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 18:
In the comments section, Uncle Milton disagrees with me when I say that the Republican Party has been cultivating anti-intellectualism for a long time now. He goes on to list a number of bright Republican politicians, but concedes Gerald Ford was a dunce.
They truth is this. The Republicans have been cultivating anti-intellectualism and just being shit-ignorant in general for a long time now.
In part this has roots in pro-business culture. For a long time in the US, the business and money crowd was aggressively anti-education and anti-intellectual.
I've worked around rich people a lot so I know it still exists. For many years as I was growing up, I could not count the businessmen who delighted in telling me that they either hadn't spent a day in college or didn't have a degree. The idea was that you didn't need a degree to make money, and college just got in the way of making a buck.
One great thing about MBA-addiction is that we seem to have done away with that silliness once and for all. Now, for an entry-level position at many corporations and other institutions, a BA or BS from an accredited university is required. Increasingly, a degree is indeed required in order to make decent money.
I've also spent a lot of my life around some real intellectuals, including the poetry crowd, the artist and art crowd, the writer crowd and the Hollywood crowd. A lot collected books and art, listened to opera, went to art movies, the theater, seminars and dance performances, and could bend your ear about all sorts of highbrow stuff. As a general rule, while these folks were not poor, they were not rich by any stretch.
The truth is that the Republican Party cultivates nothing less than hatred for educated people, intellectualism, knowledge, culture and brains. They hate college professors, they hate intellectuals, they hate Hollywood.
Of course many Republican politicians, thinkers, authors and voters are very smart. Sure they have advanced degrees, law degrees and medical degrees. Sure they write books and whatnot.
But the message and tone of the party is deep contempt and hatred for education, college degrees, advanced degrees, intellectuals, eggheads, all of that.
Ronald Reagan was a fucking dumbass and a hardcore anti-intellectual. He was not smart enough to be either governor or President. I don't care what his IQ was.
A friend of my father's met him once at a party in Los Angeles when Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and said he was really friendly but not that smart. A friend of my grandmother's dated him in Iowa and said the exact same thing about him. That's what everyone said about him. She dumped him because he was too dumb for her.
It was under Reagan that anti-intellectualism was cultivated to an extreme degree. With every stupid, idiotic, dumb-fuck thing this moron said, the Republicans just cheered more and more. It was like the more stupid shit he said, the more delirious they were. They weren't ashamed at all. They were rolling in the mud.
They were finally sticking it to the ivory tower eggheads, the weenie desegregationist judges, Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a clever dig at academia) and Wallace's "pointy-headed liberals who can't even park their bicycles straight" (same thing). It was like a revenge party of stupid, and it carried on for most of a decade.
Gerald Ford is a very intelligent man with a very high IQ.
Richard Nixon was a very smart guy.
George Bush Sr. is not only extremely smart, but he is also a real intellectual.
George W. Bush is intelligent. I read a 5-6 page interview with him in a major news magazine once and I came away thinking, "All this time I thought this guy was dumb, but he's actually a bright fellow." But he is not a deep thinker, nor is he intellectual at all, and furthermore, he is unbelievably shit-ignorant.
He continues the aggressive cultivation of ignorance started with Reagan.
Sarah Palin, an intelligent woman who is also appallingly ignorant for the job she is running for, continues in Reagan's footsteps.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Showing posts with label Republican Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican Party. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
A Defense of White Working Class Republicans
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 7:
Here.
Doesn't make much sense.
First of all, it starts out with a defense that the White working class is making an intelligent decision to vote on abortion, gay rights and the 2nd Amendment as opposed to economics. Not much to say to that.
Next he argues that Democrats don't really have the economic interests of the White working class at heart; in fact, Republicans do. This is the hoary Republican line, disproven endlessly, especially in these difficult times.
Finally he gets down to some red meat. Turns out that Republicans are better for the White working class because they support lax to nonexistent zoning regulations, which makes homes cheaper! This incredible argument is from none other than Steve Sailer, who apparently works for the Republican Party now. Sailer wants to have a truce with me, but I am thinking of unilaterally violating the cease-fire.
According to Sailer, the Republicans support something called "cheap family formation". A study of economic statistics over the past 30 years should disprove that.
Yeah, I've met so many working class Whites who vote Republican to eviscerate zoning laws so they can get a cheap house ! Lax zoning laws of course being a prime cause of crappy neighborhoods in the first place of course.
Next up. It's smart for the White working class to vote Republican an anti-immigration basis. Though both parties are horrible on this issue, the current Republican Party is one of the most horrible parties for immigration-restrictionists in recent memory. The Republican Party is for all intents and purposes an Open Borders political party.
Last, it's smart for the White working class to vote Republican because Democrats try to desegregate White schools. First of all, few actual desegregation efforts occur outside the South anymore. Second of all, they are ordered by judges, not federal, state or local officials. Third, I am not aware of the Republicans doing anything to stop desegregation of schools.
From the banner:
Who is this blogger? He's big enough to get written up in the New York Times? How sorry.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated December 7:
Here.
Doesn't make much sense.
First of all, it starts out with a defense that the White working class is making an intelligent decision to vote on abortion, gay rights and the 2nd Amendment as opposed to economics. Not much to say to that.
Next he argues that Democrats don't really have the economic interests of the White working class at heart; in fact, Republicans do. This is the hoary Republican line, disproven endlessly, especially in these difficult times.
Finally he gets down to some red meat. Turns out that Republicans are better for the White working class because they support lax to nonexistent zoning regulations, which makes homes cheaper! This incredible argument is from none other than Steve Sailer, who apparently works for the Republican Party now. Sailer wants to have a truce with me, but I am thinking of unilaterally violating the cease-fire.
According to Sailer, the Republicans support something called "cheap family formation". A study of economic statistics over the past 30 years should disprove that.
Yeah, I've met so many working class Whites who vote Republican to eviscerate zoning laws so they can get a cheap house ! Lax zoning laws of course being a prime cause of crappy neighborhoods in the first place of course.
Next up. It's smart for the White working class to vote Republican an anti-immigration basis. Though both parties are horrible on this issue, the current Republican Party is one of the most horrible parties for immigration-restrictionists in recent memory. The Republican Party is for all intents and purposes an Open Borders political party.
Last, it's smart for the White working class to vote Republican because Democrats try to desegregate White schools. First of all, few actual desegregation efforts occur outside the South anymore. Second of all, they are ordered by judges, not federal, state or local officials. Third, I am not aware of the Republicans doing anything to stop desegregation of schools.
From the banner:
Half SigmaUm, don't think so.
The new politics of common sense. Neither Republican, Democratic, nor Libertarian.
Who is this blogger? He's big enough to get written up in the New York Times? How sorry.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The "School Vouchers" Bullshit
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 16:
McCain's going on and on about school vouchers in the debate right now. It's a scam, a Republican scam. What's it all about? A lot of Republicans are rich. They send their kids to private schools. Even Republicans who aren't rich, still try to send their kids to private schools.
Only rich Americans, or those who really dig deep into their pockets, can afford to send their kids to private schools. It's a luxury. Ordinary Americans living sensibly within their means just can't afford it. So these rich people want the state to pay for them to send their kids to private schools, instead of paying for it out of their own pocket! What a joke!
The fact is that public schools in a lot of places in our country (perhaps not coincidentally, in areas with large Black and/or Hispanic schools) are not in very good shape. I taught for a long time in these schools. There is nothing wrong with the schools! They are out of money, but whose fault is that? The "vouchers" crowd doesn't want to give these schools one more nickel.
The whole problem with these schools is lack of money and the kids. Lack of money means these schools are falling apart, and a lot of them hardly even have textbooks. The books that exist are often old or partly destroyed. Who destroyed them? In some cases, the kids did. Who thrashed the schools? In some cases, the kids did.
There's no problem whatsoever with the either the teachers or administrators in these schools. I've worked with 100's of them and the vast majority of them are just fine. They deserve medals, not slamming. The Republicans hate no one in the US so much as our schoolteachers. The teachers are incompetent, and their unions are evil.
Supposedly, in a poorly functioning area, the private schools are better than the public ones. It's quite possible, but the only reason is because the private schools throw out all the knotheads! Anyone who fucks off, is disruptive or destructive just gets tossed. Public schools can't do that. We have to take everyone. We can hardly throw out anyone, or at least we hardly could when I worked there.
There is no a priori reason why a private school should be better than a public one. I taught in the public schools for years and I assure you that we are under a Hell of a lot of pressure on the job. Pressure from students, from other teachers and especially from administrators. We can't fuck off or screw up. The administrators are breathing down our necks all the time.
Many of the kids are scummy little brat shits who monitor our speech for the slightest little unacceptable comment and then run to the administration or Mommy and Daddy and say, "Teacher said bla bla bla".
The White kids are by far the worst ones of them all - and the wealthier the White kids are, the more evil they are. Hispanic kids were generally pretty good - at least, they seemed to have the same sort of "fear and respect the teacher" that my Mom did.
Blacks are sort of a mixed bag and you really have to watch what you say. They like to go running to Black administrators and teachers and say, "The evil White teacher said bla bla bla." Usually they try to construe something "racist" out of this. The Black teachers and admins, in too many cases, just back up the kids against Whitey, I guess on the basis of racial solidarity.
We've given these little bratty shits so much power that they think they control the schools and hire the teachers.
The real power in the schools is the parents. Parents act like they hire and fire the administrators and teachers and are always marching off to complain about this or that teacher. Why? Who the Hell knows? Usually it's, "Evil teacher picked on my precious little (devious and wicked brat) Johnny". Almost always White parents running off to bust the teacher too.
My Mom says that when she was in school, this was unthinkable. Only the most grotesque untoward behavior by a teacher would conceivably send them complaining to parents or administrators, and she can't think of one time when it ever happened. She said that if they ever would have come home to complain about the teacher, their parents would have defended the teacher and told them to shut up and knock it off.
They lived in fear of the teacher. Teachers were not supposed to be nice. You weren't supposed to like the teacher. The teacher was supposed to kick your butt and make your lazy punk ass learn something.
We teachers can hardly talk about anything. We can't talk about our personal lives and we sure as Hell can't talk politics. We can't talk about race, religion or all sorts of stuff. I was paranoid the whole time, watching every word coming out of my mouth, and the brats would still keep try to bust me.
There is also a problem with this whole debate. If kids aren't learning anything or are failing, it's the teacher's fault! Well, maybe in a few cases. In most cases, I say no way! Kids fail classes or don't learn either because they are dumb or because they fuck off and don't try.
There's no reason private schools are better than public schools, and the truth is that they are not. My father taught in private schools and they are a joke. I guess some of the really expensive ones are pretty good, but your average private school sucks education-wise.
They horribly underpay and overwork the teachers. They scrimp on everything, don't spend shit on the school and throw it all over to the teachers. My father was buying paper, pencils and all sorts of school materials because the school wasn't providing shit.
There were strict orders to pass X number of students and give most students A's and B's. If a teacher gave too many failing or low grades, he was threatened with being fired! The whole thing was one big fraud, a grotesque, cynical joke. The owners of the private school were rich shits who cared nothing about the schools and spend most of their time flying around in a private helicopter!
By all objective criteria, kids seemed to be getting a better education in my father's public school classes than in his private school classes.
Furthermore, the vouchers scam defunds the public schools at the same time that it increases that number of "special needs" kids, problem students, brats and fuckoffs (since these will all get kicked out of the private schools) while many of the better students will take off.
It's a recipe for destroying the public schools in the US. Yes, it is true, but the Republicans are so reactionary that they actually want to get rid of public education in the US or at least defund it so much that it doesn't work.
This whole "vouchers" debate has a Hell of a lot to do with race, but no one ever discusses that. I'm going to end this post here without spelling it out for you. I invite you to ponder the obvious fact that the vouchers debate here in the US, like so many things, is shot through and through with race.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Updated October 16:
McCain's going on and on about school vouchers in the debate right now. It's a scam, a Republican scam. What's it all about? A lot of Republicans are rich. They send their kids to private schools. Even Republicans who aren't rich, still try to send their kids to private schools.
Only rich Americans, or those who really dig deep into their pockets, can afford to send their kids to private schools. It's a luxury. Ordinary Americans living sensibly within their means just can't afford it. So these rich people want the state to pay for them to send their kids to private schools, instead of paying for it out of their own pocket! What a joke!
The fact is that public schools in a lot of places in our country (perhaps not coincidentally, in areas with large Black and/or Hispanic schools) are not in very good shape. I taught for a long time in these schools. There is nothing wrong with the schools! They are out of money, but whose fault is that? The "vouchers" crowd doesn't want to give these schools one more nickel.
The whole problem with these schools is lack of money and the kids. Lack of money means these schools are falling apart, and a lot of them hardly even have textbooks. The books that exist are often old or partly destroyed. Who destroyed them? In some cases, the kids did. Who thrashed the schools? In some cases, the kids did.
There's no problem whatsoever with the either the teachers or administrators in these schools. I've worked with 100's of them and the vast majority of them are just fine. They deserve medals, not slamming. The Republicans hate no one in the US so much as our schoolteachers. The teachers are incompetent, and their unions are evil.
Supposedly, in a poorly functioning area, the private schools are better than the public ones. It's quite possible, but the only reason is because the private schools throw out all the knotheads! Anyone who fucks off, is disruptive or destructive just gets tossed. Public schools can't do that. We have to take everyone. We can hardly throw out anyone, or at least we hardly could when I worked there.
There is no a priori reason why a private school should be better than a public one. I taught in the public schools for years and I assure you that we are under a Hell of a lot of pressure on the job. Pressure from students, from other teachers and especially from administrators. We can't fuck off or screw up. The administrators are breathing down our necks all the time.
Many of the kids are scummy little brat shits who monitor our speech for the slightest little unacceptable comment and then run to the administration or Mommy and Daddy and say, "Teacher said bla bla bla".
The White kids are by far the worst ones of them all - and the wealthier the White kids are, the more evil they are. Hispanic kids were generally pretty good - at least, they seemed to have the same sort of "fear and respect the teacher" that my Mom did.
Blacks are sort of a mixed bag and you really have to watch what you say. They like to go running to Black administrators and teachers and say, "The evil White teacher said bla bla bla." Usually they try to construe something "racist" out of this. The Black teachers and admins, in too many cases, just back up the kids against Whitey, I guess on the basis of racial solidarity.
We've given these little bratty shits so much power that they think they control the schools and hire the teachers.
The real power in the schools is the parents. Parents act like they hire and fire the administrators and teachers and are always marching off to complain about this or that teacher. Why? Who the Hell knows? Usually it's, "Evil teacher picked on my precious little (devious and wicked brat) Johnny". Almost always White parents running off to bust the teacher too.
My Mom says that when she was in school, this was unthinkable. Only the most grotesque untoward behavior by a teacher would conceivably send them complaining to parents or administrators, and she can't think of one time when it ever happened. She said that if they ever would have come home to complain about the teacher, their parents would have defended the teacher and told them to shut up and knock it off.
They lived in fear of the teacher. Teachers were not supposed to be nice. You weren't supposed to like the teacher. The teacher was supposed to kick your butt and make your lazy punk ass learn something.
We teachers can hardly talk about anything. We can't talk about our personal lives and we sure as Hell can't talk politics. We can't talk about race, religion or all sorts of stuff. I was paranoid the whole time, watching every word coming out of my mouth, and the brats would still keep try to bust me.
There is also a problem with this whole debate. If kids aren't learning anything or are failing, it's the teacher's fault! Well, maybe in a few cases. In most cases, I say no way! Kids fail classes or don't learn either because they are dumb or because they fuck off and don't try.
There's no reason private schools are better than public schools, and the truth is that they are not. My father taught in private schools and they are a joke. I guess some of the really expensive ones are pretty good, but your average private school sucks education-wise.
They horribly underpay and overwork the teachers. They scrimp on everything, don't spend shit on the school and throw it all over to the teachers. My father was buying paper, pencils and all sorts of school materials because the school wasn't providing shit.
There were strict orders to pass X number of students and give most students A's and B's. If a teacher gave too many failing or low grades, he was threatened with being fired! The whole thing was one big fraud, a grotesque, cynical joke. The owners of the private school were rich shits who cared nothing about the schools and spend most of their time flying around in a private helicopter!
By all objective criteria, kids seemed to be getting a better education in my father's public school classes than in his private school classes.
Furthermore, the vouchers scam defunds the public schools at the same time that it increases that number of "special needs" kids, problem students, brats and fuckoffs (since these will all get kicked out of the private schools) while many of the better students will take off.
It's a recipe for destroying the public schools in the US. Yes, it is true, but the Republicans are so reactionary that they actually want to get rid of public education in the US or at least defund it so much that it doesn't work.
This whole "vouchers" debate has a Hell of a lot to do with race, but no one ever discusses that. I'm going to end this post here without spelling it out for you. I invite you to ponder the obvious fact that the vouchers debate here in the US, like so many things, is shot through and through with race.
Note: Readers should carefully read the Commenting Rules before commenting to avoid having their comments edited or deleted and to avoid being banned from the site.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Worst Day in a Century For US Financial Markets
Well, Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest, if not the biggest stock brokerages in the US, has gone under. Bank of America bought them out for $50 billion, but if they would not have, Merrill Lynch would have had to file for bankruptcy. At the same time, the huge, 158 year old Lehman Brothers financial firm, the fourth largest in America, has filed for bankruptcy. This venerable firm is apparently history.
30,000 have been laid off around the world and the company has $600 billion (WTH!?) in outstanding debt. There were negotiations between Lehman and Barclays and Bank of America to buy out Lehman, but without guarantees of the US government (taxpayers) taking responsibility for the soaring peaks of bad debt on Lehman's books, no one wants to touch this bad apple with a ten foot pole and an eleven foot extension.
Some are calling the crash of Lehman Brothers the worst day in a century for global financial markets. That was what Alan Greenspan called it.
At the same time, AIG, one of the nation's largest insurance firms and at one point the largest insurance company in the world, is in serious trouble, and its stock is being pounded into the ground. I am not sure what it is up, but apparently they are caught up in the subprime bad housing loans catastrophe.
The Bank of England injected $5 billion into markets to keep them going, and the EU Central Bank pitched in $30 billion for its share.
Some call AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch thetop three names on Wall Street.
If these three go under, billions in pension funds will be zeroed out and banks and financial firms all over the world will be hammered. Washington Mutual, one of the US' largest banks, is also seeing its stock beat up badly, and it is in danger of going under.
Wall Street hemorrhaged an unbelievable 500 points on Monday, September 15. I'm amazed they didn't stop trading. I'm terrified at what tomorrow holds.
The Bush Administration seems to be taking a hands off approach and saying to let these huge firms go under. This is the classic free market evangelical fundamentalist approach and it is one that John McCain is advocating.
McCain is taking the apparently completely insane position that the cure to this chaos and Hell caused by deregulation is even less government. He proposes more tax cuts for wealthy persons and corporations, and this is going to fix the mess up just fine. Even Ayn Randist objectivist and ultra-reactionary Alan Greenspan says that's nuts. Obama promises more socialist regulatory measures as a nostrum, which is what this crisis needs.
McCain also seems to edge towards calling for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He and Palin wrote an editorial a week ago that called for "downsizing" the two institutions. That's probably a completely disastrous notion. It was wild privatization of everything in sight, including oversight, that caused this whole mess. The Bush Administration's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a socialist move, but it was right and proper.
It arguably should have been done long ago. The reason the two institutions got into too much trouble was because it was too private and not public enough, and in the process of becoming more and more private and less and less public.
Both Obama and McCain oppose a bailout of Lehman Brothers. I don't know enough to comment on that. However, Paul Krugman, whom I deeply respect, says that the US government is playing Russian roulette with the financial system.
After Bear Stearns went down six months ago, socialist regulations should have been put in immediately to try to stem the hemorrhage. Instead, the Bush Administration did nothing at all. At the time, Krugman called that move foolhardy. He is looking more and more right, and I don't want him to be.
McCain opposed the Bush Administration's socialist bailout of Bear Stearns. It was painful, but arguably necessary, and inaction would have been much worse. It certainly slowed this crisis down and bought it some time.
At the time, McCain called for less regulation of financial institutions, not more. McCain and Palin both seem to be resolutely and reflexively opposed to more regulation of the financial sector, or even of regulation period. In this way, they are even further to the right of ultra-reactionary George Bush.
McCain-Palin's economic plan, what little we learn of it, sounds really frightening. They would continue the insanity and idiocy of Bush economics and have vowed to actually make things even worse.
I'm no economist, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Government bailouts are nasty, but the alternative may well be worse. Anyway, I'm a socialist, and bailouts can be seen as a kind of socialist intervention.
The Bush Administration, and frankly, Republicans for the past 30 years, have created this whole mess. I must admit sadly that "free market Democrats" like Jimmy "Atari Democrat" Carter and Bill "Eisenhower Republican" Clinton had their mitts in this mess too. This is because Democrats have increasingly been adopting radical neoliberalism over the past 30 years, with the predictable results.
But the biggest players have always been Republicans and one of the biggest culprits of all is one of George Bush's and John McCain's best buddies, Phil Gramm of Texas.
Now retired, Gramm is probably responsible more than anyone else for dismantling regulations set up in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in order to prevent it from happening again. Many reforms were enacted during the Depression and afterward. It's best to call these socialist reforms because that is what they were.
These socialist reforms tamper the insanities of the free market like lithium smooths the moods of a psychotic bipolar patient. Or another analogy could be a fog layer and an ocean along a seacoast that moderates the weather and produces a nice Mediterranean climate for much of the year.
True, if you love wild swings, you can go inland to the deserts where there is no moderating weather and it's 120 in the daytime and 30 at night.
This is what the capitalists want. Capitalists are basically sick people - they behave like the mentally ill or sex or drug addicts. They are like untreated psychotic bipolar patients who live for the wild manic rides. Capitalists are like a pathological gambler in a casino with a no-limit credit card blazed on coke and downing cocktails. There's no limit to the runs.
The capitalist wants the ability to run up huge profits in crash and burn, live fast die young, boom and bust economics. Neoliberal free market economics is just great for the boom and bust crazies. Like the wasted gambler with the stolen credit card in the casino, the capitalist thinks there's no limits to the run-ups. He keeps going to new tables and doubling down.
You tell him his manic episode is going to crash hard at some point and he turns around to punch you in the face and charges at you like a buffalo as you race out of the building for your life.
With capitalism, as with boys on a playground, adult supervision is necessary. Capitalists need to be supervised by adults called government and socialism. Even Adam Smith himself acknowledged that the unregulated free market was one of the worst evils known to man. He said the free market had to be regulated by the state to prevent total economic chaos. The heirs to Smith's throne seem to have forgotten his books.
They got rid of almost all of the progressive socialist legislation we put in that prevents wild run-ups and Gold Rush style booms but at the same time also dampens down the inevitable free-fall busts that always follow the booms, like day follows night.
It used to be, you went to get a mortgage and if your income was about 1/3 of the mortgage and your credit was good, you got the loan. The bank wanted to make dead sure you were going to pay back the loan so they vetted you carefully. Those days are gone.
In recent years you could get a loan for 7 times your income, and the lenders assumed you would not be able to pay it back. But they didn't care anymore because you weren't even going to pay it back to them.
They took your bullshit loans and packaged them into some bullshit thingies called CDO's, which were some weird investment vehicles made up of thousands of home mortgages, many of which were known to be bad loans. Then they got crooked accountants to mark these crap securities with AAA ratings when all they were were turds with fancy paint all over them.
They then hocked this ripoff fraudulent packages to suckers in the financial world, while claiming they were worth their weight in gold. The deregulations had gotten rid of the notion that investment banks should be separated from consumer banks. There was supposed to be a solid wall between the two, so if one went down, it would not take down the other.
If a financial bank went down, it would not take down consumer banks. When banks were allowed to be both financial and consumer banks, they failed in 1929, causing the Great Depression. This wall, called Glass-Steagall, has been progressively whittled away for many years now to the point where it is about gone.
Republicans, especially Mr. Gramm and his diabolical Dragon Lady Korean wife, were the worst offenders. The destruction of Glass-Steagall is an important reason why we are seeing these financial meltdowns right now. Another reason was the whittling away of standards for home loans. The lending industry has always hated regulations making it so that those who took out loans to buy homes could pay back their loans.
By the 1960's, regulations were in pace that enabled banks to make vast numbers of home loans, very few of which went bad. As the banks itself ate it when the loan went bad, applicants were vetted religiously. This was progressively gutted over the years to the point where loans were given out gleefully to folks who in no sane world should have gotten a loan.
White nationalists have posited a theory (and now pro-business freemarketeers havejumped in) that the subprimes and other bad loans were ordered by the US government eager to get Hispanics and Blacks into home ownership, hence the niggers* and the Mexicans are responsible for the devastation of our economy! Wow, what a breathtakingly audacious theory.
There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was. The Feds started cracking down on this under Clinton 10-15 years ago, and there was no housing crisis then.
The notion that PC Feds pushed poor, innocent, mortgage banker criminals into making bogus loans to irresponsible non-Whites appears false.
The mortgage bankers made lots of money on every loan, so they would practically sign up a German shepherd if one walked in and asked for a loan. The criminals quickly sold the loans in fraudulent packages to poor suckers in financial institutions, so it was out of their hands they didn't care whether it was paid back or not.
True, people took out loans they could not afford, but in a sane society, those loans never get made in the first place. Loan officers criminals were con artists who slickly pitched the loans to ignorant people who had no business being there. They got them in at very low teaser rates and didn't really explain well that the rate was going to go up later on.
The lenders were as low as Nigerian email scammers.
But it's not up to the borrower to determine if he qualifies for a loan, and a borrower is not irresponsible for taking out any loan.
The burden of responsibility in a sane society lies on lenders. If lenders eat it when loans go bad, then they are unlikely to loan to the undeserving, who are shown the door. Blaming Blacks and Browns for this housing collapse is an appalling exercise in White racism.
When the loans went bad, as any idiot knew they would, they pounded financial institutions all over who had bought huge quantities of these crazy things without really knowing what they were getting into. Financial houses poured billions into fools gold securities that disintegrated in front of their eyes to pennies on the dollar.
Soon they were out billions with bills coming in continuously and frankly no money in the drawer to pay any of them. You can only go on for a while like that.
John McCain has had his mitts in this bullshit for about 30 years. He's supported just about every crazy deregulation package that came down the pike. If he ever opposed one, let me know.
Furthermore, McCain was in very, very deep in the same horrible Savings and Loan collapse. He spent much of the 1980's, while prophets were screaming in the wilderness about the doomsday looming S&L mess, barking about the need for fewer and fewer regulations on S&L's. Look what happened.
McCain hasn't learned a Goddamned thing. Here it is, 20 years later, and he's back doing it all over again. He's like a sociopath impervious to punishment.
McCain, the Bush Administration and Republicans in general are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse of the housing market and the resulting failures and collapses in the financial market, banks and insurance companies. Democrats are also responsible, but much less so, and hardcore liberals like Obama probably have little dirt on them.
John McCain now says he's coming in as a "maverick" and he's going to flip and change 30 years of deregulation mania as he becomes some kind of born-again reformer. Just as Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative in 2000, when he had many years in office proving the opposite, McCain's record speaks for itself. McCain the socialist big government regulator? Get real.
*used sardonically
30,000 have been laid off around the world and the company has $600 billion (WTH!?) in outstanding debt. There were negotiations between Lehman and Barclays and Bank of America to buy out Lehman, but without guarantees of the US government (taxpayers) taking responsibility for the soaring peaks of bad debt on Lehman's books, no one wants to touch this bad apple with a ten foot pole and an eleven foot extension.
Some are calling the crash of Lehman Brothers the worst day in a century for global financial markets. That was what Alan Greenspan called it.
At the same time, AIG, one of the nation's largest insurance firms and at one point the largest insurance company in the world, is in serious trouble, and its stock is being pounded into the ground. I am not sure what it is up, but apparently they are caught up in the subprime bad housing loans catastrophe.
The Bank of England injected $5 billion into markets to keep them going, and the EU Central Bank pitched in $30 billion for its share.
Some call AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch thetop three names on Wall Street.
If these three go under, billions in pension funds will be zeroed out and banks and financial firms all over the world will be hammered. Washington Mutual, one of the US' largest banks, is also seeing its stock beat up badly, and it is in danger of going under.
Wall Street hemorrhaged an unbelievable 500 points on Monday, September 15. I'm amazed they didn't stop trading. I'm terrified at what tomorrow holds.
The Bush Administration seems to be taking a hands off approach and saying to let these huge firms go under. This is the classic free market evangelical fundamentalist approach and it is one that John McCain is advocating.
McCain is taking the apparently completely insane position that the cure to this chaos and Hell caused by deregulation is even less government. He proposes more tax cuts for wealthy persons and corporations, and this is going to fix the mess up just fine. Even Ayn Randist objectivist and ultra-reactionary Alan Greenspan says that's nuts. Obama promises more socialist regulatory measures as a nostrum, which is what this crisis needs.
McCain also seems to edge towards calling for privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He and Palin wrote an editorial a week ago that called for "downsizing" the two institutions. That's probably a completely disastrous notion. It was wild privatization of everything in sight, including oversight, that caused this whole mess. The Bush Administration's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a socialist move, but it was right and proper.
It arguably should have been done long ago. The reason the two institutions got into too much trouble was because it was too private and not public enough, and in the process of becoming more and more private and less and less public.
Both Obama and McCain oppose a bailout of Lehman Brothers. I don't know enough to comment on that. However, Paul Krugman, whom I deeply respect, says that the US government is playing Russian roulette with the financial system.
After Bear Stearns went down six months ago, socialist regulations should have been put in immediately to try to stem the hemorrhage. Instead, the Bush Administration did nothing at all. At the time, Krugman called that move foolhardy. He is looking more and more right, and I don't want him to be.
McCain opposed the Bush Administration's socialist bailout of Bear Stearns. It was painful, but arguably necessary, and inaction would have been much worse. It certainly slowed this crisis down and bought it some time.
At the time, McCain called for less regulation of financial institutions, not more. McCain and Palin both seem to be resolutely and reflexively opposed to more regulation of the financial sector, or even of regulation period. In this way, they are even further to the right of ultra-reactionary George Bush.
McCain-Palin's economic plan, what little we learn of it, sounds really frightening. They would continue the insanity and idiocy of Bush economics and have vowed to actually make things even worse.
I'm no economist, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Government bailouts are nasty, but the alternative may well be worse. Anyway, I'm a socialist, and bailouts can be seen as a kind of socialist intervention.
The Bush Administration, and frankly, Republicans for the past 30 years, have created this whole mess. I must admit sadly that "free market Democrats" like Jimmy "Atari Democrat" Carter and Bill "Eisenhower Republican" Clinton had their mitts in this mess too. This is because Democrats have increasingly been adopting radical neoliberalism over the past 30 years, with the predictable results.
But the biggest players have always been Republicans and one of the biggest culprits of all is one of George Bush's and John McCain's best buddies, Phil Gramm of Texas.
Now retired, Gramm is probably responsible more than anyone else for dismantling regulations set up in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in order to prevent it from happening again. Many reforms were enacted during the Depression and afterward. It's best to call these socialist reforms because that is what they were.
These socialist reforms tamper the insanities of the free market like lithium smooths the moods of a psychotic bipolar patient. Or another analogy could be a fog layer and an ocean along a seacoast that moderates the weather and produces a nice Mediterranean climate for much of the year.
True, if you love wild swings, you can go inland to the deserts where there is no moderating weather and it's 120 in the daytime and 30 at night.
This is what the capitalists want. Capitalists are basically sick people - they behave like the mentally ill or sex or drug addicts. They are like untreated psychotic bipolar patients who live for the wild manic rides. Capitalists are like a pathological gambler in a casino with a no-limit credit card blazed on coke and downing cocktails. There's no limit to the runs.
The capitalist wants the ability to run up huge profits in crash and burn, live fast die young, boom and bust economics. Neoliberal free market economics is just great for the boom and bust crazies. Like the wasted gambler with the stolen credit card in the casino, the capitalist thinks there's no limits to the run-ups. He keeps going to new tables and doubling down.
You tell him his manic episode is going to crash hard at some point and he turns around to punch you in the face and charges at you like a buffalo as you race out of the building for your life.
With capitalism, as with boys on a playground, adult supervision is necessary. Capitalists need to be supervised by adults called government and socialism. Even Adam Smith himself acknowledged that the unregulated free market was one of the worst evils known to man. He said the free market had to be regulated by the state to prevent total economic chaos. The heirs to Smith's throne seem to have forgotten his books.
They got rid of almost all of the progressive socialist legislation we put in that prevents wild run-ups and Gold Rush style booms but at the same time also dampens down the inevitable free-fall busts that always follow the booms, like day follows night.
It used to be, you went to get a mortgage and if your income was about 1/3 of the mortgage and your credit was good, you got the loan. The bank wanted to make dead sure you were going to pay back the loan so they vetted you carefully. Those days are gone.
In recent years you could get a loan for 7 times your income, and the lenders assumed you would not be able to pay it back. But they didn't care anymore because you weren't even going to pay it back to them.
They took your bullshit loans and packaged them into some bullshit thingies called CDO's, which were some weird investment vehicles made up of thousands of home mortgages, many of which were known to be bad loans. Then they got crooked accountants to mark these crap securities with AAA ratings when all they were were turds with fancy paint all over them.
They then hocked this ripoff fraudulent packages to suckers in the financial world, while claiming they were worth their weight in gold. The deregulations had gotten rid of the notion that investment banks should be separated from consumer banks. There was supposed to be a solid wall between the two, so if one went down, it would not take down the other.
If a financial bank went down, it would not take down consumer banks. When banks were allowed to be both financial and consumer banks, they failed in 1929, causing the Great Depression. This wall, called Glass-Steagall, has been progressively whittled away for many years now to the point where it is about gone.
Republicans, especially Mr. Gramm and his diabolical Dragon Lady Korean wife, were the worst offenders. The destruction of Glass-Steagall is an important reason why we are seeing these financial meltdowns right now. Another reason was the whittling away of standards for home loans. The lending industry has always hated regulations making it so that those who took out loans to buy homes could pay back their loans.
By the 1960's, regulations were in pace that enabled banks to make vast numbers of home loans, very few of which went bad. As the banks itself ate it when the loan went bad, applicants were vetted religiously. This was progressively gutted over the years to the point where loans were given out gleefully to folks who in no sane world should have gotten a loan.
White nationalists have posited a theory (and now pro-business freemarketeers havejumped in) that the subprimes and other bad loans were ordered by the US government eager to get Hispanics and Blacks into home ownership, hence the niggers* and the Mexicans are responsible for the devastation of our economy! Wow, what a breathtakingly audacious theory.
There appears to be little evidence to back this up. For many years, banks had different standards for Whites versus non-Whites and many Blacks found it almost impossible to get a home loan no matter how good their credit was. The Feds started cracking down on this under Clinton 10-15 years ago, and there was no housing crisis then.
The notion that PC Feds pushed poor, innocent, mortgage banker criminals into making bogus loans to irresponsible non-Whites appears false.
The mortgage bankers made lots of money on every loan, so they would practically sign up a German shepherd if one walked in and asked for a loan. The criminals quickly sold the loans in fraudulent packages to poor suckers in financial institutions, so it was out of their hands they didn't care whether it was paid back or not.
True, people took out loans they could not afford, but in a sane society, those loans never get made in the first place. Loan officers criminals were con artists who slickly pitched the loans to ignorant people who had no business being there. They got them in at very low teaser rates and didn't really explain well that the rate was going to go up later on.
The lenders were as low as Nigerian email scammers.
But it's not up to the borrower to determine if he qualifies for a loan, and a borrower is not irresponsible for taking out any loan.
The burden of responsibility in a sane society lies on lenders. If lenders eat it when loans go bad, then they are unlikely to loan to the undeserving, who are shown the door. Blaming Blacks and Browns for this housing collapse is an appalling exercise in White racism.
When the loans went bad, as any idiot knew they would, they pounded financial institutions all over who had bought huge quantities of these crazy things without really knowing what they were getting into. Financial houses poured billions into fools gold securities that disintegrated in front of their eyes to pennies on the dollar.
Soon they were out billions with bills coming in continuously and frankly no money in the drawer to pay any of them. You can only go on for a while like that.
John McCain has had his mitts in this bullshit for about 30 years. He's supported just about every crazy deregulation package that came down the pike. If he ever opposed one, let me know.
Furthermore, McCain was in very, very deep in the same horrible Savings and Loan collapse. He spent much of the 1980's, while prophets were screaming in the wilderness about the doomsday looming S&L mess, barking about the need for fewer and fewer regulations on S&L's. Look what happened.
McCain hasn't learned a Goddamned thing. Here it is, 20 years later, and he's back doing it all over again. He's like a sociopath impervious to punishment.
McCain, the Bush Administration and Republicans in general are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse of the housing market and the resulting failures and collapses in the financial market, banks and insurance companies. Democrats are also responsible, but much less so, and hardcore liberals like Obama probably have little dirt on them.
John McCain now says he's coming in as a "maverick" and he's going to flip and change 30 years of deregulation mania as he becomes some kind of born-again reformer. Just as Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative in 2000, when he had many years in office proving the opposite, McCain's record speaks for itself. McCain the socialist big government regulator? Get real.
*used sardonically
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Drill, Drill, Drill!
This is the classic Republican campaign. Gas prices are very high, probably to a great deal due to George Bush's reckless militarism in invading Iraq and then threatening Iran, and so the Republicans hope to turn this into...even more of a windfall for the oil companies.
Apologists for the oil companies love to point out that the oil companies are not behind the skyrocketing prices. Fair enough, but the oil companies are indeed generating record profits in the midst of skyrocketing prices! Skyrocketing oil prices = skyrocketing oil company profits! Nice equation, huh?
It is so despicable and cynical for the Republicans to play politics with this bullshit. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and many other top Bush Administration officials are all oil company hacks going way back. John McCain is in deep with oil companies and Sarah Palin is more or less married to oil companies.
Listen up fools. Do you get it? Record gas prices = record oil company profits. What's not to love. The Republican Party is the party of the oil companies, so massive run-ups in gas prices are good times! Got it? Bush, Cheney, Condi, Palin and McCain are digging these high oil prices! Their babies, the oil companies, are swimming in money. And they're all so rich, they don't care about price at the pump anyway. The higher the better.
So, while the Republican Party obviously swoons over high gasoline prices, at the same time, the morons who support them are hopping mad about these same skyrocketing prices at the pump. The idiots can't figure out that their beloved Republican Party loves gas price run-ups and is laughing all the way to the bank. They're mad about gas prices, and they're voting Republican! They're typical retarded American White people!
So the Republican Party decides to play to the idiots. They pretend to be all concerned about the gas price run-ups. The way to lower the pump price (Which is bad for oil companies, so it's bad for the Republican Party) is to drill, drill, drill!
Wait a minute. Gas prices anymore have nothing to do with supply and demand. It's all just crazy market-driven speculation. The price at the pump just dropped dramatically in the past two months. What happened? Changes in supply and demand fundamentals? Course not! Nothing has changed. What changed? The mood of the speculators on the world's two oil bourses, one in New York and the other in London.
Lately, Republican phony liars like Newt Gingrich have come out against the evil speculators! They don't care anything about speculators, and most Republicans got rich through some speculative bullshit anyway. But hey, it plays good to the White idiots!
If we drill, drill, drill, drill, all over the US, it's going to...? Whoa! So flood the market with crude, it's going to, like, force the evil speculators to lower oil prices! Oh yeah! Never mind that you can't force a speculator to do anything. Never mind that declining gas prices are bad for oil companies and bad for Republican oil plutocrats. It's time to play politics with moronic Americans!
The latest thing is to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Palin and all of Alaska wants this because their oil checks will increase. By the year 2022, the oil from ANWR will finally come onto the market. And...it's possible...that all that oil...could lower the price of gas by, like, 4-5 cents a gallon. Wow! Or maybe it won't. No one knows, because oil prices have nothing to do with supply-demand fundamentals.
But it sounds so simple, huh? Wallet-killing prices at the pump? Solution? Drill, drill, drill. That will lower the prices, right? Not necessarily. Maybe not by even one penny. But it sounds so logical to your average fool.
What will drill, drill, drill do? Make beau-coup bucks for oil companies and their sleazy Republican agents. Great. Let's all line up behind that. I'm White! I'm dumb! I'm voting Republican! Oh yeah!
Here's all the land that is open to the oil companies that they are refusing to drill on for some insipid reason. Why are they refusing to drill on this land? I have no idea! Maybe someone who can figure out what's going on can explain this nonsense. There's tons of land open to oil companies, but they are refusing to drill on it. Instead, they want to open up lands that are forbidden to them. Doesn't make sense. Someone explain this one to me?
Apologists for the oil companies love to point out that the oil companies are not behind the skyrocketing prices. Fair enough, but the oil companies are indeed generating record profits in the midst of skyrocketing prices! Skyrocketing oil prices = skyrocketing oil company profits! Nice equation, huh?
It is so despicable and cynical for the Republicans to play politics with this bullshit. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and many other top Bush Administration officials are all oil company hacks going way back. John McCain is in deep with oil companies and Sarah Palin is more or less married to oil companies.
Listen up fools. Do you get it? Record gas prices = record oil company profits. What's not to love. The Republican Party is the party of the oil companies, so massive run-ups in gas prices are good times! Got it? Bush, Cheney, Condi, Palin and McCain are digging these high oil prices! Their babies, the oil companies, are swimming in money. And they're all so rich, they don't care about price at the pump anyway. The higher the better.
So, while the Republican Party obviously swoons over high gasoline prices, at the same time, the morons who support them are hopping mad about these same skyrocketing prices at the pump. The idiots can't figure out that their beloved Republican Party loves gas price run-ups and is laughing all the way to the bank. They're mad about gas prices, and they're voting Republican! They're typical retarded American White people!
So the Republican Party decides to play to the idiots. They pretend to be all concerned about the gas price run-ups. The way to lower the pump price (Which is bad for oil companies, so it's bad for the Republican Party) is to drill, drill, drill!
Wait a minute. Gas prices anymore have nothing to do with supply and demand. It's all just crazy market-driven speculation. The price at the pump just dropped dramatically in the past two months. What happened? Changes in supply and demand fundamentals? Course not! Nothing has changed. What changed? The mood of the speculators on the world's two oil bourses, one in New York and the other in London.
Lately, Republican phony liars like Newt Gingrich have come out against the evil speculators! They don't care anything about speculators, and most Republicans got rich through some speculative bullshit anyway. But hey, it plays good to the White idiots!
If we drill, drill, drill, drill, all over the US, it's going to...? Whoa! So flood the market with crude, it's going to, like, force the evil speculators to lower oil prices! Oh yeah! Never mind that you can't force a speculator to do anything. Never mind that declining gas prices are bad for oil companies and bad for Republican oil plutocrats. It's time to play politics with moronic Americans!
The latest thing is to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Palin and all of Alaska wants this because their oil checks will increase. By the year 2022, the oil from ANWR will finally come onto the market. And...it's possible...that all that oil...could lower the price of gas by, like, 4-5 cents a gallon. Wow! Or maybe it won't. No one knows, because oil prices have nothing to do with supply-demand fundamentals.
But it sounds so simple, huh? Wallet-killing prices at the pump? Solution? Drill, drill, drill. That will lower the prices, right? Not necessarily. Maybe not by even one penny. But it sounds so logical to your average fool.
What will drill, drill, drill do? Make beau-coup bucks for oil companies and their sleazy Republican agents. Great. Let's all line up behind that. I'm White! I'm dumb! I'm voting Republican! Oh yeah!
Here's all the land that is open to the oil companies that they are refusing to drill on for some insipid reason. Why are they refusing to drill on this land? I have no idea! Maybe someone who can figure out what's going on can explain this nonsense. There's tons of land open to oil companies, but they are refusing to drill on it. Instead, they want to open up lands that are forbidden to them. Doesn't make sense. Someone explain this one to me?100% of Hardcore US Racists Vote Republican
If you go to White nationalist sites, you will be damned if you ever find even one Democrat on those boards. You will find some ex-Democrats. Nor will you even find one person who votes Democrat, except some now voting Obama for racist reasons*.
I've made the rounds of many of these sites. The truth is that 100% of US hardcore White racists vote Republican! Year in and year out. Are there any hardcore White racists in the US who vote Democrat? I do not think so. I've never met one, and I've never seen one anywhere on the Net.
The White racists are simply a subset of US Whites. On the White racist sites, they make it completely clear that the Republican Party is the party to vote for if you are White, and especially if you are a racist White.
In looking at how White racists in the US vote overwhelmingly Republican, we can begin to understand why US Whites vote so overwhelmingly Republican. I suggest that the hardcore racists and the rest of the Whites are voting Republican for some pretty similar reasons.
James Schipper in the comments points out that the Republican Party has hardly given US Whites a damned thing for their racist votes. At the very least, he argues, it could have come down hard on illegal immigration, reduced legal immigration and ended affirmative action.
Instead, the Republican Party is 100% Open Borders and can't get enough millions of legal immigrants to satisfy their needs. It's true that they have made some movements on affirmative action, and it's being outlawed by many states anyway. But private firms can still have diversity goals and whatnot, and that's apparently legal.
The Republican Party has been winking at White racism for decades now. In 1981, Reagan went to the site in the South where the bodies of the two murdered civil rights workers were found and spoke before a crowd of hollering, hooting White peckerwood crackers, saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a horrible mistake. Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court apparently oppose civil rights, but little has come of that.
The Republicans, a plutocratic political party, have used the racist Whites in the same way they used the culture warriors, the Christian Right and the rest. Your average plutocrat is probably not very racist, not very religious and cares nothing about holy roller Christians.
Wealthy young women have abortions in very high numbers. The wealthy drink, use drugs, have promiscuous sex, have homosexual sex, and do all sorts of depraved things at a greater rate than the middle classes - they always have in most every society. At the same time, they cynically use the culture wars stuff to get the fools and suckers to vote for the plutocratic party.
Like the rich who supported the Nazis, they hope to use them for the ride and hopefully never implement any of the projects of the racists or holy rollers. When it finally gets to the point where the rich need to implement racist or holy roller policies in order to stay in power, things get awfully dicey. It's a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty game the rich play.
*There is a fascinating movement within White nationalism called White Nationalists For Obama. The idea here is to "heighten the contradictions" in Marxist terms. Electing a Black president will be so horrible that it will "wake up the sleeping Whites" to the White racist cause.
The resulting tumult will be so great that a vast race war will break in the US. In the course of this race war, the Whites will win. The upshot will be either the removal of all non-Whites from the US, or their sequestration to a few states of their own.
I used to think that the race war thing was only a dream of the real hardcore White power types, but even if you go to the more moderate sites, you will find huge numbers of commenters who are all for race war in the US to "shake things out". I was appalled. I really don't think it's ever going to happen, but in analyzing White nationalism, we ought to conclude that many, perhaps most, of them long for a race war in the US.
I've made the rounds of many of these sites. The truth is that 100% of US hardcore White racists vote Republican! Year in and year out. Are there any hardcore White racists in the US who vote Democrat? I do not think so. I've never met one, and I've never seen one anywhere on the Net.
The White racists are simply a subset of US Whites. On the White racist sites, they make it completely clear that the Republican Party is the party to vote for if you are White, and especially if you are a racist White.
In looking at how White racists in the US vote overwhelmingly Republican, we can begin to understand why US Whites vote so overwhelmingly Republican. I suggest that the hardcore racists and the rest of the Whites are voting Republican for some pretty similar reasons.
James Schipper in the comments points out that the Republican Party has hardly given US Whites a damned thing for their racist votes. At the very least, he argues, it could have come down hard on illegal immigration, reduced legal immigration and ended affirmative action.
Instead, the Republican Party is 100% Open Borders and can't get enough millions of legal immigrants to satisfy their needs. It's true that they have made some movements on affirmative action, and it's being outlawed by many states anyway. But private firms can still have diversity goals and whatnot, and that's apparently legal.
The Republican Party has been winking at White racism for decades now. In 1981, Reagan went to the site in the South where the bodies of the two murdered civil rights workers were found and spoke before a crowd of hollering, hooting White peckerwood crackers, saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been a horrible mistake. Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court apparently oppose civil rights, but little has come of that.
The Republicans, a plutocratic political party, have used the racist Whites in the same way they used the culture warriors, the Christian Right and the rest. Your average plutocrat is probably not very racist, not very religious and cares nothing about holy roller Christians.
Wealthy young women have abortions in very high numbers. The wealthy drink, use drugs, have promiscuous sex, have homosexual sex, and do all sorts of depraved things at a greater rate than the middle classes - they always have in most every society. At the same time, they cynically use the culture wars stuff to get the fools and suckers to vote for the plutocratic party.
Like the rich who supported the Nazis, they hope to use them for the ride and hopefully never implement any of the projects of the racists or holy rollers. When it finally gets to the point where the rich need to implement racist or holy roller policies in order to stay in power, things get awfully dicey. It's a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty game the rich play.
*There is a fascinating movement within White nationalism called White Nationalists For Obama. The idea here is to "heighten the contradictions" in Marxist terms. Electing a Black president will be so horrible that it will "wake up the sleeping Whites" to the White racist cause.
The resulting tumult will be so great that a vast race war will break in the US. In the course of this race war, the Whites will win. The upshot will be either the removal of all non-Whites from the US, or their sequestration to a few states of their own.
I used to think that the race war thing was only a dream of the real hardcore White power types, but even if you go to the more moderate sites, you will find huge numbers of commenters who are all for race war in the US to "shake things out". I was appalled. I really don't think it's ever going to happen, but in analyzing White nationalism, we ought to conclude that many, perhaps most, of them long for a race war in the US.
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