Left-Federalist

2007-09-13T08:57:00.000-06:00

A follow-up post scriptum(s) to last post...

A case in point of how Debt has become as American as Coca-Cola is a former Boss I had who continually lamented about his bills, how far that he and wife were in debt(they recently purchased a huge four bedroom house - when all their kids were grown and had fled the coup), and he was barely paddling in the water. Finally, he got one of these Debt Consolidation deals that reduced his costs and got his mortgage within some means of payment with his and her incomes. The ink wasn't dry on the contract, and ONE DAY after the signing of it, I caught ex-Boss going over a catalogue full of televisions in the breakroom, and he said that he also needed a new riding lawn mower(he already had a good used John Deere); at lunch he visited the car dealership across the street and returned an hour later with the paperwork on a new auto. And this guy was always complaining that his kids couldn't manage their money....

[ Said former Boss also watched Golf AND Bowling on his 150 inch flat screen TV; feature that ex-Boss is one who thinks that reading books is a "complete waste of time." He asked me what a 'Buddhist'(this guy had some three years of college) was once, and another time he wanted to know if Mark Twain was the current kin to some bimbo Country singer with a weird first name....]

2007-09-13T07:35:00.000-06:00

Congratulations America! We are not only the undisputed masters of the universe in Debt, we ain't resting on our laurels either: we've passed the $9,000,000,000,000 mark of Gross National Debt. Hurrah! 'We're #1!! We're #1!'

Where are the Flag Wavers when you need them??

Feature that the USA does not assume a great portion of this nine trillion dollar national debt, and we are kept from insolvency by foreign nations buying up T-Bonds and what have you. It's academic that if the Dollar tanks, these guys will get panicky and begin to call in their loans - which our government is in no position to pay.

Credit Card Lobbyist Stooge, Senator Grassley of Iowa, got the bill passed a few years back that makes it difficult for individual Americans to file Bankruptcy. Grassley and his other minions are part of the reason why we are approaching insolvency as a collective whole in Americana, yet this person has the gall to finger-wag the American people that they need to be more responsible with their money. The fact is, abuse of bankruptcy filings was not all that common and many Americans over-extended themselves on credit due to job outsourcing or medical bills. Besides, these guys at the Top has pushed this Debt Culture on the rest of us, then they whine when people 'aren't paying their bills' (and I thought only liberals had this "do as I say, not as I do" con down).

Guess we can blame South Dakota. In the early 1980s when the economy was actually in a depression, the Credit Card industry was near collapse, on its last legs. South Dakota's Governor want to jump-start the economy so he abolished the state's usury laws and invited the Credit Card New York City fellas to set up shop in his state. This sparked a chain reaction and all the other states in the Union that had usury laws knocked them down, one by one, and the Debt Culture was born....(no wonder some people want to put Reagan's mug on Mt. Rushmore, eh?).

Concur that a credit card is useful in emergencies, but the plan of attack from this industry is to get the user of it head over heels in debt with the Card so he or she is just paying the high interest. It's a racket, and the Credit Card lobby admits this: they totally despise people such as myself who pays any credit card purchases off in full, monthly. To combat those who 'just pay their bills', the Credit Card shysters will then offer extended lines of credit to entice the frugal to go out and spend and get so far in debt that they will just be doing the interest; once I had a credit company that voluntarily bumped-up my line beyond the sum that I was earning at the time in a single year. So, I looked the gift horse in the mouth and returned my cut-up credit card in response to this magnanimous offer;-).

This lobby needs to be checked, and Left-Federalist fully supports the re-institution of usury laws at the federal level.

'Work on 'em when they're young'.... the Debt Cartel knows this and practices it with gusto. A Kindergartner can get a Visa card these days, and so can his dog, Spot. It used to be a tradition in some American families to get Junior his own savings account passbook at his watershed sixth birthday, now we indoctrinate him in the 'Off-the-Cuff Existenz' before he can spell d-e-b-t. 'Saving for College' is no longer a common expression - the ticket is for Dick and Jane to take out loans for higher education with ever higher tuition costs just when their lives are just beginning;his/her Piggy Bank is now full of IOU's rather than US Currency....

I still bank at the same institution that I got my original Savings Account as a wee lad. Last year, this Savings& Loan abolished 'savings accounts' officially; once I asked a typical dimwit Teller there about their rates of CD's(just to test her knowledge) and she looked at me like I had come from Alpha Cenauri.

Basing an economy on Debt/consumption alone is a house of cards and it could easily collapse. I have this theory if just a quarter of the US population tears up their credit cards and never gets one again, this entire edifice will end up smoking rubble. We could easily turn the Consumer culture on its head, but won't happen: John Dole needs his 150 inch flat screen TV because Jones has a 140 inch one, and Mr. Dole needs a bigger house five years after he purchased it. He'd never think of saving for anything....

2007-09-12T09:40:00.000-06:00

Outside of Sports, automobiles and talking Shop, one of the conversation bits that come up when the American Male species of two-legged mammals engages in what sociologists dub *Male Bonding*, knocking-back a few with his buddies, is - "Who would you do if your were trapped on 'Gilligan's Island'?

Being the type of hominid that I am who doesn't like either/or situations, want my beer and drink it too, I always toss a wrench into this question - 'You're leaving someone out of this here - what about Mrs. Howell??'

When shock manifests - " You'd do that Old Bag?!?' - I merely answer that 'Lovey' needs some lovin' too - her husband 'Thurstun' sleeps in a separate cot with a Teddy Bear, for chrissakes. And they say that older women turn into HornDogs when their hormones start rearranging at that age. Though I haven't a Granny Complex and very much prefer Ginger and/or Mary Ann as a mating partner, think of it this way: get in good with Mrs. Howell, give her a few good humpings, whack Thurstun and get all of his money - then you can BUY both Ginger and Mary Ann( yes, Mary Ann can be bought...her innocent Kansas farm-girl act didn't fool me a bit - and I know all about Kansas farm gals.) ;-)

American males are often so one-dimensional and they don't even have a good game plan even when thinking about studding TV actresses...

2007-09-12T07:49:00.000-06:00

My last post may have been offensive to causcasoid members of the underclass, but I'm actually in their corner( I come from the same poor agrarian turned working class that they do and I so remain, not ashamed.). The major beef is when they get parvenu and uppity when some extra money comes their way and they have more than what Gramps and Granny had, and think that extra il dinero actually makes them somebody, when they aren't well-rounded fellows or care about being good citizens. Gramps&Granny may had been as poor as dogsnot, but they were probably better human beings?

Jim Goad wrote a sociological masterpiece regarding said white underclass , The Redneck Manifesto. Goad neither took a typical leftist path on it as Barbara Ehrenreich did, and neither is he a 'white power' advocate as some may initially think. Rather, said book is a balanced and well-researched text(and funny as hell, to boot) regarding America's historical attitudes to the White Trash, and the panache of the White Trash themselves. The sum of the book's message is that the white underclass has always been the convenient group to pick on, because they've always been so powerless, and they don't care that they are, really.

I've felt like 'getting Moe Howard' on HL Mencken lately, so I will continue. Many hail Mencken as muckraker for civil liberty and personal dignity such as his long campaign in the 1920s bashing the Ku Klux Klan in print. That's noble on the surface, but Mencken adorers(found today in the 'libertarian' ranks) need to realize that his hatred for the Klan, other white supremacy groups, and religious fundamentalism was motivated entirely from his classist snobbery: Mencken was a rare bird who hated both Jews and what he dubbed to be White Trash. His upbringing in Baltimore was high-bourgeoisie and he had that typical Southern upper-class distaste for Hillbillies and Hayseeds. 'Distaste' is a mellow word for it; Mencken believed that the underclass of Appalachia was fitting for extermination. His later opposition to the TVA New Deal program was in lieu that he didn't believe that these folks deserved any help. His championing of civil rights for Black Americans was only because he hated the white underclass more. Mencken was not a 'humanist' by any wild stretch, and Blacks were okay just as long as they worked in his daddy's cigar factory or served as cleaning help and chauffeurs.

The Mencken family married into the Hohenzollern aristocracy; Henry Louis's branch of this DNA left Germany in 1848 not because they felt that the democratic Republican revolutionary movement there would be gunned down in the streets(what ultimately happened) - but because Opa Mencken thought that they would win. The Menckens were not the liberal Forty-Eighters as was typical of German immigrants here in the 1850s and 60s; Hank wrote esoterically as if he had been deprived of his aristocratic heritage in America, and sought a way to get it back. Therefore, his attraction to Nietzsche, and he had the standard misreading of Nietzsche's thought - except the Master vs. Slave morality thingy - and Mencken undoubtedly felt himself to be a Herrenmensch, when Nietzsche himself wouldn't had liked him (there weren't too many that Nietzsche did like anyway). Though Mencken's personal politics contained those Jeffersonian memes, he had no love for even representative democracy and a biting and vicious rancor of anything smacking of populism and/or having an energetic citizenry from all walks of life promoting civic nationalism....

'Digression' is my middle- name. The message can be NutShell'd as this: There is nothing wrong with the underclass steppin' up in the material world, but when they forget where once both feet were planted, there is the problem. Having more $$ than your parents did, doesn't make you a better person if you also do not work on being. And please, do not confound it more by adopting a hyphenated surname, and pretend that you are part of the jet-set because of your admission into the local Elks Club, or that the Masonic Lodge wants you(they'll take anybody these days...even I was approached once by one of their recruiters), and you go into further debt by buying a house or vehicle that shows status, but is nevertheless beyond your means...

2007-09-07T22:11:00.000-06:00

Another thing that I find curious about some of my fellow Americans(mostly the females) are those who adopt hyphenated surnames. I mean, who the dickens do they think that they are - British aristocracy(didn't we have a Revolution some 200+ years ago to throw these types out of the country, or did I miss something??)?

Reading the local neighborhood committee's insert placed in my mailbox the other day, I noticed a hyphenated surname of an American female that I have known most of my existenz on the steering committee of said organization. Well, I just had to laugh: said female-human American with the hyphenated surname, hails from the biggest WHITE TRASH family(s) in the entire county and so does her Better Half! Her DNA is so White Trash, that the guests on the Jerry Springer Show would hold their noses up in the air if they met up; she's so White Trash, that field rats jump into water to cleanse themselves if they ever found themselves near her; she's so White Trash, that the inbred Hillbillies of Tennessee(where her protoplasm originally comes from) ran all of her kin off with shotguns because they didn't want to appear slumming by having them share the same mountain, near Bugtussle....

And this person, who couldn't find Great Britain on a map or care if she couldn't, has adopted a hyphenated-surname???

2007-09-07T07:04:00.000-06:00

The two pillars of the current' American Way of Life' -work and individualism - have both shining and glaring contradictions. Though we today do the 24/7 work/consumption(and debt) routine, we are some of the laziest people on the planet outside of the job site(s). We work longer and have got fatter than the previous generation, and at the shopping mall - even in fair weather - witness the bipeds drive around the busy parking lot for 10 minutes just to find an open space that is close to the entrance ( once I watched this fat bitch - who nearly tagged my truck - in a BMW do this. I parked way back in the boon docks and hiked in in less than a minute. I walked in the door and noticed that she was still driving around searching for an opening, close-by. She finally made it in the store and I noticed that she had *Slim-Fast*products in her cart!); one spouse of a relative insists on driving to her job though she lives a mere two-blocks from it; the other day I opened the office door for a banshee who didn't want to make the effort to get her own key and walk back(she was the same distance from said office that I was;Banshee was on her way to the Athletic Club for a cardio, undoubtedly.) These are some subjective observations out of numerous....

As for individualism, Americans are the most Herd-like creatures - whilst they be Squares or think that they are part of the *Cool Ones* maximizing their individualism for all the world to see. I don't have much bones to pick with the Squares(Frat Boys/Chamber of Commerce/Stock Broker/Insurance racketeers, etc.) since most will fully admit that they are going along with the flow, playin' the Game, keeping up with Jones - it's these coffeehouse/hirsute/ purple or Ronald McDonald haired Roosters adorning themselves with fishing lures in their faces, thinking that having shit permanently engraved in their skin makes them really unique specimens in the known universe. Each their own - I'm keen on that. If people want to look like Walt Disney puked all over them, that's okay with me. If they have more pieces of metal in their faces, tongues and other body parts than I have in my fishing tackle box - bloody well n' good. What is the objection is that when such creatures somehow believe that they are non-conformists and that they're their own personal archetype of an *Individual*(just ask them). The negation is that they're merely conforming to a notion of non-conformity - doin' what their friend or some celebrity is doing;notice that these self-proclaimed individuals always run in packs, just like all other humans do. Those who confess that they just want to be 'Goth', 'Punk', Metal Face,HipHopper, Rastafarian(the Caucasian Dreadlocked bunch are particularly amusing to behold) neoHippie/neoBeatnik, whatever category - I respect them for being truthful. But don't give me any of this 'individuality' crap - they have little concept of it.

And few homo sapiens sapiens are true individuals/non-conformists - just like true Genius comes around once in a blue moon. Genuine article individuals are usually found in the NutHouse or they inhabit downtown streets and eat out of garbage cans(in the Middle Ages they were burned at the stake for being witches), and they can keep it. We're all Herd and social animals regardless how much persons deludes themselves thinking - "I'm a unique Individual and the sun personally revolves around Me!"

And Yanks are the most adroit cattle-grazers that there is. They know all about having&doing mind you, but speak on Being - you might as well be trying to converse in Swahili with them: just greet a colleague with "How are you being?" instead of 'How do you do?" and watch the momentary blank look on their countenances before they reply....

Post Labor Day Thoughts

2007-09-06T05:52:00.001-06:00

A liquor store employer remarked to me and the other patrons in his store, last Saturday, that Labor Day is the day of 'not-to-work', but Americans with their Consumer Cult need for 24/7 service, no longer abide by this. He said that he would be damned if he was going to work on Labor Day, and neither were his employees. These are not the words of a labor unionist or socialist - he owns a small chain of liquor stores and seems to be quite well to do. He began as a mere grocery store clerk however, and obviously hasn't forgot what it means to be an employee.

Naturally, I put my two-cents in, and replied that first they took away May Day from the American Working Stiff, now they went to work on the first Monday in September; there are companies who don't even have Labor Day as a paid-holiday for their staff. Some - most Yanks - gasp that May Day is a 'Commie Holiday', and no red-blooded true American would observe it. Actually, May Day goes back to pagan times before Karl Marx&Co. were spermatozoa swimming in their daddies' MuleJuice. It's actually as American as Apple Pie: the first of May was one of the days that George Washington ordered the Continental Army to stand down when they were not in military engagements, for instance...

The fact is, that Yanks in the 21st Century work longer hours than at anytime in the 19th Century - the period that some erroneously view as the golden age of the Protestant Work Ethic. Some slave-driving American capitalists joke about the 'lazy bums' in places like France with their 35 hour work week(soon to abolished by Paris's NeoCon and laissez-faire Le Predator, Nicky Sarkozy?), yet the Frenchies today work longer than their grape-pickers in Alsace did in the Middle Ages. Our ancestors were 'slackers' in comparison to present times, but still we hear Old Foggies lamenting - " they sure knew how to WORK back in them thar days!" Yeah, they did. They worked their butts off via lack of technology, artificial lighting, but they also knew what leisure meant. The medieval peasant, the apprentice blacksmith, would not be employed at any company in the 21st Century because he would insist on having his holidays - which were more numerous than those today. And from what we know about the sociology of the Working Stiff in the 13th Century, it appears that they largely kept their own hours and were not regimented to a defined daily punch-in and out. Many have this image of the Feudal Lord standing over his Manor occupants cracking the whip; though feudalism was a form of slavery,the Lords actually seemed to have been loose, lackadaisical bosses - just as long as they got their cut from the crops and whatnot that their peasants toiled over to bring in. Their workday, as an aggregate whole, probably didn't extend much over five hours - yet civilization continued. Thus, the 24/7, three-jobs, 48hour + a week Consumer/ Work Cult today is more indicative of decline than that of social benevolence...

Even when Americans are off from their jobs come Labor Day, many spend it working about their houses and whatnot( as they do come their summer vacations and leave - if they have vacations, that is.) Even those who utilize their granted holidays and leaves, they remark that they'd had rather been working and didn't know what to do with themselves when granted leisure, even if it is paid; humans that spend their weekends not doing something, are often derisively regarded as 'loafers' by these above robotic workaholic creatures - even if the loafers are punching a clock consistently during the week, and have a dedicated ethos on the Job. I personally know people who would rather work than to fuck, for that matter - "..sorry, Miss Penthouse Pet of the Year, I gotta get to my third job at the Convenience Store!" Maybe I exaggerate here, but I wonder about some of these guys who slave-drive themselves(?)

Another thing that is deeply annoying are these workaholics who complain that they haven't time for their Families and maybe they should downsize their worship of the Protestant Work Ethic. The fact is that they don't even know their *family*(they're always working, how could they?), and would undoubtedly end up in divorce, wife-beating and child abuse if they were in the situation to "spend time with my family". If one is truly into *Family Values* they would had tried to fathom a way that they could work less, anyway. But they actually think that Family dedication is having things to keep up with the Joneses and the latest gadget trends. This has become the true-blue American concept of Family, so workaholics had better not cry on my shoulders about their neglected families - spouse & the biped spawn from their loins are mere possessions for them. I once played the workaholic game, time to time, but I learned to grow-up out of it.

And I don't work at a goddamn thing on Labor Day, either, and I'd probably shoot the person who tried to coerce me to work that day.

Ode to Ike; the Zen of Golf

2007-09-01T09:01:00.000-06:00

Critics of Consumer Cult Critics(yours truly) always state that we want every American to become Silas Marners, live in hovels and don sackcloth for clothing as we count our money stowed away in coffee cans. Far from that! Actually, what I personally envision is close to what we had in the 1950s when Papa Ike was running the Show: we had our gadgets, a car in every garage but Yanks had Savings accounts,also. 'What is Above, is Below'(again). President Eisenhower, people must remember, was a true *fiscal conservative*( not a fake one like most GOPers are presently): Ike looked on everything in the Budget with a administrative accountant's eye - including the Pentagon. There was nothing of this later gnosticism of Reagan about him that somehow, over-spending on Defense is not detrimental to the health of the Budget, but domestic spending is wasteful and inflationary. Eisenhower had the horse sense to know that the Cold War would ultimately bankrupt us, and Ike had wisdom. That is why following the death of Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles - Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz couldn't hold a candle to that bastard - Eisenhower began pursing the policy of detente' with the USSR and hence, his famous Farewell Address warning Americans of the 'military-industrial complex'. We didn't listen to Ike and we got what we have now. Eisenhower, one of the architects of the NATO alliance, admonished incoming President John F. Kennedy in January of 1961 that the time had come for the United States to gradually disengage from this military alliance. You know, Ike was a Five Star General, and if anyone in that period and thereafter had a grasp of military entanglements, the pluses and minuses, it was him.

Contrary to the belief of Adlai Stevenson democrats, Ike did much more in his eight years in the Executive Office than play friggin' Golf. This is what an Adlai Stevenson liberal, Fred Greenstein, demonstrated in his book about the statecraft of Eisenhower, The Hidden Hand Presidency. Eisenhower cultivated the public persona of a smiling face with a five-iron, the optimistic panache that everything was Okay. He looked and acted like anyone's benevolent Grandpa. Nixon in later life remarked that America had no idea that behind the scenes, Ike had a devious streak(Nixon should know all about that); off the Golf Course, Eisenhower burned a lot of midnight oil and this was all part of his asymmetrical rule, his refusal to engage personalities directly. Like George Washington, Eisenhower wanted to appear above politics. Privately, he'd call in Cabinet members and slap wrists when need be, dress them down like the old General that he was. Few knew the ends and outs of bureaucracy like he did. Let's face it: the man held the Allied Coalition together in WW2, and no other general from either side could had done it. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who seldom gave anyone besides Bernard Montgomery praise, admitted as such. The key to Ike and his commanding respect is that when he gave his Word - it was gold. His famous Grin was genuine, but hell hath no fury when one crossed Ike and got his dander raised. Eisenhower had a fierce temper that he kept cloaked from the public, but it was like a sudden thunderstorm, and he was not one to carry long-term grudges against someone. Many people say that 'hate is not part of my vocabulary'(some of these types are some of the most prolific haters, actually), and this is true of Eisenhower. Nixon, his Vice President - no stranger to hatred - remarked that Ike had no concept of the term and didn't understand it. Ike was both a responsible statesman and also a benevolent human being - rare in the political arena.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had his faults and big ones like anyone. He listened to Dulles too much and actually enabled the growth of the military-industrial complex/National Security State by looking the other way on CIA shenanigans in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere. The Domino Theory was erroneous. But his finest hour was in 1956 when he refused to directly engage the USSR over Hungary and in no uncertain terms he told the British-French-Israeli tag team on the Suez Canal to back-off - such prevented the USA-USSR from going to nuclear war and ending human civilization. The John Birch Society called Ike a 'Communist' because he didn't think that turning the Earth into a radioactive crater was a good idea. Go figure, consider the source....

As I previously remarked to my virtual friend, Howard J. Harrison, over at 'The Economic Nationalist', the 1950s under Papa Ike was perhaps the last decade of the 'American System' economics - even with the antithesis of Bretton Woods: internal improvements(the Interstate/Autobahnen Plan), fiscal responsibility;Ike believed in Carey's harmony of interests as well. Eisenhower admired rich industrialists and brought some of them into his Administration, and they are those he cultivated as golfing partners. But unlike 'Republicans' today, Ike accepted the social-market of the New Deal and thought those who wanted to destroy the social-safety net were correctly, STUPID! Not that he was a Guns n' Butter liberal either - Ike was at heart a conservative and spoke in nostalgia and wistfully of small-town America, like Abilene, Kansas that he grew up in, and he was a firm believer and practitioner of the old Protestant Work Ethic. Yet, he knew that not everyone could enjoy the benefits of this, and some people were born with strikes against them that they could not overcome. Again, noblesse oblique. Eisenhower was neither a Calvin Coolidge nor a Great Society patron. Out of all the post WW2 presidents of the USofA, Ike came the closest to finding the Synthesis in national economic policy.....

The reader must know that I am a bit bias since like Ike(no pun), I am also a Kansan. Visiting his Presidential Library in Abilene is like a pilgrimage site that Roman Catholics have to Lourdes and Rome. He's the Sunflower State's Guy that rose above the detrimental reputation of 'Hayseeds &Methodists'( coined by that bigoted, classist slug, Free Market Bolshevik & Nazi sympathiser - HL Mencken) and made good in the realm of the City Slickers, and he was the best that Kansas ever produced for the United States of America in the political arena - Bob Dole could not shine Ike's shoes, because Bob Dole lacked the certain essential ingredient that Ike had - Great-Souled Man.

Few Presidents could look the Founding Fathers in the eye and say that they passed muster. Dwight D. Eisenhower was one who could, and he would smile when he said it.....

2007-08-31T05:49:00.000-06:00

Bush's Solution for every economic malfunction: cut taxes. Dean Baker at 'Beat the Press' does a fine job demonstrating that the Shrub's plan to help Americans suffering from the foreclosure epidemic is not only empty symbolism, but stupidity. Of course, the wealthy who over-extended themselves in real estate speculations will benefit the most. Another classic case of the OverClass's assault on the American Dream - that every citizen can 'build a home where the buffalo roam' - is now getting to be just that.....

Glad that College Football Season is commencing, this Saturday! It should be a civic Holy Day. The NFL does not quite have the 'soul' as football does at the University level; anymore I could care less who gets to the Super Bowl come next February.....

"My Country, Right or Wrong - still my Country." I'm down with that and always have been. Yet Americans generally lack the ability or desire to look into the mirror - especially those who they elect to public office(s). When any citizen takes issue with the detrimental general behavior of their fellow Americans, the imperial hubris of foreign and defense policy craftsmen, the NeoCon lobby always screams that such an analytical citizen is some American-hating Leftist, a 'Fifth Columnist'(?), or some other label. If Americans forget that they are all-too-human like anyone else, how can we ever know when our Country is in the right direction??.....

'What is Above, is Below' - This is another thing that Europe still in part retains whilst Americans have lost the concept of, or never really had - the duality of the macrocosm/microcosm. My fellow Yanks scratch their heads when the totality of Being is discussed;instead we Americans have a worldview of have and do, and think that having and doing something is segregated from the so-called 'great chain of Being'. This is why post WW2 Existentialism never caught on much on this side of the Pond except in academic or bohemian circles; for allegedly being so 'modern', Existentialism is broadly a continuation of the old medieval macrocosm/microcosm interaction, though with heavier emphasis on the micro- individual's role in this. We are supposed to be such individualists here in the USofA, yet we lack the spiritual essence within existence , and often dismiss any heady discussions of Being as gobbly-goop - we got the wrong verbs as guidance, that's why.Finger-pointing? Yup, a man named John Locke - America's 18th Century Enlightenment patron philosopher - for starters...

Spenglerian 'second-religiousness' doesn't apply to spirituality: religion is often divorced from spirit and often have no correlation. If/when we go down the commode, it will be because the spirituality of the macro/microcosm is out of whack, regardless of how many Americans attend church on Sunday to beat the Bible and make some lazy-assed shyster preacher or priest, well-to-do. A total atheist is often more spiritual than your token orthodox true-believer and less susceptible to experience what we in the US has, from Top to Bottom, spiritual death. Even if every American fills the church pews come Sunday morning, it shan't make a bit of difference and hold back the Fall of our own creation(?).....

2007-08-28T04:30:00.000-06:00

Was going to do a sarcastic piece on Larry Craig and the Party of *Family Values*(GOP) but anyone can read about it anywhere else, and the writer will probably do a better job of it....

This is to inform any reader that for the time being, posting here will be less frequent. I am in the abyss of redundancy and it is getting difficult to spin any post regarding Free Trade, Protectionism, etc., where I do not wax like some Dittohead merely repeating what His Fat Hypocriteness, Rush Limbaugh( I know.. Mikey Moore is fatter and he recently did a health-care movie.Not seeing it.),spews out daily - which are the same things he said the day before, and before, and before....

Not that Left-Federalist has thrown in the towel, and I'll probably utilize this blog space for unrelated topics; I'm just as earnest on the core issues discussed here as ever. I've not hit a block, but a broken record, and it's time to turn it off for a bit. Unlike Limbaugh, I'm not getting paid to be repetitious, and other things require my attention in this thing called existence......

2007-08-24T10:36:00.000-06:00

Another thing that has contributed to the demise of American Working Class culture is that no longer is Joe Six Pack paid for his blood, sweat and tears, weekly. 'TGIF' used to have more significance in that the Blue Collar guy could look forward to getting his wages - now he usually has to wait biweekly for them, and like myself, he is oft not paid on a Friday. Who killed Friday PayDays? I have this theory that a long time ago in a drone mill or factory in Anytown, USA, some lazy accountant who was swapping spit with the Boss convinced him that if payroll was done only twice a month, their beautiful special relationship would only get better. Hence, the meme was passed down to all the lazy personnel in payroll at companies everywhere and it has become adopted, almost everywhere.

It's bad enough that the corporate overclass has to bust up unions, buy off politicians for passage of *Right to (screw) Work(ers)* laws - they then attacked the general morale of the workin' stiff by taking away the joy of all Fridays. Feature that many people do not earn enough to properly budget(what's that?) their earnings in the first place, and this biweekly business throws another wrench into it. And whoever came up with the idea of 'rotating shifts' - that messes up an employee's biological clock - needs to be tarred&feathered, beat with in an inch of his life, then shipped off in a cargo hold full of big rats and presented to trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity.......

[Also I have this other conspiracy theory about something else: shyster divorce lawyers at some conference in the 1990's were lamenting that since more normal heterosexual couples have opted to just shack-up instead of going through the traditional ritual of pair-bonding - they decided to push this Gay Marriage bit to drum up more business . Given that infidelity is the #1 cause of marital breakups, and male homosexuals are the most promiscuous out of all genders of sexual orientations - divorce lawyers could then clean-up at court. What a bloody racket!]

2007-08-24T05:34:00.000-06:00

Spiegel Online has a cooing article regarding Ukraine's economic 'boom' and between the lines said article insinutes that said GNP growth is because of laissez-faire policies - "politics is politics, business is business". Certainly the Free Market Bolsheviks at the Cato Institute have picked up on this info and are strutting about with chub-ons. Well, a time will come shortly that they will need Viagra to maintain them: Ukraine still has its old industrial base which as we know, hard- industry is the key for economic growth and without some form of dirgist public planning, booms will ultimately go bust. Ukraine also has a growing service sector which is anthema to industry and sets out to rob the labor force;if some checks are not put on said service sector, and if Ukraine does not protect its industrial base, watch them slide into Americanization. That Ukraine also has a growing speculative force should be reason for Kiev to have yellow lights flashing now. Plus, the Spiegel article lauds the growing consumerism of Ukrainians. Really now, the last thing that a growing national-economy needs is to adopt the USA's Consumer Cult! Ukrainians should be saving instead of spending on Mickey Mouse gadgets. Yeah, I know that they were deprived of their toys under the horrible, central-planned Leninist State economy of the USSR, but going full-throttle in the other direction is not the answer. Look what happened to us Yankees here, Ukrainians, and learn: autocratic State Socialism isn't the answer, and neither is the neofeudalism of globalist laissez-faire.....

Morris Berman loves to point out how the materialist, hedonistic Consumer Cult has robbed Americans of their soul, yet he omits the role that his side has played in this. Though I don't think that Berman is a cultural-Bolshevik himself, he is a man of the Left, and the Frankfurt School import here was anything but good in post-WW2, USA. But Berman is on par that America as the beacon of liberty was from its inception based on negative freedom: we held liberty as against something else instead of for. But Berman's criticisms of America does not have the hue of his Leftist counter-parts like Howard Zinn and Michael -'let's not pick on Stalin'-Parenti( as I'd love to time-warp Holocaust Deniers to Auschwitz, circa 1944, same applies to Gulag Deniers like Parenti - a logging camp on 600 calories per day in 1930s Arctic Siberia would do him nicely.) and he acknowledges that America was once a good idea and the Federalists of the Early Republic were the real Menschen of classical-republican virtue and retained that benevolent aristocratic meme of organic Europa melded to said 'small-r' republicanism. Berman rightfully blames the Jeffersonians for mucking all of this up, when usually Lefties coo over the Jacobin world-view of TJ. Neither does Berman champion the meme of full-fledged participatory democracy, and he grasps in his own wording what is needed in a healthy society of a nation is a harmony of interests between the Few and the Many - not leveling from either/or. The Few have leveled the USA by hyper individualism in the name of laissez-faire. But a negative harmony does exist : the Many keep voting these cruds in to rule them, or they don't even care to go to the ballot box to do so. The excuse that there is a case of no real alternative, and why should the Commons even bother to vote, rings hollow. Many times in American election history we have had third parties on the ballot that was an alternative to the Demo-Repub duopoly, but few have ever made more than a sharp splash with the voting population. For instance, in 2000 we had alternatives both on the Left and Right(Nader/Buchanan) to Gore and the Shrub - two that few were enthusiastic about and they were roughly the same species - but how many voted for either two of the named alternatives? The excuse that voting for a third party candidate is "wasting your vote" is stupid( as if voting for some corrupt dummkopf that a voter doesn't like isn't wasting a ballot). This is exactly what the Demo-publican party-power structure wants the voter to think, and it works, apparently.
*************
Notice how Americans with their cult of individualism are actually herd-like within it: they all indulge their consumerist hedonism based on what their neighbor has, or what some cool&trendy celebrities and other aspiring criminals are doing and wearing. For instance, this current tattoo craze originates from that one of the Beautiful People, somewhere, decided to get a Tat one night when drunk, and then subsequently the Sheep were standing in line at the Tattoo Parlor, bleating to get their wool adorned with, (cough) body art.

Many other examples exist on how conformist and collectivist Americans truly are despite their 'rugged individualism', and they have the individualism/communitarian dichotomy in all the wrong places, flip-flopped back asswards.

Time to be Thankful

2007-08-23T06:17:00.000-06:00

Barak Obama has been showing that he can be John Wayne,too(reference to his comments on Pakistan,etc.). Imagine him and Duncan Hunter getting together and playing Cowboys & Indians in elementary school....this demonstrates that the Democratic Party is the one of *Empire, Lite* and will not change too much the current foreign policy shenanigans of neoimperialism, and neither will they check the power of the 1% OverClass despite their occasional rhetoric to the contrary. Feature that the *National Security State* was created under a Democratic Administration(Truman) in the first place, as Chomsky points out in his lectures. The Dems lone candidate actively endorsing America's full pull-back from Empire and return to the social-market edifice of the New Deal is Dennis Kucinich; if the Midget gets more than 5% of the vote in the upcoming Iowa Caucus - it will be proof that God indeed does exist. He's a joke within the Democratic Party and doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. The GOP's authentic maverick and anti-imperialist, Ron Paul, doesn't either. This is a grim reality that we will probably be looking at President ClintonII in '08, or another *compassionate conservative* like that idiot Morman, Mitt Romney. Start waving bye-bye to the Republic then - because it will be then beyond a doubt - finito . It may have already fled the nest, and we know who is to blame. The sad situation is that most of the American citizenry doesn't give a shit just as long as they have their toys and gadgets, satellite TV with 500 channels of kitsch on it and that there is always low prices at Wal-Mart( yes, it IS this bad); women can qualify for liposuction/cosmetic surgery on their health insurance and the drive-thru is open 24/7 at McDonalds; Johnny can have his Ritalin and there is another sports arena built in their local city for more Bread n' Circuses entertainment - 'A Republic?? I don' care!'

Thank you very much, my fellow Americans, and to the bastards&bitches that you elect as public officials to run the country into the ground(those of you who do vote) -

"...thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."

- William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer

Bretton Woods& Berman

2007-08-22T11:59:00.000-06:00

Dean Baker has a nice snippet at 'Beat the Press' about 'Wall Street Welfare Queens' - you get 'em Dean!

Alas, the subject of this post pertains to the current book that I am reading, Dark Ages America. I've read a few other texts by the author before(good ones) and I possess a sense of loyalty to authors that I like. Initially, I was not all that keen on reading Dark Ages given that I am already pessimistic enough about the fate of America, but I do have a hunch that the window is open enough that things can be turned around with the right people conducting the orchestra. Also, one review of Morris Berman's latest book proclaimed that Jimmy Carter is the hero of it, and that kind of put me off - I never could abide Carter much(though Jimma' deserves two thumbs-up for his dedication to Habitat for Humanity, which is also my pet charity.). I waited until the local Uni library had a copy available, and now so I read it.

Morris Berman presents the similar theme with his current one that was in his previous, Twilight of American Culture. Now, he states that the sky is not only foreboding, it is already hailing & raining on us but we do not know it fully as yet. Berman is Spenglerian without ever mentioning Spengler in Dark Ages and he states unequivocally that TINA is the reality, though Berman's TINA has a strong case of STD's - he doesn't like the whore and is not a protagonist, willing Trick for her.

The focal point of this post will be his economic comments of Berman's book, and I found some of them spot-on, though he leaves out some essentials that should had been addressed for his arguments. Namely, Berman regards the demise of Bretton Woods as the epicenter of the end of the USA's economic hegemony which is but partially true. Berman believes that Bretton Woods was the 'check' on globalist laissez-faire and he looks upon economics as a sociologist/cultural historian that he is( we need more economists with this panache). Rightfully he remarks in said text that the post- Bretton Woods era opened the door wide open for this globalist catastrophe that we are witnessing now;the floating-exchange rate of currencies is a predator-speculator's dream come true, and there have been no authentic checks on the ebb&flow of international capital as it was in the post WW2 Era because of said Bretton Woods Agreement.

Morris Berman, like other protagonists for BWA, ignores why the edifice collapsed. Instead, he merely states "...for whatever reason...". This is rather odd given that he is usually a well-endowed researcher, and one would think that if someone felt that Bretton Woods was the Thing, that they'd want to know why, and inform their reader. I covered the *WHY* in previous post, 'Nixon Shock, Revisited', and I'll not rehash it much here. A few months ago, I visited Berman's blog and posted in brief some of these factoids about the collapse of BWA, but he never responded(Berman seems to only reply to commentators who claim to be fellow educators and Ph.D's....I won't call him a snob, but question marks are there.) to it. He should had read George Greider's, Secrets of the Temple, before he wrote on the subject, but that is neither here now there.

Berman's hero of Bretton Woods is the British delegate at the conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes. Yet, Keynes was not at all onboard on all the final accords reached there - BWA was essentially that of Harry Dexter White who was not a 'Keynesian'. True enough, Keynes does deserve accolades. One of the most major misconceptions about Keynes is that he was a socialist - far from it. He was a capitalist who wanted to put a 'human face' to it and he himself got immensely rich with sound investments in stock( it's ironic that most professional economists often loose their ass in their own personal speculations). Another Keynesian myth is that the current status qua of deficit-spending with gargantuan debt is all based on his plan - Keynes only sanctioned deficit spending as a temporary measure during severe economic downturns as remedy instead of raising taxes;Keynesian prescriptions during 'good years' called for balanced-budgets, federal restrictions on spending, national debt reduction and the necessary tax hikes to reach these ends - basic common sense. JMK met an untimely death in 1946 because Vienna School predator, Friedrich August von Hayek's magnum opus,The Road to Serfdom, was actually a declaration of war on Keynesian economics and Keynes was up to meeting the challenge. If he would had lived longer, Keynes would had undoubtedly cleaned the clocks of the minions of the Mont Pelerin Society (Wilhelm Roepke, excepted.Roepke was closer to Keynes than he was to his neoclassical colleagues in said MPS;Roepke is the genius who found the synthesis of neoliberalism &neosocialism, some say). The Vienna School would had been discredited and laissez-faire would had remained deader than fried chicken as it was by 1945 - ass-up-end into the dustbin of economic history where it belongs.

Morris Berman, a Leftist and Red Diaper Baby, waxes like a fiscal conservative in his narrative, and correctly identifies LBJ's costly Vietnam War and Great Society(yes! a lefty critic of of Johnson's spend-thrift, Guns n' Butter,pipedream to end poverty!) for the inflationary spikes that led us up to August 15, 1971. However, the author omits Kennedy's role in this morass: JFK began the policy of deficit-spending within productive economic times and he also cut taxes for the wealthy Overclass - a prelude to Reagan twenty years later. The Kennedy-Johnson Administrations were the main culprits in the Bretton Woods debacle, and all of this was thrusted into Nixon's lap.

The author sighs over Bretton Woods's collapse, but unlike other partisans of it like Ravi Batra and James Tobin, he doesn't believe that it can be re-instated. Berman also demonstrates that branches of the BWA such as the IMF and World Bank has become the antithesis, the alter ego of its original benevolence. They are now the Enemy after the laissez-fairists have taken them over and now their program is to install cosmopolitan corporate feudalism(or fascism?) all over the Blue Dot, and they're making a fine job of it.

The year Nineteen-hundred-seventy-three, being held as the epicenter of the end of America's hegemony internationally( a horrible, shitty year indeed; nothing good came out of '73.Nihil.), plus the omega of the USA's 'human-face capitalism', the Dark Ages America directly lends acquiesce to this. Nixon did try to re-set the Dollar at a fixed-rate as before, but no international consensus could be reached to restart Bretton, thus the 'floating-exchange ' rates of currencies was officially adopted, which has become a predator-speculator's nirvana. De-industrialization in the USA took off with a passion, real wages have plummeted and have not moved of any significance since 1968( to get the real wages to '68 levels, our current federal Minimum Wage law would have to be set at $8.08 per hour. Scandalous!), and inflation has literally ate us alive since them. But Berman and others must know that Bretton Woods should not have been set up as a permanent international order, and the real cause of America's economic demise was lack of protection. I can't write this enough.

*****

Here's a harebrained idea where internationalist BWA nostalgics and tariff protectionists such as myself,perhaps all can reach an accord to turn-back the globalist monster, beat-it down and have a pseudo-cosmopolitan economic order as well: given that Bretton Woods was primarily oriented for economic recovery of Europe and to avoid pitfalls of laissez-faire, why doesn't the powers-that-be in DC say to Brussels - "hey, it's your turn." ? In this here simplified form, all participants agree that the Euro should be the reigning fixed-rate reserve currency backed by a species of gold from reserves from all said participating nations. Convertibility of Euros to gold are conditional on majority vote and with limits on the transfer of gold reserves from one nation to another. The US Dollar remains constitutionally sovereign but stabilized in this format. Tariff rates(yes) will be assessed based on the current fixed-rate of the Euro compared to the value of the Dollar. In short, this is a reverse- Bretton Woods with many of the holes of the BWA plugged. Nations will be allowed to unilaterally raise and lower their own tariff-rates to rectify their own trade imbalances or for policies that require internal improvements or their vital industries that are getting hit with inordinate foreign competition. Both the fixed-rate reserve currency and tariffs will cover one another in this sequence. As for the IMF and World Bank and WTO - to the graveyard they will go.

Maybe this plan has glaring caverns in it as well, but it is worth a try to tweak and should be satisfactory to both economic-nationalists and those who are hung-up on international stability of a consensus. Berman's declaration of an impeding dark age may be halted economically.

Don't Heart Huckabee(s)

2007-08-20T06:20:00.000-06:00

Anyone wonder which GOP Presidential campaign that Karl Rove will try to latch himself to? Anytime that a public official proclaims his/her resignation to "spend more time with my family" one should know enough by now that this is a code-phrase meaning that he/she wants another job. These politicos would probably end up killing their families if they spent time with them anyway. Rove will write his book but keep his name out in the meantime. If there are no takers for his services with the GOP hopefuls, there are plenty of lobbyists that would hire him.......

Our current system of electing a President is sick. Sick! Sound-bites, one-liners, are what matters instead of serious discourses on issues and above all a candidate needs the endorsement of the One True God of the United States - Mammon. Though the Primary system was originally intended to have more democracy in the selection of Presidential candidates, it has become perverted and has degenerated into a funding sweepstakes. Besides, the rank and file of voters usually stay at home during the Primaries. Give me back the smoke-filled convention hall, or at least have a one-day National Primary in late summer, or a run-off, in an election year......

According to an article at American Prospect, the Religious Right are finding their Anointed One in Mike Huckabee - a charismatic Southern Baptist who also belongs to the Amen Lobby; the AL believes that the foreign policy of the USA should be merged with that of Tel Aviv. I would think that the Israelis themselves should be reticent in taking such praise and devotion from this group of Fundy bipeds: if it wasn't for their 'Rapture'/Armageddon mythology, these are the same people who'd be charging the Jewish people as 'Christ-Killers', and would had been cheerleaders for pogroms at ghetto gates back in the Old County in another time.As Michael Lind pointed out in his 'Up from Conservatism', Christian Zionists such as Pat Robertson have a strong dose of Anti-Semitism and Reverend Pat himself believes firmly in the Jewish Banker/Freemason/Illuminati (?)conspiracy......(I guess that includes 33rd Degree Mason, George Washington, Pat??) The Religious Right have nothing in common with the traditional non-aligned foreign policy of the United States and they're also for the most part have the economic and trade line of The Wall Street Journal (now owned by the globalist-predator &Free Market Bolshevik - Rupert Murdoch).....

Notice that even the Black churches are getting in on the *Prosperity Gospel* act when previously American Black churches had been a bedrock of Liberal Christianity and the Social Gospel(that is more in tune with the message of the New Testament that I've read). Jesus not only wants you with him in Heaven - he wants His Sheep with a BMW parked inside a three car garage in a overpriced home in the suburbs too. Jesus at the Second Coming wants to Rapture the faithful that have Rolex watches on their wrists, with sound Stock investment portfolios. This is nothing but a recycle of old Calvinism and Elmer Gantries in three-piece suits. Naturally, the Reverends want a rich flock to fleece because it will mean more tithes & offerings for them - so they can live affluent without having to do any work for it. These preachers touting the Prosperity Gospel heresy are nothing but parasites, regardless of their racial classification......

Am currently working on the pages of Morris Berman's,Dark Ages America, where the cultural historian takes a Spenglerian hue and proclaims we are are done for here, and he washes his hands. I do think that he is being unduly defeatist, but the message of the text is grim and compelling. Berman rightly assigns the blame for America's demise when we had transformed ourselves into a National Security State and simultaneously pushed globalist laissez-faire as essential ingredients of Pax Americana. American exceptionalism is filled with contradiction: the first nation to wipe-out the institution of titled-nobility(good), but forfeited the old organic noblesse oblique in the process, which was the benevolence of European aristocracy. That we are from birth a bourgeoisie country that didn't endure feudalism has come back to bite us on the ass, according to Berman. The author, a Leftist, did mention that the Federalists of the 1790s came close to finding the synthesis between collectivism and individualism but the pre- McCarthyite demagoguery of Jefferson's Republicans kept it from forming because anything slightly resembling the governance, social aspects and financial apparatus of old Europa was regarded as 'monarchist'.....too early for a long book review yet, and I don't know if I'll do a complete one on Dark Ages America....

Two for Adams

2007-08-17T06:29:00.000-06:00

John Adams was not the successful administrator that Washington and Jefferson was;he was quite the absentee President and when he was in the capital attending to business, he would more times than not focus his energy in the wrong direction.

Many historians blame Hamilton for the demise of the Federalists and for Adams's re-election loss in 1800, but the biggest portion of the Federalist Party's downfall rests in the person of John Adams himself: he was the one who gave the Republicans the red meat that they wanted by pushing the Alien& Sedition Acts that was designed to punish Republican yellow-journalists who would often engage in personal attacks on Adams himself. The vindictiveness of JA's character is paramount here. Hamilton himself thought that the Alien&Sedition Acts was going too far - and he had endured more abuse from the Republican hacks than Adams ever had thought about. The mere proposal of these Acts were political suicide especially after Adams had broke the back of the Jacobin tendency of the Republicans in the 'XYZ Affair', and his re-election was a gimme. All that A&S did was to give the Republicans new life - something that both Jefferson and Hamilton realized.

Even without Hamilton's party- pamphlet circular attacking Adams as having an unstable personality (which the Republicans got hold of and published with glee) and unfit for the office of Presidency,John Adams would had lost in 1800 because of the Alien&Sedition Acts. True enough, I think it was partially a case of sour grapes with Hamilton since Adams had 86'd his last chance of military glory that he always craved, but the essence of said pamphlet also rang true: Adams was not up for the task of Chief Executive and Hamilton was hardly the first who realized that Adams was more than a bit neurotic. Adams's cantankerous, spiteful, and argumentative side of his persona was well known from his days in the Continental Congress in the 1770s; Benjamin Franklin realized that Adams was brilliant, but he "often left his senses" when political debate and discourses were engaged. The stories of Adams's temper-tantrums were reported by not a few, and one has the image of Hitler's conduct in the Der Bunker to compare with President Adams's behavior. The "right men for the job" was the one that preceded him, and the one who followed Adams into the executive office in 1800.

But let's give Adams some respect - he was a victim of circumstance. The fact of the matter is that there was no man in the Early Republic who could had been a good 2nd President of the United States. Jefferson in 1796 would had been a poor and even dangerous selection - he was still in his Jacobin phase - as he was the best one four years later. Hamilton would had not been a good choice in 1796 or at anytime(AH's talents were being an aide-de-camp, or an unofficial prime minister to a Chief Executive, and he was too controversial and divisive anyway). The 2nd President had to be always in Washington's shadow, and a more kinder and gentler man in Adams's place would had also been deemed a failure. John Adams, in a sense, took another proverbial bullet for the Team by even allowing himself to be elected President in '96 though he proved himself to be unfit for the Office.

John Adams retired to his farm in Braintree and lived another twenty-six years after he left the Presidency, writing his thoughts in a journal and later on reviving his friendship with Jefferson via a famed correspondence and he lived to see his son, John Quincy, elected President. Unlike most spawn from brilliant people, John Quincy Adams was more than a chip off the old man's block - Adams II was a certified genius, a wunderkind. But like his dad, JQA was a one-term President and not a successful one.

Though John Adams may rightly deserve an 'F' rating as President, few worked harder for the American Cause in the Revolution than he did, and he shall always be in the pantheon of the Founders. He had a keen legalistic mind and was a intuitive political scientist. Adams is the poster Founder of conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk, but I think that this is not a good judgment of John Adams: unlike Kirk, Adams was not an Anglophile; Adams had a distaste and fear of mobocracy, but being a New Englander with it's tradition of townhall democracy, Adams was and couldn't be undemocratic per se, even with a few Tory trappings here and there(Russell Kirk and his disciples should had moved to their beloved Great Britain and became genuine-article High Tories like Kirk's slobbering Anglophile hero, TS Eliot, did. I never fully understood why American conservatives thought that Russell Kirk was the Thing).

Adams was an astute Thinker and a leader among men - until he reached the Alpha political office, and the Presidency requires true Alphas. Adams came up more than a bit short, and it is a pity.

One on Adams

2007-08-15T06:04:00.000-06:00

Anytime I think of the second President of the United States, an embittered elderly gent lingering over his desk with ink and paper comes to mind - a taciturn New Englander who felt that his place in history was robbed, and he aimed to set the record straight according to his take on it...

John Adams is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Founders. Him being one of the 'old men' of the Spirit of 1776, he shared with Jefferson the notion that said spirit's carpet was pulled from underneath them by popinjays and parvenus and lesser men, and some Manichean conspiracy lurked beneath it. Adams was there at the Continental Congress and he was the one who stood up and endorsed George Washington to lead the Revolutionary Army; he tidied up the work in France for their recognition of America and later had to deal with insults and ostracism being the 1st American Ambassador to Great Britain. It was Adams who prodded the shy and semi-reclusive Thomas Jefferson to pen The Declaration of Independence. The thanks that he got for this was minimal, he believed, so forever walked about with a chip on his Yankee shoulder and nursed both his public and private grudges to his dying day.

John Adams took another one for the team by following George Washington into the office of the Presidency in 1797;anyone in succession of Washington would be under the gun to meet a certain criteria that no one at the time could surmount. The contrasts of the Adams Inagural were striking: here was outgoing Washington, hirsute, tall, regal looking, standing next to the short and rotund John Adams, who was bug-eyed and chrome-dome bald. Washington was a true Alpha Male who could command respect of his peers by merely entering the room - whilst Adams had to shout and argue to gain respect, but no cigar. John Adams was a legal scholar with all the classical education to go with it while Washington's schooling was minimal(like many of the Presidents of the Early and Middle Republic, George was primarily self-taught); Adams was a stickler for academia and felt that Washington's mind was not a good one because he never attended the Big Three Unis of America - he had a case of educational snobbery and thought he was being dwarfed by cerebral dilletantes.

Adams was the first middle-class President and had all the stereotypical frugal Yankee virtues in tow. He did not gel with the patrician plantation class, and couldn't abide their land speculative ways based on the institution of slavery. He also did not like or understand the nouveau riches of the big cities like Phili and ,and had a deep case of xenophobia. This is partially what binded him to Jefferson: though Adams was nominally a Federalist and often accussed of being a monarchist, he had much more in common with the Republicans of his day, for irony. He didn't understand the Hamiltonian financial system and generally loathed the idea of having a standing peacetime Army(though Adams was always a big booster for the Navy). Adams loathed the Jacobin tendency of the 1790s Republicans and their "womanish attachment to France" but he possessed no love for the British Empire or the Hanoverian Dynasty ( Ambassador Adams never forgot the insult of George III's turning his back on him at their initial meeting) that ruled it. Adams was objective enough to admit that there was benevolence in the British constitution, but he had always a profound hatred of titled nobility and was bigger than Ben Franklin on meritocracy. 'Adams the monarchist' is quite laughable - though he would at times direct a 'monocrat' hue in his Administration.

For all of Adams' crucial hard work directing the Revolutionary cause, when he reached the plateau of Chief Executive, immediately President Adams displayed lack of leadership. His hatred of Alexander Hamilton began full-flower in 1797, yet he kept AH's allies in his Cabinet and always complained about it when he could had just as easily dismissed them. Adams's conduct in Cabinet meetings was part court-room melodrama and partially a circus: John Adams loved to argue often for the sake alone and would occasionally play the role of gadfly just to hone his debating skills. Yet, said skills were not that fine-tuned because he would often get angry and throw temper-tantrums( some reports have Adams kicking his wig across the floor, and even throwing it at one of his ministers). The provincial Adams hated the big city of Philadelpia(then the US capital) and would spend long furloughs away - sometimes at seven months at a time - in his native Braintree, Massachusetts. Then Adams would play the martyr and complain that his government was out of control and that they would not listen to him! Of course, he blamed 'Hamilton's junto' for this, when John Adams was the one man with the duty to direct hands-on administration.

Many historians point to Adams's animosity toward AH from the election of 1796 when Hamilton behind the scenes tried to get Pinckney into the top spot, but there is a longer history to this: John Adams was devoted to his wife, Abigal, and to put it in modern day jargon, John Adams was quite 'pussy-whipped' - Abigal wore the pants. Abigal's personal and political opinions counted most with hubby John, and Abigal was usually prime influence on who John liked, and who John hated. Mrs. Adams took an instant dislike to AH, but she was always gaga on Jefferson. Out of all the public percieved 'meddlesome' First Ladies in US Presidential history - Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Wilson, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton - they could not hold a candle to Abigal Adams. This, compounded with Adams at the thankless and worthless job of Vice-President in the Washington Administration - where Hamilton had the most influence - Adams had a long- seated grudge and jealousy of AH before '96 who he regarded as a "foreigner...a bastard son of a Scotch peddlar".

President Adams's one shining moment could had been his handling of the 'XYZ Affair' (where France demanded a heavy ransom and other humilating tributes to conclude a new peace treaty with the United States). When the pro-French Republicans in Congress demanded to see the communique of the said 'XYZ' documents, them thinking that Adams was holding back on the "generous and friendly French', he called their bluff and did just that. The revelations shocked the nation and thus ended America's love-affair with France until 1917, and the US prepared for war against their one-time ally, and rallied around their President...

President Adams let his new popularity go to his head and began strutting around Philadelphia in a military uniform( something that was probably quite humorous to behold since Adams had the most un-military like physique and bearing)making patriotic speeches. For national unity purposes, he requested that George Washington form and lead the Army against what seemed an inevitable French invasion. Washington accepted, yet he tossed a big wrench in Generalissimo John's plan: George would only be the de facto head of the Army only from the capital or Mount Vernon in administrative capacity, and only if John Adams appointed Alexander Hamilton to Major General to do all the tasks that was needed to form, organize, and lead the Army on the battlefield. After contending with 'Hamilton's Junto' in his Cabinet, one could quite imagine Adams throwing his wig when he read Washington's condition. Now, Alex himself was back in public life, and head of the Army to boot, and once again overshadowing Adams.

John Adams grudgingly complied with Washington's demand, undoubtedly feeling helpless in the situation, yet began complaining that Hamilton was "another Bonaparte" set to usurp power for himself. President Adams as CIC was in the legal capacity to say 'no' if he truly believed the Caesarian ambitions of Hamilton, and he displayed his weakness paramountly here. Now, the War Hawk Adams began his transition to Dove and throughout '98 and '99 did his best to slow down the forming of the Army through delaying funds, denying Major General Hamilton's requests, and being purposely standoffish. Washington's death in late 1799 undoubtedly had Adams sighing in relief. Hamilton without his chief patron was now open season and Adams immediately sent another peace mission to Paris to conclude the matter without resorting to war, and subsequently disbanded the Army - something that Adams and many historians think that was his finest hour. Some have written that Adams "saved the Republic" from Hamilton's martial ambitions. But it was pure partisanism and related to his own animosity and jealousy of AH, and not for the sake of 'peace' that Adams took this dovish route and prevented war.

Adams's legacy of a peacenik is quite undeserved given that he was all John Wayne before the hated AH came into the picture of 'XYZ'. If someone else more to the taste of John Adams would had been Major General - or if Washington wouldn't had conveniently died - we would be reading of the *French War 1800- ?* in American history books today. War Presidents are more apt to be re-elected as John Adams to his chagrin discovered......

(to be continued)

Various Voices of Anti-Globalist Economics

2007-08-14T06:27:00.000-06:00

"In the science of economics, theory and practice are virtually divorced from one another - to the detriment of both. Economists condemn practical men as mere followers of routine who fail to appreciate either or the grandeur of the doctrines enuciated by economists. Practical men, on the other hand, regard economists as mere doctrinaires who ignore the facts of life and inhabit a dream world of economic theories that exists only in their imagination."
- Friedrich List,
The Natural System of Political Economy,1837

"Free Trade definitely kept prices low - but so did the Great Depression."
- Ravi Batra

"To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society."
-Karl Polanyi

"In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who want to sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it have ever been called into question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind."

"...capital employed in the home trade, it has already been shown, puts in motion a greater quantity of domestic industry and gives revenue and employment to a greater number of the inhabitants of the country, than equal capital employed in the foreign trade of consumption."
-Adam Smith

"Today, the transnational corporation has virtually no allegiance except to its own global expansion and profit. What brings financial value to the shareholders is the only criterion even if jobs are destroyed and whole communities devastated."
-Jerry Brown

"...trade agreements are crafted to enable corporations to play this game at a global level, to pit country against country in a race to see who can set the lowest wage levels, the lowest environmental standards, the lowest consumer safety standards. It is a tragic "incentives" lure that has its winners and losers determined before it gets underway:workers, consumers, and communities in all countries lose;short-term profits soar and big business - wins."
-Ralph Nader

"Free Trade is the religion of our age. With its heaven as the planetary economy, free trade comes complete with philosophical and analytical underpinnings. Higher mathematics are used to prove its basic theorems........Rather than promoting and sustaining the social relationships that create a vibrant community, the free trade theology relies on a narrow definition of efficiency to guide our conduct."
-David Morris

"Thank God I am not a Free Trader!"
-Theodore Roosevelt

"The global economy has become the world's closet dictator."

"Both enterprises and entire states see themselves trapped in a situation of relentless competition, where each particpant is dependent on the decisions of all other players. What falls by the wayside in this hurly-burly is the possibility for self-determination."
-Wolfgang Sachs

"We will not bind you to America. If you(US corporations) wish to shut down here and go to China - go to China! But your products will not re-enter the United States duty-free. They will carry a tariff to make up the difference between the cost of the Chinese labor you hired, and the cost of the American labor that you left behind."
-Pat Buchanan

"What in the hell are we waiting for?!? The time was YESTERDAY to fix bayonets and totally gut these bastards."
-Mitch/Redoubt10
;-)

Meandering around Monticello, again.

2007-08-13T04:49:00.000-06:00

Following reading "Burr: The Fallen Founder", Joseph J. Ellis's 1996 one on the Sage of Monticello - "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson" was quite refreshing and is a tome of historical accuracy, unlike Nancy Isenberg's revisionism. The author delves into the complex worldview of the 3rd President, yet does not resort to extensive psychoanalysis of the man. Ellis's view of TJ is favorable if one reads between the lines, but he remains an objective historian enough to present Jefferson as a man and public servant where something was missing in his psyche and why he remains controversial and a complex enigma to this day. Ellis is an historian who has a literary sense and "American Sphinx" is entertaining for the layperson, professional historian, and the Wanna Bees such as myself.

But my criticisms are numerous of this book, and some will be explored here. Ellis remarkably does not spend a great deal of time writing on the Hamilton-Jefferson feud of the 1790s, and any biography of these two Founders I would think that narrating this ordeal at length should be a requisite of any biographer. He also glosses over TJ's flip-flop on the slavery issue and does not take him to task enough on it though he hits him at the necessary angle.Instead, Ellis devotes lengthy discussion on the Sally Hemings miscegenation controversy, which I think has little to do with discussing Jefferson's statecraft:one writer that I read once dropped an apt observation that biographers that devote inordinate length discussing their subject's sex life says more about the sexual panache of the writer than of the subject.

I could care less if Jefferson fathered children from an extraterrestial, but of course my opinion doesn't count.

Ellis does mention that Jefferson did truly loathe Alexander Hamilton, but doesn't go into much detail why: TJ was a big snob who only thought that the men who were there in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 knew the authentic value of "the spirit of 1776", & they were entitled to decide and rule in the Republic. Hamilton was a parvenu immigrant who had energetic, even hyper-active ways that put the country-squire Virginian off, who preferred a genteel, aloof manner of statescraft and in personal relations (but Hamilton managed to rub-off quite well on another Virginian gentleman, George Washington). Jefferson hated British monarchy and became a Francophile and always felt that the Federalists with their push for a strong activistic government were set on restoration of the Hanovers. Ellis himself finds this notion silly and he writes -

"Hamilton's plans for a proactive federal government empowered to shape markets and set forth both the financial and political agendas were certainly not monarchical in character - if anything, they were more a precocious precursor of twentieth-century New Deal values than an archaic attempt to resuscitate the arbitrary authority of medieval kings and courts - but in Jefferson's mind these distinctions made no appreciable difference."

Ellis goes on to write hither and thither throughout the book about TJ's unfounded obsession with 'monocrats' and monarchists, and the author believes that if there was anyone who was a monarchist in the Early Republic it was Aaron Burr - who was Jefferson's first-term Vice-President and member of his Republican Party. Though John Adams(who was TJ's on-and-off-and on chum) wrote some good things about constitutional monarchy, Adams was a republican, though not an emotional, wear-on-the -sleeves type like Jefferson's partisans were. But Aaron Burr was not a monarchist per se - he was unprincipled in personal political power pursuits and one can easily see Burr being just about anything to reach this end; Burr in another century would had been a good Nazi, Communist, Falangist, Tory, Labourite, or Social Democrat - ideology didn't matter to him.

Like many Jeffersonian historians, Ellis gives President Jefferson's 1st Administration(1801-1805) a big thumbs-up and this is an accurate portrayal. Jefferson throughout most of his term(s) in the executive office was a hard-working - near workaholic - President, who was always up at five in the morning and at his desk. His only leisure was an hour or two spent riding his horse in the afternoon, an occasional dinner-party at evening, and he worked again at night until bedtime at 10pm. Jefferson always wanted to avoid heated debates, so seldom chaired full Cabinet Meetings and preferred to meet department heads one on one and he established a disciplined chain of command within the federal bureaucracy. Jefferson, however, was rather monkish in his statecraft and the man-of-the-People never gave a public speech in his entire period as President - he was only recorded as making brief speeches for his two Inaugural addresses. His shyness of speechmaking was probably in lieu that he had a squeaky, near-effeminate voice with an occasional lisp that he was undoubtedly self-conscious of, plus he probably thought that public speaking was pandering (TJ the aristocrat-phobe was always a patrician). Jefferson instead was a master of the Written Word and there was probably no other Founder that could match his wordsmithing. But TJ was even shy about publishing and guarded his correspondence deftly. When he wanted to put into print an onslaught on his perceived enemies, Jefferson would clandestinely pay hacks to do it for him, or badger his surrogate James Madison to pick up his quill and attack. Jefferson's only book was Notes on Virginia that contained some of his cranky theories within that does his mind a disservice. TJ seemed to believe that his draft of The Declaration of Independence said it all that he needed say for public consumption and his posterity?

TJ's 1st Inaugural contained the phrase - "we are all republicans - we are all federalists". Some have always believed that this was a conciliatory olive branch to his Federalist foes, but Ellis disputes this. TJ didn't capitalize either subject in his handwritten speech(in those days English-language writers capitalized all nouns, and Jefferson had impeccable grammar). Rather, President Jefferson was faced with the reality that his 1800 Second Revolution for "pure republicanism" was going to have a check on it, and a big one. It wasn't Hamilton who stood in the way, but Chief Justice John Marshall, who made it clear, tongue-in-cheek, that TJs desired purge of Federalism was going to be tempered by the Judiciary. Marshall was a rarity who was both a Virginian gentleman and a High Federalist;Marshall made both Adams and Hamilton appear moderate in some aspects. According to American Sphinx, Jefferson came to hate Marshall more than he ever did Hamilton or Burr, but Ellis does not explore into the caverns on this. Jefferson always wanted to eliminate the federal judiciary for this very reason and resented the 3rd branch of the government more than anything that he found disquieting about the US Constitution. TJ also believed that the Senate was a carbon copy House of Lords and he was an early champion for term-limits of Senators. He believed that the House of Representatives should had been the sole legislative body(AH's original plan for the House was actually more democratic than TJ's, btw),the only edifice that should govern the Republican Spirit, which he believed that he had the most correct interpretation of.

Jefferson came into the Presidency with a pre-Reaganesque promise: he was going to cut and eliminate internal taxes, reduce the size of the federal government and retire the National Debt(unlike Reagan, Jefferson cut Defense spending to pennies and totally scrapped the US Navy...unlike Reagan, Jefferson reduced the national debt). Publicly, Jefferson picked financial wizard, Albert Gallitin, as head of the Treasury to set -up a schedule of eliminating said National Debt. However, the first order Gallitin was given was to go over all the accounts of the Treasury and National Bank to get evidence that Alexander Hamilton had 'cooked the books' when he served in the department under Washington. This was not merely the old feuding political vindictiveness on TJ's account but related to his own battles with personal debt: no matter how much Jefferson kept dutiful records on his expenses, he never could come up with black ink. Like many spend-thrifts his solution of failed austerity was to go into debt even more. Jefferson couldn't believe that what he felt to be a lesser mortal could have his own private and public accounts in order without "tricks with numbers". Jefferson was always just a step ahead of his creditors and his debt -ridden ways caused him constant headaches; when Hamilton wrote that the National Debt could be a blessing, immediately TJ's ire was raised.

Albert Gallitan was an old foe of the National Bank and debt assumption and was perhaps the only man of his time who could hold his own in a financial debate with AH. However, via Gallitan's search for financial impropriety at Treasury and the BUS, he became a True Believer in the Hamiltonian financial system edifice. Gallitan reported to President Jefferson that Hamilton's accounting was clean as a virgin snow, that the system was on sound footing and it was ideal to maintain the method to schedule payment of the national debt. Gallitan recorded in his journal that Jefferson became crestfallen at this news, and he sat silent with his lips pursed in disappointment. The Sage never admitted that he was in error that AH was cooking the books, but nevertheless kept the National Bank and was partisan for it's recharter. Via moderate tariffs and agrarian exports, the Treasury was stocked full of sound dollars to buy the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon , and also Jefferson fulfilled his tax-cutting pledge and the national debt was being retired ahead of schedule. Though Jefferson was a Physiocrat and disparaged cultivating American hard-industries, he did use some federal monies for 'internal improvements', one of the cornerstones of what was later to be dubbed the 'American System' of economics. Ellis wrote that Jefferson's 1st Administration "was perhaps the most successful one out of all American Presidencies" and this is probably not convincingly debatable.

However, Jefferson II was fraught with disappointments as all-too many 2nd term Presidents encounter: graft was discovered by Republican officials in the Administration(Jefferson only thought Federalists were corrupt); his obsession with nailing his former Vice-President Aaron Burr on treason charges totally backfired, and the 1807 Embargo Act destroyed the humming and vibrant economy of his 1st Administration. Jefferson's intentions were noble - get peace between England and France by denying them US ports, and barring American trade with Europe - but agrarian America had no industrial base to fall back on, and the embargo hardly touched Napoleon or Mighty Britannia regardless. Jefferson, usually the assiduous chief-executive, became an absentee President in his last year and had turned over much of Presidential duties to his de facto prime minister and heir, James Madison. Unlike John Adams, Jefferson had a stable personality, but one gets the gist that TJ had a bout of incapacitating clinical depression in his final year as President and he spent a great deal of time in his hermitage at Monticello away from the fray in the District of Columbia.

Jefferson was an aloof personality who loathed controversy and avoided it whenever possible, John Adams seemed to thrive on verbal fights, and Hamilton didn't know when to shut-up, either in print or orally(Hamilton developed a habit of even talking to himself in public). George Washington conducted Cabinet Meetings as if he were still the Revolutionary War General having councils of War under the tent; though Washington hated bickering and factionalism, he wanted the opinions of all his staff together before he decided on a plan of attack. Jefferson only called his Cabinet together rarely, and liked the individual approach mainly to avoid debate. Even at his dinner parties when he'd invite both Republican and Federalist officials and politicos - politics was the taboo subject to raise!

TJ had very broad interests and was a bibliophile beyond par, and amature inventor. But like many intellectuals, he seemed to think that he was brighter than he really was. TJ liked to tell tall tales about his political battles and his interests that always put himself in the most favorable light. John Quincy Adams, a genuine-article Big Brain and erudite scholar, picked up on this side of Jefferson quite early on and learned to take some of the Sage's stories with a pinch of salt. TJ had a staid persona and liked to speak on the primacy of 'Reason', but he, like anyone, could be quite vindictive and guided by personal hatreds; Francophile Jefferson thought that the Federalists were 'Anglomen' and hehated Britain more than an Irish Fenian could - yet he believed firmly in nativist Anglo-Saxon supremacy. A constitutionalist who didn't like a great deal of the US Constitution and tried to circumvent at times...a shy Sage who despised public political displays but would resort to behind the scenes skulduggery..... an aristocrat for the 'little guy', but he never would think of rubbing shoulders with them personally and always hung-out with his fellow Virginian planters. TJ was a person who had an instinctive distaste for slavery; before the 1790s Jefferson came very close to being an Abolitionist, but became hardened later on and grumbled in old age about Yankee abolitionists. Slaves paid his copious debts and gave him Monticello and he never thought twice about buying or selling slaves(though he did prevent families from being broke up and there is no evidence that TJ himself was ever cruel to his slaves or deprived them of basic necessities for their bondage existence.)

However, as elder statesman, TJ came to reject absolutely Free Trade and realized the necessity for protected industries, that scrapping the Navy was a terrible mistake. What he never could admit to anyone or himself, was that this 'purist Republican' and one time heavy flirter with Jacobinism had evolved into a Hamiltonian on many issues. Jefferson could never see the paradox of his worldviews; though he was a hypocrite, he was one who didn't realize that he was.

The Babe's Still the Sultan

2007-08-09T04:32:00.000-06:00

Have you noticed that there aren't great glorious celebrations of Barry Bonds breaking the all-time Home Run record? Not the remarkable coverage of Hank Aaron's own eclipse of it in April 1974 that I watched on TV as a wee lad, definitely. The differences between Bonds and Hammerin' Hank are cut and dry: Bonds extended his career by usage of human growth hormones that transformed his once athletic, svelte build into looking like he was King Kong. Hank Aaron was 190 lbs at his highest career weight, wet and in uniform - a skinny guy by today's standards. Hank Aaron hit the majority of his homers in the 1960s when the Pitcher ruled the Game and he never hit 50 homers in a season;Bonds had the luxury of playing in the expansion era where pitching talent is spread thin and umpires have a strike zone that Annie Oakley couldn't be on target. Barry Bonds is a cry-baby, a liar, cheat, racist and a spoiled brat spawned from a famous Baseball daddy who had his career mapped out for him from Day One. Hank Aaron got to where he did by his own talents and he began playing the Game in the Jim Crow era - lots of hurdles to jump. Aaron was always quiet and a class act and he had to endure real racism, but never threw the race card down himself, to my knowledge. Hammerin' Hank will always eclipse Barry Bonds no matter if Bonds extends his home run total to a thousand.

Though not the Baseball Freak that I once was and am not one of those who sat for hours with Bill James's sabermetrics nerd pursuits, Babe Ruth still remains in my book the Greatest All-Around Baseball Player that ever donned a major league uniform. Ruth not only hit the Big Ball many times over, he has a high career BA with it and in his younger and thinner days he was known for defensive skills and was a remarkably fast runner on the pads. Lest we forget that Babe began his career as a Pitcher, and he was a damned good pitcher. He swatted home-runs in the Teens during the tail-end of the DeadBall Era and when pitchers could use spitballs and cuff the ball to gain advantage over the hitter. Plus, he was lovable and was a fan favorite and excellent ambassador for the Game - unlike these arrogant Baseball stars today.

The Babe is in a League of his own and no ballplayer of any racial classification can ever match him no matter how many numbers crunchers beg to differ.

Long Live the Babe!

2007-08-08T01:42:00.000-06:00

Paul Craig Roberts has an excellent excerpt from his book, The Return of the Robber Barons, at Economy in Crises -

http://www.economyincrises.org/articles/show/1105

titled "Do You Want Fries With That?" directly admonishing a counter-paradigm shift away from the McJob/ Wal-Mart Uber Alles,scanty productive service morass. Roberts was one of the architects behind Reagan's supply-side fantasies, but he has obviously turned a corner in his economic worldview since the early 80s, and I'm somewhat fond of the gent though he goes a wee bit too far in his rhetoric castigating the NeoCon's and NeoLibs empire building: Roberts recommendation that the US Army mutinies instead of deploying to Iraq....that crosses the line. Alas, Roberts can be a poster-child on how paleoconservatives like he is,industrial unionists, National Liberals and some libertarians(except the Free-Market Bolshevik faction),are basically stating the same macro thing; it's indirectly another call & a pressing necessity for a creation of a coalition of the above - what Howard J. Harrison is trying to educate his fellow conservatives at 'The Economic Nationalist'. I'll re-register as a 'Republican' if that party can get this way, take this hue of above characters, and return to the protectionist roots that at one time defined the Republican Party, who they were. The GOP needs a National Liberal wing - not the fuzzy-wuzzy chicanery of the old globalist Rockefeller liberalism of yesteryear(I never liked Nelson Rockefeller either). If the Democrats let their cultural-Bolshevik/ social issues obsessed West Coast cadre set the paces instead of focusing on where they and the economic infrastructure of the Republic needs to be( "it's protectionism, stupid!"), they shan't get any of my loyalty in name, either. The Democrats need more Dick Gephardt types and less Thomas -"the world is flat"- Friedmans, Clintons, and phony slobs like Al Gore(and is anyone besides me getting sick of Barak Obama mentioning 'hope' every other sentence?). Whatever one will say about Dennis Kucinich (he does physically and verbally wax like he has been transported from another galaxy), at least on economic issues he is the only genuine old New Deal Democrat in the race, and he's a solid trade protectionist who dares utter the T-word. Why can't the less weird Democrats take a page from his book on this?

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Just completed a forgettable bio, "Aaron Burr - Fallen Founder" by a Nancy Isenberg. Isenberg commences patting herself on the back by stating that not a genuine biography of Aaron Burr has ever been written and it is high time that one has. Reading her revisionist take on the third Vice President, killer of Alexander Hamilton, and probable traitor, one firstly grasps that this historian is hardly penning an objective biography. Isenberg fails to convincingly present Burr as a misunderstood and vilified person by jealous rivals and I think that her actual notes were from Gore Vidal's totally fictional account, Burr. Her take on Burr is that he was an outsider not because of his sleazy personality, money-grubbing debt-ridden existence,unprincipled pursuit of political power for the sake alone - but because Aaron Burr was a feminist. Yes. Burr did believe in rights for women and thought that women were just as intelligent as men, but this stance was not that unique among men of the 18th Century Enlightenment, and Burr's views were just that of Rousseau's. None of his detractors such as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, ever wrote or said a thing in disparagement of Burr because of his 'feminist' stance(they probably didn't know about the extent of it or care if they did),but because he was deemed untrustworthy in the political arena. Isenberg doesn't reflect that if both Hamilton and Jefferson could agree in their judgments concerning something and someone - there must be something to it. Washington himself couldn't abide Burr, and just about every historian of the Early Republic concedes that Washington was an excellent judge of character and was not known to carry grudges long-term without a valid reason for it.

Isenberg believes that Hamilton was totally at fault for the duel and dismisses the accepted fact that AH intended to throw away his shot, as was a common practice in dueling(few duels ever resulted in death or even injury in those days;it was a 'save face' ritual of honor:if a duelist could just prove his manhood by merelyshowing up it was regarded as satisfaction.Most duelists ended up shaking hands and repairing to a pub.) Isenberg asserts that Burr used the challenge to a duel as a last resort based on personal attacks by Hamilton. The real reason is that Hamilton prevented Burr from being President in 1800 and later Governor of New York. With Jefferson dropping his name from the ticket in 1804, Burr's political career was finished, and he took his vengeance out on the man who did the most to check his pursuits. I think that there is no question that Burr issued the challenge with the intent to kill. Isenberg insists that Hamilton was the one who sought to maim Burr and Burr's mortal wound on AH was 'defensive'. That Hamilton put on his spectacles and practiced aiming in the sunlight is proof to Isenberg that Hamilton was not intending to throw his shot. Again, this was part of the dueling ritual play : one had to act as if the duel was going to be carried out to full extent to save face, though usually the challenger and challenge would throw their shots. Isenberg's revisionist take on the Duel can easily be refuted by the fact that Hamilton did not set the hair-trigger on his pistol - something that gave the duelist an advantage to get off the first shot. Isenberg also doesn't cover in Burr, that Hamilton confided in friends before the duel that he was going to throw his shot away, and many counseled him against this, knowing that Aaron Burr meant business. The author's attempts to paint Burr as a benevolent fellow gets really cavalier when she discusses the Duel. Nancy Isenberg also does not mention that following Burr's mortal wound on Hamilton, Burr returned home and had a nice celebratory breakfast and carried on about his business as if it was just another day - hardly the behavior of someone who felt remorse of his actions. Aaron Burr himself never expressed remorse over killing Hamilton; into his old age he loved to narrate his account of the Duel to any who would listen. People with guilty consciences usually do not like to be reminded of their past and certainly do not voluntarily talk about them. Burr's panache was close to that of a sociopath, and he probably was one.

Hamilton and Burr had cordial relations until 1800, and shortly before their infamous duel Hamilton had even loaned Burr money. Though Burr belonged to the Republicans, he was not an ideologue and could had just as easily had been a Federalist(he even began making plays for them after Jefferson had dropped him from the ticket).One may ask, why did Hamilton have such a sudden ax to grind with Burr, and why did he support his hated foe Jefferson over Burr for President in 1800, then? Hamilton revealed in 1800 to a correspondent two conversations that he had had previously with Aaron Burr that made him dead-set against Burr attaining the pinnacle of political power: when AH was Treasury Secretary, Burr admonished Hamilton to take advantage of his power of the nation's money supply and use it for his own needs and wants instead of living in a rented house like a pauper. Later, during the 'XYZ Affair', when Washington vetoed AH's request that Burr be made a Brigadier General, Burr in a fury visited Hamilton and suggested that he use the Army for a coup. This clearly demonstrated to Hamilton or anyone else that even Jefferson would be a better man as chief executive.

Isenberg does also cast Jefferson in a unfavorable light as opposed to Burr and she's on par that the person who benefited from the Duel was TJ himself: one perennial political rival dead, the other's political career finished. Following Burr's killing of Hamilton, Jefferson wined and dined his outgoing Vice President at the White House when beforehand he avoided AB as much as possible. If it wasn't for Hamilton, Burr probably would had been sitting in the Presidential chair, but never would the Sage of Monticello acknowledge this. Later, Jefferson turned on Burr and tried to get a treason conviction on him(I concur that it was not proven that Burr intentionally set-out to create his own country on the Western frontier;too many bad witnesses and too murky what Burr was up to) to no avail.

Aaron Burr may not have been quite the genuine-article psycho, but the man was both privately and publicly corrupt. Burr the Feminist doesn't change these facts, and undoubtedly Isenberg lets her own feminism dictate her narrative of Burr? Not a good biography of Burr at all, and some more objective historian needs to give it a shot. Wait for Isenberg's bio of Burr to hit the library if you want to read it.

Or better yet - buy my copy, please.

2007-08-05T05:10:00.000-06:00

Responding to Howard Harrison's comment regarding "crunchy conservatives" in previous post, his description of them makes them wax like unique specimens;however I have yet to meet any people that are this way, but I don't travel in the ranks of the churched-up people - kind of a secular monk I am. All in all, I do not think that they should be antagonized and the sane ones should be cultivated into the broad American anti-globalist movement. Unlike many secular oriented people, I do have a sense of respect for scholarly orthodox Christians, and we share the same Western culture, naturally; secularists &religionists are both *Faustian Man* to put it into SpenglerSpeak.

Prejudices do exist to prevent any broad umbrella anti-globalist movement: many liberal oriented bipeds do not want to break bread with "right-wing religious freaks", many conservatives do not want to be involved with left- of-center people. There is probably a mere .0000325% of the American population that would gel with the basic worldview of Left-Federalist, for that matter. Many anti-globalist folks just prefer their own version, go it alone, come hell or high water, and are comfortable within the cubby hole of their own box. That is fine, but as Howard pointed out, there is just 3% here and there, scattered like a tipped-over jigsaw puzzle. The fragments need assembly if a serious offensive on Globalism can manifest - the cosmopolitan multinational corporations and the politicians in their pockets hold all the cards at the moment, and they know it. Plus, they have a small but powerful edifice of useful idiots from the intelligentsia that enable them . This is crunch time, and there is not much leisure to go wobbly on protectionism, and the anti-globalist fragments have to be assembled yesterday. There are some politicos that are turning around(more than there were just a few years ago) so the situation may not be entirely dire, but it remains.

The anti-globalist movement needs a single aggressive lobbyist effort. As much as I detest the 'fourth sphere of government'( on insomniac nights I count sleazy lobbyists with a bullet in their heads instead of counting sheep), this appears to be the sole pragmatic way available. There is the question of money, and anti-globalists don't have many rich people that would gel to the cause and donate, unlike other lobbying outfits on the Hill. Thus, resources would have to be pooled together and the broad anti-globalist movement, those who want to participate in a concentrated effort, would have to sit-down and agree on a consensus of core -issues and push them. Many would not want to forfeit what I think are medium to light issues;some have not grasped the crucial aspects of this period and they need to understand that they will not get all of their pet projects as a working reality - to make the big ones a reality the other issues are give&take, on the auction block. Secular liberals need to get it that there will always be religious oriented folks around,vise versa. Well, I like making fun of some of them too, as said, but if they are protectionists opposed to predator-economics and are concerned for the survival of the independent constitutional Republic - they're my boys. They can mock some of my stuff too(little ol' me is of no consequence one way or another) - I don't care as long as we got the core intact and are in gear to go out kick ass and take names later, as that saying goes.

Distributists, Greens, Bolsheviks,Fundies, Spengler & Midgets..

2007-08-05T00:01:00.000-06:00

Added on the left at 'Blogs& Websites' is that of the Distributist Review. They are not economic-nationalists and I find some of their social and religious views a bit daffy, but they are earnest anti-globalists and love to bash laissez-faire. So, this here agnostic from Protestant/ confessional-Lutheran background unilaterally finds allies in traditionalist RC's. Strange realm, this anti-globalist movement. All in all, I have curiosity of some aspects of Distributist economics and it is a valid alternative to the current state of affairs; the Distributist's spiel sure beats the Catholicism coupled with Predator-economics that one will read at Bill Buckley's, The National Review...

I believe in Meme- building; get the various information out of the anti-globalist movement under an umbrella, even when lots of details of the meme I don't particularly jive with. Oh yes, I do have a threshold: I wager that the Communist Party USA and the Ku Klux Klan are against globalism too, but I won't let those PukeStains out of the rain.

My goal is to find economic protectionist Greens to include them here in 'Blogs &Websites', but all searches for virtual pages directly endorsing this has come up empty, or they thump other things that I find too wacko to bring them on-board with a good conscience. It is needed to spirit the Greens away from Al Gore& the Davos Group; witness that some Free-Market Bolsheviks are making a play for them with 'Green-privatization', 'Eco-market', hooplah. The Green angle is up for grabs and economic-nationalists need to cultivate them. Personally, I would love to see a Third Industrial Revolution commenced with clean energy as the principle for it, if possible(don't like Our Planet looking like a shit-trap either and I hate smog). I do believe that the notion is worth some good R&D from the Top on down, and wish that the Greens thought the same way. Nevertheless, we have to re-industrialize asap.This sounds alarmist, but I think that time is running out for the USA. Stinging globalism on the margins will not get it done; when/if the window cracks open - slip through it and go for the jugular, shoot for the late Round KO like in a Rocky movie....."Yo, Free Traitors!... youse goin' down."

The Old Ravi Batra demonstrated that tariffs are ecologically friendly, and 'tis a pity that he didn't follow up and pursue this angle better thereafter. He once perhaps had the ticket to ride for American Greens. However, too many Greens are formerly 'Reds' & remain Luddites, and they have an abiding hatred concerning anything smacking of technological industrial capitalism of any type, even the dirigist/mixed national system that Left-Federalist spews out, at times daily. This - they need to work on.

******************

One of Oswald Spengler's themes is second religiousness; when a civilization is about to collapse, a super-nova of traditional religion explodes, a call to return to the 'True Faith' comes into vogue. Entertaining the prospect that Spengler was a sharp -customer with his organic/cyclic theory of history(I'm a doubting Thomas), indicators are here today in circa 2007 that this 'second religiousness' is manifesting: Pope Benedict endorses a return to the Latin Mass and has all but 86'd the ecumenism of Vatican II;Protestant fundamentalism still rages in the Americas despite recent scandals with their gurus, like Ted Haggard(LMAO!). America, the 1st Modern Nation/state, has made a plunge into the Middle Ages as we witness in pop culture with Fantasy oriented stuff, the assault on Evolution, the quenching of biological research of human beings and their diseases('let's not play God, now!'). But part of me understands why Fundies would think certain things with these activist-lawyers from the cultural-Bolshevik ACLU wanting to take away Christmas trees from their kids in public settings(but the X-mas tree is a pagan thing, I know.)....Left-Federalist is against Bolshevism in any form even when they trample on the Fundies. The real truth is that I ordinarily like virtually slapping them both around, role- playing Moe Howard on The Three Stooges. Why, pray tell? Well, I think it is needed...

..and it is also - fun:-)

Given that I had to stop running over midgets in my truck(I heard somewhere that it is against the law - even vehicular homicide on midgets. Can you believe that stupid law?!?), I need some other outlet that is physically non-violent to manage my 'anger issues'...

Right....to take a broad interpretation of second-religiousness, perhaps my own plea for a return to the Federalist-American System is a symptom of this? I do possess a near- religious devotion to protectionism...or rather, Spengler was full of shit. I hope so. If he was right, we are toast in the United States of America & EU...

'Nixon Shock', Revisited

2007-08-04T07:00:00.000-06:00

August 15, 1971 was the date that America's postWW2 international economic hegemony ended officially. President Richard M. Nixon, an avowed disciple of the free-market and also free-trade, announced to the world that the United States was closing the dollar's convertibility to gold that had operated as the international reserve currency at a fixed-rate since the Bretton Woods accords in 1944. Nixon also proclaimed a 90 day wage and price freeze and slapped a 10% surcharge on all imports(another 'tariff avoidance' phrase). Though attempts at devaluation of the Dollar were made thereafter, no international agreement could be attained to reset a fixed rate. Hence, the floating currency exchange that we have now.

All of the Nixon Shock was supposed to be temporary and most of it was. That such a free-marketer such as Nixon would do such a thing in the first place, delves into the complexity of the man. Nixon could be said to be our one -and -only Shakespearean President ; RMN is a multi-act play taking the observer through triumphs, tragedies, and even comedy if one looks for it. Nixon was an introverted intellectual type who couldn't abide intellectuals; he always felt like an outsider of the Eastern Establishment, but at times tried to cozy up to them. Nixon was at heart a conservative, but did liberal things as President and when he was a Senator and Congressman: a Red Baiter who nailed Soviet agent Alger Hiss and talked about the Communist menace - then opened up to Mao's China and pursued detente with the USSR. One of Nixon's favorite Presidents was the 'idealistic' Woodrow Wilson, but he was a perennial pragmatist, Realpolitik was the foreign policy that he pursued. On his infamous tapes one can hear Nixon ranting about "Jews", but no Administration had more Jewish top level officials, and he risked a confrontation with the USSR to bail Israel's tookas out of the '73 Yom Kippur War. Though disappointed and irritated in perceived anti-Americanism of European leaders, he nearly worshipped Charles de Gaulle who was the most anti-American post-WW2 leader in the West and a certified ungrateful son-of-a-bitch. Nixon could play the piano, was an aficionado of Classical Music, a bookworm, but he spoke in terms of Football and identified with the Hardhats and the small-farmers and would often mock and deride arty sophisticated types in Archie Bunker fashion. He was a populist who coined the "Great Silent Majority" phrase, but he set up an 'imperial Presidency' and barricaded himself around a select group of advisers, many of them corrupt DirtBalls like Chuck Colson. Nixon was a hard-charging , go for the jugular,campaigner who disliked shaking hands and did not want to be touched , even by his wife. He was a natural paranoid, but when he trusted someone, it was often the wrong person to confide in; a man from the quiet and somnolent Quaker faith but he made friends with fire- breathing evangelists like Billy Graham, but he did not attend a church and seldom mentioned religion in his speeches. Nixon liked dirty jokes and took an interest in the extramarital affairs of his peers, but no evidence was ever uncovered that he ever had a mistress or even a one-night stand. He liked talking tough in foreign policy and bombed the bejesus out of Hanoi, but was always motivated to build an international order that would guarantee peace, at least between the Big Players of his day. Nixon inherited civil war conditions at the start of his Presidency and spoke of "law and order", yet he flagrantly broke the law and thought that he was entitled to do so.....

One can go on and on psychoanalysing Richard M. Nixon, the enormity of contrasts and contradictions in his policies and his personality. The dialectic of Nixon is transparent in the Shock of August 1971: he had free-marketeers like Arthur Burns on his economic team, yet he opted for the plan of practical Treasury Secretary John Connolly(some say that Connolly &Nixon were soul-mates). The Shock was short-term and was primarily motivated for his re-election; Nixon was not an economic President, and to his credit, he at least admitted that he did not understand a great portion of it(unlike LBJ, Carter, Reagan etc who pretended to understand and didn't). Such a free-thinker on foreign policy(contrary to legend, China, triangular foreign policy was his idea - not Kissinger's), Nixon was like a dutiful schoolboy taking notes from his economic and trade advisers:he'd cram hard for the test and then quickly forget afterwards what he had learned.

Nixon had developed an abiding detestment of wage/price controls when he had briefly served on one of the numerous bureaucratic War Boards in 1942, yet he implemented Wage-Price controls as part of his Shock. Though most only lasted 90 days, it was a glaring contradiction and contributed to inflationary problems in the long term. A 'fiscal conservative', he also claimed that "we are all Keynesians now" just at the time when intentional deficit spending was coming out of fashion, and was one of the biggest reasons that the US experienced spikes in inflation in the late 60s, early 70s. Though he spoke of the virtues of having hard-currency, Nixon took the US Dollar off the gold reserve that was the cornerstone of the Bretton Woods system. In his defense, Nixon didn't have a good decision to make on this point: other nations, because of inflation and the unilateral anti-protectionist policies of previous Presidential administrations, had accumulated surplus Yankee dollars that they did not want to hold indefinitely. The fear that said nations would cash them in for Yankee gold as they were entitled to were genuine. Especially since Nixon's hero, France's Chuck de Gaulle, intentionally& for the sake alone commenced undermining the US Dollar by accumulating gold with France's stockpiled Federal Reserve Notes in the early 1960s(why RMN loved this bastard is to me one of his biggest mysteries, enigma). Though West Germany gave a verbal agreement not to exchange dollars for gold, the danger was there that other nations would begin to panic and Ft. Knox would had been cleaned out in a matter of a few weeks if they did. Nixon had no choice but to close the gold window in this circumstance. It would had been more irresponsible and he would had had a lot more explaining to do if he would had allowed all the gold reserve in the country to flee, I think.

As an economic-nationalist, the 10% import surcharge(tariff) was the only genuinely good part of the Nixon Shock. Thanks to post- WW2 unilateral trade liberalization, the United States , for the first time in a long, long time began running a trade deficit by 1971 - something that was shocking in itself then. Where Nixon went wrong on this is that he only employed it short-term(again) and caved in to protests at the initial Tokyo Round in 1973 - which by then he shifted back to the free-market, free-trade policies of Arthur Burns - a Milton Friedman devotee. Bretton Woods ended on Nixon's watch;instead of taking the US back to it's protectionist roots when the opportunity required it, he left the worst thing about the Bretton Woods edifice in place when he could had easily knocked it off then for good by keeping his tariff in place, raising it if need be, and telling the whiners and sob sisters at the Tokyo Round to take a hike if they didn't like it. He could have nipped globalism in the bud then and we wouldn't have protectionist ranters and ravers at blogs like 'Left-Federalist' today. America would perhaps not be in the mess that we are now in trade if Nixon would had thought in the long -run in August of '71 instead of chiefly fretting about his up-coming re-election.

Nixon was a patriot but he neglected the economic and trade side of patriotism and shown gross irresponsibility in this department - to me this dwarfs Watergate and letting Kissinger talk him into prolonging the Vietnam conflict, giving the green light for the Chilean coup in '73...

In closing, Nixon was a character who had huge potential to have been both a benevolent human being and a great President, but he let his dichotomous personality, the inner demons of his dark side - 'Tricky Dick' - over-ride the noble qualities that the man had. Like a lot of organically brilliant men, he often did very stupid things and never could find the synthesis between the Idealist Nixon and the Practical Nixon.

Dr. Ravi Batra Responds(and so I retort)

2007-08-02T14:37:00.000-06:00

This email reply from Ravi Batra was received today by me:

"I have abandoned my old stance about competitive protectionism for two reasons. First, the U.S trade dependence has sharply increased since 1993, when The Myth of Free Trade' appeared. Our trade deficit is also much higher.So competitive protectionism should be useful in the long run;but in the short run it could destroy the U.S and world economy and bring discredit to the idea, which will be then discarded. Secondly, while working with some politicians I discovered that no kind of protectionist has any chance of adoption in today's world. That's why I thought of the export exchange rate plan presented in my latest books. This way the workers would get higher wages and growth would improve. My first interest is removing poverty through practical plans, and that's why I moved away from outright protectionism."

Et tu, Ravi?

In another time and place I would had been flattered getting an email from a reputable economist, but this one was - though expected - a kick in the groin. Batra was once one of my contemporary heroes.Ordinarily a email response deserves another in kind. But I dragged my readers into this controversy with Dr. Batra's flip-flop on tariffs, so I will deconstruct my would-be counter response in draft here:

Batra was correct that the trade deficit and dependence on foreign imports has increased since the appearance of his magnum opus. But to me, this should be the reason why we need protectionism NOW more than ever than in the dawn of the NAFTA era. A simple analogy is that when one is in a fight for his life with bully, the time is crucial to shout out 'Hey Rube!' and ask for further protection against a deadly enemy.

Competitive protectionism would "destroy the U.S. and world economy" in the short term, according to Batra. Huh? We are already sunk here! Did protectionism get us in the economic trade morass that we are up to our eyeballs in?? No! Protectionist economics built the United States into a industrial dynamo and ignored the snickers of doom from the British-Manchester Free Traders in the 19th Century.And how would the USA by returning to its natural protectionism "destroy the world economy"? Japan, China, most of the other Asian Tigers are highly protectionist economies, they are integral in the international economy yet they thrive(mainly on our backs). As written ad nauseum here, there is no place else in the Solar System that Asia can market their exports at high volume than in the USA. Contrary to what most economists will tell you, they need us much more than we need them. America is addicted to debt, Asia requires a neomercantilist exporting edifice to thrive and survive. They will pay the tariff kicking and screaming. Just close the Treasury Bond window to foreign investment and announce that we are responsible for our own debts for now on - via earmarks from tariff revenue. Time to pull this monkey off our backs

Batra claims that there are no politicians that would accept a protectionist trade format. It demonstrates what kind of politicians that he has been talking to by this statement. Actually, Dr. Batra has abandoned protectionism when now more politicians are swinging near economic-nationalism and the Free Traders are going on the defensive; we don't have them by their balls - yet - but the movement, the winds of economic trade change, is growing. Feature that Dr. Batra likes patting himself on the back for all the economic predictions that he claims to have made that came true. He has certainly missed the boat on this one!

As written in the previous post, Batra's "export exchange rate plan" is lifted primarily from the Bretton Woods system where it tried to maintain an international balance of trade via similar fixed- rate pegging of the US Dollar, which operated as the international reserve currency backed a certain percentage of gold from Ft. Knox (this plan was implemented over the objections of Keynes that was the brain-child of Harry Dexter White - revealed post-mortem to have been a Soviet agent, btw). Oh yeah...Bretton Woods worked as long as Europe and Japan were busy reconstructing their devastated economic infrastructure in the 50s, and they rode the US Dollar to do it. For it's time and purpose, I agree that Bretton Woods was the right thing to do. Yet, in hindsight, Bretton Woods should had been abandoned as early as 1958 when Western Europe and Japan were back on their feet and beginning to export in large volumes. The time was then to adopt bilateral reciprocal protectionism, but the unilateral Free Trade dogma had claimed such a stranglehold on both Parties by the 1960s. Instead, the U.S. waited until the 'Nixon Shock' of 1971 to come to terms that Bretton Woods was detrimental to our national economy;Nixon only employed temporary measures that made the economy appear robust to guarantee his re-election in 1972. This is my main beef with Richard M. Nixon - not Watergate or prolonging the Vietnam War(another story for another post).

Batra doesn't write that fixed-rate export pricing of the US dollar only worked as long as the USA had undisputed international economic hegemony;it's proven that it's not feasible for a balance of trade between robust economies. Neither does Batra use Bretton Woods as reference point for his plan(does he want the reader to believe that he dreamed it up himself?. I'm not a professional economist like he is, but I know more than the usual about economic history. He sounds a wee bit like Lyndon LaRouche with this 'fixed-rate' obsession.).

Dr. Batra avoids details on how his exchange rate plan will solidify "high wages" for industrial workers in the USA. Batra is also for high corporate taxes without loopholes for the predator Overclass. How and why will the American affluent invest in hard capital in the domestic USA with his plan? There is no reason for them to do so. Even if Batra's plan somehow created a trade balance, he ignores that we are a post-industrial economy with dwindling high wage industries left! Nobody benefits from it accept the exporters into the United States, though they don't get as much as before.

Via his religious devotion to the Hindu neo-humanist guru, PR Sarkar, Batra's #1 aim is to eradicate global poverty; in his quest(noble, yes) he ignores the fact that one has to firstly mind the store, and he has now embraced TINA wholeheartedly. Frankly, he's a goddamn sell-out! And that honestly pained me to write this.

Hopefully, in years to come, Ravi Batra will wistfully look over all his published books and come upon 'Myth of Free Trade' and utter - "I had it right then."

Ravi Batra: Romancing TINA

2007-08-01T18:24:00.000-06:00

As I've commented over at 'The Economic Nationalist' site, Dr. Ravi Batra's , "The Myth of Free Trade", stands alongside Buchanan's "The Great Betrayal" as premier texts in the contemporary protectionist movement with me. I have read "The Myth of Free Trade" more than once and have copious notes in the margins such as "hurray!" and whatnot. Ravi Batra's program is domestic competitive protectionism and expends a great deal of time in all of his texts tearing the theological laissez-fairist's arguments apart quite convincingly.

But something happened to Batra from the publication of The Myth (1994) to the 21st Century and it is disappointing.

Though Batra's last two books - "Greenspan's Fraud"; "The New Golden Age" - maintain his basic economic doctrine as in The Myth of Free Trade, he no longer supports a tariff-based trade system though he remains a staunch critic of the current abortion that some call 'Free Trade'. On page 180 of The Myth, Batra writes in no uncertain terms - "Tariffs are the best way of granting protection. They are simple and easy to administer and also produce ample revenue for governments strapped by budget deficits". Then Batra writes in total contradiction to this above in 'The New Golden Age' - "These are the days of globalization, and the whole world is interlinked by trade. Tariffs would start a trade war, and immediately impoverish everybody. Besides, they are not permitted by the World Trade Organization, to which our nation is committed." (page 204).

Batra now proposes of pegging the dollar to the Yuan & Yen for a fixed-rate export price where somehow in the process(he is hardly clear) the trade deficit gets bottomed out with no inflationary costs, and China and Japan is buying Yankee made products as much as we here are buying theirs. What he doesn't write is that Chinese consumers can't afford imports anyway and neither do they want them, neither will their government ever un-protect itself(why should they?), and neither will the Japanese. We are a post-industrial country with little to export overseas anyway largely because of globalism. Without protective tariffs to earmark funds therof for re- industrialization, how can it export goods now? We have almost zero electronics , textiles to export, and our big ,huge SUVs and trucks - few humans outside the United States want them, and can't afford them if they do. Asians and Europeans like small vehicles and they have to buy small. Besides, the engineering quality of US Autos leave something to be desired for the past three decades.
Even if Batra's currency manipulation arguably 'worked', where are the US export industries?? He has an answer - raise corporate taxes. I am privy to this, but raising taxes on the Overclass alone will not get them away from high speculative financial wheeling and dealing and turn them back into the captains of industry as they used to be. Raising taxes on the Ueber-wealthy alone will only make them save a bit more of their own money, and they most likely will not use it to invest in hard capital. With tariffs and public encouragement from the revenue accumulated from them, it sends a message to the Overclass :'invest in hard industries again and we will protect you'. A high tax on the upper 10% or so should be in a sense, voluntary: "invest in hard capital or pay". To me this is a good bargain given that we all know how the wealthy would rather throw money into the ocean rather than to use it to pay taxes. But to Batra, high taxes alone will get them more economically responsible, and that is just balderdash.

Batra contradicts himself when he wrote in "The Myth" that inflationary spikes from tariffs are largely fear-mongering from the free-traders given that in the 19th Century when we had steep tariffs, prices remained relatively stable; America's biggest rises in inflation came the same year that it officially went to Free Trade, 1973. Dr. Batra spent practically an entire chapter in his "The Myth of Free Trade" documenting that high volumes of international trade naturally expends fossil fuels and increases pollution, and admonishes nations to be as regional as possible in trade for this obvious environmental reason. Tariffs, he believed then, were ecologically sound because they would have a reduction in global trade(tell that to Al Gore who is both a Free Trader and an ecological mandarin) and better jump- start countries to localize their own industries. He forgot all of this in his latest book and has joined the hand-ringers and those who think that they can manipulate currency exchanges to get balanced trade. Batra needs to remember that that is what the Bretton Woods post WW2 system attempted to do, and it crashed in on the USA in the late 60s and we have this mess now just because of an entire generation of tariff-phobic economists and the dimwit politicians who listen to them. Batra also seems to have co-opted 'comparative advantage' as well - he should know better!

I wrote Dr. Batra a cordial email, asking if he could explain his turn-around on tariffs. Even better yet, I gave him the addy to 'Left-Federalist' to comment here on the subject if he would be so kind to instruct those who read this blog, better clarify his position. I still am gaga on his plan of 'competitive domestic protectionism', but I can't conceive of it manifesting without the implementation of tariffs - something that he was once a believer in too. Plus, Batra's surrender to the global trade entanglements is quite a letdown since I have recommended him to fellow economic-nationalists before. The Myth of Free Trade remains in its present hierarchy with me, but I cannot think otherwise that Dr. Batra has become another economic -Laodicean. He is not the first economist to change his position(s),but usually when economists do so, they go into detail why they have done so(such as when John Maynard Keynes wrote his long, "The End of Laissez-Faire", explicitly explaining why he rejected Free Trade after being one of its typically British proponents). Batra neither goes into detail for his change on tariffs, and neither does he mention in his latest books that he once was a tariff-advocate. A novice reader of Batra would get confused quite soon if he/she read 'The Myth of Free Trade' after reading his latest two books.

Ravi Batra owes his readers and fans an explanation.

Where Have You Gone, Michael Lind?

2007-07-29T04:31:00.000-06:00

Changed the template of the blog for more cheerful colors, I guess, though there isn't much to be gleeful over concerning the subject matters that 'Left-Federalist' hammers at times redundantly. Also uploaded at 'Blogs &Websites' is a link to the liberal think-tank, Economic Policy Institute, founded by Bob Kuttner. Currently in the middle of reading one of his books - "The End of Laissez-Faire" -where the author adopts an economic nationalist/protectionist viewpoint, but demonstrates as well that this has to be international, and protectionism has to be the international order in today's world.
My thoughts exactly and always were.

In the process of uploading the 'Economic Policy Institute', I decided to purge, if you will, 'The New America Foundation' from said Blogs&Websites. The reason being is that this think-tank is dull, and does not take a stance that I like on globalization - the folks there are wishy-washy and seem to try to pose as such enlightened, intelligent folks that they are opaque in their policies. Though I still like Michael Lind, one of the founders of the above think-tank, I believe that he has become lukewarm on his Hamiltonian, 'Radical Centrist', civic nationalism that was his zeal in his writings in the late 1990s. And I don't gel with Lind's foreign policy very well, and his latest books on it were not well researched unlike his earlier texts such as his one on Abraham Lincoln. Lind has accepted the 'reality' of NAFTA, which is something that is a antithesis that cannot be reconciled into a synthesis with his civic nationalism: no one can label themselves a 'nationalist' and be for Free Trade or be an apologist of entangling trade blocs that are inimical to the national interest and the national economy. I'm sorry...one cannot have laissez-faire and protect the Republic too; extreme laissez-faire - as designed by Ricardo, Say and Cobden - is by design hostile to a soveriegn nation/state. Adam Smith himself is not the boogeyman: Smith was actually a moderate capitalist who believed that when Free Trade was detrimental to a country, retaliatory tariffs should be imposed to correct the problem; Smith wrote that government had a dirgist duty to step in on public education, aid to the poor, and also maintain high wages with the laboring sector. Smith himself was not totally sold on his own 'hidden-hand of the Market", but I have digressed here(imagine that).

The problem with Lind is that he has changed his political stance so much in his life that he has yet to experience a political-animal wholeness , a Ground, maybe. Nevertheless, his excellent - "Hamilton's Republic: Readings in the American democratic-nationalist Tradition" remains one of my 'bibles', essential to my own political worldview, as expounded here at this little blog. Though I've always been partial to Alexander Hamilton as my favorite thinker of the triumvirate of the Founding Fathers, Lind reconfirmed my own Hamiltonianism, gave me a substantial amount of idealistic vigor. The earlier Michael Lind, at least, remains in place though I've deleted his think-tank from my recommended links at Left-Federalist.

If I Were Voting for a GOPer Presidential Candidate.....

2007-07-28T19:14:00.000-06:00

Mitt Romney: 1/2 Billionaire, Cult Member ....Free Traitor -

Old Mitt took his plastic-looking self down to South Florida to woo voters of Latino descent. To the Americans of Cuban ancestry, he vowed on a Banana Republic never to meet that demon Fidel Castro, and neither will he meet with his brother Raul if the American people totally lapse into full blown insanity and elect him come November 2008(well, they already did so by electing BushII at least once). Mitt cheerfully chatted up the Venezuelan Americans and proclaimed that Free Trade is the solution to all of South American ills, and blamed protectionist Democrats for stalling on further trade sell-offs. Mitt's speechwriters forgot to inform him that nobody in Latin America except the plutocratic Hildagos wants Yanqui lassiez-faire, especially after what they seen NAFTA do to Mexico. What we are getting in Romney is a handsomer,more polished version of the Shrub. Mitt, by his affiliation with the now acceptable cult, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, will have two Bibles to beat instead of Bush's one - The Book of Mormon ( I'm certain that Governor Romney assures Southern Baptists that both of his Bibles are in the King James Version). Because he's a Latter-Day Saint, Romney is a teetotaler like Bush is, and he doesn't even drink coffee.Romney's wife is already a 'babe', so we do not have fret him scoring a knob -job in the Oval Office from an overweight intern. What a real moral guy to take the country down into the North American Union and annul the Constitution! Joseph Smith is looking down from a UFO somewhere and is mighty proud...

No, the prospect of electing a Mormon President does not compare to the 1960 controversy of electing a Roman Catholic one(everyone knows now, and knew somewhat then, that the Kennedys weren't particularly pious RC's anyway and could care less what the Man in the Funny Hat in the Vatican said; the true Kennedy Religion is Birds&Booze).Not even close. But, I would not like Romney even if he had a Jeffersonian view of religion(one of the few things that I dig about Marse Tom):he's a flip-flopper beyond what John Kerry flipped on, he's an avowed Economic Predator(Mitt promises to do to Washington what he did to the corporations that he previously served as CEO of: downsizing the labor force, bust any hint of 'union', and maximize profits for himself and his rich shareholders...wow!) and of course, he's a Free Trader globalist BarfBag. Yet, throwing Mormon into his make-up, he kind of scares me.

I hope that Romney stays in the race a long time, since he is such good fodder to poke fun of. It would be great if he loses his fortune in his quest to wrest the GOP nomination and comes up empty,also. More seriously now, I do think that his religion should be an issue: would Americans feel safe and secure having a Scientologist, Jehovah's Witness or a Moonie on the nuclear button? How about a Hari Krishna? To me, Mormons aren't all that much out of step with the panache of these other named cults. In synopsis, they're annoying and friggin' nuts! The prospect of being trapped in a crowded elevator with Islamic fundamentalists isn't so bad if my only other choice were a group of Mormon missionaries; at least the Islamic ones would probably put me out of my misery by someone ultimately blowing themselves up in the elevator(joke). Listening to a Mormon missionary is like having the hands tied with Rap playing on headphones non-stop....if I were in combat and captured by the Enemy, they wouldn't have to resort to physical torture to get me spilling the beans: within 10 minutes of listening to a Mormon with his conversion con - I'd be telling the interrogators things that the CIA, Edgar Casey and Nostradamus never dreamed of.

Kansas's very own, Senator Sam Brownback, doesn't seem like too much of a bad deal when Romney is in focus. And that's BAD. Real bad. However, unlike Kennedy, Brownback is a convert RC and has all the zeal of Opus Dei; don't be surprised if Brownback announces that Mel Gibson would be his running mate if he gets the Religious Right on his bandwagon in the GOP primaries. The only good thing about President Brownback would be that we could get him out of Kansas, but I wouldn't wish that on my fellow Americans in the other 49 states. If Brownback is more Catholic than the Ave Maria prayer itself, at least he could adopt the Distributist economics in his platform that many traditionalist RCs have instead of the standard gaga on laissez-faire capitalism that he spews - I might vote for him as DogCatcher if he did...

Rudy Giuliani - he says that Democrats are 'stupid', and previously thought that he could pick an issues fight with Dr. Ron Paul(who's 'stupid' now?). I keep waiting for Rudy to get a new comb-over and start mealy-mouthin' about the GOP's favorite theme of Family Values - when he has been married and divorced more times than Zsa Zsa Gabor and Frank Sinatra combined. Watch Rudy make a play for the Religious Right by picking Ted Haggard as his Vice-President...

Tom Tancredo - "I'm against illegal immigration!!!"(we know, Tom...we know...anything else??)

Duncan Hunter - I rather like Duncan because he is against NAFTA and tries to make protectionism a theme with the GOP contenders, but to no avail. He needs to tone-down his John Wayne act and stop mentioning 'Reagan' in every sentence, however.....

Mike Huckabee - I can't take a man seriously with a surname like that.

Thompson - he' a poorer actor than Reagan was. Get out of here!

Ron Paul - confess that I warm a bit more to his campaign daily. It is refreshing to hear an avowed Libertarian warn the country about the "corporate fascism" of globalism. Paul seems to be a constitutionalist first and a Libertarian second ; maybe he is dropping a cue that he can be 'turned' to the economic -nationalist cause?? He is definitely the most intelligent out of the GOP contenders, and seems to be a man of integrity and honesty with minimum spin - rare in a public servant these days. Paul puts America over the Free Market theology it seems, and this is what the Republic direly needs. However, I don't like his starry-eyed cadre that trolls around message boards with their 'VOTE RON PAUL!' tags. Ron needs to dress them down on this personality cult that they've created....

John McCain - *The Mummy*. The Mummy had his best shot in 2000 but he made the mistake of telling the Bible Beating theocrats that they were 'intolerant'. The truth did not put the Mummy into the White House, let alone set him free. The Mummy needs to retire to his tomb and sleep another 2000 years or so, and maybe the GOP will like him then....

The Verdict: Ron Paul or Duncan Hunter. Hunter or Paul...Paul Hunter..Hunting Paul....... and I am not at all enthusiastic on any of these two guys, but they are the best that the GOP has at the moment. One may ask why pick Ron Paul when he is a disciple of predator-economics? Well, except for maybe Hunter, all the other GOPers are as well, and Paul has demonstrated himself to be flexible and thoughtful - he has his own mind. Again, Paul is a man of dignity & can work with the other side of the aisle, and he cares more for the Republic than he does ideology. Though he himself is religious and is against abortion, Dr. Paul believes in the 'wall of seperation between church/state. That's the constitiutional American Way.

The fact is that I am not at all crazy about the Democrat's front runners, Hillary and Obama;though the Democrats have moved closer to protectionism than the GOP has, their contenders for the Top Job leaves a lot to be desired as well. One thing that we do not need is another Clinton in the White House of any gender, and Obama is all show, no substance, thus far. I think that he's an airhead who thinks that he can get by just because he is handsome and has charisma. Hillary has adopted a centrist line and occasionally drops remarks about the plight of the Blue Collar Joe as well as the Middle Class, Obama has yet to be heard,and I trust neither one of those two. Hillary shouldn't be dragging her hubby around since Bill is the biggest Free Traitor President of the 20th Century.
John Edward's imitation of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 campaign is getting beyond annoying; him trying to garner the sympathy vote because his Better Half has breast cancer is bottom-feeder politics as is befitting the Ambulance Chaser that he is. I like the Midget - Kucinich - but he is not on the radar even with the Far Left of the DLC.... I wish that the Dems adopt his economic and trade platform however.

What I'm afraid of is that I will be forced to throw a 'protest ballot' in November of '08 as I did in the previous two Presidential elections(Nader, both times). Before I expire my mortal coif, I would like to witness a Presidential election that both the GOPer and the Democrat are competent and both reflect my core issues more. Some say that we haven't had an election like that, with two outstanding candidates from both the Big Two, since '68 or even as far back as '60...so maybe that is a pipedream of mine.

Feeling Caulfieldesque today...

2007-07-28T09:09:00.000-06:00

If you are but a semi-illiterate biped dwelling in a place called the USA presently, you can saunter out your front door and not be smacked in the face by Harry Potter. Harry Potter this, Harry Potter that; Copernicus had it all wrong: the sun of our solar system personally revolves around what that Brit, RK Rowling, has burning -off on her printer.
Witness the lines at bookstores last weekend: it put me in mind of the cattle waiting at the trough for grandpa to fill on the old farm. One may protest - "well, at least they're reading." Looked into a Harry Potter book once and it's just another ersatz Tolkien/Fantasy genre written primarily for children. A goddamn kid's book. It's the adults that are getting all gaga on it. Harry Potter is a classic example on books that shouldn't be read. Just another recycled empty, pseudo-medieval magical stuff one can get just as easily by reading the one before it. I thought CS Lewis and Tolkien had already done this; just as it has been stated that Western Philosophy is mere footnotes to Plato, same can be said without much debate for the Fantasy genre about those two guys above. The Great Consumer American, following the herd buying- practices of the Joneses, of course couldn't wait for someone else to buy the book then borrow the text after they got finished with the tripe to see if it is worth a dollar, couldn't have patience to wait for it to appear on the shelves of a used book store, let alone wait for the paperback. Devotion to the Mall God required that they stand in line wherever and get Harry Potter for some $34, I think. It is sad that Americans won't stand in lines to purchase any books that are useful, that extends self-education. And Yanks wonder why some other people on the Blue Dot think that they are shallow, uncultivated and dumber than shit as a collective whole. But I bet they stood in line for Harry Potter in Copenhagen too, or whenever it is printed in Danish....

....and how much does anyone want to wager that this Rowling dame will bring Harry Potter out of retirement in a few years when her royalty checks start decreasing in amount?? I'd like to see the Vegas odds on that.

2007-07-28T03:19:00.000-06:00

The Bush Administration has finally done something that I agree with(I haven't been able to write this in a long, long, time): said Administration is thus far not buckling under to Brazil's threats of retaliation through the WTO concerning American cotton subsidies. This could be the starting point of dismantling this globalist edifice if the cards are played correctly. Firstly, it is not another country's business on how another nation subsidizes or does not subsidize their internal agricultural or industrial base. The contradiction of the Bush Administration is that it has as policy that the USA does not need a 'permission slip' to defend America's interests and sovereignty, yet pursued further trade liberalization via the globalist edifice. Read: okay to place American troops in Iraq without UN authorization, but not kosher to protect the economic infrastructure of the United States.' And Bush probably wonders why people think that he is rather, uh, daft.

It is my hope that Brazil aggressively pursues penalties via the World Trade Organization, as threatened, and this Administration stands its ground. This could spell a zeal to pull out of this entangling trade organization , or rather, the WTO can do us all a favor here in Middle America and kick us out of it.
No, not all agricultural subsidies are good - especially those that benefit chiefly the big AgriBiz sector at the expense of the small family farmer, who is rapidly approaching extinction. Currently, with this *BioFuels*(or 'fools') rage, it is this side of retarded to subsidize the corn crop. The argument can be presented that it is further shooting ourselves in the foot by subsidizing domestic cotton when the USA has few textile industries left - cotton remains chiefly an export. But on the other hand, subsidizing cotton smooths out the costs of any tariffs imposed on American cotton. Subsidies are an internal matter, a domestic fight, and not Brazil's, Ethiopia's, or any other nation's business, to sum it all up. Neither is it any of the USA's business what another nation does with their internal agricultural and industrial sector. THAT is Fair Trade; respecting another country's national economy is the cornerstone of amicable international relations. Economic nationalism is international, albeit not global. For instance, the USA has never been a closed autarky or isolationist even in the days when it had high tariff walls. Washington in his wisdom made it quite clear that the USA would trade with any nation in the spirit of fairness early on, and he was opposed to special relationships that favored another country in trade at the expense of another. 'Left-Federalist' is firmly committed to this tradition in trade. Even if the USA could be a 100% total economic autarky with benevolent results, I'd rather have this current laissez-faire instead(if a gun was held to my head for an either/or choice in the matter, that is). We do not want to become like North Korea or the former Albania either. However, using autarky in times of global conflict has its merits, as President Jefferson employed during the Napoleonic Wars between France and Great Britain; if Woodrow Wilson would had banned all trade and financial loans, public and private, to the waring parties in the Great War of 1914, the world conflict probably wouldn't had lasted more than a year. Wilson was such a peace-lovin' man, yet he allowed the Wall Street faction of his Democratic Party dominate his views. By 1915, the Entente Powers were broke and were dependent on the financial apparatus of the City of New York to keep them in the war. If Wilson was that serious about world peace, and America being a leading role in this aspect, one would think that he would had put his foot down early on and summarily informed both the Entente and Central Powers, that was turning Europe into a big graveyard of trenches : "..the pinch is off! Not one more Yankee dollar, not one kilo of wheat, and certainly not any weapon of warfare and the ammunition to go with it - will cross the Pond until you guys sit down and discuss a just armistice." ?? Wilson could had practically dictated peace terms, if he so elected, without sending a single American soldier to France. Some 57,000 + American lives wouldn't had been snuffed -out in the prime of their young lives in Flanders Fields, and millions of lives of our European cousins would had been saved undoubtedly.

Though I have the luxury of hindsight here, I seriously believe that the Great War of 1914-18, the length thereof, could had been averted if Woodrow Wilson would has closed American ports, banned exports to Europe, and had told the JP Morgans and Co. on Wall Street that they are not to extend loans to anyone outside of the United States - and they would go to the gaol if they do. Such would had temporarily harmed the US economy, these measures, but back in those days we were a second-to-none industrial power,quite self-sufficient domestically(unlike today) and could had weathered the hardship without serious calamity.Those were the days when we followed the National System of economics to varying degrees(though Wilson himself was a Free Trader by design). Presently, because of *Free Market&Trade Bolshevism* we Americans are dependent on others.
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I do not think that is a flame-o phrase to create antagonism - 'Free Market Bolshevism'. Rather it is an apt and fitting description of the Libertarian purists, and some members of the GOP. Just as the Marxist- Bolshevik faction in Russia believed that only they had the answers and only they are fitting to lead just talk to a Vienna School devotee at one of their corporate funded think tanks and one will hear the same noise and hubris. Neither the Marxist or Free Market Bolsheviks are about democracy and really do not care for adoption of the populists, and they are not welcome in their ranks anyway. Lenin thought that only his Bolsheviks had the correct idea of socialism , though they were far outnumbered in Russia by other socialist factions and parties. Same applies to libertarianism in the USA: no other people have the correct line on capitalistic economics than - them. The 'People' aren't in for their spiel, so they have contempt for the commoners quite like the Marxist intellectuals have. It is not surprising that some ex-Trotskyites often evolve into libertarians, like PJ O'Rourke. To both Free Market and the former communist Bolsheviks - ideology is everything and trumps all. If the Galt's Gulch capitalist Utopia was ever granted the opportunity to employ their measures, labor camps for *Individualist Re-Education* for the "altruistic-collectivist-mystics and Enemies of Capitalism" would be the likely result. Whittaker Chambers had Ayn Rand and the broad Libertarian movement dead to center in his famous piece at National Review - "Big Sister is Watching You". Chambers, being a repentant Communist and Soviet agent, recognized his erstwhile fellow travelers when he seen them - even when they're under the slogans of liberty, individualism, 'Free Markets'.....

2007-07-26T03:11:00.000-06:00

Dean Baker at Beat the Press thinks that newspaper columnists in the USA should open up their jobs for foreign competition - journalists who could do their job for less money and perhaps write even better, and I agree, naturally. Newspapers need to keep prices low especially since they have been hit hard from other information centers such as the Net where it is often free. These champions of the China Syndrome, the peculiar notion that cheap imports somehow helps out America's poor, need to put their own jobs on the global auction block since they are so concerned about the buying power of the underclass. This I've written ad nauseam before, and I can't help but playing the same side of the record over and over again. Frankly, I feel like a slacker because I haven't spinned it enough.....
Dean also takes America's physicians to task: I guess that doctors just can't make it on an average of $200,000 per annum(after malpractice insurance), and some of them are putting themselves in the same work boots as a steel worker. The doctors in the USA, via the AMA, are a protected caste and still they whine about ambulance chasing lawyers, and the cost of malpractice insurance. The reality is, is that they do not feel that they should be held accountable, period. Physicians, lawyers and educators are like the old medieval guild systems and the government gives them protection that it does not believe should apply to anyone else in any other field. Lawyers and doctors have very powerful lobby edifices as well(since most public servants are lawyers by trade - and increasing numbers are physicians - they got it made in the first place ). The American Medical Association, the various Bar Associations have no competition in the global economy and they fight tooth and nail if they believe that their monopoly is threatened. High time that these hallowed Guilds gets busted up in the same spirit of Anti-Trust Laws. But this is a pipe dream given that, again, most politicians are attorneys, and some physicians; the cause should be to bust the Trusts that public servants and the Fourth sphere of government - lobbyists - have over the people of the United States. The contradiction is that a lobby would have to be formed to shed the power of lobbyists and the protected guilds of the professional class...and so on. Next time that I meet a doctor, lawyer or educator who sings odes to the virtue of the Free Market and the global economy...well, never mind. I don't want to go jail;-)

At least the professional class should be partisans of all fields and careers in the job market should have their protected guilds that they enjoy. That waxes like some Distributist(I am not one) but at least Distributists have an alternative to the present state of affairs in the economy; they want everyone to have their own guild and would be an alternative to labor unions. Most Distributists are traditionalist Roman Catholics who reject the predatory, usurious aspects of capitalism and the leveling of Marxism simultaneously. The morale is that 'third ways' do exist and always have. The National System of economics is also an alternative, and to me is the alternative for the United States. It was the system that we had in various forms until recently in our history. It wasn't perfect, but it worked better. Distributists can be brought into the coalition, if ever one gets going to arrest TINA(There Is No Alternative) and get her off the streets.

2007-07-25T03:50:00.000-06:00

Uploaded is another website I have found while surfing - "The American Protectionist Society" (see left column) dedicated to annihilating Free Trade. Cheers all around. Interesting enough, this American Protectionist Society seems also partial to Vienna School avatar, Ludwig von Mises; such economic folks and their followers are one of the prime reasons we are in this trade morass in the first place. Usually protectionism is that bane for such Free Market Bolsheviks(yes, they are) but the APS seems to be broad minded and enlightened people and apparently doesn't hang on every word that von Mises and Hayek wrote.

Here I am supposed to be a man of the Left,and most of the people at 'Blogs&Websites' that I have listed are conservatives or libertarian oriented in economics. The situation is that most of the anti-globalist Left are only so because laissez-faire harms the developing world and Free Trade is ecologically detrimental. Plus, the said left -of-center anti-globalist movement is just perennially hostile to any form of private enterprise it appears. The difference between them and wittle ol' me at 'Left-Federalist' is that I look at the situation from a national political economic base. The anti-globalist Left remains dedicated, by and large, to a fuzzy-wuzzy internationalism regardless of their hostility to Free Trade. And many do not dare utter the 'T' word in their program given that tariffs are designed to protect the economic infrastructure of the nation/state. The anti-globalist Left is still ate up with utopian anarchism, and I am quite the unapologetic statist(to put it in RandSpeak). Except for market-socialists like David Schweikart, it is difficult for me to find fitting fellow-travelers in economic protectionism from the Left, so this is why at the moment that *Blogs&Websites* has largely centrists and right of center hominids. The anti-globalist Left needs to get over their own hang-ups and realize that people like Buchanan are opposed to the same core thing that they are. There are many things about Pat that I still don't like, just as there are things about Nader that is unappealing to me. But if I can set my own prejudices aside about right-wingers - so can they.

Ergo, I mainly ally with the 'Free Market in One Country' people who are firmly in the trenches against globalism and give a hoot about the national economy and the people in it, though we may differ radically on the internal details.

Alternative History : Jefferson and Hamilton at the Potomac

2007-07-22T12:24:00.000-06:00

Point of Divergence: George Washington does not die from pneumonia in 1799 (rather he was bled to death by doctors) in Real Time. Thus, with Washington still the de facto supreme commander of the Army assembled to fight France in lieu of the 'XYZ Affair', President Adams does not send his 'peace mission' to France and the field commander, Major General Alexander Hamilton, marches as planned on New Orleans in early 1800 and summarily defeats the Spanish garrison there and then turns the Army around and meets the French Expeditionary Force in West Florida and annihilates it in a stunning victory. Hamilton then wrestles an armistice from the surviving French commander that gives all French claimed for -territory in North America to the United States. The victory gives John Adams his re-election in 1800, but the President is not happy: he believes Hamilton to be a 'Caesar' and orders him to disband the Army and then de-commissions him without approval of the Senate. Hamilton disregards the order and then marches his Army through the Carolinas and into Virginia. President Adams then orders the Virginia Militia to confront the Federal Army as it nears the new capital, Washington City. Civil War seems to be at hand....

Appomattox Court House, May 12, 1801

"Major General Hamilton, Vice-President Jefferson has arrived and seeks your consultation, sir."

Hamilton shifted through the papers on his desk and quietly sighed. He knew that this meeting would come, but wondered why it had to happen now, this late. 'Just like Tom Jefferson to wait for the dramatic moment.' Hamilton rose and returned the salute to his aide-de-camp and ordered him to see the Vice President to his quarters with the extra command that they were not to be disturbed....

" I do say, Hamilton, that you have aged greatly since we last met," was Jefferson's opening statement to his old nemesis as he entered the room, after a pause.

"I do feel older than I may look to you, Mr. Vice President. And that is 'Major General Hamilton' to you."

"Oh no...you have been de-commissioned and courts martial proceedings have already been implemented."

"This de-commission", Hamilton tartly replied, "is quite illegal and so is the courts martial. Also is illegal is President Adams's arrest of Thomas Pickering, other Senators, and those who raised objections to his dismissal of the Army and myself. If there is anyone making a replay of Rubicon, as Mr. Adams insists - I wager, in a highly emotional venue - it is not Major General Hamilton who is the antagonist. This Army has been fired on by Virginia State Militia already without provocation and I seek to put an end to this dilemma once in for all, Mr. Vice President. That Adams has waited until His Excellency George Washington met an untimely death last year to make this vindictive move...I'm not astounded."

Jefferson sat in a chair across from Hamilton, took a sip of offered tea from a servant and sized up his adversary - "You were always a verbose wight, Hamilton. You go on and on in whatever rattles in your brain as if the gods themselves bend an ear to hear what expires from your mouth regardless of the time duration. This is a mission that I have taken on myself , and I will be brief and direct: if you march on Washington City - the capital that you helped create - this republican government, this idea, is finished. This is what the European monarchists want to see transpire, and your action will prove to me what I have always thought you of. I'm certain that you won't have that? You may not think much of state militias organized by the people, but they are dug in in the Federal District and they aim to fight to the death. I will personally be at the lead of their column if you do make your Potomac crossing, and I will have my eyes peeled for your physical presence when the time comes with a loaded musket. So, I beg you ,Major General, to disband your Army now, and you return home to your cacophonous metropolis of New York where you belong."

Hamilton laughed derisively - "Disband you say? If I do so now your state militia will dispatch me before I get into Maryland proper. And let me remind you that my Army is disciplined, battle hardened, and more than a bit perturbed that they can't go home now because of the shenanigans of your mad, quite mad, President. No ragtag militias can defeat this Army after it made quick work of the professionals of Spain and France - regardless who is at the helm of their column - and no mind if I meet my own death. This ,they discovered near Richmond the other day when they launched an attack like sneak-thieves in the night at my camp. Mr. Jefferson, you don't stand a chance and you know this. But this 'crossing' I seek to avoid as well, for similar reasons as yours. I've already sent President Adams four different dispatches offering my terms, and they have been unanswered. It is the President of the United States who wants this 'Civil War' that he rants on about as if Cato's disembodied spirit has possessed him. Those terms are still on the table, but not for long."

"Need I remind you, Hamilton, that President Adams is constitutionally Commander-in-Chief of the Army and militias - not you. He has ordered you to disband, and you march north to where he resides nevertheless. What else is he to think of you? What am I to discern from your rash actions? To me you are a clear and present danger to the Republic as long as you are head of a numerous army, this close to the capital."

"John Adams has suspended habeus corpus and arrested many men without provocation. So do not throw the Constitution in my face after I expended copious energy for its ratification - more than Adams, Madison and you. You always struck me as being somewhat detrimental to the Constitution, the plan, anyway, sir. And if you think for a moment that I want to see Washington City turned into blood, you are quite mistaken. I am not the glory hunter as you think, and I have no aspirations for a dictatorship. The window for peace is still open, if Mr. Adams takes it by the offered branch."

Jefferson shook his head, rose and paced the room -"Ah! I had you so wrong, Hamilton! Always have I believed that history has always stooped to you, and now you have shown to have met it, and now you play the director."

"A situation that your druthers would have you in , Thomas? Regardless of the role, one can't be a director without a producer in a play. By you being here without the sanction of the President, you aim to be the protagonist. You can't be one without me, no matter how it pains you," Hamilton intoned.

"What mischief do you spill, man?"

"What I always knew about you, Mr. Jefferson, is that I could sweeten deals with you. You resented this. You never thought me your equal and still do not. Just because I was not born on a plantation like you were in the Americas, your genius could not accept me. Ergo, you always thought I was about 'mischief'. Very good.... There is no time now for your personal animosity to try to out fox me. The ultimatum is clear: if I do not have terms that are just to disband my Army, it will march in the next handfull days."

"Your terms, pray tell?,"Jefferson asked.

"You as the producer of this Rubicon play, will convince John Adams to resign the office of Presidency. Tom Pickering and all arrested public officials will be released and pardoned. The men of my army will be given guaranteed full pensions. Then, at an appointed place, the Federal Army and the militias of Virginia and Maryland will meet and lay down all arms and be released from active duty."

"You're daft, man! Adams will never sanction that and neither do I! I will not become President because of a bargain with you!"

"This will save our young Republic, something that we both want. And don't tell me that you didn't eye General Washington and especially the fat rump of Adams sitting in the Presidential chair and thinking all the while that you could do a better job of it than they. I watched you, and I knew. You're not just a producer, Jefferson, you are quite the actor: always feigning that you didn't much jibe with public life and only wanted to be a monk at your Monticello, studying insects, collecting books, gathering correspondence from the Enlightened Ones of America and Europa. I knew better. For all of your anti-federalism ,you,want to be the head Federalist of the Republic. This, is yours to have."

"You are Satan, Hamilton! Satan! And what will you do, if all of these terms are met? How do you know that I won't arrest you too if I am President? That I do think that Adams is rash and would have done things different - truth. Washington...he always lent his ear to you, and diregarded Virginia, but an able man ...I can't be President under these conditions - especially with you the loose cannon that you are and knowing that I owe the chair to you. I could never look my fellow Republicans in the eye therafter...."

"Jefferson, my only desire is to accept this de-commission and retire to private practice in the City of New York where you said that I belong. I've neglected Betsy and the children and they deserve better. My public service is at its end, this I know. Because of the Reynolds thing - that you were behind - my political career was over long ago. I want peace, Jefferson, both publicly and privately. Enough blood has been shed. If that means that you are the President, I have accepted this and you have to as well. You're a demagogue democrat and I think that you are a rank hypocrite. But you are a better man than Adams."

"I never was behind the Reynolds expose...think what you will."

"Oh no? You financed Callender and that other rogue. You couldn't find any corruption at the Treasury and the Bank, so you resorted to digging up the sins of my private life and very nearly ruined my entire family in the process. Have you no shame, sir? It nearly kills you that I am not the corrupt man that you thought me as, and you can't believe that I love this Nation more than you, though I've sacrificed about everything for this country including my family!"

"Hamilton! You can't know what an American is fully...but maybe in the past I was a bit hasty in my judgment and let our clamors get the best of my reason..."

"You will be President and will then hold all the cards. You can do with me what you wish. But I ask as a gentleman that you let me and my family dwell in peace."

"You will not pick up your poisoned quill and write your diatribes against me to the Federalist press? I find that hard to believe, Hamilton. You are a brilliant man, Major General, but you don't know when to desist!"

"Jefferson," Hamilton sighed, "if you will do but one thing as President, you will never again read a single word from me on your democratic policies under any pseudonym."

"And that would be?"

"President Jefferson will introduce to Congress a constitutional amendment prescribing manumission."

"What war will do to warlords! Now you have become a fanatical abolitionist. Did a cannon-ball graze your head in New Orleans, Hamilton?"

"Unfortunately for you and Adams, the ball was off target. During the long march here, I traveled the length of the South naturally ,and the journey brought me back to my youth in the West Indies. Whatever you think about the African race - slavery is evil , sir! I would not have even the demons in Hades enslaved. I personally do not think that I fought in the Revolution, then later on led men to defeat the French and Spaniards for the freedom of our Republic, to keep a large portion of our residents in bondage. You had similar views as a young man, but you have forgotten them. You need to remember the Young Tom, as I have recalled the Young Alex recently."

"Very well. What will you do if I don't set your precious Negroes free?"

" There's nothing that I can do, Mr. Jefferson. I will be a private lawyer by 1802, hopefully. But a future generation will rise and do something about that peculiar institution if you do not act."

"You are being presumptuous, Hamilton. I haven't agreed to any of your terms. I still think that you are Caesar, and are offering what you call 'terms' that is beyond me or anyone else to sanction - so you march anyway."

"That I will do, Tom, if Adams is not in a carriage on his way back to Braintree within a week."

"You will destroy the Republic."

"Adams already made the the first move in that direction..you can say that my terms are yours, if you feel the need. I really don't care. The terms on anyone's shoulders are quite liberal. This will avoid bloodshed and disunion.It is up to you at this point. You said that you will be brief, and I concur - this interview is at its end. Think on it on your way back to President Adams, and may God go with you....."

Following much heated discussion and tantrums, Vice President Jefferson and the Cabinet convinces President Adams to resign the office of Presidency because of "ill health". Major General Hamilton disbands his army as agreed upon and vetoes President Jefferson's proposal for a Victory Parade in Washington City. Hamilton retires to private life in New York City and three years later is killed in a duel by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. Unlike in Real Time, Jefferson is shocked and grieved at Hamilton's death and remembers the conversation in Appomattox Court House during the 'Rubicon Situation': President Jefferson introduces a Constitutional Amendment for the Abolition of Slavery which passes after much tribulation. By 1825, no man or woman is held in bondage to another man and woman in the United States of America...

A Defense of Gaius Julius Caesar

2007-07-20T16:48:00.000-06:00

Just completed Tom Holland's - 'Rubicon - The Last Years of the Roman Republic' and found it a tantalizing read, well-researched and entertaining in many places. Holland follows the the norm of most Roman historians, that Julius Caesar ended the Republic by crossing the Rubicon with his legions returning from conquest in Gaul. Yet, he takes the reader through a narrative of the other personalities involving Rome in its last Republican days, and he is not convincing in his own words that we can heap the whole demise on Caesar himself; one can read between the lines that the author of said book himself has his doubts that Rubicon was the epicenter of the Roman Republic's omega.

Unlike most antiquarian, Classical historians, Holland portrays Cicero for what he really was -
a two-faced,synchophant, class-climbing, oppurtunist, and not personally a very brave citizen no matter how many speeches he delivered in the Senate extolling Stoic and manly Roman virtutes. Cicero wasn't spawned from an 'old' Roman family, so he planned his career in kissing the reactionary optimates' arses, and they ultimately rewarded him with power and wealth. When Cicero talked up the 'Republic', he was speaking for the slaveocracy, the slum-owners, the patrician grifting class, and the Optimates' death squads that were occasionally employed in the late Roman Republic. Often Cicero the man is skirted over in Classical departments at universities and he remains a hero to this day with some of these scholars. In modern day comparisons, Cicero puts me in mind of a cross between William F. Buckley Jr and Rush Limbaugh: silver tongued, verbose and educated as is Buckley, a mealy-mouthed demagogue for the corporate Overclass as is Limbaugh.Because that's his meal-ticket. Cicero would had been a populares if he thought the silver spoon with all the power to go with it could had been attained sooner.

Cato the Younger enjoys Tom Holland's greater esteem; Cato was a Republican purist who pined for the golden age of the Roman Republic that didn't exist (except in his own mind). Cato can be respected, but not at all liked: he was a filthy rich brat from an impeccable Roman aristocratic family but he purposely dressed in a dusty black toga, often forgot to wear shoes in the Forum, and talked- up living the spartan existence as an essential Roman virtue.One is reminded of the chic, wealthy bipeds we witness today who go slumming in their attire. You know, the crowd that wears used flannel shirts with a John Deere ballcap to top off their uniform and purposely rips holes in their Jeans...and all the males have perennially a three-day beard no matter what day you see them. Cato was like the person that you read about in Weird News who lived (when not homeless )in a trailer-park, drove a dilipadated that '70's' station wagon and drank ghetto wine & beer but died in a Salvation Army Shelter with millions in the bank and in stocks and bonds(via inheritence, mostly); it was discovered post mortem that he had a degree from Harvard who snagged his Ph.D from there writing apologetics for Social Darwinism and Ricardo economics... But Cato was a True Believer, unlike Cicero. He could afford to. Cato could look like a DirtBall and preach on stoicism. Julius Caesar never could sit smug and he was born with a major strike against him.

The Julius family were old Roman patricans, but had become impoverished by the time that Gaius made his appearance on the tragic Earth crying from his mother's womb. The homestead of said Julius family was set right adjaecent to the plebian ghetto of Rome and heard, smelled and maybe felt their pain, per diem. For a talented and ambitious Roman patrician without wealth, the only ticket to sucess was political and military power.Yet Caesar did have some principles that he abided by and didn't let oppurtunism trample them(unlike Cicero). His family were from the populares faction that more or less sided with the reformer Marius - who met a gruesome end at the reactionary coup led by a patrician warlord named Sulla - the first Roman who broke the law by sending his legion into the Rome. The Sullan coup was the pre-Rubicon and in my estimation was when Rome as a Republic ceased to exist but in name only. Sulla could be compared to Augusto Pinochet: he soon sent out his death squads throughout Rome and it was reported that some three-thousand Romans, plebians and patricians alike, were dispatched to the afterlife - mostly populares partisans and Sulla's personal enemies. In late life, Sulla wrote that he regretted not assigning Julius Caesar a similar fate when he had the power to do so. In fact, he offered the young Caesar a Faustian bargain: join the optimates faction and power and glory would be his. Caesar bravely declined and remained with the populares and he always was one. This is proof that Caesar was not a single-minded oppurtunist as many historians try to paint him as.

Sulla was granted the title of dictator by the Senate to "restore the Republic". His and the Senate's idea of restoration was to undo all of the Marius economic reforms and they did so in fine fashion(like Pincochet implemented "free-market reforms" that primarily benefited the Chilean wealthy elite). The restoration was quite un-republican and Sulla ruled by his goon squads that would knife opponents, or suspected ones on Roman crossroads w/o trial. Not a peep in protest was heard from Cicero, the Great Orator of republican virtues and order . Cato did occassionally take issue with Sulla, but again, being who he was, he was untouchable and could afford to dissent. Yet, Cato handled Sulla with kid gloves in comparison to his screeching diatribes against Caesar later on.The reason was that Sulla was no threat to the patrician's monopoly on the Roman economic infrastructure; Caesar attempted to put checks on it and spread out the interests involved.

That Sulla later on voluntarily walked away and ended his dictatorship is lauded by some Classical historians that Sulla was a true republican and was earnest in its restoration. The author of Rubicon begs to differ:Sulla had a strong hedonistic streak and was quite fond of wine and had an open prediliction for drag queens. After killing off most of his opponents, accumulating great wealth for himself and his already wealthy friends, Sulla decided to retire in his opulent villa and fully steep himself in his vices, write his memories. His shadow remained over the Senate, however, and his Death Squads were always at the ready if need be. Even later when he died from cirrosis of the liver in the arms of his transvestite lover, the fear of Sulla was like a fog over the citizens of Rome that never abated.

Many people do not realize to full effect that Rome was quite already an Empire before Ceasar formed his legions and marched into Gaul at age 40, and he had solidly established himself as a politician from the populares;he was the third link in the triumvirate and fought in the Senate for the plebians, the free lower class Romans. His later reforms as dictator was not entirely a power move to get the 'mob' firmly on his side. Though Caesar was not a humanist by any wild stretch of the imagination, and probably didn't personally give a bleep about the plight of the Roman working stiff, he did think that he had an obligation being the populares that he was, and Caesar delivered. He talked the talk and also walked the walk. True, many patricians would side with the plebians only to garner useful idiots in their quest for personal power and throw them off when their objectives were realized, Gaius Julius Caesar did indeed have virtue in his political worldview. Because Caesar was true to his word to his plebian allies, this is the main reason that he was feared by the optimates like Cato and Cicero.

Tom Holland doesn't go into detail why Caesar sent his legions across the Rubicon. By then, the centrist Pompey had been turned by the optimates following the death of his beloved wife - Julius Caesar's daughter. Plus, Pompey had become jealous of Caesar's military conquests when he had always egotistically thought himself as the Alpha Male and believed Caesar as a mere protoge, not exactly his equal. Pompey had previously formed a legion of his own in the quise of putting down mob gang warfare in Rome itself which was already a violation of Senate law. Caesar was given an ultimatum when he had crossed the Alps to return to Rome: 'disband your legion now, and return to Rome in your own person.' Caesar was quite aware of history what had happened to populares reformers like Marius and summarily retorted that he would gladly comply with the Senate's ruling if Pompey would disband his own legion that was already stationed within the city limits of Rome - so would he, his legions. Besides, Sulla had crossed the line before, and so had Pompey. The Senate rudely rejected Caesar's reasonable proposal, and the die was cast.

We know the rest of the story - the Civil War the that followed the Crossing of the Rubicon and Caesar's triumph over Pompey and his optimates minions; Caesar being awarded the title of dictator by the Senate(which was in the Roman constitution, btw). He was a legal dictator, but unlike Sulla, Julius Caesar was not a tyrant. Caesar, known for his occasional cruelty on the battlefied against barbarian enemies, was overly magnanimous to his vanquished fellow Romans. He had pardoned many of his key opponents in the Civil War - including Brutus and Cicero - and was reported to have wept crocodile tears when Pompey's head was delivered to him by treacherous Egyptians that took it upon themselves to execute him(Caesar subsequently had Pompey's assasins meet the same fate). During his reign as dictator, Caesar tried to form a coalition, a harmony of interests, if you will. He tried to work chiefly with the Senate initially, but when they rebuffed him on his proposed social and economic reforms, he then installed more power to the plebian Tribal Council to do so. Certainly, there was rigged elections, corruption,bribery but Caesar didn't resort to organized Death Squads as what was the norm in the Sullan dictatorship, and he could had done so if he wished. Caesar tried to reform the Senate in putting 'new men' who got there based on their merit & loyalty, not because of their family name. The die that was cast is that the Roman patrician oligarchy was going to have checks on their power.

I concur with Parenti(though I really hate to admit it): if Caesar would had never reformed the economic plutocracy of the Optimates, they probably would had sang moonshine and roses about Julius Caesar and held him up to be the archetype of a Roman Republican. Instead, Caesar pushed through rent controls in the Roman slums( even gave a one year moratorium on rents), installed a system of public works for the idle plebians, rewarded his long suffering and loyal legionaires their own land plots in Italy. Caesar knew that the people could not live by Bread n'Circuses alone. The final nail in Caesar's coffin was when he had pushed through the Tribal Council a bill that would require the rich plantation owners to hire 15% free labor. That was a threat to the slavocracy - and the economic oligarchs acted accordingly by murdering the man who was the closest thing to a democrat that Rome had at the time. Following the Optimates propoganda campaign that Caesar was going to bring back the monarchy, they ultimately got monarchy with Ceasar's nephew Octavian/Augustus: Augustus became Emperor but kept the Senate intact nevertheless and he restored the economic oligarchy of the patrician class, undid all of his uncle's reforms. No protest from the reactionary Senators was heard then, no cries for a restoration of republican virtues and government...

Caesar didn't end the Republic - it was gone before he was even born.Most did not know so at the time. Rubicon is just a power word, a weasel phrase, and it is historically unjust by putting the blame on Caesar for the Republic's demise, just as it is for blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression, Kaiser Bill for the Great War 1914-18, LBJ for the Vietnam War, and so on.
Comparions can be odious at times. Many like to compare the USA to the trials and tribulations of the Roman Republic. If they are fitting, we have to be on-guard against our own patrician rulling class & their mouthpieces today who talk about "restoration of the Republic". This is why I don't quite trust such aspiring political power personalities such as Ron Paul, though I find myself in agreement with a portion of his spiel. If the USA goes to full-blown Imperium, it will be under the blanket of republican virtues and it will be when the American Overclass feels that their monopoly on economic interest are threatened. The Night Watchman of the Republic can't afford to catch sleep during the Day, either.

2007-07-15T06:33:00.000-06:00

Searching around the blogsphere I realized that I missed somethings a week ago on Independence Day: Howard Zinn had his own anti-patriotic celebration pleading with people to root out nationalism in all forms from flags to songs. Him and the old Marxian international Left believes that the very existence of independent nation/ states is evil in itself and civil/liberal nationalism is just as bad as militarist, nativist,chauvenistic, illiberal nationalism.This is fairly much the stance of hard-core libertarian ideologues.
Zinn and Michael Parenti are the Poster Children of what is wrong with the hard Left in the United States. Zinn is famous for The People's History of the United States which he leaves out anything good about the USA's history and employs embellishments and shoddy research on everything that he believes is malignant - which is everything, according to Zinn. As for Parenti, Professor at Berekely(where else?), though I thought that his Assassination of Julius Caesar was an excellent and accurate narrative delving into the real reason why Ceasar was killed by the reactionary Roman Senators( Julius assaulted the slavocracy and implemented land and other economic reforms), Parenti sounds like a lunatic on about everything else that is a big issue with him. For instance, Dr. Parenti doesn't like his far-leftist brothers and sisters picking on Joseph Stalin;he dresses down Noam Chomsky every chance he gets for doing so and all but accuses Chomsky of being a closet right-winger. Just as the Far Right lunatics have their Holocaust Denial, Parenti engages in Gulag Denial: according to Parenti, just a few thousand died in Siberian labor camps instead of the millions that is widely accepted by everyone today, including the Russians themselves. And it wasn't 'all that bad'. Parenti blames the West for Stalin's purges and collectivization of agriculture and claims that everyone who was shot by NKVD thugs were as guilty as sin and deserved their fate('and it wasn't all that bad'). Parenti is also an opponent of nationalism in all forms, though he contradictory praises Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia - who was also a nemesis of Parenti's hero, poor, misunderstood Stalin. Tito organized Yugoslavia on the lines of a national-economy and allowed private enterprise and he was not a communist in the Leninist-Stalinist mode at all, which is something that Parenti seems to bemoan that has evaporated and wants to bring back the good ol' days of the Cheka, gnostic Command Economies with its monolithic, over-centralized, corrupt Big ,Big Bureaucracy....

I got sidetracked here, as usual. I have no stake in the matter, or really care, to save the looney-bird Far Left from themselves anymore than I seek redemption for the Right wing nuts. In fact it is good that they all exist to provide entertainment and point the lucid people of the realm of what not to believe in. But there does exist some benevolent figures in the American Left on certain things. Noted is David Schweikart's Market Socialism; Schweikart not only is a chronic revisionist Marxist for endorsing the 'Market' in the first place, unlike most Marxists he believes that market-socialism requires a protectionist national economy and there is not much any of this fuzzy internationalism about his plan. Reading his work, I about spilled my coffee mug when I read that he believes in the necessity of tariffs even between comparable market-socialist states. Though I doubt that market-socialism could ever take root in the United States - and there are good reasons why it should not - and I do not endorse Schweikart's economics, he remains refreshing to read after previously getting a fill of Zinn's and Parenti's gooblygoop....
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On the 'Christian Nation' controversy, I beg to differ with the secularist side that holds up Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, and the fact that 'God' does not make an appearance in the writing of the Constitution, as the smoking guns that we are not a Christian nation per se. The real meat can be found, or not found, in the Federalist Papers - the argument for ratification of said Constitution. One would think that if Jay, Madison and Hamilton wanted to create a Christian Nation and that their Constitution was based on Biblical principles, that they would provide Scriptural quotes and writings of the Church Fathers on government to present their case. Thumbing through my own copy the other day, I couldn't find any of their arguments presented from a Judea-Christian base. Instead, their references were pagan Greece and Rome, the Swiss Cantons, the British constitution, etc...

....and the Founding Fathers didn't base the Constitution on that of the Iroquois Nations, either.

The Demise of Working Class Culture

2007-07-11T14:47:00.000-06:00

It was intended to finish the second part of the 'Ancients and Moderns' entry, but drafts aren't up to even my chaotic and dilettante standards for publishing as yet.Luckily I got diverted the other day on a new tangent while surfing the web....

Gabor Steingart had an excerpt from his book written at Der Spiegel Online - 'White Trash, Fast Food' nearly a year ago narrating the once proud German working-class slide into Jerry Springerdom in the 21st Century. In the Wilhelmian era, the working-class lived in hovels, were often hungry, but they had unity within the SPD;the 'proletarian' knew who was their friend, and who was their enemy. Special party schools existed not just for political indoctrination into socialism, but various self-education in numerous fields were open to them and they readily took advantage . What was interesting was that the working-class in the 19th Century gravitated to the German Classics and didn't pay much attention to the modernist avante-garde; plays of Schiller and Goethe etc., were commonly put on at Socialist Clubs. The proletarian could hold their own with the buegerlich on cultural literacy. Now the working class in Germany and the West in general has never had it better with living standards, but many spend their time watching TV, drinking, munching fatty food. If they have political views at all, they resort to protest vote of the extreme Left or Right parties and they often switch from election to election....

In America there has been a similar transformation with the industrial worker, the HardHat. Most of the Caucasian working class no longer votes at all; those with political views often merely ape what Rush Limbaugh and O'Reilly says -otherwise politics is generally a no-no to talk about on the job. Sex, comments on Larry the Cable Guy's allegedly humorous antedotes; the latest Sports score and plans after they win the Lottery are often the focal point of conversation besides subjects related to 'work' itself. Though occasional remarks about "rich punks" can be heard, there is no element of Class Warfare involved; often the Blue Collar Joe just wants the toys that the rich boss has and yearns to be a rich punk himself. As for 'educational endeavours', the best way to get oneself ostracized and ridiculed by fellow employees is to show up on the job site with a book(once, a fellow co-worker actually got angry at me for committing this unwritten infraction). Newspapers are kosher as long as one just reads the Sports section - Front pages are for geeks: a nuclear bomb may detonate somewhere on the globe, but what matters is that Barry Bonds got caught again shooting up steroids, for discussion in the breakroom.

The American working class was more aware of world events in the days when there were strong Labor Unions, perhaps. Others point to the nihilism of our general culture in the past decades, the great leap forward in CEO pay/income discrepancy; the more numerous Bread n'Circuses available to tune out the brain to for the Jerry Springerization of the white working class. Class Warfare didn't take the hue here as it did in Bismarck's Germany , but at one time the industrial worker had points of reference besides general pop culture and quenching their own desires , and there was no pride in being a total general dumb ass as it is today.

This is not clarion call for the working class to become socialists to recapture their own sense of sub-culture - just at one time it did have value, gave them a better sense of purpose other than making a buck. It is doubtful that it can be recovered. Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, World Federated Wrestling and NASCAR has got their souls in an iron-tight bag. ( however,some get uppity and parvenu and take up Golf; not a few has confessed to me that they even spend a Sunday afternoon watching Golf on television). A few think that they have their own souls intact the old-fashioned way of fundamentalist protestantism and distribute Jack Chick publications throughout the plant, construction site, etc. But that's okay since since it is not a book and in cartoon format...

Further insights along this line can be read in Charles Bukowski's short stories(who was both White Trash and literary) and Jim Goad's excellent The Redneck Manifesto that takes the reader on a humorous sociological trip regarding the Caucasian American underclass....

Ancients&Moderns (Part I)

2007-07-09T03:43:00.000-06:00

It's been said that the USA was the 1st Modern Nation and this is absolutely on the money. If one believes that ideas matter and carry long-term effects on the socio-political realm, we can see the spectre of John Locke planted on the American flag from the onset. Locke, following Hobbes, coined the 'Natural Rights' idea; we are all equal in the sense to act within our own motivations and interests and overthrow the State when these a priori rights are transgressed. This philosophy is stamped on The Declaration of Independence quite distinctly.

I will not go into much whether *natural rights/laws* are actually natural though this is a highly debatable point with the argument's upperhand pointing to the negative: it can be said that 'Natural' rights and laws are one of the noble lies/political truths that we automatically assume to be 'self-evident', yet the whole unvarnished truth it is not. The crux of this entry is to punch at the seams of this Moderns vs. Ancients debate, and how our FF's may have been too modern.

There are many things admirable about Locke's social contract theory, but one has the feeling with his resolve to toss the notion of the divine right of kings, Locke purged the tub with the dirty water and some of the Founders of the Republic, especially Jefferson, followed accordingly. One good thing about the medieval political system, perhaps the sole good, was the axiom of noblesse oblique. This largely explains later on in the 19th Century, monarchical, more authoritarian regimes in Europe adopted a sufficient Welfare State, whilst the republican/democratic United States was a johnny-come-lately to it, and very reluctantly. Even Great Britain, the home of Enlightenment liberalism and corresponding classical economics, adopted the Welfare State before America did and 'socialism' didn't carry quite the Dracula reaction with Brits as it did(still does) with Yanks, even with some Tories. Europeans blended in synthesis modern-Enlightenment ideas and still retained their old spirit of noblesse oblique. Also, the USA was born a middle-class society with land seemingly infinite to privately own;even in 1787 when the USA's territory was merely the Atlantic seaboard, America was geographically the largest nation in the West and sparsely populated. Europe is simultaneously both 'old' and 'new', whilst America was 'new' but many thought they were continuing the 'old'.

The contradiction with the Founding Fathers is that they revered old Classical Rome and Greece, but took the new nation on the modernist path, excepting retaining the institution of slavery. Hamilton and his allies in the Federalist Party appears to be the most cautious moderns of them all; the National Bank and proposal to partially publicly fund via the BUS internal improvements and jump-start industrialization was in a sense a retention of the old European noblesse oblique. This among other things opened Hamilton up to accusations that he was a closet monarchist, though he was not. Unlike the Lockeans, Hamilton wasn't into leveling everything connected with the ancient regime, and wanted to give the bathtup a new cleaning in republican fashion.

2007-07-06T04:05:00.000-06:00

Alan Tonelson at American Economic Alert really hammered liberal TINA pimp, David Broder, and I will join in in the slam fest a bit here. Broder hand-rings about Bush's loss of Fast Sell-Out Authority and he's in lock step with the apocalyptic forecasts of Kommissar Schwab. Free Trade is good for the world, according to Broder, because "95% of the consumers live outside the United States". Out of all the apologetics for laissez-faire, this is one of the most dense. Namely, no other nation on the planet has our consumer oriented market culture and neither the buying power. Other nations, such as in the western EU ones, may have a higher standard of living, yet they still retain their savings panache and have less household debt, etc. The fact exists that the nation is losing a gold-mine because of our consumer/post-industrial economic and trade structure;implementation of tariffs would be a check on our American Consumer Religion, and also would provide the federal government with revenue, and lots of it. Feature that many of these free-traders also want to keep taxes low and decry deficit spending; liberal globalists want money for programs such as health care and the general social safety net. Okay, why not have China and others indirectly pay for them?

Broder is wishy-washy, like most globalist liberals, and believes that "labor and environmental standards" in free-trade agreements is enough to offset shortcomings. History lesson, Mr. Broder: Clinton slipped them in with NAFTA and look at the result. They're empty symbolism. Even if they were abided by, the de-industrialization of the USA is continuing, real wages have not experienced significant growth with GNP since 1973, and our once second-to-none manufacturing base has transcended into McJob, service-oriented crappy positions. Jobs that free-traders like Broder and his Wall Street Journal fellow-travelers haven't found a way to outsource elsewhere. If they could, they would.

As I've stated before, I yearn that these professionals will someday feel the pinch of their own globalist outsourcing agenda:

'First globalism came for the factory workers;
I wasn't a factory worker, so I didn't speak out..

'Then it came for the software industry,
I didn't work in the field, so it meant nothing to me....

'...then globalism came for my job.
But there was none left to speak out for me.'

Choices

2007-07-05T15:26:00.000-06:00

Free Trade Kommissar, Susan Schwab, laments that the Doha Round - geared for the further sell-out of the economic infrastructure of the Republic - is breaking down. I reckon that Brazil and India doesn't like the Bush Administration's Marxian trade policy and they're balking. Kommissar Schwab says that if nothing is done in 2007, Free Trade could be in limbo for "years".

Good God... I hope that she is on par in her assessment and not just engaging in typical free-trader alarmist, fear mongering...

Let's hope that '07 spells the year of the death of laissez-faire and it doesn't have a revival. It has been a disaster for the country and the world in general and it is high time that it is buried. There have been signs that globalism is cracking and the roll-back may be nigh. Let the powers that be not pussy-foot around about it: the solution is not to induce other nations to adopt free-trade(we're supposed to be 'good neighbors'), or set quotas and beggar thy neighbor and manipulate the currency - that's all been tried before. As stated in a previous comment in response to a poster, we've got to kick the living guts out of globalism, and the steel-toed boot to do it with is called tariffs. It is proven in economic trade history and it works. Devil may care if it sets off a 'tariff-trade war': look at our trade deficit and then ponder what other region on the planet has the consumer buying power of the United States of America?

Speaking of consumerism....if purist Free Market coupled with Free Trade is supposed to magnify "freedom to choose" at the Mall, how come one cannot purchase socks and underwear and most electronics that has the *Made in USA* label on it? As an economic patriot, most goods that I buy with Federal Reserve Notes I want them manufactured by American workers in the United States. This 'freedom' is taken away from me as a consumer to buy American. Instead, I can only get goods made in sweatshops in the so-called developing world. I may have 117 boxes of breakfast cereal to choose from at the supermarket, but if I insisted on 'Buying American' always, I'd have to walk about nude and not have a television or boom box and could not drive my GM truck(many parts are manufactured in Mexico). Instead of freedom, patriot consumers have no choice in the matter - we live under a tyranny of foreign goods on the shelves. True-blue economic patriots are naked and Luddite today. I'm a fraud since in public I am always dressed for the occassion.

Even if a flat tariff spiked inflation(Free Trade has hardly been a spectre of deflation either; look at the costs in Year One of FT, 1973, and compare to today) long term,that may spawn a private wave to have domestic goods manufactured cheaper than all the kitsch that we have to buy from China and other places. The tariff would protect infant industries; or should I state, jump-start re-industrialization.We would have "choice" with domestic goods and services competing with foreign ones. If some product is made better than the American one and roughly cheaper, the market will bear, right? That's competition. That's capitalism. That's choice in the marketplace.

Mr. Bush: Accept Putin's Offer!

2007-07-04T08:42:00.000-06:00

If Bush has any grain of intellect in his being, he will go along with Russia's offer to have the useless MDS deployed in southern Russia instead of the planned placement in Poland, the Czech Republic. Yes, I don't doubt for a single moment that Putin has ulterior motives(as we would in his shoes), but this NeoCon Administration has made the USA - once the beacon of light on the free world - a pariah state with most of the population of the dark Earth. Bush is no longer answerable to the electorate - but he is answerable to history.

The NeoCon lobby will use Cold War metaphors that Putin's proposal is appeasement if accepted. Actually, it is on the surface Realpolitik good-sense. If Bush is honest that the MDS is only to counteract radical Islamic regimes like Iran when they attain nuclear weapons capability, deploying them on Russian soil will be an act of good-will and perhaps will lead to more amicable Moscow-Washington relations in the near future. We direly need at least one of the two, Russia or China, in better, warmer dialogue. Ideally, I'd prefer a loose USA-EU-Russia triad partnership in international relations; a concert of powers if you will. Besides, if or when the next Administration gets a pair and levies import tariffs, we in the United States will need other nations in our corner when China and the other Asian tigers raise protest at the imposition of said tariffs. We need allies that matter on the macro world scene; having smaller nations like the Czech Republic and Poland, romanticizing unduly this UK-USA 'special relationship' is not cutting it.

If Bush rebuffs this offer from Mr. Putin, the GOP members of our federal legislature need to find a pair and impeach, then remove this man along with Vice President Dick Cheney. Enough is enough! This Administration should had been impeached long, long ago. Bush has not provided for the general welfare of the nation - he has put us in further peril. Besides, politically they do not want to be linked to Bush in '08 anyway.

Deploy the MDS in southern Russia, or do what is really right and scrap then entire program. Deployment of this system in Eastern Europe will be the re-start of the Cold War and this time we won't have a Stalin to blame for it, but a Bush.

Ramblings on nationalism, religion....

2007-07-04T06:30:00.000-06:00

The idea of the autonomous nation/state is something that is rather unique and new in the long history of the Western Mind, or Faustian Man, if you will. Old medieval feudalism was hostile to the very notion of nationalism in any form. The object was always a pining for, a romanticism for the ancient Roman Empire's revival with many political thinkers of auld Europa. Medieval thinkers entrenched in their status quo were the reactionaries of their day; the assertion of some that nationalism has it's roots in the 'left' is not at all unfounded. Rightists have traditionally thought of political organization within the grounds of empire and kingdom until the 18th and 19th centuries when the feudalist system had its great unravelling. The birth of the United States of America was the catalyst.

Concur with some conservative thinkers that democracy per se is not what republics, sovereign nation/states are supposed to be about. Democracy, democratic elements in our own Republic came later, we evolved into it. Our Bill of Rights is based on liberty of citizens;checks and balances in our governmental structure. Our Constitution is geared to check the power of both the Few and the Many so that tyranny does not result from either side. As a liberal - a National Liberal - I firmly believe based on observable phenomena that this harmony is way out of balance,the economic elites in particular. Naturally, I am not anti-democracy but often it is not a cure-all for whatever plaques us within our Republic. Economic democracy, however, can be utilized to check the power of the economic elite. Another thing is to ban ALL lobbyists from Capitol Hill - even lobbyism that I agree with. Our Congresspeople are there to represent us, the Voter, not some high flung special interest group that uses the threat of electoral funding to buy our public servants to vote on laws that specifically benefits them. But we economic and civic nationalists have to resort to this lobbying ourselves in the meantime if things are going to be turned around. If they are not, start waving bye-bye to the Republic. There are signs that our side is gaining some ground, but the edifice of globalism from both the Right and Left is hardly beaten;they're wounded. Hopefully, we are analogous to Muhammed Ali vs. Foreman in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle and we're roping the dope? That is my most optimistic angle at this moment, and that might wax of romanticism.

Yea, the general Left's hostility to nationalism is quite in error given that civic nationalism, at least, has it's roots there. The American nationalist tradition was from the onset peaceful to other nations and there not a bit of militarism in it. Perhaps the most nationalist President of the 19th Century was John Quincy Adams and he smacked the knuckles of those that wanted to go abroad and seek dragons to slay. His Secretary of State, Henry Clay, tried to form a consensus with the newly independent Latin American republics, a forerunner to FDR's "Good Neighbor" policy. John Quincy Adams was said to be the most intelligent man to sit in the Oval Office, and he was well-traveled on top of being well-read. Ironically, Quincy Adams was one of the most *Hamiltonian* President of them all, and his own dear old dad thought Alexander Hamilton to be the Antichrist to the end of his days.

What the Republic direly needs is a revival of this civic nationalism as companion to economic nationalism. This nationalism is the transmission fluid of the Republic. We're inhabitants of the planet Earth, but citizens of our respective Republic, a sovereign nation/state wishing good-will to all the global nations and not demanding that they adopt our 'way of life'. It's actually none of our business what kind of internal political- economic system another nation has as long as they do not directly attack American interests, sovereignty. Neither is it another nation's business what our internal structure has. Isn't this a good policy for all nations to have in international relations? It's not even all that idealistic, but solid pragmatism I always thought.

Said civic-economic nationalism can marginalize as requisite the natural enemies of the sovereign Republic - NeoCon imperialism, globalist laissez-faire and purist *free-market* reverse- Marxists. On the Left, there are the multicultural ideologues from the generation of 1968 steeped in their Frankfurter morass who have not the Republic at heart by any means, either.On the illegal immigration crises, as we all know, this cultural-bolshevist left is on par with the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal. As a National Liberal, both camps are my sworn enemies. The hard left calls people like me "social-fascists"; the Dittohead-RightRantRadio lobby quite assures me that I am a envious leftist in the Leninist mode who wants to shoot every kulak/businessman in the country and confiscate everyone's wife, girlfriend, house, car and toothbrush in the name of levelling egalitarianism. News to me.

Why the hell would I want Bill Gates's toothbrush?? And I wouldn't trade my Chevy pick-up truck for any limo that is out there.

Then you got the Religious Right. As an unbeliever in evangelical/fundy Christianity, and since I think that biological evolution is a fact, folks like Pat Robertson thinks that I am behind a Manichean satanic plot to turn the youth of America into gays and lesbians, atheist practitioners of witchcraft, anti-American Trotskyites who want to kill their parents and make every female get a coerced abortion of their fetus....okie dok.

Well, some of my best friends have been orthodox Christians, and I used to be one myself. I'm just as annoyed with some evangelical atheists like Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins who insist on atheism to make a human to be a full human being. If religion is indeed a *Mind Virus* not all its properties are all malignant, though it has caused and is now a lot of calamities in the world. There is often none so dogmatic and wrapped in religious thinking than a zealous anti-religionist. Both camps of opposing Fundys detest agnostics like me as well, I've noticed.

A Republic we have if we can keep it.......

Happy Birthday, Uncle Sam

2007-07-03T16:38:00.000-06:00

'Tis true that the Founding Fathers didn't settle on a Republic until after the War of Independence was won. But the events in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 was the mother shot heard around the world;the significance thereof was the solid end of Western feudalism and the bloody legacy of the 'divine right' of kings, titled nobility. Ironically, we had the aid and comfort of absolutist monarchs of France and Prussia to attain the dream of driving the aristocratic-oligarchs from our shore. Alas, in those times there were few republics and /or democracies to choose from to aid the Revolutionary cause; as Americans we should be eternally grateful as republicans to Louis of France and Friedrich II of Prussia. Let's not forget the brave men of Europe who fought and died for the American cause - some were aristocrats themselves who couldn't abide their own societies and wanted to make something better in the nominal 'New World'.

The 2nd President of the United States, John Adams, always felt that he was shortchanged on his contributions to the Revolution. Both his contemporaries and history would have been more kind to him if he would had wrote the Declaration of Independence himself, instead of twisting Tom Jefferson's writing arm to do the deed. Perhaps Jefferson wouldn't had become the shining star that he did. But, even I, an open Jefferson hater, gets a bit misty- eyed at times reading the famous opening paragraph of the Declaration, and I will not poo-poo it just because Jefferson wrote it. It is sanctified to me as an American, and as a liberty lovin' republican. This document also signifies the major turning point of both Western and world history. Rebellions were quite common beforehand, but now the world was given a philosophical and moral foundation for it in a little courthouse in Phili, on a hot day in July, 1776. It came at a time when the revolutionary cause looked hopeless, but all these men risked all and put their necks into the noose by signing it, this Declaration of Independence. In collegial terms what it stated is that the British Empire could take their Kings and Queens, Barons and Dukes and duchesses, colonial governors and shove them all up their tea-drinking, fox-hunting pompous arses.

This heralded the birth of nationalism. Liberal nationalism, that is. In these days and times too many think that nationalism is another 'N-word' and something that should not be said. Even those with political, economic nationalist programs. This is a grand fallacy. Nationalism can take many forms, and the original nationalism(s) was republican, anti-monarchical and based on liberty. Illiberal nationalism came later on in various parts of the globe. It is an error to associate the N-word with goose-stepping hysterical patriots in fancy uniforms wanting to conquer the globe; neither is nationalism as a rule associated with isolation, chauvinism,autarky,jingoism,fascism and dictatorship.Will anyone sanely accuse George Washington of these things? Nope. George Washington was the Greatest American, the archetype of an American nationalist. Not a philosopher-king by any means, he wasn't, but a huge portion of the men who followed him in the office of the Presidency were not fit to dust his dinner jacket(especially the current one in the White House).

The USA is still young and yearling in comparison to other realms on this Blue Dot. Some think that we are done for as a Republic and Caesar already has crossed the Potomac as a thief in the night; in dark nights of my political soul, I find this above axiom difficult to argue against at times. At least we are in troubled times fraught with doubt and at times nihilistic tribulation from certain sectors. But the optimistic side of my being always whispers that we are still young, we have growing pains, and it is something that we are capable of flushing out for a modicum of renewal, republican renaissance, if you will. Nevertheless, ye American republicans, heed the words of the great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas -

"Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night:
Rage! Rage! At the coming of the light!"

As a parting glass for this blog posting, every year about this time I re-watch the movie Gettysburg. My favorite part of the whole long movie was the Battle of Little Round Top sequence. When ammo was out, and everything looked like it spelled 'retreat', Col. Joshua Chamberlain ordered his 20th Maine Regiment to "Fix Bayonets!" and charge. We republicans, liberals and conservatives ,who give a bleep about the Spirit of 1776 may find ourselves in Chamberlain's situation, if not already. Globalism is the #1 Enemy to our Republic - to any republic - so we should all be vigilant as the 20th Maine Regiment was, back in 1863.

Enjoy the Fourth, all readers. Remember why you are setting off fireworks, spending quality time with family and friends, this great day:-)

The Eagle has Landed

2007-06-29T03:15:00.000-06:00

After many days, weeks, months of political morass, yesterday, June 28, 2007, was a good day for the Republic. The Bush/Kennedy immigration bill - which would have solved nothing and was a de facto surrender to illegal immigration - was killed in the Senate. The Supreme Court ruled that children couldn't be bused across town to fulfill a school district's race quota in the name of diversity. News reports read yesterday were that 'Fast Track' trade authority at the executive level is set to die on Saturday(and for god's sake make certain it has an eternal death this time!)...the state of Kansas has made English the official language, and America's national symbol, the Bald Eagle, has been removed from the endangered species list. For those of us inclined to believe in meaningful coincidences(synchronicity) perhaps this last phenomena was the most important of all.

True, all of these above are quite minor in the grand scheme of things, the fight for the Republic. The work ahead remains gargantuan and there is no call for popping champagne corks yet. But, let's take it. Yesterday was a good day, and hopefully the date signifies the beginning of the end of globalism, multicultural Identity politics, free-trade, and the USA is no longer on endangered nation's list as the Bald Eagle is no longer an endangered species.

We need to craft an authentic immigration bill that addresses the Why of undocumented workers, and more needs to be done - much more - to promote a color-blind society based on citizenism within the Republic. Having the individual states of the Union pass laws making English the official language will just be mere symbolism if energy is not enforced.Work is ahead and it is a towering stack.

Why the social-liberals took so much offense at the High Court's ruling is rather silly. If they look at it, all Justice Roberts was doing was echoing the spirit of Brown vs. the Board: one cannot discriminate against school admission based on race or national origin. That include Americans via all races. Just as laissez-faire is the dogma of some, multiculturalism is the Nicene Creed with others. Few besides social liberals are more obsessed with race, bean-counting based on skin color and hyphenated names than they are. Being good citizens is not on their draftboard apparently. They need to check themselves and recall that recently departed liberal icon, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., was one of the first to be an opponent of the multicultural agenda of the 68ers who despised 'National Liberals' such as himself and derided them as "social-fascists"(which was the old Moscow line against Western social-democratic reformers). Liberals need to promote color-blindness and chuck all of this diversity, multicultural crap, which only makes the citizenry of the United States more divisive, if anything.

Nevertheless, the Bald Eagle is back!

Oh well...

2007-06-27T02:51:00.001-06:00

The GOP Senate leadership spared their lameduck embarrassing President a veto by doing what they said by killing off the Union Card Bill - voting to forbid it from coming up for a vote(and some of these guys like to wear democracy on their sleeves). Talk about throwing red-meat to the Dems. Feature that this is the exact time that the Corporate-Feudalist Party needs to distance themselves from those imbeciles in the White House and they are standing by the Shrub (and also the US Chamber of Commerce) and have revved up their Class Warfare another notch at the time when they will need any vote that they can get come '08. Oh well.

Anyone with a degree of common sense knows that the Bush/Kennedy immigration bill is nothing less than amnesty for undocumented workers in the United States and it is made to fail, and it doesn't address remotely the reason WHY we have this catastrophe. Conservative supporters of said amnesty do not want to offend their rich friends who make money from illegal immigration , and/or step away from the Wall Street Journal's open borders dogma, "faith-based economics"; liberal partisans do so in the name of 'political correctness',their Third World spirituality, or are afraid of sounding like "right-wing racists" for opposing this sell-out. Keep in mind that most of these cloaked amnesty people are both Free Traitors and TINA pimps. 'Nuff said. Oh well.. if this amnesty bill passes, the implementation of the *North American Union* is no longer a matter of 'if 'but 'when' and what is left of the US Constitution will go ass-up end into the dustbin. This is what Alexander Hamilton - who did more to ratify the Constitution than anyone else - generally warned about over 200 years ago: if energy is not put into said Constitution it will remain a token parchment of paper. If we do not build our own national economic infrastructure and maintain it, we will lose it. Ben Franklin was so succinct - "A republic, if we can keep it."
Most annoying is that the herd of US citizenry do not really care or even give this dire crises much thought. Just as long as they have their consumer-credit power to buy their toys, knick-knacks and have their Bread n' Circuses - the fall of the Republic, you say?? Oh well...

And every politician in DC knows this collective 'oh well' , oh so well.

The dictatorship of the High IQers

2007-06-24T03:24:00.000-06:00

Browsing about YouTube on one of the days when I had much, too much time on my hands, I came across a three-part video series regarding the billed 'Most Intelligent Man in America', Chris Langan. Mr. Langan's story is that he was working as a bar-bouncer when he took an IQ test offered in Omni magazine and his resulting score was off the scale. Said personal IQ was accessed at 190-210. Hence, he had his fifteen minutes of fame and was featured in magazines and on the newsprogram, 20/20.

I was very keen to learn more about what this IQ Titan had to say about this thing called life and his theories, so I watched the entire video series. The third-part segment is where Mr. Langan goes into his 'Unified Theory of Knowledge' spiel, also his pitch for eugenics - something that he believes that if conducted on a national scale will solve all the nation's problems. Simply have high IQ people(to be a member of Langan's internet group one has to have a verifiable IQ of 150+) breed with one another which is straight out of Brave New World; every female born would have birth-control devices implanted and later as an adult, said female would have to have permission to be impregnated with a human fetus. Only a high-IQ mate will be approved by this Baby Control Board. Mr. Langan goes on to narrate that he is distressed at the low IQ people that are running things and thinks that we lesser mortals should put him directly in charge of his eugenics operation....

Where do I begin deconstructing all of this noise?

One, though I am reticent to use the label of 'fascist!' to any political and socioeconomic view that I dislike, this is what immediately popped into my own organically average IQ brain when watching Mr.Langan's big head spew this tripe. Well, we have heard this all before, the axiom of high IQ humans running the the Show. It is not necessarily a dreamy utopianism either, but actually it has been tried before in a primitive and varying degree: the feudalist rule of titled-nobility, the 'Divine Right of Kings'. This aristocracy, the alleged best and brightest, produced a whole slew of petty tyrants, ignoramuses, incompetents, hedonistic self-serving autocrats as a whole for generations. There were few enlightened and wise ones out of the lot. Proof that having the alleged intelligent elite breeding with one another will not produce spawn that are likewise, a chip off the old block of Mom &Dad Big Head.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's IQ has been accessed by some as high as Chris Langan's, and Chris is obviously no Goethe. Goethe's own son was said to be a worthless wastrel. And have we ever heard about the musical genius of Mozart's children? What classical music aficionado ever claimed that JS Bach's composing kids were better than dad? Einstein's son turned out to be a schizophrenic. One Nobel Laureate(I forget his name) when asked to be a Sperm Bank donor replied that they needed to instead solicite his functional illiterate street-peddler grandfather:his own son was a dope-smoking amature guitar player.

It's obvious that incredibly intelligent people can believe in cranky,stupid, and lethal things, and average and low IQ human brains have their 'eureka!' moments. For instance, I don't know of anyone who ever stated that Vladimir Illich Lenin was an idiot savant(his big brain was never in question) but his world-view was something else in statecraft; the kulak with perhaps a low IQ had a more cerebral approach to agriculture in Soviet Russia than the philosopher-kings sitting in the Moscow politburo conducting their genocidal collectivization program. Few have ever dismissed Hitler as "stupid" either;he was just a sharp-knife who believed in stupid and insane things. Einstein could dazzle us with his Relativity but the man couldn't understand the rules and dynamics of a simple game of Baseball....and so on, yadda-yadda...

Chris Langan could be the Poster Child refuting Bell Curve conservatism,Nature determinism. High IQ is no guarantee for socioeconomic success and Chris is a living walking example for most of his existence. He's a Blue Collar guy from a typical dysfunctional American family and if he would had never taken the Omni IQ test, we would had never heard of him. If Chris would had had a bourgeois Ward & June Cleaver parentage, perhaps his star would had flickered before it did unto the world? Nurture does matter. For prime example, does anyone think for a moment that George W. Bush's posterior would be sitting in the White House if he wasn't spawned from a Brahmin elite New England family?? Would Ted Kennedy be Massachusetts' 'Senator for Life' if born in South Boston to Irish millworker drunks instead of in ritzy Hyannisport? Even one of my personal icons, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I doubt that he would had got to Home Plate if he wasn't born on Third Base. How many of those on the Fortune 500 list would be there if they all began with an idea, a pick-up truck and no money to commence their road to riches? Very few.

It is also obvious that possessing copious brain-folds is not an indicator of originality. Chris Langan's world-view is nothing new. We heard from Plato, Nietzsche with a dose of Ayn Rand and slipped in 19th Century Social Darwinism(though he is hooked into Dembski's *Intelligent Design* racket); perhaps he has read Frank Herbert's Dune SciFi novels religiously. Langan takes a semi-pantheistic view that we are all plugged into the Mind of God( Chris appointed himself as chief interpreter of the Mind of God,btw) and he can logically prove his thesis via mathematical formulas(shades of Bertrand Russell & others). The Lesser IQ folks such as myself can easily figure out his eclectic pathways. To sum up Chris Langan,I'll utilize Nietzsche , contra Langan's elitist high IQ hubris -

"Menschen - alles auch Menschen"

But Nietzsche didn't have as high IQ than Chris Langan, so why should he pay attention.....;-)

People need to ascertain that IQ testing were initially the passion of progressives in the 19th Century. British Fabians endorsed IQ testing in tangent with their class consciousness: they wanted proof - and got it - that the Ladies &Gentlemen, the Dukes and Barons, the Sirs and Dames that ran the British Empire were as a whole dumber than dirt despite their 'Public School' and Cambridge/Oxford educations. Look at the Windsors today. Why the British citizenry loves these worthless cretins of Buckingham and do not demand a Republic is quite beyond me...

Besides, what these arrogant IQ Ones have never questioned is themselves: maybe they are freaks, accidents, or the spawn of Lucifer. Eh? Why hasn't this *Mind of God* made every human with a high IQ? Let's face it: Jesus, Buddha,Krishna, Mohamed and other 'avatars' didn't hang-out with the elitist organic geniuses. They took their message to the 'People' - the losers, the 'scum' of their society. When geniuses talk about knowing 'God', it makes me laugh and vomit at the same time. My druthers are to listen to some illiterate Hillbilly snake-handler rather than some neoPlatonist , self-proclaimed Uebermensch, arrogant twit ,when the subject of 'God' comes into play.

Now, it is not that I am a blank-slater and think that society/ environment determines everything. Environmental determinists annoy me as much as the genetic ones do. My own Weltanschauung is heavily influenced by sociobiology and I'm fascinated by the Human Genome. 'Tis common sense that nature and nurture together makes us what we are - human beings - and it is not an exact measured science and is variable from people to people. In politics, I fear having folks with IQs above 150 running the country as much as the prospect of having a society ran by social engineers does. It wouldn't bode well for the rest of us, us lesser neocortex bipeds. That one has a high IQ is hardly indicitive that he or she is of benign substance and wishes the rest of humanity good will.

The Prize of Illegal Immigration

2007-06-21T03:20:00.000-06:00

The largest segment of the American population who wants to thwart any real illegal immigration reform, is naturally the predator overclass that benefits from it the most. Some conservatives obsessed with undocumented workers in the United States overlook the fact that without NAFTA, without thousands of jobs offered at poverty level and below wages and without the Corporate union -busting lobby that buys our public officials - there perhaps wouldn't be an illegal immigration problem.

La Raza, Hispanic interest groups, the ACLU and other cultural Marxists are not the ones who are 'softest' on illegal immigration, it is the upper income 20 percent within the United States. And it is particularly this class who should be footing the bill for whatever public services that illegal immigrants accumulate and not burden the middle and working class. Illegal immigration is a major tool in the Overclass's economic warfare and it will only abate when the wealthy are directly charged for it via specialized 'Undocumented Worker Tax' on the upper brackets of affluence, the tiny elite who owns most of the wealth of the United States. Fences and mass deportation will not solve the situation:you have to follow the money and hit it at its source. These 'Minutemen' are conducting vigils in the wrong places.

It is academic that the notion that illegals "do work that American Blacks wouldn't do"(Vincente Fox) is a big myth. Americans will work at meatpacking plants, construction, the agricultural realm etc. for a decent wage and rights - not the poverty Permanent Peasant Wage that is paid to undocumented workers. And the wealthy do not have an interest in amnesty or even the Wall Street Journal's "open borders" dogma: take the illegal out of immigrants and they would be of no use to this upper class. Mandating that all immigrants learn English will rob the wealthy of a cowed and ignorant feudal peasantry. Hell, they might even form(gasp) Unions.

If you're against illegal immigration and want true reform, you should therefore champion a Tax - a big one - on the Predator Class in the USA. Fences, a army of Border Patrol and targeting the illegals themselves is not the answer. If Corporate America pays the burden of illegal immigration as they should, watch them beat down the doors of their politicians wanting to do genuinely something about the situation. It is time, high time, to end this conservative Nanny State and attack socialism - Affluensa Socialism - that is.

On Unions and Jesus

2007-06-18T03:09:00.000-06:00

The Corporate Feudalist Party, a.k.a the 'GOP', are continuing their Class Warfare with their usual hubris and energy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has vowed not to let the current Union Bill out of the Senate, and the Corporate Feudalist leadership is mobilized not to even let even come up for a vote via the filibuster. Said proposed Bill will grant US workers further leverage to form labor unions based on card signature instead of having the usual vote at the plant which allows a company to identify who is who, fire the ringleaders and use intimidation and threats to keep an employee from voting for a union. Same old trick straight out of the 1890s...next thing we will see is return of Pinkerton goons and National Guardsmen(oh, they are all in Iraq) firing on strikers.

The Corporate Feudalists do not want to appear to be directing a war on the working class that they are doing, so their public reasoning for using the filibuster (the most anti-democratic tactic of legislative bodies) to block the Bill is that card pledge votes are "anti-democratic" and they "want to protect workers from Union intimidation". Don't the Blue Collar guys and gals feel so lucky to have these stooges for the Overclass looking out for them?? This is the same party that wants to also do away with overtime laws and bring back the 12 hour workday if need be.

August Senators like McConnell want to spare their President a veto of the Bill that he has vowed to do if it reaches his desk;instead they filibuster it, which is a dumb tactic: Bush is a lameduck and is no longer answerable to the electorate - the Senate still is. Why not let the Bill come up for a vote and certain passage and let Bush take the heat for the veto? Goes to show that not only are the Corporate Feudalists' ideas bankrupt, so is their political savvy. If they keep up their War, they will discover that pandering to social conservative issues will no longer get them any votes from the working class.

******************************************
The problem with the Corporate Feudalist Party is not that they have abandoned the principles of conservatism, is that their current leader has embodied everything about it and notably the worst aspects(NeoCon thuggery&theocracy&predator-economics). Many candidates feel that they have to out-Right Bush, which is appalling since he makes their patron saint, Ron Reagan ,appear 'liberal 'on many things to compare. But let them do it and I am not complaining:if they get a Party Platform that makes Dennis Kucinich look moderate, that is the more the better and hopefully they will suffer a '32 and '36 type of burial come November 2008(if Dick Cheney doesn't start WW3 in Iran first).

The GOP's sole hope at the moment is that the Democrats will trip themselves up by pulling out 'progressive' social issues to head their train, and there is a danger of this. Instead they can neutralize social issues by hammering economics/trade: demonstrate clearly that the the GOP, this proclaimed party of *Family Values* and Jesus Christ, is anti-family with their Free Trade/Union busting/tax-cuts for the rich/imperialist foreign policy. And I always thought that this fellow Jesus Christ didn't like rich folks very well and liked to hang-out with 'losers'?? The Dems can afford to inject a bit of old William Jennings Bryan's 'Social Gospel' into their panache; revive FDR's Inaugural Address phrase of vowing to drive the moneychangers from the temple, without getting nutzy religious like the GOPers are. I personally am a staunch secularist&agnostic and think that *Family Values* is just a Machiavellian power-phrase political con. But they, the Dems, can beat the Christocrats at their own game if the play their cards correctly on the Jesus thing. Reiterate that Jesus wouldn't had beat the workers down by preventing them from organizing a labor union since he was the dude who said - "Blessed are the poor."

No sainthood for Milton and Ayn

2007-06-17T05:51:00.000-06:00

The benevolence about National System economics is that those who still advocate it do not promise a Rose Garden(along with the sunshine) if re-enacted. There will be problems as there are problems with any economic or political program, and utopianism is not the agenda of the American School of economics and it never was. The other competing economic theories and formats such as the Vienna School are steeped in gnostic utopian thinking as much as Marxists are/were; as stated countless times before, these promotors of it are actually right-wing Marxists, and the tragedy, I guess, is that few of its ideologues realize it.

Foraging about at the Uni library I found an oldie but goody book , Not So Free to Choose (Elton Rayek) picking apart the laissez-faire economics of its recently departed guru, Milton Friedman. Rayek demonstrates that in true Stalinist fashion Friedman engaged in revisionist and cavalier history to promote the Vienna School/Chicago Outfit economics such as inventing a "golden age" that never existed of Free Market/Free Trade. 'Classical economics', according to Friedman, had its hay-day from 1815-1914 and gushes in his magnum opus, Free to Choose, that this 99 year period was blessed with "peace, freedom and free market and trade internationally". Such assertions are on par with Rousseau's notion of the 'noble savage'. Anyone who has read an elementary school textbook regarding the history of the 19th Century knows it was anything but one on Pax. European colonialism was quite busy denying freedom and choices to a large part of the globe during the 1800s and fought countless wars to do so. Friedman applauds Great Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws as the epicenter of great liberty and omits that this produced an induced in famine in Ireland to coincide with the repeal. The Chicago Guru also spins a tall one regarding Japan's Meiji Restoration and claims that Japan became a modern power overnight by embracing laissez-faire. Everyone, except for Friedman, knows that Japan has always had heavy statist influence in their economy from day one and Japan built themselves in the late 19th Century up via protectionism and also engaging in colonialism in Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan - denying these people freedom. I could go on about Friedman's cavalier and selected approach to history - its like reading a capitalist version of Pravda. The real bonanza period of classical 'liberalism' is what we are experiencing today which is the corporate feudalist globalizing of much of the planet and the rape of public infrastructure of national economies and their attendant political autonomy.

Friedman's Big Sister and ally was the the emigre novelist, Ayn Rand, with her so-called philosophy of 'Objectivism'. There was nothing objective about it. Rand, despite her atheism, had a Manichean and gnostic view of the world. According to her, at one time the 'Individual' was born free and selfish with a natural inclination to free-market economics but was corrupted by "collectivists" and "mind-blown mystics". Besides Ayn Rand herself, the only thinkers in the Western world who were benign were Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas ; just about everyone else - especially Plato and Kant - were evil. This political cult's influence on the libertarian movement is profound and hardly will one meet a libertarian today who doesn't have a gold-bound edition of Atlas Shrugged on the bookshelf. She is also popular in the NeoCon ranks. There is a Vienna -Chicago connection with about all of these players in the Predator Economics globalizing game: Friedman, Leo Strauss both taught at Chicago Uni in the same period, for instance. Rand just merged the economics of Hayek and von Mises(who brought Vienna to Chicago) with her infantile philosophy, though she had little understanding of them herself. It's analogous to self-proclaimed Biblical fundamentalists who never bother to read their sacred text extensively or with an open-mind.

'Classical' promoters. whilst they be of the economic,educational, religious, political or musical types, all have their Edens - a golden age that never existed except in their own minds. This is odd since none of their historical classical heroes thought that they were being 'classical' in their own day - they all believed themselves to be moderns apparently. These reactionaries in the 21st century need to get with the program, and the program is that we are all post- moderns now. The classical Western canon needs to be respected, and traditions can be quite good, reference points that even self-heralded 'progressives' utilize. But a utopia it is not - never was, never can be - and they need to halt their revisionist historical nonsense.

I hate PJ O'Rourke(I really hate him)

2007-06-13T04:06:00.000-06:00

I've been picking on 68ers turned conservative a great deal lately, and thus far the need to do so has not abated. Next character who meets this above criteria is PJ O'Rourke - former hippie turned stooge for the Cato Institute. 'Libertarians' love him as much as I hate his friggin guts and it is beyond me how anyone would think this idiot is a master satirist in the same league as HL Mencken and an authority on 'classical economics'. Like a lot of New Leftists from the Sixties, O'Rourke could see where his money could come from by making a right-turn later on.

Never did I pay much attention to this man at all until I seen an interview of him on PBS shuckstering his latest book, a revisionist take on Adam Smith. The meat of said interview is O'Rourke pandering his Trade-Deficit Denial gnosticism and claimed that Adam Smith would agree with him if he were alive today. O'Rourke failed to mention Smith's famous exceptions to Free Trade dogma, and everyone of them would be applicable to the current United States's de-industrialist, outsourcing trade policies. Actually,Smith would be smeared by PJ as a "protectionist/collectivist" if the man had ever bothered to read his exceptions to laissez-faire in the Wealth of Nations. Verily, I felt the urge to jump through the television screen and gangster-slap this burned-out druggie, 'Hip-Capitalist'(he has a stupid looking face anyway).

PJ O'Rourke, and those 'libertarians' like him, need to actually work in a factory somewhere. And then subsequently outsourced from that job. Rather, they need a occupation in the McJob service sector which is quickly becoming "the only job in town". This is the same thing that they say about armchair socialists and it is applicable to these Rand-roiders like O'Rourke as well: 'libertarians', few of them, have ever had to do any real work for a living. Despite their spiritual dedication to capitalism, many have never operated a legitimate business of their own and doubt half of this many couldn't balance their own checking accounts.

Free Market economics has been good for PJ O'Rourke - especially since he has never had to work and slug out in the marketplace. Like a lot of suburban chic leftists need a Holiday in Cambodia, the image of PJ sentenced to life as a Walmart Greeter beats counting sheep on insomniac nights...

Kommisar David and his Crusade

2007-06-10T05:48:00.000-06:00

'Academic Freedom' is the banner cause of Trotskyite turned NeoCon, David Horowitz, and he's going about Uni campuses ranting and raving about "leftist totalitarianism" in higher-education. For starters, Horowitz is only giving publicity to these marginal lefty kooks that few has ever heard about it until he began his campaign to bring his own conservative counter-revolution to university faculties. Secondly, few conservative oriented people chose the liberal arts anyway; righties usually go in for the hard sciences, Business. One will meet few if any liberals in Engineering schools if they are political at all, for instance. How about turning academic 'freedom' on its head and require the University of Chicago to accept Market-Socialist professors at their Economics Department, hmm?

What Horowitz is up to really, is anyone's guess. Some conspiracy oriented paleocons believe that Horowitz is actually an unrepentant Sixty-Eighter New Lefty who attached himself to the NeoCon movement to garner notoriety and also it is a big cash cow for him; Horowitz's books tell the NeoCons and their fellow-travelers what they want to read and hear, and they admire the fact that he is an "ex-Marxist"('ex'?), so he should know what he is writing and ranting about when he assails lefties, liberals, Muslims and 'self-hating Jews'( their phrase for any Jewish person who is not in lock-step with the Likud Party of Israel). He does seem to have a personality-cult about himself, Horowitz does, and perhaps has a goal of being the Noam Chomsky for Rightists.

Again, who ever heard of Ward Churchill until Horowitz made him a poster-child dartboard in his 'Academic Freedom' crusade? If anything, Horowitz is enabling these 'kooky-lefty professors' and getting what he dubs the 5th Column all fired up. It is a big duh! that there are Leftists who hate the United States, but as I pointed out in a previous post here - there are plentiful Right wingers who loathe the Republic as well - more than Left 'Fifth Columnists' in my judgment. Seldom will you hear Horowitz blasting them, partially because they are his fellow-travelers, politically.

Let's take Horowitz at his word and entertain that his political conversion is genuine. If so, his agenda is worse than it appears, and his goal may be to purge all the leftist professors from the Campus and replace them with right-wing nuts. So much for 'freedom'. This would be exactly the Weimarization of academia. In the 1920s the German university system was dominated by political thought of the Conservative Revolution, a force that openly hated the Republic, democracy and liberalism. Pro-democratic and liberal professors were few and far between. Though today's conservative intelligentsia in America claim they are all for democracy and the Republic, some are attached to the anti-democratic Vienna School of Economics(look at Chicago Uni, Nevada-Las Vegas) and other anti-republican, authoritarian think -tanks and what have you. Horowitz himself, though he claims to be a secular agnostic, makes common cause with the Religious Right that has a strong Dominionist/theocratic influence. If it wasn't for their crack-brained belief that Israel will convert to Christianity at the "end of Time", these are the very people who would champion the expulsion of Jews and then some from Christian America. I know that politics makes for strange bedfellows( myself included...I'm a New Deal liberal who likes Buchanan's trade protectionism and most of his foreign policy), but Horowitz crosses the line into zany wackiness;his fellow-travelers are something else to behold. Just read the comments at his FrontPageMag.com. Sheesh!

Horowitz wallows in his own form of McCarthyism. Noted is that he accuses often critics of Neoconservatism of being motivated by Anti-Semitism; the word 'NeoCon', Horowitz and his pundits say, is a 'code-word' for Jew, and this is how Anti-Semites communicate with one another. This is the worst straw-man argument that I have heard in quite sometime, and it brings up shades of 'Thought Crime' - the same thing that NeoCons accuse the leftist Politically Correct commisars of engaging in. And when NeoCon critics get defensive and retort it is just about ideology and that some of their favorite people happen to be Jewish - the NeoCons say "I toleja so!". NeoCons even accused Radical Centrist,Michael Lind(who's father is Jewish) of Anti-Semitism because he named names of the Neoconservative movement, many who had Jewish surnames like his. That's like saying anyone who hates Rap and Hip-Hop is anti-Black, though many of the older Black people can't abide the cacophony either;when they get defensive and retort that they like other Black oriented music like Jazz, Motown, 70's Soul - they are accused of engaging in the "some of my best friends are Black" spiel. You can't win with some mind-blown ideologues.. It is best not to even try.

Returning to the main theme, what is needed in higher education are more engineers/technocrats, physical economists, anyway, regardless of their politics. That the Left has the hold on University liberal arts is really of no grand consequence. Having a bunch of right- winger Classical scholars running the departments sets off a more dangerous thing and is not what I would call freedom.

Imagine a Kucinich-Buchanan Ticket in '08;-)

2007-06-08T15:21:00.000-06:00

Let me begin with trivial news about a trivial person: Paris Hilton's weeping fest about being returned to jail for violating probation. It's academic to state that if Ms. Hilton wasn't an heiress from the Overclass, she would had been long in jail and not had that preferential treatment that was granted to her already. You(if you are a Commoner) and I wouldn't be granted such leniency if we were convicted of driving while intoxicated....and everyone knows that if OJ Simpson and Phil Spector were truck-drivers by occupation they'd be both on Death Roll right now. The Justice System in America is not racist - it is classist. Wealthy dumb-assed athletes, pedophile musicians and Hollywood thespians can get away with murder regardless of their race, color, national origin. This is the reason that I have qualms about capital punishment though I remain a token supporter of it. The affluent aren't held to the same legal standards. Duh. If they change the laws that makes Enron executives and other corrupt CEOs - Economic Predators - on par facing capital punishment for their egregious crimes with commoner sexual predators & other violent predators - then I will be gaga on the Death Penalty. If we stick the needle in the arms of corrupt politicians - I'll be campaigning to make Capital Punishment a Constitutional Amendment. Until then, though I personally support it in principle, I'd be willing to seek it's federal abolition in exchange for economic/foreign policy concessions. Because, Paris Hilton weeps -

"It's not fair!!"

[Shoot a dozen convicted corrupt corporate lawyers, and even the most activist anti-death penalty folks will drop their spiel....:-) ]

*****************************************************
Wow, I had a cerebral and polite comment in yesterday's posting from a Ron Paul supporter. I believe that I have spoken enough to what I think of Dr. Paul, but I'll nutshell it again here: his foreign policy is enlightened nationalist in the Federalist Tradition of the United States, yet Congressman Paul definitely is not an economic nationalist. That is my #1 Core Issue here, economics/trade, and Paul is not what I am looking for. The dark horse I'm wasting a bet on is Dennis Kucinich because 2008 is the Democrats to lose. Kucinich, though stereotyped as a *looney lefty* is both an economic- nationalist(via the 'New Deal') and also for a return of "good neighbor" non-aggressive foreign policy - just as much as Ron Paul is. The other GOPers are laughing at Paul, and I doubt he will have any influence on the Party Platform - the GOP is dominated by Christo-crats and imperialist NeoCons. Just because Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld have departed from the BushII Administration, it doesn't mean that neoconservatism is dead. Rather, they are regrouping and are cultivating Giuliani and McCain. Paul's best splash is to return to the Libertarian Party and maybe pick up 3% of the vote. With the likely Democratic nominees, Hillary or Obama, Kucinich can make himself heard in their platform with help, I do believe.

If an authentic economic-nationalist seeks the GOP nomination, I may give him or her support, though I regard myself as a liberal and get turned-off when they talk about social issues and 'God'. In fact, I love to shock my liberal friends by speaking moonshine &roses about Pat Buchanan's magnum opus, The Great Betrayal. Not a greater contemporary text has ever been written in regards to economic nationalism and trade protectionism than this, above. And this is a core issue with Pat unlike his other conservatives in the GOP. Yup, I'd vote for Buchanan over Ron Paul in a heartbeat. I may be a liberal(and proud), but I am flexible. The very existence of my beloved Republic is at stake. This amour I share with *good guy conservatives* and we need to work together, somehow.

An oxymoron: The 'Republican' Party

2007-06-07T15:13:00.000-06:00

The GOP Presidential Debates are resembling a comedy tour; it is just appalling and humorous how stupid these men vying to replace Bush are. Mike Huckabee had to roll out the Reagan personality-cult from the get go by stating that last night was Bonzo's birthday(actually it is February 11); the word 'God' was mentioned over twenty times and ' Constitution' had three appearances.Vienna School adherent and neo-Confederate Ron Paul was the lone dissenter when it came to the topic of religion and stated that people needed to read the 1st Amendment. Paul is also against the Iraq War - he just wants to concentrate on making Class Warfare on working people in the United States. No time for foreign entanglements for Dr. Paul; he has a national economy to destroy if elected.

Have momentously decided not to refer to the GOP as the 'Republican Party' at this blog anymore. It is ridiculous that they call themselves Republicans when their entire agenda is to dismantle the republican-nation-state with Jesus at their side. Lincoln was a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt could wear the label. So could good 'ole Ike Eisenhower. But not any of these idiots in public office with an 'R' next to their names today can call themselves 'Republicans' with a straight face.' Corporate Feudalist Party' would be more truthful as the Warmonger-Chickenhawk Party would as well. Today's 'Republicans' are about as republican as Michael Jackson is the archetype for virile manhood......

The criteria for being a republican in a Republic is that you seek to protect it, both defensively and economically. The WOT is not in the national interest of the United States and neither is globalist 'free trade'. A republican puts energy into a harmony of interests and doesn't favor one over the many. A republican thrives for a dynamic citizenry across the board and not bet on apathy, divisiveness, and play on fear to get elected. This constitutional Republic is founded on freedom of religion and from religion as well; Bible Beating should be confined to home and church on Sunday. The political podium is not the pulpit. The American republican tradition is based on a foreign policy of good intentions to all, 'special relationships' with none. We use troops only when we are attacked and directly threatened. Exporting 'democracy' and 'freedom' is not in the republican format or interest. Besides, we here are not a democratic society anyway. We might as well be a coffee exporter or market abroad American made TVs, radios, and textiles....

I still won't take the GOP seriously if they change their Party moniker to something more fitting to their current political tastes and (cough) ideals. But at least these clowns would be more honest.

Ban All Protectionism

2007-06-06T14:59:00.000-06:00

Proponents of outsourcing naturally do not care much about the factory drone losing his or her job because of it. The Republicans, the party of Haves and Have-Mores, would rather not hear about it and want the working class to take a hike, period. The upper-crust liberals, what economist Dean Baker calls *loser liberals*, at least want the wealthy to compensate somewhat for job loses in the form of higher corporate taxes and what not. Yet these type of liberals blame the working-class themselves just as much as the GOP does for their plight via outsourcing. They want everyone to go back to school, as if this would solve the problem.

Very remarkably is that both Republican and Democratic cheerleaders for outsourcing are under the umbrella of protectionism themselves. Yes, the so-called professional class - doctors, lawyers and politicians - are protected from the leveling of outsourcing that they advocate, so Free Trade does them no harm. It's sanctimonious that they cry 'Protectionists!' at working and middle-class economic nationalists, when they are the most spoiled and coddled class there is (they're also practicing socialists since the conservative nanny State supports them).

A modest proposal would be for absolute outsourcing and Free Trade: no longer will there be restrictions on foreign lawyers, doctors and elected officials. Any professional from India or China could do their jobs just as well and also for less salary. The rich want tax-breaks, they say? That's socialism! No more tax dodges and rebates, and the private Defense industry will get no more contracts from the Pentagon. That is socialism and "government interference in the market". Everybody regardless of job or class will have to compete for their positions on a global scale just as American manufacturing and construction workers do. All elected officials will have to forfeit their jobs if some person from the Third World puts in a bid for a lower salary, and so will all other 'professionals'. Life is tough, isn't it? That is what they have always told laid-off factory workers and bankrupted small farmers. Now they shall experience the globalism that they so much cherish.

For now on I am taking my medical care when needed to a foreign born doctor, and I'm writing my Congressmen and two Senators that they should give up their jobs to a guy named Habib or Desi. How dare they discriminate against the global market by being Americans in an American job! These aren't citizens, you say? So what! Hell, the Wall Street Journal says we need open borders and open markets, so politicians shouldn't be immune.They're damned protectionists, and so are the American journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

Morale of this satire: 'Professionals, put your own jobs on the world market or shut up.'

The Cold War is Ended! Long Live the Cold War!

2007-06-05T14:57:00.000-06:00

The Bush Administration not only advocates and practices total war, they are architects of re-creating Cold War conditions in Europe by insisting on their Maginot Line in Space, or the BMD locales in the Czech Republic and Poland. Bush insists that they are protecting Europe from a missile strike from Iran, yet they pledge that Iran will not be allowed any nuclear weapons, and Iran has yet to have the ballistic capability as of yet. Really, who can blame Putin?
This Administration has put US vs. Them everywhere on the globe and if anyone feels more secure with Bush and Cheney running foreign policy they must be comatose. It is humorous that Bush belongs to the GOP that brags that their icon, Ronald Reagan, 'won the Cold War'(which is poppy-cock). Well the GOP re-started it. The Republican Party erroneously boasts as well about being frugal with tax-money but wastes billions on a useless missile defense system. That's your *fiscal conservatives* at their finest......

Many bemoan the violence at the G-8 summit in Rostock -which is over-inflated by the news media anyway. The violence is by a few token groups and most are peaceful. Regardless, violence is understandable. The young people of the globe have been lied to, conned, and shat upon by these political leaders whose policies are taking away their future. The political parties do not represent their views as they should so protest is about their only way to convey their anger and frustration. These heads of governments at the G-8 and WTO summits are the real criminals and it is right that they are shown to be so.....

Dennis Kucinich has about 1% approval rating in the Democratic Party poll so he is a long, long, shot, the darkest horse of them all. Still, with unified anti-globalist support from both sides of the political spectrum, at least perhaps greater attention to the core issues will be picked up by the media and the other candidates still searching for their soul. Kucinich can still be a player in the party's platform organizing if he shows better than expected in next year's primaries......

On the current candidates

2007-06-04T15:32:00.000-06:00

Lately, some wingnuts are presenting Congressman Ron Paul as the savior of the Republic and the only decent fellow in the GOP running for the top spot. Perhaps these Paulophiles aren't looking beyond his other agenda and criteria besides his opposition to the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. It is my opinion that Paul is one of the worst of the lot of the Republican Party hopefuls, and he symbolizes just as much as the NeoCons what is wrong with the GOP and the nation at large.

Ron Paul's other track record is his support for States Rights and went on the floor of the House to denounce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The man is a former Libertarian Party activist and is tied in with the Ludwig von Mises Institute which supports anarcho-capitalism and is part of the neo-Confederate movement. Though Paul is against NAFTA, he is nevertheless for unrestricted Free Trade and vows to dismantle what remains of the social-safety net. Dr. Paul has the support of some rather unsavory characters such as the paranoids who operate Infowars. This man, if elected, would certify the end of the Republic and is hardly a "savior". Trade Protectionists need to forget any Republican Party goon anyway.

Conservative anti-globalists need to get over their phobias of liberal Democrats and support the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich. That would be a titanic leap for them, I know, but regardless of some of his far-left positions and his eccentric character, Kucinich is focused on the core issues that conservative trade protectionists are as well. Kucinich has sworn to dismantle all free-trade treaties including the WTO and has dared to raise the 'T-word' -tariff - in regards to China and other nations that the USA has a towering trade deficit with. And yes, he is against the Iraq War and has at least a plan to get out of there. Kucinich is also for the impeachment of Dick Cheney that none of the other Dems running have the gonads to openly advocate.

This may sound ridiculous that conservatives can find a home in the Kucinich campaign, but conservative anti-globalists aren't going to find their man in any of the GOP stooges running now, including Ron Paul. These paleocons, conservative economic-nationalists and others have been shat on and spit out by the Republican Party. Why should they remain loyal to a party like this? They can go third party in '08 and maybe get 9% of the popular vote. The hope is with the Democrats this time around. I am not gaga on the Democratic Party myself, but I don't see any alternative at the moment. The Good-Guy conservatives need to realize the same and bolt for the people who are core-issues centric. Kucinich may appear strange, and he's a strong social-liberal that turns conservatives off, but if the trade- economy is not turned around soon, none of these social issues will matter anyway. Besides, name one candidate for anything a individual has agreed 100% on their platform? Not going to happen unless someone is brainwashed. Conservative anti-globalists are often conservative on social issues too, but what has the GOP ever did for them either on these things? Not much. Maybe with conservative support, Kucinich will compromise here and there on his social programs. Ron Paul? He's a doctrinaire unbending libertarian, or what I dub as a Right Wing Marxist;one might as well support a bona-fide Trotskyite instead.

Kucinich is a long-shot as it is, but maybe with some other support he can take a good stab at the Democratic Nomination. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are pure opportunists and some are starting to realize this within the Democratic Party. Time to put energy into a maverick, and Kucinich is a probable candidate that both the liberal and conservative anti-globalists can rally around. There have been stranger bedfellows in politics before.

The Conservative Fifth Column

2007-06-02T18:58:00.000-06:00

If one reads Neocon blogs such as FrontPageMag.com, quickly he or she will notice that they are obsessed with Fifth Columnists. To NeoCons like David Horowitz and his fellow travelers, anyone meets the criteria of being a 5th Columnist for being against the Iraq War, if they're are not knee-jerk pro- Israeli; if they are not Islamophobic and are critics of Predator Economics. Gee, I guess that means me.

FrontPageMag leaves out a vibrant segment of the American ideological population, and that is the anti-American sentiment from the Right. Yes, right-wingers often have not the Constitutional 'general welfare' of the United States at heart and seek it's eradication as a sovereign nation/state. Specifically, the neo-Confederate Movement(the other NeoCons) within the USA hates America more than any Flag burnin', molotov cocktail throwing ,anarchist or commie-pinko Marxist-Leninist ever thought about.

I'll pick on and single out The Ludwig von Mises Institute,once again. This organization's wheeler and dealer is Lew Rockwell Jr., and this paleo-conservative serves also on the board of The League of the South, a traitorous organization that openly advocates secession from the United States. It is fitting that Rockwell advocates the anarcho-capitalism of the Vienna School and names one of his organizations after its avatar. Despite von Mises and Hayek's innocently appearing code-words of 'individualism', 'liberty' and 'freedom' in their texts, what this School aspires for is a return to Monarchy ruled by the Lords, Dukes, Barons and the Vons like it was in the 'good ole days' of feudalism. That is why these Austrian titled nobility snobs have always been attracted to the ante-bellum South of the USA where Master Vs. Slave morality operated fully. Southern Revanchists today kiss up to the Vienna School's mentality for this very reason, likewise. Laissez-faire and Free Trade were the cherished economic memes of the Old South slavocracy, lest we forget.

A individual by the name of Hans-Hermann Hoppe sums it all up and he should be the poster child of Right Wing Fifth Columnists in America. Dr. Hoppe is a Vienna School devotee currently under full-professorship at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Hoppe authored a book claiming that democracy is an abysmal failure and he advocates monarchy as the 'alternative'. To people like Hoppe and Kuenhelt-Leddhim, a monarchy is the only way, and secular sovereign republics are the bane to 'liberty'. A King or hereditary ' emperor' is the 'owner' of the realm and he uses many pages borrowed by the pro-slavery philosopher, John Locke, to fit his nonsensical reactionary beliefs. Hoppe is also involved in the League of the South and loves to re-write history by spitting invective at all three of America's Greatest Presidents - Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt.

Uh...where is the Department of Homeland Security when you need it, pray tell?? Hoppe is a guy who openly hates the very existence of the American Republic and he teaches at a Ami Uni and thus lives off of public taxes paid by hard-working Americans of the state of Nevada. If Hoppe isn't a Fifth Columnist I don't know what is! Instead, folks like ex-Trotskyist, turned NeoCon, David Horowitz, focuses their McCarthyist witch hunts on goofy looney lefty tenured professors like Ward Churchill, who was never a big name until Horowitz made him one in academia. This makes one wonder if Horowitz is actually still a 68er playing like he is a converted conservative(?).

Here is the skinny: the Vienna School, although it advocates *classical liberalism* is actually a branch of the Conservative Revolution, primarily birthed following the fall of the House of Hohenzollern in 1918. The minions of this Conservative Revolution in Germany had one abiding aim of undermining and destroying the Weimar Republic, and they accomplished this very well. Though the Conservative Revolution of the 1920s detested Anglo capitalism, and many of the Vienna School's minions were refugees from the Third Reich, they were nevertheless a freak arm of this movement and remains so today. The situation is this that not everyone who fled the Nazis were good people; some were just as bad as the Brownshirts were. Via Hayek and von Mises, the reactionary Conservative Revolution was brought to the United States under the guise of ' liberalism' and free market economics.
The post-WW2 conservative movement in the United States was by and large an intellectual import from across the Pond that merged with the indigenous Jeffersonian memes. Again, the real focal point of the Vienna School and its attendant Mont Pelerin Society was political in contrast to economic. Despite all of their erudite writing endorsing a form of small government localism and laissez-faire, their main aim is for a re-establishment of hereditary monarchy on the shores of North America. This is not any crack-pot conspiracy theory - it is taking the figures involved at their own words. Just read Hoppe's and Kuehnelt-Leddhin's derision of democracy, republics and the common people who inhabit them. Such figures from this group became pundits for William F. Buckley's National Review, later became a major influence on the 'libertarian' contingent who didn't think that conservative Republicans were capitalist enough. The reactionary Conservative Revolution of the 1920s - that helped the most to destroy the Weimar Republik - had a very American face by the 1950s, 60s and to the present.

The aim of the Conservative Revolution was to destroy the New Deal which they ultimately did, and then ending the sovereignty of the USA as a republic, which they are doing quite nicely at. It is what happened to Weimar and they are doing it to America. Weimar's demise in textbooks has been blamed on the Left and this is a gross myth. The Right wingers did in the German Republic and ushered in the Third Reich; leftists and the enlightened bourgeoisie such as Gustav Stresemann supported the Republic(except for the KPD) by and large. The Conservative Revolution with the Versailles international financial system of the 1920s that wrecked the German economy and subsequently the World's - poor Weimar didn't stand a chance.

Perhaps if America doesn't deal with the right-wing Fifth Column NOW, it will suffer a similar fate as Weimar.

No Miracle w/o 'Statists'

2007-06-01T00:01:00.000-06:00

For the utopian free-market crusaders with their obsession with privatization, one key way to debunk their alleged economic science is to merely ask an important question:

Name one nation that got to be a world economic power via laissez-faire?

The answer is simply, 'none'.

Pure free-market economics is not designed to be a nation builder from the onset. Excessive privatization and its companion, *Free Trade*, if anything tears down a country's economic infrastructure as it has been historically seen. Many conservatives have been trying to point to post World War 2 West Germany as an economic miracle because of free-market economics when the evidence is that the BRD achieved it's dynamic recovery with much statist interference in collusion with Business and Labor. The West Germans heeded the principles of ordoliberalism which sets the rules of play for both the Public and Private sphere in the economy, theorhetorically a check on one another and never abandoned the Welfare State . One of the planners of this miracle, Wilhelm Roepke, stated what the Vienna School deemed as heresy, and that is that the Market is not everything. Roepke and Alexander Ruestow, though both were critics of socialism, fully well knew that there were people who are outside the Market, and deserved a social safety net. This was and is the *Third Way* - one of the economic ones - that slaps the globalizing strumpet TINA directly in the face.

I read once an article from the conservative economic predator think tank, The Heritage Foundation, that asserted that the German economic miracle was by and large due to reavualting the currency and lifting wage and price controls. The said article also claimed that the Marshall Plan was insignificant. These assertions are half-truths and like the laissez-faire disciples always do, they never present the big picture. One, the new Deutsche Mark created in 1948 was under the Bretton Woods international agreement that the US Dollar would be the hegemonistic fixed-rate currency backed by a percentage of gold reserve that gave the DM the security it needed. Two, though it is true that West Germany recieved little funds from the Marshall Plan, it did help. The Marshall Plan only lasted for a few years anyway, so it is superflous to state that it "failed" as the laissez-fairest insinuate. Plus, the 'Miracle' was plain circumstance given that a nation building up from World War Two's devastation will experience high growth rates in recovery. Even the centralized-planned economies of the Eastern European Leninist States experienced their own post-war recoveries with high growth rates. GNP growth is not always a 100% statistic that prooves a healthy economy either. China has stupendous growth yet the majority of its population still lives in hovels , for example.

Another post-war Economic Miracle was going on in France at the same time W. Germany was experiencing theirs. The French Way was even more statist planned than the German one was through their philosophy of dirgisme; France had many public owned heavy industries , transportation, and utilities. Nationalization and long term Plans weren't a dirty words to them, and the French had decades long growth and general prosperity. The unfettered*Free Market* wasn't for them, and they'd be damned if thinking that any hidden hand could do the job for them. Both the French and German recoveries were within their respective National System tradition, not the Manchester-British globalist one.

Sadly for the French, now that the neocon(?) Sarkozy is at the helm, their Third Way exceptionalism may be coming to a close. Sarkozy is horny for privatization and he also claims that the French 35 hour workweek is "absurd". Sarkozy just rode the anti-immigrant consensus to power and the French middle class will rue the day that they didn't vote for Royal.

Tito's Yugoslavia was another model. Though Tito was a Marxist, he didn't set up a Leninist State and pursued market-socialism in the former Federated Republics of Yugoslavia. It was a failure, some will say? It was only after Tito's death and privatization conditional loans via the IMF to Yugoslavia when it unraveled. 'Tis another chalk-up that Free Market 'solutions 'tear down a nation/state when let to run wild. One will not hear the Heritage Foundation talk about Tito largely because his success employing Market Socialism is a direct contradiction to their dogma of free-market capitalism, that only their way "works". It does work for the affluent, which is, again, a form of socialism for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. I thought that capitalism was supposed to be competitive?? Well, it is not, and left unfettered it will only evolve into corporate monopolies. And in direct contradiction to capitalist ideologues, business-people, especially Big Businessmen, they are not capitalists themselves. Not one free-market economist has ever realized this. A CEO would just as soon be headquartered in North Korea if the state would guarantee his or her corporation zero competition and keep the unions beat down and extinct.The wealthy , the Predator elite,only pays lip-service (and fund free-market think tanks and politicians) to preserve their own power and increase it. The reality it that they would operate for anyone regardless of ideology. They have no problems with statist interference such as corporate welfare, if one has ever noticed. Corporations love regulations from the government when it benefits them exclusively. They applaud when government uses tax money from working Americans to bail out failing corporations. There is not a CEO one who is a true believer in laissez-faire - they just fund egghead economists and pundits as their useful idiots and they are laughing their asses off.

Bust the Labor Busters

2007-05-31T12:34:00.000-06:00

It's always time for a vomit-laugh when Republicans - who are primarily in the pay of the corporations and their lobbyists - point their fingers at Democrats who sponsor pro-labor legislation as "serving the interests of Big Labor".

The Bush Administration is threatening vetoes of proposed Labor reform laws that puts a check on labor busting activities of Big Business, and Republican Congressmen such as Pete Sessions and John Mica are belly-aching about Labor Union "earmarks", since Labor usually contributes to Democratic candidates come election time. In comparison to the corporate funding that Republicans rake in, Labor lobbyist monies are rather insignificant. And by the way, I think that the Dems are merely doing their jobs of looking out for the working class, which is the majority of the population. When have the Republicans in the last generation did anything to help working America? Federal income tax cuts don't really count since every tax-cut from a GOP Administration has benefited their rich friends. When people like me mention this, the rebuke is always that the Dems are engaging in envy and class warfare. Even if it is class warfare, the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan on started it. Envy? No, it is called 'survival' for desiring worker protection and attaining the living wages that they deserve. If the GOP had it's way they would allow their corporate buddies to pay wages in pesos and would re- institute the 14 hour day, seven days a week. Worker's Compensation, safety laws would be annulled. Their vision for Working America is that of absolute feudal slavery and they've been edging that way in leaps and bounds since their Gimp, the Gipper, came on the scene in 1980.

Any economic nationalist, even a 'conservative' one, should be a cheerleader for the Union Label. This edifice is trying to put a roadblock on the designs and ways and means of globalism and needs all the support it can get.

A anti-homily on Classicalism

2007-05-27T06:26:00.000-06:00

The title of this blog is written under the spirit that I am an American in the Federalist Tradition of the USA, and 'left' because I am a feverent opponent of laissez-faire globalization and seek a return to the New Deal social-market consciousness. This may be redundant to state this. But the program is both conservative and liberal. However I've addressed little on social and cultural issues for a reason: the United States of America was born 'modern'. Its birth signified a split with the organic European consensus, though the umblical cord remained attached.

European critics of globalism of whatever ideological stripe dwell on the culture thing in contrast to the economic, especially those of the so-called Nouvelle Droite. Not that I oppose the culture thing in itself, don't think that it doesn't need to be discussed and what have you. Some dialogue is needed and culture does matter. But it has more significance across the Pond than it does on this side of it. Organic Europe has thousands of years of culture and economics did not play a huge role with its intelligentsia until very recently in its long,long history. Americans were born homo economicus and political economy was the big controversy at the genesis of the United States. The Founding Fathers of the Republic were not uncouth dummies, however. Many were steeped in the Classics of Europa, and had the classical education which was the rote of 18th Century men. But they faced the prospect of building a new nation and knew that they couldn't rely on Hellenism to do it, that culture is not what an economic infrastructure makes, or what has been called the physical economy.

Much of the American conservative intelligentsia today preach for a return of classical education as if it alone will solve our problems. This puts them out of the Federalist Tradition that stressed political economy. A historical reminder is that it was the agrarian Physiocrats like Jefferson, who hated Federalism, who were all gaga on finding a natural aristocracy via study of the Classics. The Federalists were elitists as well, but believed in a more practical meritocracy of economic diversity, where those who are on the bottom could use what inherited and acquired talents that they had to hopefully rise. That was the American Dream that never materialized in its projected form, yet it was much better than the reactionary agrarian idea of the Jeffersonians who based their meme on that of old Republican Rome( that was a slavocracy) like classical scholars always do to this very day. Most Federalists were early proponents of Manumission not just for humane or economic reasons. Alexander Hamilton, for one, correctly viewed slavery as a tremendous waste of talent and believed that gifts and potential transcended all races of humanity - something that was considered a radical idea to hold in the 18th Century. Most manumission advocates of that era were 'Free Soilers' and thought the freed slaves should be "re-colonialized" somewhere else on the Earth (including Harriet Beecher Stowe and initially Abe Lincoln). Hamilton wanted them to have the same rights and citizenship of Americans of whatever color or race.

Today's classical education fanatics react against the post-modernism, the secularism of what they deem a virus from the radical left, or 68ers. It is very true that some of academia have utter contempt for Western Culture and see it as the root of all evil, a notion that is indeed harmful and ridiculous. For every "evil White Man" there are three brown and black devils standing beside him. Yet conservative classical boosters think that everything post-modern is malignant as well and see the world in strict Manichean terms. I believe that reading of the Western Canon is important for anyone in intellectual endeavors, but I fail to see how Homer, Pythagorous , Thomas Aquainas will turn the American people away from their pancem et circenes and most notably, what the Wise Ones of ancient history can give us advise on how to prevent the global hegemony of the economic-predators? The Men of the Classics had no idea that they were to be revered hundreds and even thousands of years after their expiration from the dark Earth, anyway. Though they had an interest in the future, they wrote and composed for their contemporaries, and none ever claimed, to my knowledge, of being fortune-tellers.

The 'good' about post-modernist thought, or de-construction, is that it taxes the brain muscles just as much as studying classical Greek would. De-constructionism, in a nutshell, innocently lifts up to the surface that whatever notion, idea, world-view that an individual possesses could be possibly in error? It is not nihilism(true nihilism is impossible, in my judgment) but just as much dialectical in format as Aristotleian logic is, but is more free-flowing and not as rigid as the former. Instead of telling a person how to think, de-constructionism mounts the podium, begs the question -

"I already know 'how', I want to know - 'why'?

-George Orwell

Classicalists can better present their case by adopting the cream of nominal post-modernist thinking, perhaps. This doesn't mean adding Dada or Foucault to the Western Canon, but not appearing so ancient which few people ever has embraced. Let's face it: every attempt to promote The Great Books down to the ranks of the hoi poli has been a failure. Those antiquarian texts are usually just 'show-books' that line the shelves in a suburban living-room seldom opened and read. A relative of mine once got into the Great Books discount- buying and when queried who the names were on the titles she couldn't really give a good answer. I remember that she said that Adam Smith was "some physicist from England". My cynical snicker at this led to her admitting that the Great Books in her possession were mere decor for her new Study in her house where she didn't have the time to study anything. Her copies of Stephen King and Jacquline Sussan looked well-thumbed, however.....

Again, Homer and Bach will not tackle the essential dillemas of Americans in America. We can still learn from Plato and Aristotle and appreciate Voltaire, Erasmus, etc. Though I am a critic of the eggheads of Classicalism, I never want to see the Western Canon abolished as the extreme cultural Left wish it to be. Yet, even if a Halliburton executive, for instance, can recite The Inferno canto by canto, he or she remains an economic-predator. A construction worker who's well-versed in Shakespeare will not improve his income and general existence; the tele-marketer who can hum note to note from begginning to end Handel's Messiah is still stuck in a thankless and abusive low-paying job. A Fast Food worker will not impress his/her employers because he/she knows Plato's Dialogues....

One needs to consider who these folks in the UsofA that are promoting classical education are, where politically they are coming from. Both NeoCons and paleo-conservatives are hung up on the Classics to the nth degree. We all know about the Straussians already, but the paleoconservatives, the types that read the neo-Confederate mag, Chronicles, are in the Agrarian/Physicocrat/Jeffersonian memes &often merged with various degrees of religious fundamentalism. Their theological beliefs usually have little to do with the benign Renaissance Christian Humanism, but post-Reformation dogmaticism and intolerance whilst they be Catholic or Protestant. Today's paleo-classicists reject the syncreticism of Pico, Cusanus, Erasmus and others of the Renaissance and offer us a medieval either-or Return quite like the medievalism of Luther, Calvin and the Vatican's counter-reformation. This is what killed off the Renaissance in the first place. Classicists want bright minds only if they are inside the box.

Personally, I have never met a Classical scholar who seemed to be very liberal on much of anything, with the exception of one, who claimed to be a Buddhist and a socialist as well as a devotee of the Western Canon. That was very unique. Most classicalists seem to pine for that Golden Age in antiquity that never existed in actuality. In music, Beethoven was considered 'too loud 'by the musical reactionaries of his day who stressed adulation for JS Bach. I'm certain that Bach was criticized by Old Foggies of the Lutheran Hymnal too in his composition days, and so on. Every generation coming up has been accussed of perverting and losing the 'wisdom' of the former and some predict the destruction of society, Zeus thunderbolts of doom unto the Earth -

" Hey, but look at me Joey - I'm still standin'!"

-Robert DeNiro, Raging Bull

The Classics need to be syncretic, brought into the general memes of social thought. The Western Canon can be added on to. American homo economicus, circa 2007, cannot live hardly on Homer & Hayden and fellow travelers alone. The paleo-classicalists today are hung up on the very word -classical. That Predator Economics is dubbed as 'Classical Economics' automatically finds those scholars of Thomas Aquainas endorcing it, it seems. That's interesting since Aquinas himself was a strong enemy of usury and held the mercantile class as suspect of impiety, and he never endorced the rugged individualism that predator/classical economics holds as sancrosanct.

'Tis interesting that a good percentage of American classicists today(the political ones) who claim to be "proud to be also American", find a nice home for themselves in one of the most anti-American think-tank called the Ludwig von Mises Institute, headquartered in Alabama. Ludwig von Mises is the avatar of the Vienna School of Economics and he had utmost contempt for anything from 'the Herd' in proper aristocratic Habsburg fashion. The Vienna School's founder was Carl Menger, though not a hereditary aristocrat himself, he like Cicero and Cato of Rome was an ass-kisser to them. Menger's prime motivation was to attack the German/American Historical School of Economics that dominated the Wilhelmian Era of the 19th Century. The titled nobility felt their previous hegemony slipping badly and needed something else for a restoration of their elite. So why not individualist based "free-market" economics that denied the role and even existence of society ? In such a anarcho-capitalist utopia, the 'Vons' would be restored to lords of the Manor, once again. The Vienna School had utter contempt for the United States, but found some Americans to be their useful idiots to broadcast their message. It is remarkable that the free-market economics of von Mises never caught on in Austria or Germany, but flowered in the USA in post- World War 2 amoung the Old Right opponents of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal which was the fruition of the *American System*. The American System was brought to Central Europe via Friedrich List and later had the 'Historical School' label. The Historical School metamorphed into the "Social-Market", the plan that re-built West Germany into an economic titan following the Second World War. This, the Vienna School of aristocratic predators from Menger, von Mises,von Hayek, and the Catholic bigot&monarchist, Erich von Kuehnhelt-Leddihn, sought to destroy as well as the soverignty of nation-states. It is humorous that Hayek readers were accusing everyone else of being 'socialists', when the Vieena School had much more in common with the Trotskyite globalist Left than they cared to admit, or acknowledged.

That the Vienna School hated the Federalist Tradition of the United States is a no brainer, obvious. But they found a fellow-traveler in America with the Jeffersonian/States Rights/laissez-faire contingent. It is no surprise that Americans who slobber over the Vienna School are also tied into the traitorous neo-Confederate movement. People need to remember that the aristocratic old European Right of the 19th Century hated the very existence of the United States of America and clapped their hands with glee when it looked like the American Republic was going under during the Civil War, 1861-65. The European reactionaries were as a whole pro-South in that conflict for this very reason(also for the prospect of duty-free exports in Southern ports). The Southern slavocracy was aristocratic, classicalist, fundamentalist Calvinist, Anglophiliac free-traders during this era. Plantation owners imitated the ways of British Imperial country gentry and some even advocated of rejoining the Empire if need be. Only Russia and Prussia were pro-North/Union during the American Civil War out of all the European powers, but could provide little assistance. If it wasn't for the restraint of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's hubby, Great Britain would had jumped into the conflict on the side of the traitorous Confederacy with both feet during the Trent Affair. This is what Jeffersonian neo-Confederates sigh over to this very day.

Southern partisans need to remember that the person more tied with the 'Yankee' Federalist Tradition is the Virginian, George Washington. There was no other place on Earth than his Mount Vernon that George wanted to be at. But during his service as Commander-in-Chief of the revolutionary Continental Army, George Washington became a nationalist and endorced the Federalist program of Hamilton, both politically and economically. Washington also released Mt. Vernon's slaves from bondage at his death. None of the other plantation- owning classical 'democrats' - Jefferson, Madison, Monroe - followed Washington's example. In fact, Jefferson increased his slave-ownership over his long years and only granted manumission to a mere five of the hundreds of slaves that this hypocritcal bastard owned. Let's not forget that Jefferson was always going-off about classical Roman virtues.

Ergo, 'classical 'doesn't mean that everything 'good' was ever intwined with it. One can see just as much that was and is bad. And a note to leftists is that not everything dubbed 'traditional' is and will be a hindrance to socio-economic progress, either.

Unearned Citizenship

2007-05-26T03:28:00.000-06:00

Robert B. Reich has a grand idea. In a article in The American Prospect, Reich matter-of-factly stated that American rich folks who have Cayman Islands tax-shelter accounts should also forfeit their citizenship. If they purposely take revenue out of the United States(and also capital) they annul themselves of their claims that they are producers, and it's bona-fide proof that the OverClass have no interest besides their own. The hot issue now is a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants; perhaps a better issue should be earned citizenship. I can see how illegal Mexican fruit-pickers, meat-packers are earning their way to be Americans much more than the super-affluent families in the USA who can trace their ancestors back to The Mayflower, or Sons of Cincinattus.

Spengler Reconsidered?

2007-05-23T09:24:00.000-06:00

The paleoconservatives are up in arms over the immigration bill. Reading Pat Buchanan' latest diatribe of gloom and doom about the south of the border invasion, I was disappointed in the man that he didn't address the why in his rant. Buchanan sees things in ethnics and race first, trade/economics second it so appears. The Paleocons could make their case more presentable by reversing this order; with the Mushy Middle who believe but are skeptical of TINA globalization, racialist concentration of this tribe gives trade protectionism a not so good name, and alienates a good portion of the anti-globalist left. Being convinced that the best way to fight against TINA is a synthesis of both arms of the anti-globalization movement uniting at least on these core issues, reading Pat's column lately makes me think that there is more work in store than originally thought.

But I'll tackle this immigration/race issue anyway here. Mainly I am not a builder for this above proposed consensus, but just another poor slob with a blog that apparently only spammers ever grace. I do assign some of the blame to the 68er New Left who abandoned the Melting Pot concept and chose Identity Politics of hyphenated Americanism, radical-feminism, deep ecology and what have you. This not only contributed to the unraveling of the New Deal coalition but also alienated the Average Square and this helped breed that species called 'Reagan Democrats' later. Because of the obsessive Third Worldism of the 68ers, illegal immigration was seen by many as a good thing since these people are brown and alleged to be exploited by 'evil white males' and such other tripe like this. Instead of wanting to Americanize immigrants, legal and illegal of whatever color, they were encouraged to keep and foster their own cultural identity while living in the USA. Combine this with the laissez-faire economic predators who benefit from illegal immigration, a lethal potion has been concocted. The Culture Elite and the economic OverClass are in collusion.

People need to remember that it was liberals such as the recently expired Arthur Schlesinger who first warned about multiculturalism/identity politics. The right-wingers rose later to dominate the issue and liberals buried it for the sake that they didn't want to sound like racists by criticizing. Now, both the left and right on immigration have demonstrated their lack of responsibility by not focusing on the 'Why' and acknowledging that the economic-trade status quo has to radically change before the hordes from the south will halt their flood. If this is not tackled soon, Buchanan's predictions may very well turn out to be on par and you can kiss the sovereignty of the United States of America good-bye forever. In twenty years, if not sooner, we will then dwell in a corporate feudalistic 'North American Union' totally dominated and ran by the OverClass of all three countries with everyone else being - regardless of race - the peasants of the service-oriented manors that the OverClass will own privately, lock, stock and barrell. Marx and other Enlightenment thinkers of the West were in error. History is not a progression from point A to B, but it seems to run in cycles perpetually.
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That last sentence above is in lieu that I have dusted off Spengler and have been giving the author of "The Decline of the West" another reading. I retain a profound distrust of this man, and many if not most of the things that he touches on in his magnum opus are cranky, i.e. cultures are collectively living organisms and each Culture are crafted by some Unseen Historical Law that requires a Culture to cross into decadence of 'Civilization' to eventual fall, dark ages then possibly cultural rebirth. Spengler didn't address that Indian and Sino cultures have survived for thousands of years, largely intact, even during downturns; his historical research was shoddy in many areas. The mysticism of his works set himself up for the ridicule of many historians and sociologists. If it wasn't for the fact that Germany lost the Great War 1914-18, "The Decline of the West" would have been confined to pulp in the publishing house.
Spengler's success was initially with the folks of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s and he enjoyed every moment of his notoriety. Though he flirted heavily with the Nazis at first, to his credit Spengler later condemned the gross Anti-Semitism and brutality of this regime and seen Hitler for what he really was. Yet Spengler remains to this day a darling of the Far Right intelligentsia which is something that aides in putting more liberal minded folks off from reading him. But here and there, he has a bit to say to everyone regardless of political hue in circa 2007 C.E.?

Oswald Spengler narrated little about America in his chief write and nothing good. Spengler's Gymnassium classical education left him with the typical contempt for the notion of homo economicus, and had the typical prejudice to "shopkeeper commercial republics". In contrast, he admired Friedrich List - the man who brought the American School of Economics to Germany and fitted it in a Prussian way. Spengler didn't mention this fact about List and that List was ever bit of homo economicus as much as Adam Smith was. Spengler further contradicts himself throughout his years about economics. Though he lauded high culture, or what he believed it to be, he initially admonished his young readers to drop the paint brushes and poem writing and pick up the tools of the engineer. Later, in his Man and Technics, Spengler blasted materialism and technological endeavours and waxes like a Luddite. We have the esoteric snobbish Spengler and the practical Spengler waring with one another and he never got over his own confusion.

Probably the most prevalent theme that Oswald Spengler was clued-in on was the subject of socialism. Socialism stripped of it's economics is still socialism anytime the State plays a role in the nation. Economic socialism is "the capitalism of the working-class". This is totally lost on Americans, especially the free-market types. Any social entity is by nature 'socialist' and government, big or small, is socialist regardless of the economic policies it champions. Laissez-faire is the socialism of and for the OverClass, as economic socialism is that of the underclass, or used to be. In a way it can be stated that libertarian-capitalists are 'socialists in denial'. They are at least utopian dupes and dopes.

Spengler seen America as an ersatz pale carbon copy of his Western 'Faustian Man' with it's commercialism and democratic edifice that he assigns to his theme of 'cultural death'. Thus, according to Spengler, America is exceptional, but in a bad way. He warned even in 1917 that the USA will attempt globalizing it's markets for hegemony since economics is it's only function and is neither a culture or a civilization per se. Spengler correctly views money not harnessed to the use of the State as a corrupting influence that will be a major factor in bringing any culture-civilization down in his historical cycle.

One symptom of cultural death in a civilization is what Spengler dubbed as the "Second Religiousness" - a reactionary movement back to the orthodoxy of a nation's respective religion, a SuperNova before darkness. Though Spengler judges America not part of a true civilization, the concept of Second Religiousness is prophetic if one looks at the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s until presently in the USA. Perhaps Islamic Civilization is simultaneously experiencing the same. According to Spengler, Europe should be undergoing the Second Religiousness, but its organic path points to further secularization. Maybe despite doomsday scenarios for the European Continent, Faustian Man will still be standing with Sinic and Hindu longevity. Spengler aside in this issue, America will go down, and is going down, quicker than any other region on the Globe one can point the finger at.

2007-05-22T09:15:00.000-06:00

The current freshmen Democrats in Congress were sent there for more reasons than Iraq. Many of the new class are economic populists with a mandate to do something about the globalization policies endorsed by Wall Street. Currently, the Democratic Party's financier wing is putting pressure on the freshmen Representatives and Senators to toe the Free Trade line of the Clintonian DLC, which is nearly identical to that of the Bush Administration. Again, this laissez-faire lite is where the Democrats went wrong initially, and the freshmen elected officials are under obligation to do something about the DLC and hopefully purge these arrogant economic traitors from their midst. The Democratic Party needs these New People to re-set the paces.
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Out of all forms of nationalism, the worst kind of it currently is these neoconservative globalizing goons who masquerade themselves as 'American Nationalists'. Such species are neither 'American' per se nor 'nationalist'. The ABC's of this specious ideology is an ersatz blend of globalistic memes such as Trotskyitism married to the ideology of international free-market capitalism, which is not American. American capitalism traditionally ran based on the national model and retained until recently at least a sense of noblese oblique to the citizenry of the nation-state. Even the Guilded Age barons kept their economic predation at 'home'.
Anyone endorsing and promoting globalization that is sucking the life out of the USA's infrastructure and decaying the political autonomy of the nation/state cannot with a clear, sane head refer to themselves as 'nationalist'. More truthfully they should call themselves imperialists, or Right Wing- Marxists - this is exactly what these people are. Don't let their public claims of dedication to the 'American Way of Life', fool. Their only loyalty is to the corporate elite who have no loyalty to anyone besides their own private interests. Look who's funding these NeoCon think-tanks: Get and pay-off a bunch of Ayn Rand/Hayek reading geeks and classical culture snobs;ex-Communists wanting to make a buck;Chickenhawk foreign policy promoters and Fundy Christians with their 'Family Values' con to write and push the corporate modus operandi - not a bigger and more shrewd racket has ever been created! My hat's off to them.

Sunday Morning Sermon

2007-05-20T11:02:00.000-06:00

Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and architect of the 'Contract ON America', delivered a rousing eulogy at Rev. Falwell's funeral. Newt admonished the Liberty Uni's student body that they are the vanguard against radical secularism and paganism in America and should continue to push for 'Judea-Christian Values'. Onward Christian soldiers!

Mr. Gingrich is obviously spoiling for a comeback in the political realm. Why not use the old trick he pulled before of getting the Bible Beater-theocrats onboard his economic-predator/imperialist program? It is humorous that Newt champions the Christian ethic, having delivered divorce papers to his wife on her deathbed, neglected his children, and confessed to carrying on an affair with an intern himself.

Let's take a look at 'Christian America' here. Western Europe is secular and dubbed 'post-Christian', but these godless folks have a lower divorce rate than the gawd-fearin' USofA does. Europeans are judged by Ami Fundys of having a overly tolerant, amoral society, yet drug abuse and crime is much lower there(especially violent crime). 'Old Europe' might have regulations that some Americans may think is overly restrictive, yet you don't have to fret going to your job,school or visiting a shopping mall in Brussels, Berlin, Rome and wonder if some psycho is going to gun you down in mass murder mayhem. As for career endeavours, there are more people who are 'self-employed' in Europe than there is in the alleged mecca of de-regulated opportunity, the United States.

The Euro- bashers never reflect that if the EU is supposed to be so bad, how come Europeans aren't flocking to emigrate across the Pond? The USA used to be the place to be for Europa's poor and disenfranchised class, but that is no longer the case.
As for comparable elites, European political elites are primarily from their educated middle-class. The ruling American elite is the One Percenter economic OverClass. Full circle has manifested: the USA, excluding the institution of slavery, was born a middle-class society when Europe was ruled by the titled hereditary nobility. It was the shot heard around the world when we tossed the worthless parasitical nobility/European colonialism from North America, and it's something to be proud of. Now, Europe is much more democratic than the USA is and certainly has less gaps between rich and poor. Many have public funded elections where $$$ is not the overriding way and means for a candidate to get elected to a political office. In America, you either have to be wealthy yourself to get into a high federal or state office; if not, the candidate had better have wealthy contributors. Our politicians are bought -and- paid for by Mammon in Christian America. We are actually 'One Nation Under Mammon' and not a nation blessed by the Judea-Christian 'God'. The values that Gingrich and his Religious Right minions speak of are the very ones in contrast of those in the New Testament. Give me the secular, godless, amoral Euroweenies any old day!

So, where did we go wrong? Firstly, even Marxist oriented cultural historians such as Morris Berman reflect that the USA began well with the Federalist principles of the nation's founding in the 1780s, 1790s. The Federalists, though they sanctioned private property as much as the Anti-Federalists, kept some of the organic, Old European memes intact with supporting dirgist methods in the nation's economy; the 'Few' had some responsibility to the 'Many', or the Commons. If there is anything good about medieval feudalism it was at least there was the very idea of social responsibility between the classes/castes, though it was hardly practiced. The Jeffersonians were more nativist and coupled the nativism with a Jacobin leveling of all institutions. Federalists didn't want to toss the tub out with the dirty water. The Federalists, the top dogs, served with distinction in the Revolutionary Army whilst many of Jefferson's boys(including Big Tom) had a large percentage of chickenhawks in their midst.

Many historians point to the Administration of Andrew Jackson - who was supposed to be the "People's President" - in the 1830s as when Middle Class America began its unraveling into the gulf of uber-wealthy versus poor. Jackson's first item of business was destruction of the 2nd Bank of the United States. This action turned the very speculators that Jackson hated free and loose from any public oversight and they commenced busting privately owned banks everywhere. Though Jackson was the only President to have paid off the National Debt, he also ruined America's credit rating with other nations.

Jackson's one saving grace is that he believed in tariff- based trade, and threatened to hang all the ringleaders of the South Carolinian 'Nullification Crises' until Whigs such as Henry Clay engineered a compromise regarding the tariff rate. As much as I admire Clay, sometimes I judge that he often compromised too much. Perhaps if he would had let Old Hickory hang a few traitors it would had been a wake-up call to the Southern slaveocracy/Free Traders that they needed to change their ways. Even if Jackson's actions would had led to civil war, it would had been better to have the civil war in that decade than in the 1860s.

The Federalists had a revival with Abe Lincoln's Republican Party where the American School of Economics was pushed with gusto as opposed to the British-Manchester one of laissez-faire - the school that the Southern slaveocracy favored. Lincoln also acknowledged that Capital was dependent on Labor, and Labor should take the top role over Capital. Lincoln, the son of 'yeoman-farmers', knew that the United States had to industrialize asap, but he was obviously not in the pocket of financiers with his championing of the knights of Labor who made the wealth of the manufactures possible. Again, this is the meme of the European concept of responsibility of the elites to the Commons. It is very likely that if Lincoln wasn't murdered by a pro-Confederate chickenhawk actor(John Wilkes Booth), the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons of the later nineteenth century would had been at least more tame. The Populist movement of agrarian America in the 1880s and 1890s had a slogan regarding the Robber Barons - 'This is not what Lincoln would had allowed'. The Populists were correct. It goes to show that anyone who assaulted their respective slaveocracies (coupled with laissez-faire) throughout history from Julius Caesar to Tsar Alexander and Lincoln - paid the price with their blood and lives.

Theodore Roosevelt, though an imperialist, tried to take on the Economic Predators and get the Republican Party back to its Lincolnesque/Federalist roots with just a token measure of success. His populist/progressive model was Alexander Hamilton. In 1912 Roosevelt tried for a third presidential term under the Progressive/Bull Moose Party, yet many of his progressive principles were hijacked by Woodrow Wilson as themes for his own campaign. As we know, President Wilson set the progressive movement back, and he actually employed some of the most reactionary policies( a true-blue Jeffersonian) that was contradictory to the Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century. Wilson was the most racist President we had in the last century, and he outdid the imperialism of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt in practicing gun-boat diplomacy in Latin America. Wilson was a bigger hypocrite than his poster-child, Thomas Jefferson, and the USA- and the world - would had been better off if Taft won in 1912.

The 1920s was a return to the 'normalcy' of the 1890s where the rich dominated everything, and 'the business of America was Business', to echo Calvin Coolidge. New Technology spawned GNP growth, yet it was a bad decade for the industrial working class and the farmers. The Roaring Twenties had a high tariff trade policy , but because that international trade was dead in that decade because of the Great War 1914-18, little revenue was made of it. A huge speculative Credit Bubble was created in the Twenties(does that sound familiar??) in lieu of the Versailles Treaty provisions that had Peter to borrow from Paul to pay Peter&Paul; de-regulated private banks would give sub-prime loans for stock speculations and it all roared to a huge crash in 1929. Then American history was graced with the appearance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President in 1933...

FDR was a fifth cousin of Teddy Roosevelt, a old -monied WASP patrician who never worked a day in his life. Unlike other patricians like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin actually cared about the Commons. Undoubtedly when FDR was crippled by Polio he learned the lesson of being powerless, helpless, and being a circumstantial victim of the Tragic Sense of Life. FDR tapped into the old Federalist tradition offering a 'New Deal' for the American people, a social contract where both the private and public economic sphere could work together. FDR was no limp-wristed weenie liberal either. He took on the 'economic royalists' with energy and he welcomed their hatred of him of being a 'traitor to his class'. In hindsight, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Baddest Ass who ever sat in the White House: FDR smoked three packs of cigarettes, drank five martinis per diem; guided the USA through the Great Depression then through a major two-front World War and he had post-War aspirations of European de-colonialism, the respect of sovereign nation-states to live their lives as they saw fit to do so in a spirit of international peace. Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln had so much morass heaped on their laps as President than what FDR had to contend with under his Watch.

The social contract of the New Deal, in tune with the Federalist Tradition of America, lasted in both parties, Democratic and Republican, through the 40's, 50's and most of the 60's. A good friend of mine claims it all unraveled with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon was actually on the bubble, in my opinion. Nixon inherited civil war conditions and had to constantly play the centrist role between left and right factions. People tend to forget that Nixon pissed-off the right wingers as much as he did the liberals. He made attempts to perfect the social-market by reaching out to Labor as well as Business, and Affirmative Action was Nixon's plan. With good reason even the iconoclast libertarian-socialist, Noam Chomsky, declared Tricky Dick Nixon as our last liberal President. The end of the New Deal was actually in 1973 coinciding with the Watergate Scandal that brought Nixon down. Without Watergate and its results, I firmly believe that such idiots like Carter and later Reagan would had never been elected President and the social-market, American style, would had continued to be better, more efficient. We would had been more ingrained in the organic European genesis, and the NeoCons would be at best a cranky, marginal, spare think-tank of ex-Trotskyites where they belong.

Myths to Die By, etc.

2007-05-18T08:40:00.000-06:00

The compromise Immigration Bill has a serious fault from the onset: it doesn't address the why, why illegal immigration is so epidemic. Earmarked to any illegal immigration bill should be a call to repeal NAFTA; because as long as the Mexican economy is tied into this free-trade treaty, as long as the OverClass can hire illegals on the cheap as they do, the flood from the south will keep coming regardless of how many border checkpoints, fences, fines that are imposed on the illegals. Frankly, the businesses that have hired illegal aliens should pay any levied fines. This bill will do nothing to stem the flow of illegal aliens, and Senator Kennedy should know better.
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It seems like the World Bank is the next stop for foreign policy failures like Wolfowitz and previously the architect of the Vietnam War, McNamara got the post at the World Bank. It was humorous to hear following Wolfowitz's announced resignation from the WB, that George W. Bush lamented that it was regrettable since Paul Wolfowitz was "helping the poor". If anything, the World Bank is an edifice to aide the international OverClass to loot the Third World and privatize everything from pensions to the position of dog catcher.
We need to worry about establishing a true 'National' Bank, and such global entities that serve the interests of the cosmopolitan economic Predators, such as the above, the IMF, WTO need to be strangled and buried.
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Have been reading considerably lately about the thing called meritocracy. It is amazing who many people swallow old myths today, and this notion that hard-work, education and the "right attitude" can and will propel anyone to greatness and riches is one of the biggest old wives' tale. Even millionaires themselves do not believe in the core principle of meritocracy - hard work. In a survey of Forbes millionaires, they were asked to list five essential ingredients in what made them tick: 'Work' came in dead last. The very people who lack socioeconomic mobility, the Working Class(who 'work' the hardest),seem to believe in the Work Ethic the most though it perennially gives them fractional and illusionary gains. It seems that meritocracy is the real opiate of the people in this sense. And most remarkably it plays into the hands of the caste that knows that meritocracy is bunk, that is screwing the hard- working worker over.

Meritocracy is something that we all want to believe in, however. It is analogous to an agnostic Christian who wants to believe in salvation, but everything in his/her mind knows that it just isn't so. It is perhaps just another dopey-daffodil utopian scheme, the notion that one can rise based on merit alone. But the desire is to make myth reality here, and many have set at drafting boards trying figure out a scheme to have a natural aristocracy, have the best and brightest running the show.
As usual I am pessimistic. Probably nothing outside The Brave New World can we have anything resembling a meritocracy, and few would sanction a society like that. Yes, the problem, the main roadblock to a meritocracy is THE FAMILY. Family Values is the bugbear. Social conservatives need to get a reality check here that the problem is that we have always had too much Family Values. Or at least the wealthy have.

It is academic that if the 'pull-yourself-up-by-the bootstraps' individualism worked on a utilitarian scale, how come the affluent do not kick their kids out of the house when they reach their majority? Why not have them fend for themselves and get their own money and way through life? Instead, regardless how Mom &Pop came into their fortune, they send their children to the best schools with other rich spawn and fairly much give their own children cradle to grave care. Forty percent of those on Forbes got a large portion of their wealthy via inheritance;the higher a mogul is up on the Forbes list, the more likely he or she had a substantial trustfund from a rich mommy or daddy - it takes big money to make big money is oh so .We must realize fully that we live not in a democratic meritocracy, but an oligarchy. The odds on that someone can start from the bottom and work their way to the zenith of the socioeconomic scale is egregiously astronomical. Winning the PowerBall lottery twice is more practical to compare.

Straussians say that the herd need their myths, and the merit-system is the Numero Ono - even surpassing other myths like those that believe in Adam and Eve, 'Intelligent Design', Tom Jefferson was for the People and Ron Reagan ended the Cold War. Better it is to address the reality that we do not have a meritocracy and never did. Maybe something benevolent can sprout from people dwelling on what Miquel Unamuno dubbed as the existential 'Tragic Sense of Life' than proliferating myths that make us forget it. Or maybe the suicide rate would skyrocket if we all did.

Slapping around Larry and Curley...

2007-05-16T05:15:00.000-06:00

The Ten Little Reagans gathered again in S. Carolina for a debate on the 'issues'. According to reports, the 'issues' discussed were the usual ones from the GOP playbook: fetus politics, the right for psychos to buy guns and commit massacres, making Dubya's tax cuts for the OverClass permanent. Rudy Giuliani pledged to cut the federal budget, Reagan style. Half- a -billionaire Mormon, Mitt Romney, spared with John "the Mummy " McCain over flip-flopping..... Duncan Hunter assured everyone that none of the other nine contenders is a bigger warmonger than he is and gave the crowd his best John Wayne persona. What a crew. I was surprised that all the ten didn't slobber over the passing of the Christocrat- Moron Majority Iman, the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

I did catch the Mitt Romney interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday. I was struck by the plasticity of all the Romney family where everyone is good looking, rich, and pious devotees of the cult of the Latter Day Saints. Except for the religious part, they reminded me of characters in a soap opera. Mitt says he looted many companies as CEO and can't wait to get his hands on Washington, tongue-in-cheek. Not only is he a proud economic-predator, he does it without any stimulants such as caffeine, nicotine, booze, drugs and cussin'(Mr. Romney emphatically wants the American people to know that he doesn't swear.). His wife is a 'babe' so he won't need oral sex in the Oval Office from an overweight intern. Wow, what a guy!

Puts me in reflection of the founder of Mitt Romney's cult, the shyster flim flam man, Joseph Smith. Mr. Smith wanted to go to Washington real bad and set up a Mormon theocracy. He had something like twelve wives to give him oral sex. But no can do since other religious freaks killed Joe, and his flock high-tailed it to the desert of Utah. Now Romney can fulfill Mr. Smith's dream of being President. Maybe Jesus will come down in a UFO for Romney's inauguration....

It has been said that in these days and times that no liberal should speak ill of another liberal. I think that this is a stupid rule, whoever came up with it. I know that there are bad liberals such as these ones like James K. Galbraith, Tom"the world is flat" Friedman and those immersed in inane 'Identity' politics and love to use hyphens and 'nations' except for the nation that they should be concerned about, the USA. All of these issues - gay marriage, pro-choice, multicultural diversity, sobbing over baby seals and Brazilian rainforests - are at best, marginal topics in the grand scheme, full-picture of things. In fact, dwelling on these issues above plays into the Republicans' hands almost every big election. They need to shuffle these petty things to the bottom of the pile and start hitting the GOP hard on the general economy, trade and foreign policy. And don't take the neo-liberal/ predator-lite, Clinton route doing so. Once we get our store in order - if - they can begin addressing these social issues, or better yet - keep sending them to the bottom of the pile.

James K. Galbraith's apologia for free-trade is based on his assertion that social-democratic Sweden has free-trade, so it must be okay. Thus, American liberals need to get with "reality" and accept the global edifice. Yawn.. Some liberals are as obsessed with Scandinavia more than free-market, minimal government libertarians have Switzerland as their pin-up model. Neither segment factors that both Sweden and Switzerland are not the United States, and they have different situations in the geopolitical and economic scheme of things. Though there are many things about Sweden and Switzerland that is on the surface admirable, neither nation can be transplanted here. Sweden is a small country, already integrated in the European economy that has a broad social safety net that subsidizes their populace where the ill effects of free-trade are not felt as roughly. The USA is in a totally different trade/economic situation than Sweden or Switzerland, and American liberals and Jeffersonian conservatives need to get over their respective womanish attachments to these two countries.

Pat Buchanan would make a better advisor on trade than James K. Galbraith with his weenie hand-ringing apologetics to globalism. Protectionist liberals need to reach out to the conservative economic nationalists given that they know that they aren't welcome in the GOP anymore. Having the Galbraith Juniors and the Tom Friedmans in camp with their Swedish obsessions will not help the cause.

Jefferson's Republicans = Dick Cheney's GOP

2007-05-15T09:08:00.000-06:00

Last night PBS had a bio of Hamilton, "Reckless Genius", part of their 'American Experience' series. Though there was nothing new to learn from the two-hour documentary, I was struck by a comment made by one of the historians on the panel - "...it is confusing..because the Republicans of the 1790s had no resemblance to the Republicans of today..."

This got me thinking that the historian is in error. The GOP is now very much like the Jeffersonian version of Republicans :

- Tom Jefferson and company harangued everyone that those who didn't share their dopey-daffodil agrarian vision were 'monarchists'. Feature today that anyone who begs to differ with the Iraq War/ Neocon 'permanent war' policy are dubbed as enabling Al Quaida and giving aide and comfort to 'Islamofascists'.

- Dick Cheney and his Neocon thugs engage in the politics of Fear, stating that if we aren't occupying various nations in the MidEast, the Muslim terrorists will be suicide-bombing Main Street USA enabled by interior 'fifth columnists', tomorrow. The Republicans of the 1790s had similar McCarthyism down pat. Jefferson and his bought and paid for media hacks would have had the public believe that Hamilton's nation-building policies were entirely geared for the restoration of the Hanoverian British monarchy.

- Many of the Federalists served with honor in the Revolutionary Army that tossed off the yoke of the British Empire. It is remarkable how many of the Republicans, who claimed to be revolutionary purists, never fired a shot against the troops of the hated British monarch. Tom Jefferson, George Clinton, and James Madison and other Anti-Federalists didn't serve a day in the Revolutionary Army. Flash today at all of the war chicken hawks: Cheney, Bush II, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove - who all think that the Vietnam War was necessary - either got draft deferments or cushy placements in the National Guard during this conflict.

- Both Jefferson and Cheney think that they have the 'People' in their hearts and speak for them with code phrases that is in every sentence that they utter such as 'freedom' and 'liberty'. Jefferson's 'People' were largely in his own imagination and he was a slave-owning country squire who spoke chiefly for the interests of his fellow Plantation oligarchs. Jefferson, like most ante-bellum Southern aristocrats, despised the po' White Trash in actuality. Today's GOP preaches the Free Market and privatization which somehow they assure the 'People' it is in their best interests to outsource their jobs, level wages to 3rd World levels and keep them away from labor unions. The GOP are mouthpieces for the tiny OverClass from beginning to end.

- Right-wing radio and television paint anyone not a conservative Republican as 'Elitist' who despise the common people. They assure that the the Democrats are primarily Ivy League, wine-sipping 'cultural Marxists' out to enslave us all to their PC agenda. Meanwhile, these same folks crying about elitists, are spokespeople for the one-percenter corporation predators who are looting the economic infrastructure of the United States and a good portion of the globe.
Again, most of the 1790's Republicans, the top dogs, were slave-owning gentry who dished out propaganda that the Federalists were 'moneyed aristocrats'. The Federalists believed in meritocracy and most Abolitionists were Federalists in that era. Who are the real elitists and oligarchs here?

- Obsession with the Classics and racialist hegemony.
Tom Jefferson was a staunch proponent of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and had, even for those times, a over-bearing veneration of the Old Roman Republic(ruled by slave-owning plantation owners like himself).
Today's Neocons, who have taken over the consensus of the Republican Party with their fundamentalist Christian fellow-travelers, have many of their ideologues who were students and/or influenced by the classical scholar Leo Strauss. Although Strauss was opaque in his teachings and didn't concern himself with economics and foreign policy, he taught that 'modernity' lead to tyranny and only the men of ancient Greece and Rome knew what was correct for society. The men of the classics, Strauss believed, wrote and spoke in 'code' that only they could understand. This hidden elite in a liberal democratic society, had to co-opt and lead the 'People' via smoke and mirrors and give the People their Bread n' Circuses and religious fervour to protect the cloaked elites. If there was not an *Enemy* - an enemy had to be created. 'Islamofascism' is the created enemy by the Neocons, as 'monarchists' were that of the Jeffersonians.
Neocons, many of them, have adopted a neo-imperialist foreign policy called the 'Anglosphere'. They proclaim that only the nations founded by Anglo-Saxons have a monopoly on the memes of liberty, freedom, democracy, that has its roots in the Magna Carta. All the other nations, even those on the European continent that are more democratic than any nation of the English speaking ones, are subject to throw themselves in the arms of dictators and whatnot, according to the Neocons. It is the Anglo-Saxons' burden to push the memes of 'democracy' and 'Free Market' on everyone else, even with bombs and troops. Besides, this is the 'end of history'.

These are the major similarities between the Republicans today and those under the Sage of Monticello. It is now up to the Democrats(who formerly boasted about being the ancestor of Jefferson) to take the Federalist torch with both hands. The torch was passed to them with the New Deal, but they dropped it and must pick it up again with vigor and energy. Reagan was right when he said that the Republican Party was the "children of Jefferson". Let the GOP have him as Papa.