers. After a while, popular pressure forced him to support the farm invaders. This whole thing has been horrendously misreported in the Lying MSM Media.
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From North Star Compass, dedicated to the restoration of the USSR as a socialist state, a few articles.
The first points out that Bulgarian seniors had their pensions cut by 50% in the late 1990's, such that their pensions are now way below the poverty line.
I don't know how much Social Security pays, but could you imagine if the US government cut Social Security by 50%? Actually, they want to cut it by way more than under the Republicans' SS privatization plan (which seemed to be supported by 100% of the US "free press").
Imagine if US seniors had to live on, say, $500-600/month for a single person? I think they must get more than that, don't they? Surely SS must pay $800-900/month? And now after the capitalist "reforms" of 2000, health care is no longer accessible to the majority of Bulgarians. This article was from last year, so I doubt anything has changed.
One thing is for sure, you won't see any articles like this in the US media. Keep in mind that these changes were supported by the entire US media and by both the Democratic and Republican Parties of the US. Isn't it amazing what kind of evil shit our entire media and both of our political parties support? And the citizens don't have a clue about any of this.
The next article by Irene Malenko puts North Korea in perspective. I've already written about North Korea on here before in a long article. She notes that North Korea is being subjected to the same sanctions that are currently destroying Zimbabwe, so it is really amazing that they are still afloat after all.
North Korea lost 80% of its trading partners overnight in 1990. She asks how Holland or Germany would react if they lost 80% of their trade overnight. Also, the price of oil went up by 10X in less than a year. Let's see how any capitalist society can handle a 10X increase in the price of oil in only one year.
She also notes that there is almost no crime in Pyongyang, and it's not due to the secret police either. It's a whole other mindset there. The streets are clean, with no litter and graffiti.
You find something similar in Belarus, which is still a more or less socialist country: clean streets you could practically eat off, no graffiti, no homeless, almost no unemployed. The absence of drug-sniffing gangs of homeless youth alone (epidemic in the capitalist paradises of Latin America) would seem to be a good thing.
She's correct that the residents of Pyongyang are well-fed. The "Stalinist" (for lack of any better term) distribution system for food and goods has long since pretty much broken down. I'm not sure what has taken its place, but there are farmers' markets and small peddlers everywhere.
The last article deals with the changes that have taken place in the capitalist Ukraine that the Ukrainian nationalists love so much. Ukraine privatized all of its coal mines recently. (What for? Why privatize a coal mine? The state can run coal mines perfectly well.)
Since then, Ukraine has some of the most dangerous coal mines in the whole world. Most health and safety standards have been eliminated, and most of the mines have been bought by foreign vulture capitalists, who according to Ukrainian ultra-capitalist laws, are not liable for any health and safety regulations anyway, even those that might still exist.
Labor unions have been outlawed in most of the mines, and those that remain are completely controlled by management. The last phrase is a jibe at some of my readers who think that "class collaboration" is the way to "end the class struggle" and make workers and management both happy. Further, there's an inhuman speedup regimen going on that is probably also helping to kill these workers.
The last election that was characterized by an Orange Revolution (yet another US-funded color revolution) pitted the pro-US party (responsible for the coal mine horror) against a pro-Russian party coded as evil by the entire US media and the Bush Administration.
The color revolution that the US media cheered on so much (and I assume was supported to the hilt by the Democratic Party too) was all about making Ukraine's coal mines among the deadliest on Earth and other ultra-capitalist miracles, and it had little other purpose. Amazing the chocolate-covered shit the US media sells as the latest and best See's Candies, huh?
The Heroic Protests of Senior Citizens of Bulgaria By Dr. Ivan Angelo October 2007
In the late 1990’s the pensions of the retired people had been cut by 50%, so that now most of them are living way under the poverty line. Then after the reforms in year 2000, heath care is not accessible to most of the retied people.
DPRK: Where Every Day Is Like May Day by Irina Malenko September 2007
Shops are full, and plenty of people are buying. Juvenile delinquency is far lower than in Russia; there are no gangs of glue-sniffing, smoking and drinking kids on the streets. The streets are clean and litter-free; you don't even see trash cans on the street. People are friendly and quiet, as opposed to being rude and loud in capitalism.
Pickpockets are nonexistent, and you can probably leave your bag anywhere in Pyongyang and no one will steal it. There is little hunger in Pyongyang, but unfortunately there is still quite a bit in the rural areas. They lost 80% of their trade partners overnight in 1990 - we have to ask how Holland or Germany would cope with the overnight loss of 80% of its trade partners.
There are also very serious problems due to US sanctions which have hit the economy very hard - these are the same sanctions that have destroyed Zimbabwe - as such it is amazing that N Korea is still on its feet.
Mounting Tragedies in Capitalist Ukraine September 2007
A methane blast in the coal mine killed 63 miners and injured scores more. 360 miners that were trapped in this mine at more than 1,000 meters deep had to struggle against a raging fire. This tragic accident again and again highlights the tragedy of the present privatized mines that lack even elementary standard safety features.
Ukraine now has some of the most dangerous mines in the world, forced to working at high speed and, since most of these mines are foreign owned, they are not responsible for any safety regulations that might still exist. There are no trade union allowed in these mines and, many of the so-called leaders of those that still have a trade union, are bought by the management.
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First of all, we really ought to note that there was no "Holodomor" as the Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian Nazis have it. According to them, there was a man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that led to 6 million Ukrainians dying.
The harvest was excellent, but the evil Stalinists confiscated all of the grain to starve the people due to their resistance to collectivization. This is the view that Americans have been fed their entire lives by the controlled US propaganda media (There is no free press of any consequence in the USA).
Most historians now completely reject the notion that the USSR intentionally starved anyone to death in order to punish them for resisting the state's directives. There was a famine in 1933, and it continued for a few years afterward, but it extended over most of the USSR and was not confined to the Ukraine. The government was not happy about the famine and took severe measures to curtail it.
Most died of disease after being weakened by famine, not of starvation itself. Poor decisions were made by the state, but historically, this is often the case during famines. One can argue that the famine was caused by state policies, in particular an effort to jump-start collectivization and do it very rapidly.
A similar effort in China in 1959-1962 also caused a famine and led to 15 million deaths, again, mostly from disease. There seems to be a pattern of too-rapid collectivization of agriculture causing disastrous famines in Communist countries (something similar happened during Pol Pot's reign).
There was also an armed struggle going on, with bands of kulaks taking up arms against party officials, collective farms and farmers, etc. In the course of this armed struggle, the state killed 390,000 people, mostly Ukrainians. If you want to call this mass murder or genocide or whatever, you're entitled to do that, but that's not what the Holodomor crowd is arguing.
Also, there was widespread sabotage in the USSR around this time, mostly in the Ukraine again, whereby those resisting cultivation destroyed 50% of the livestock in the USSR and a good part of the grain crop too.
The reasons for the famine and the story of the famine itself are quite complex and go beyond the scope of this post. For now, this review by Mark Tauger of a recent book by Davies and Wheatcroft perhaps sums up the famine in the USSR during this period to the best of our knowledge. Instead of summarizing this complicated review, I will just link to it and let you go read it yourself.
On a related note, it appears that the Ukrainian Nazis (Holodomor crowd) have taken over an article called "Holodomor Denial" and pretty much ruined it. Most of the people accused of being Holodomor Deniers do acknowledge that there was a famine in the USSR during this period that killed at least 1 million people.
Walter Duranty, the famous New York Times columnist, acknowledged at least 3 million deaths from famine. Douglas Tottle, Mario Sousa and Jeff Conlon, all supposedly Holodomor Deniers according to this outrageously biased article, all agreed that from 1-2 million died of a famine in the USSR during this period.
The reason the Ukrainian Nazis have even come up with the phrase Holodomor Denial is to parrot the Jews' Holocaust Denial. The Holodomor was given that name in the late 1980's by Ukrainian nationalists in Canada, most of whom supported the Nazis and often fought beside them in WW2. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial are rampant amongst these fascist supporters.
Just to show you how wicked Wikipedia is, take a look at the talk page for the article. The talk page was taken over by Ukrainian Nazis, I mean Holodomorists. Check out this entry.
The person who wrote that, Jeff Peters, was subsequently permanently banned from working on Wikipedia merely for opposing the Ukrainian Nazis' Holodomor lies. Here is his talk page with all the dirty details. Looks like he was also a supporter of Hezbollah and the Palestinians and ran afoul of the Wikipedia Jews.
This is par for the course on Wikipedia. Most articles on Communism are seriously ruined by the Wikipedia Cabal. The Cabal, which takes orders from Jimmy Wales himself, is heavily loaded with libertarians who are quite hostile to any kind of socialism or social justice.
Jimmy Wales himself is a wild and extreme libertarian who argued that the federal government should not have lifted one finger to help the Hurricane Katrina victims in any way.
It's amazing that not one single article in the "US free press" about Wikipedia or its corrupt founder has ever mentioned the extreme corruption and intellectual dishonesty at Wikipedia, the propaganda cabals that are allowed to run amok, or even Wales' own extreme political views themselves. A free press in the US? It would be a great idea!
Was there famine? Yes. Was there a Holodomor? No.
The most responsible estimate of deaths due to the famine range from 1.5-6 million over a few years across much of the USSR.
It is interesting that in private correspondence, Robert Conquest, who for decades insisted that the famine was intentional (his view is now the received wisdom on the subject in the West) admitted in private correspondence with Davies and Wheatcroft that the famine was not intentional.
It's truly sad that what is now regarded as settled fact among responsible historians is still regarded as wild, unheard-of propaganda in much of the West. But then we get back to that wonderful American "free press" again, right?
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First off, let me start out by saying that I am a Leftist. In fact, I am a Communist. However, unlike 99% of Leftists, I actually oppose illegal immigration. Why? Because it is one of the worst things that has ever happened to American workers of all colors.
In my town, Madera, California, I figure that 85% of local Hispanics support the illegals that run amok all over here. The reason for that is clear. Hispanics, like every other group except Whites, are allowed to be and even encouraged to be ethnocentric.
What's completely insane about is that in their ethnocentrism, Hispanics are really hurting themselves. You never see a Help Wanted sign in this town. Why would you, when the unemployment rate is 11%? Yet I don't know one single illegal alien who is out of work. It seems 100% of them are working.
My White friend has roofing skills. He goes down to the local hiring hall and tries to get hired, but he does demand $9/hr. That's $1 over minimum wage. Yet every time, the employers say that some illegal over there will do it for $4-5/hr (that's far below minimum wage).
Also, my friend says that every job he applies for demands bilingual skills in Spanish. As he is not bilingual, he is SOL.
I find this ridiculous. It might be slightly sensible if these Spanish speakers were natives who had lived here since 1850 and hence had some right to their native tongue.
Instead, almost all of the ones you will need to use Spanish with are illegal aliens who hopped the border in the past 20 years. The notion that one cannot get a job in the US unless one speaks a foreign language is preposterous. I think it ought to be illegal.
Bottom line is I know all sorts of young Americans around here who are out of work. Now, they aren't always the most wonderful citizens, but if there were Help Wanted signs all over town, I think they could work somewhere.
Instead, they are unemployed and spend their days involved with gangs, crime, tagging, rolling drunks, fighting with gang rivals, leeching off their stupid girlfriends, engaging in petty thievery, and especially smoking dope. They just in general act highly uncivilized.
I would like to point out here that in a manner that is little discussed, illegal immigration has been partly responsible for gangsta culture, drug abuse, laziness, and just general cultural degeneration among young Americans of all races.
Studies have shown that as illegal immigration has increased over the past 20 years or so, the number of young Americans who count themselves as "discouraged workers" who have dropped out of the labor force has grown significantly.
The two things must be related.
Illegals are taking all the low-skilled labor and these were the sort of jobs young Americans cut their working teeth on in their youth. With no work to do, young Americans become discouraged, drop out and culturally degenerate in various ways.
In the comments section, commenter Lafayette brings up a highly pro-immigrant Weltanshauung in the UK involving Polish workers. The content is familiar. Britons are told endlessly the society will collapse if not for the immigrants. There are so many jobs that young Britons just will not do. If the immigrants go, the economy will tank. On and on.
I don't know the dynamic of Polish immigrants in the UK, but I assume that they are working for lower wages than Britons work for. Otherwise the entire UK media would not be cheering them on. I also noticed an article recently that said that Polish workers were better workers than British workers.
This is part of the pro-immigrant culture that we went through in the West under Reagan. Starting under Reagan, a new culture developed in America whereby rightwingers repeatedly endlessly what crappy workers Americans were, especially blue collar workers. There was no evidence for this whatsoever, but the talk went on.
Americans, mostly young Whites, were also told that blue collar jobs were for losers. The only way to be a winner in America was to run a business or work in an office. Good, honest, US working class culture was degraded with an incessant drumbeat. At the same time, the illegals started to pour in.
I think that these two things were connected.
There was a concerted rightwing project to tell young Americans that working class jobs were for losers and that US working class workers were crappy workers, combined with the beginnings of a total flood of unskilled labor from south of the border. The unstated assumption: the US working class all needed to be replaced by immigrants, especially illegals from Mesoamerica.
At the same time, an all-out war was waged on unions, the organizations of the US working class. The notion was also promoted that Americans are some kind of sissy fussbudgets who will not do any kind low-status labor. Therefore, we needed to import millions of illegals to do this work or else the economy would collapse. We were also regularly harangued with stories about phantom labor shortages.
After about 15 years or so of mass unskilled illegal immigration, the US Left did an about-face and decided to represent the interests of immigrant scabs over native workers. The nasty and wicked notion that normal, sane and reasonable opposition to illegal immigration was racism (!) was promoted, and soon wormed its way through the whole culture to where it is now widely accepted.
After that, the labor unions themselves, the last holdout of the workers, went over to the immigrant scabs, and US workers were finally left completely high and dry.
I would like to point out that the entire MSM was complicit in this, and they are to this day. Realize that if the MSM is consistent about any one thing, it is their sheer and utter contempt for labor. There is not one single major US newsmagazine, TV news station or large daily newspaper that is the slightest bit friendly to labor, much less organized labor.
As the UK's lunatic pro-immigrant culture continued, these same nasty memes wormed their way into the culture. One is the notion that there are certain jobs that Britons simply will not do. It's not stated, but what's implied is that Britons will not do this work for any amount of money. I don't know about Britons, but here in the US, that's manifestly untrue for anything other than field work.
A much more pernicious line soon followed, and this is that the foreigners are actually better workers than the natives. The Right will start this line, but soon the ultra-traitors of the Idiot Left will pick up on it.
I had an anarchist say straight to my face that US workers are lazy and incompetent, and that's why we need illegals to replace them (!).
Lafayette also points out that in the UK, the entire Left has given up on the working class. Instead, it is supporting immigrant scabs who are being brought in for the sole purpose of driving down the cost of labor for UK native workers.
What followed after that is that the labor unions themselves got on board and supported the immigrant scabs over the interests of native workers. Since government and media never support native workers, and as Lafayette notes, the Left completely gave up on them, what this means is that native workers lost their last friend - their very own unions .
The Left here in the US and UK will respond with the pleasant-sounding nostrum that what is needed is to organize all of the immigrants, especially the illegals. The problem is that this feel-good fall-back position is utterly doomed to failure.
The notion that organizing these illegals is going to help anything is even more idiotic here in the US than it is in the UK. Unionization in the US has been plummeting since the 1950's and in particular since 1973. Unions are now so weak that it's ridiculous. That they are suddenly going to organize all of these immigrant scabs and regain all their power and glory is comical.
Even if they did organize the immigrants, as Lafayette notes, what good is it with ten or more workers lining up for every unskilled job? All the unions in the world are pretty useless in the face of a tidal wave and resulting massive glut in unskilled labor.
Under capitalism, labor is like pricing - it is based on supply and demand. Massive oversupply of low-skilled labor will result in the bottoming out of the price of labor just as massive oversupply in a type of goods will result in the collapse in the price of that particular widget.
So with fields like construction totally glutted with low to unskilled workers, the high-paying construction jobs of yesterday are never coming back, whether you organize the immigrant scabs or not.
US unions can't even organize US workers and get them to join unions. How will they organize a bunch of illegals who can't even speak English?
P.S. I am not a xenophobe. I do support limited (200,000 a year?), tightly controlled legal immigration. The immigrants should be rigorously analyzed, and the vast majority of potential immigrants should be rejected. Immigrants should be required to jump through many hoops in order to prove to us exactly how they will be an asset to our nation instead of adding to our nightmarish underclass.
Educational, legal and other histories should be reviewed. Those immigrants from whatever land who successfully run this tough gauntlet are likely to be net benefits as opposed to net detractors to our nation.
One of the principal problems with illegal immigrants is that it is unscreened, so instead of getting high-quality immigrants, we get the peasantry and urban poor of the Third World. They are unlikely to be net benefits to our land in either the short or long run. Chain migration (family reunification) should be drastically scaled back or ended altogether.
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Superb commenter James Schipper takes on internationalism and suggests that nationalism is better for workers in this most interesting comment from the comments section of a recent post. My comments follow. I will say that I have a problem with nationalism in general and especially with the sound of the term "national socialism" for obvious reasons. Nationalism leads inevitably to racism, it seems.
But following pure internationalist logic, we are obligated to completely open borders. If you go over to leftwing and liberal pro-immigrant sites and prod them a bit, you often find that they actually do believe in Open Borders for the US.
That would mean that at some point, 1/3 of the world would be here, and 1/2 of Mexico (since 1/3 of the world and 1/2 of Mexico wants to come to the US). I argue that this would be a disaster for this country for many reasons. For one thing, we would become some kind of Calcutta West. For the environment, it would be a complete catastrophe.
At least at the start, unselected immigrants who are not interested in assimilation are only capable of recreating their own society in the new country. So Indians would recreate Calcutta in the US and Mexicans would recreate Mexico City in the US.
An excellent reason to make the immigration process highly rigorous, time-consuming, and difficult with much rejection of potential immigrants who do not make the cut is to insure that those immigrants remaining after the gauntlet-run are dedicated to assimilation.
Unscreened mass immigration, in particular illegal immigration, tends to create masses of immigrants with little interest in assimilating, plus you tend to get countless bad people mixed in with the good.
Many illegal immigrants are actually low-quality immigrants and would be rejected by any sane and rigorous US immigration program. The burden should be on the immigrant to show us precisely how and why they are going to be net positive to our country and not a negative.
Rigorously screened immigrants forced to go through a difficult and trying immigration process would be less likely to recreate Calcutta and Mexico City in the US.
Massive immigration of unskilled laborers is not only bad for ordinary workers, whose wages are driven downward, but also for taxpayers in general. There is no way that an unskilled immigrant can ever pay as much in taxes as he consumes in government services. There are two distributions going on here: upward redistribution of income among natives and transfer of income from natives to immigrants.
Your analysis above is essentially correct because it is based on the obvious premise that the real enemies of workers in high-wage countries are workers in low-wage countries. However, this is in flagrant contradiction with the Marxist idea that there is harmony of interests between all the workers of the world. That Marxist idea is totally false.
In a closed economy, workers and capitalists are like buyers and sellers. The interests of buyers and sellers are not necessarily harmonious but they are complementary and therefore in principle compatible.
Capital without labor is like a truck without a driver and labor without capital is like a transportation worker without a truck. Such a worker can't transport much. Capital without labor is useless and labor without capital is unproductive.
Under national capitalism, there can be solidarity between workers and capitalists. Under global capitalism there can't be because capital will use foreign labor as scabs, as you pointed out.
You may not realize it, but you are actually a national socialist in the literal sense of the term. The slogan of national socialism is not "Proletarians of the world, unite", but "Workers and capitalists of the nation, unite in the interest of the nation". National socialism does not preach international proletarian brotherhood but national brotherhood.
The Marxist notion of class struggle is pernicious because it makes national solidarity impossible, the only solidarity that can exist. Class struggle should not be fomented but overcome. Divisions can only be overcome by appealing to a higher common interest, and that can only be the nation.
It is only when the capitalists abandon all solidarity with their proletarian compatriots that class struggle becomes necessary, but such struggle should not be waged at a global level because the foreign workers are the allies of the capitalists. Instead of preaching class struggle, the left should appeal to the national sentiments of capitalists.
You and Patrick Buchanan are actually quite close. Your position is also quite similar to the BNP and the German NPD.
Another Marxist idea that is completely false is that workers have no country. It is often capitalists that have no country. Workers are tied to a place and that makes them patriotic. Nobody can have jobs in 20 different countries, but capitalists can easily own businesses in 20 countries.
If there are people without a country, it is global capitalists. A former CEO of the "Dutch" multinational Phillips once said that he wished that the head office of Phillips could be located in the middle of the Atlantic, which goes to show what a loyal Dutchman he was.
Over 80% of the employees of Phillips are now non-Dutch, so to call Phillips a Dutch company simply because most of its owners and top managers are Dutch is to show a capitalist bias. A company does not only consist of owners and managers but also of employees. Calling a company like Phillips Dutch is like saying that SA under apartheid was a white country because whites had most of the wealth and power.
The superiority of national socialism over Marxist socialism was proven in WWII. When Stalin had to motivate the Russians to fight, he didn't appeal to international proletarian solidarity, which would have been a complete flop, but he appealed to Russian nationalism because genuine nationalism unites while Marxist class struggle only divides.
Socialism can only work at a national level. The Swedish socialist, among the most successful in the world, created a welfare state for Swedes only. It was solidarity that ended at the national border. Now that the Swedish socialists have been infected with political correctness, they are undermining the Swedish welfare state by importing huge numbers of immigrants.
As one Dutch socialist put it, the welfare state is a strictly national arrangement.
The Left has hurt its cause immensely by its hostility to religion and to nationalism. Socialism without nationalism is impotent and nationalism without socialism is fraudulent. A person who claims to be a nationalist but who is a libertarian willing to let poorer members of the nation languish in misery and ignorance is like a man who claims to be a good family man but who never helps less fortunate family members.
Bottom line: there is absolutely nothing progressive about massive immigration of low-skilled to unskilled labor whatsoever. Citizens suffer from cutbacks in government social programs meant to help them.
There is a redistribution of income upwards in the citizenry itself, such that the lower 80% or so of society loses and the upper 20% of so of society gains. IOW, owners and possibly upper management and investors make out big and the workers (generally 80% or so of society) lose money.
In addition to losing money, they also lose services. It is quite possible that they may also see tax hikes to pay for diminishing services. Workers see their wages decline, suffer income losses, lose social services and get tax hikes.
The top 20% of society gets a tremendous amount of increased income, sees dramatic decreases in the wages it must be its workers, and in all probability sees the Gramscian culture of society change in favor of the top 20%, who now increasingly run things and dominate society in general. Why? With the dramatic income shift upwards towards the top 20%, this group will be able to buy the government more and more.
Since government is mostly made up such folks (in Congress and the Executive Branch), they will be delighted by their increased wealth and will continue to direct government policies to continue this redistribution.
The lopsided money shift will also mean that more and more of a nation's discretionary spending will be done by the top 20%. I believe already they spend at least and possibly way over 50% of all consumer spending. So advertisers direct most of their advertising to this top group, and just ignore the bottom 80%.
This is why when you turn on the TV, you see one advertisement after another directed towards the top 20% of society. This is why when you open up Time Magazine, 90% of the people they interview are in the top 20%, and most of their stories seem to be directed at this group also. It is almost as if the rest of us did not even exist.
I would also like to point out the inevitable: sitting there watching TV and seeing one ad after another directed at the top 20% and realizing that one is a million miles away from that income bracket, many folks will only get resentful and angry and determined to get into that bracket.
Since even if everyone tried to get into the top 20%, 80% would fail, most people are just never going to get there. This increases the dog eat dog mindset, societal atomization and probably even the crime rate.
Liberals and the Left support this!
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Well, you know, Time is still an intellectual rag when it isn't imitating US News and World Report, and I guess the mass outbreak of stupidity called a US election even sticks in their craw.
Americans being Americans, the MSM being what is, the political parties being what they are, and the Israeli Lobby being an actually existing entity, don't anyone expect any outbreaks of sanity anytime soon. Sadly, McCain beats all Democrats in keeping us safe from terrorists. I guess as long you don't have a uniform on in McCain's 100 Years War in Iraq, maybe he keeps you safer. Maybe. But I doubt it.
The worst terror attack on US soil ever happened on George Bush's watch, and he was rewarded for that "achievement" by consistently receiving sky-high ratings for "keeping us safe from terror". Are you laughing yet? Maybe you ought to be. That's the way US Idiot-Politics works. The MSM and both parties work to keep us as idiotic and ignorant as possible, and in return we voice our stupidity in the ballot box every couple years.
None of it makes sense to any halfway intelligent person, but most Americans aren't halfway intelligent anyway. They are not supposed to be, and they probably don't even want to be. That the Ruling Class of society deliberately conspires to keep them as stupid as possible is particularly infuriating, though not unexpected.
Study shows that ruling elites have opposed educating the masses for centuries if not millenia. Keeping the people as stupid as possible is a core principle of conservatism itself, and an excellent reason to oppose it outright on principle. That America continues on in the footsteps of the Medieval indulgence-buying priests saying Latin Masses is poignant and infuriating, yet makes a sort of sickening sense.
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Independent Left journalist in California. Trustafarian in a shackteau, slumming it up in the barrio. Revolutionary, Leftist nationalist, Christian, liberation theology, replacement theology. BA Journalism, MA Linguistics, Green Party, Communist Party USA, Democratic Party.
Generally, topics focused through a progressive yet heterodox lens. Discusses race a lot. Also lots of shock and horror videos - if it bugs you, don't read or watch. Pan-humanist universalist, non-racist race realist, despises the PC, Cultural Marxist, Identity Politics, Western New Left. Iconoclast, smashes all party lines, angers everyone. Notorious provocateur; if I'm not making you mad, I'm not doing my job. Channeling Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, Lenny Bruce, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, Hunter S. Thompson and Wally Gator. Shoot first.
