I have spent extensive time in third world countries. In general I found them much safer than the inner cities of the US which are filled with people who collect checks from the government and still feel strongly they are owned something and will take it out on each and anyone wandering into their midst.
The notion that "welfare causes crime" is very problematic. I don't believe that the folks pushing this argument have ever proved their case. In Europe, there is a good model backed up with many studies that shows that the more socialism you have in the system, the less crime you have.
The more capitalism, the more crime. This is proven in the transition from socialism to capitalism in the FSU, Eastern Europe and China which were followed by tremendous crime waves.
If you cut all those folks in the ghetto off of all the welfare, would they be any less criminal?
There doesn't seem to be any theoretical model for why welfare would cause crime. Why would giving someone stuff turn him into a criminal? According to Uncle Milton, it is because they "feel they are owed something."
But aren't people owed something under Communism? Basic needs were provided for everyone. Perhaps Communism was the ultimate welfare state. At least this is what conservatives say. How then did Communist states have the lowest levels of crime around?
Furthermore, I would point out that the 3rd World equivalent of our ghettos are often vastly more dangerous that US ghettos. I worked in the ghettos and barrios of Los Angeles for years and I lost one car battery in a East LA and I had the wires cut on another car battery in Watts. Of course, I was usually out of there before dark.
I lived in Oakhurst, a town in the Sierra Nevada, for 16 years. I don't know the figures, but word is that the welfare use rate was very high the whole time I was there. Girls got pregnant as soon as they got out of high school (18-20 or so) and the guy may or may not be around.
Many just became single Moms for various periods of time. I suppose there were guys floating in and out of their lives, but that's how it goes with single Moms in general. In my apartment complex, there were two single Moms out of six tenants.
The guys support the kids in some cases and marry them in others, but in quite a few cases, they don't marry the woman, and in other cases, they do not support them either.
Although the rate of this sort of thing among the Amerindians in town is insanely high, I would like to focus on the Whites. There is a very high rate of welfare use among Whites in this town. This includes all kinds of welfare - food stamps, Medicaid, welfare proper, etc. There was very little crime in this town.
The crime rate was so low that I often did not lock my car at home and often left the house without locking the door. I did that for years with no break-ins. Violent crime was nearly nonexistent. Gangs did not exist, and juvenile crime did not seem to be significant from my POV.
I had heard that it took a long time for a welfare culture to develop as kids come of age and become pathological due to being raised in a welfare family. I watched this scene for 16 years and no welfare culture developed. I assume that was enough time.
It's an interesting question why high welfare use seems to be associated with mass pathology in some groups (Hispanics and Blacks) but not in others (Asians and Whites). Even in Oakhurst, relatively high levels of pathology coincided with extremely high welfare use among Amerindians. Nevertheless, with Amerindians about 5% of the population, they were not a significant crime problem.
The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.
Updated August 23:
This is a new online magazine on the Net. I just noticed it; they've only been online for 4 months and they already have high readership of around 45,000 readers a day. Actually, this magazine is pretty scary, and it definitely has big money behind it. A very large number of the authors are extremely hard rightwing Zionist Jews, and some of them have CIA and probably Mossad connections.
Lets take a look at the authors:
Gal Luft is an Israeli or possibly Jewish "American" author who consorts with former CIA director James Woolsey and seems to have deep connections to the Israeli state.
Anne Korin, (photo) Jewish "American" author and pundit, is a hard-Right Zionist. A mysterious woman, she is a co-director with Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS). IAGS seems to have deep ties US and Israeli intelligence. She is also an agent of the weird ultra-rightwing seminal neoconservative group the Committee on the Present Danger.
Part of their agenda (Korin is the director of the weird, neoconservative and far rightwing Set America Free Coalition and editor of Energy Security) is the demonization of Arabs and Iran and concomitantly, urging the US and Israel to get off of oil in order to bankrupt the Arabs and probably also to sever the alliance between the US and Gulf Arab big money.
Cindy Hurst is a US naval commander who has deep ties to International Zionism and the CIA via IAGS. She works for the Foreign Military Studies Office, which is just a research office for US imperialism, armed branch. Quite a few high-ranking naval officers, often Gentiles, have deep connections to International Zionism.
Edwin Black, though the name does not seem to be Jewish, is a hard-rightwing Jewish "American" writer for the New York Times with deep connections to Israel.
Howard Kohr, the Jewish "American" director of the spearhead of the treasonous Jewish Lobby in the US, AIPAC, authors many pieces.
Walid Phares, is a Lebanese "American" scholar. He is a reactionary Lebanese Maronite Phalangist exiled from Lebanon because he is too reactionary for the current political situation there. The remaining Maronites in Lebanon are for the most part the saner ones - the real nutjobs have long left the place.
He is deep with USCFL, the neoconservative Phalangist arm in the US that has deep connections with far right Zionism in Israel and the US. In particular, he is in deep with Daniel Pipes, discussed in a previous post.
Sam Orez is a little known "American" author, but the name is Jewish and he writes for the Israeli press and on AIPAC and American Jewish Committee issues.
Jewish "American" David Harris, another contributor, is the director of the American Jewish Committee.
Benedict Rogers is deeply involved with the Tory Party of the UK. His purpose is to attack the admittedly horrible Burmese regime, not because it is awful, but because US and apparently British imperialism is waging war on the place because the economy is largely state-owned and the regime has not fully opened itself up to multinational corporations yet.
Joe Eskenazi is a hardline Zionist Jew and a reporter for j, a Jewish weekly. He profiles Jewish "American" gazillionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle (probably one of the world's most arrogant and unpleasant humans) on his trip to Sderot to commiserate with Jews living under largely ineffective rocket fire. Ellison is probably a big bucks money guy in the Jewish Lobby in the US, and it might be useful to investigate this.
Micah Halpern is an extreme rightwing Jew, the usual dual-loyalty type, born in the US and moved to Israel, probably treasonously holding dual citizenship. He frequently writes for far Right Israeli papers.
Gary Rosenblatt is the Editor in Chief of New York Jewish Week.
Aaron Klein is an "American" Jewish journalist who spends his time working out of the extreme rightwing Worldnetdaily's Jerusalem Bureau, often reported wild, insane and ridiculous Israeli propaganda. He did go out and interview the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade though, but he seems to have turned that into a book-length hit piece on armed Palestinians.
Klein is behind the "Obama is a 1960's Weatherman terrorist radical bomber" bullshit. He's currently waging jihad against Obama, apparently on the grounds of being soft on Israel and supportive of Palestinian terrorism, which is dubious. Syria and Jordan both refused him entry to their countries, supposedly for being a Jew, but I think it was mostly for being a Zionist agent and an asshole to boot. Good call.
David Brog is the insane Protestant fundamentalist Zionist connection. He's the Executive Director of Christians United for Israel, chaired by ultra-nutcase Pastor John Hagee.
Armstrong Williams is an ultra-rightwing Black Oreo talk show host and token House Negro serving tea for massa. He was thought to have fallen to infamy recently, but I guess he's resurfacing on this weird website and his radio station is either back on the air or never left the air. Armstrong peddled himself as an ultra-rightwing Black Christian ranting and raving about liberals and liberal values destroying America.
Truth is that Williams is fucking gay, and he's been known to have sexually harassed over 100 men to try to get them to fuck him in the ass or let him suck their dicks or whatever. The media properly buried this story, since it involves a far rightwinger, but it's all true. I don't mind gay men, but I really hate hypocrites.
He's still totally closeted and a liar, and if you look on his website, you have to admit he looks awfully queer. Armstrong loves Israel too, by the way, but probably not as much as a big White cock.
James Quinn is a economist and a professor and Senior Director of Strategic Planning, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He certainly doesn't serve imperialism or the US ruling class. He's some kind of far rightwing "buy gold and silver" sky is falling nutcase economist type of whom we've always had plenty in the US.
Nonie Darwish is some kind of a crazy person, a Palestinian raised in Gaza who moved to the US and decided to shill for Israel! What the Hell? Who's signing her checks anyway?
Joseph Griebowski is an odd fellow. He's head of a very strange organization called Institute on Religion and Public Policy. It is discussed in another post.
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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 was on a rightwing blog a couple of years ago and decided to ask how many believed in global warming. The vast majority did not. A few said it was happening, but it was natural. One or two said it was happening, but no one knew what was causing it, and we needed to study it more.
This blog has unfortunately become infested lately with some young White male 20-something reactionary-to-libertarian trolls who are lurking in the comments section.
It's quite simple to be a libertarian when you are young, dumb and full of cum. I voted Libertarian at age 22. I'd never do it again, but that's how you learn. People that age just haven't been fucked hard enough and enough times by life yet. By the time we are 40, most of us have had about a million horrible things happen to us, and narcissism is on sharp decline. That's why age and wisdom are traditionally synonymous.
They're causing a lot of dissension, but echo chambers are boring. Comments rules forbid me from banning folks based on ideology, so for the moment, they are sticking around.
It's kind of interesting to have some pet rightwingers to play with, because like a lot of pets, they do a lot of stupid shit. Since rightwingers can talk unlike all other pets, rightwingers also say stupid shit.
Debating rightwingers is like debating ultranationalist Jewish Zionists. Most of their arguments are absolute crap. The reason is because what they are arguing for is perfectly horrible to most folks.
Hence I really admire Zionists like Samson Blinded who just tell it like it is. I admire libertarians like Entitled to an Opinion who just lay it out in all of libertarianism's heartless nastiness. Plus TGGP and Obaidah Shoher and really bright guys, and I have to admire that, if they are pushing something pretty awful.
Since conservatism and Zionism are unpalatable to most folks as they actually exist, conservatives and Zionists always have to lie to try to get decent people to go along with their programs, which most folks find repellent.
Anyway, it looks like the rightwing has moved on on global warming. Only 6% of the US says it doesn't exist, but about 50% of Republican Congresscritters say so.
But the new line is that global warming exists, but it's not caused by people, it's caused by cow farts!
Well, if that were so, as a totalitarian, I would just say fine, so kill all the cows, serve the whole world steak for a month and be done with it. If that's too radical, make a beef hamburger at McDonald's cost twice what a chicken or turkey hamburger does. Soon every fast food joint has beef and non-beef options and profits are blasting right along.
This rightwing argument, like most of them, is ultimately devious. The rightwingers know that this hamburger-munching Americans will never tax their beloved burgers even one penny.
So they throw up their hands and say nothing can be done, especially about reducing auto emissions, which is really what they have their butts smoking about anyway. How dare you order me to ride a bike!
Cow farts cause global warming, so what business do we have trying to reduce car emissions? Let global warming continue apace.
Problem is that they are playing games with figures.
It is true that the cattle industry, in the totality of its effects, does account for 18% of global warming. However, cow burps and farts only account for 12% of that 18%, and that 12% is 98% burps and only 2% farts. So cow farts actually account for .04% of global warming. That is something like 1% of all transportation (mostly vehicle) emissions. Cow farts and burps in total account for 2.1% of global warming.
If cow burping and farting is only 12% of cow global warming, what's all the rest? All the land, especially tropical forest land, that is cleared for cattle. All of the fossil fuel burning that goes into the production of fertilizer, feed and growing cattle. All of the transportation costs involved in the cattle industry. And on and on.
One would think that any livestock or animal husbandry is as capable of producing this problem as any other. Not so. Cattle cause the overwhelming majority of the global warming from animal husbandry.
Therefore, we could continue to eat meat, but just switch from beef to lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, goat, etc. I'd love to turn a lot of the cattle lands on the Great Plains back to buffalo and then harvest them for food. We had great herds of buffalo roaming our Midwest for thousands of years with no problems for the ecosystem and no global warming issues. I am told that rabbits are an excellent food.
A great way to do this would just be to tax beef and probably even milk based on the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem. My brother (I won't go near the place) informs that hamburgers at McDonald's cost from $1-4. Double the price. Make them cost $2-8 instead of $1-4, as I mentioned above. It's probably politically impossible, but that's why I have totalitarian tendencies.
Cattle also cause a tremendous amount of other damage above and beyond global warming. I will just let the article summarize:
Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world's emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.
Ranching, the report adds, is "the major driver of deforestation" worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert. Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.
Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health.
The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating "dead zones" devoid of life. One is up to 21,000 sq km, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.
The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.
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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.
