Tuesday, September 22, 2015

America's Tops in Pops: Trump and The Other Chumps




The question avoided by all critics of the outrageous, outspoken, idiotic, anti-Christ, pro-Hitler, racist, misogynist, child-molesting billionaire who has equally antagonized the corporate republican-conservative, corporate democratic-liberal and (gag-barf-choke) corporate progressive establishments:

Why is this cynical asshole candidate for president who loves Israel different from all the other cynical asshole candidates for president who love Israel?


Jeepers Dr Science, aren’t they all radically different from one another?

Yes Billy, the way the moon is made of green cheese, pigs fly and religious people never lie, they are all different from one another. They represent different brands but they’re all for sale in the same market. And this billionaire loudmouth egomaniac hawks his – and their - product in a style unbecoming to the other murderous cutthroat hypocrites; he pisses them off because he proudly wears his cynical assholism like a medal of honor and gives their cynical asshole hypocrisy a bad name by doing so.

This shining example of a triumph of the system – a billionaire asshole – is a threat to all the servants of our other ruling billionaires, most especially the politicians and their media stenographers, whose job it is to make it look as though we have a democracy. Outside of a real socialist opposition, this individual success story (of course, like most rich americans he inherited the wealth he used to make his deals) could help further the failure of the system with his big mouth. The fool could accidentally help bring about a revolution against his own class. That’s why all those totally dependent on that class hate him so much.

Yes Billy, upper income liberals and conservatives have much in common when it comes to their investments, and at slightly lower economic levels, say, of their cheap imported servants, the paychecks they dole out. Das Kapital.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Trump, "Hate Speech," and U.S. Standards

The ridiculous claim that Donald Trump is uniquely guilty of "hate speech" among candidates for and officials in high office requires an Alzheimers level of amnesia to sustain. Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson once warned that, "without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife." His successor to the presidency Richard Nixon peppered his conversations with references to "jigaboos," "niggers," and "jungle bunnies." In preparation for his first foreign policy speech to Congress, he instructed his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, to "have something in it for the jigs," to which Kissinger replied respectfully, "Yes." Kissinger's deputy Alexander Haig began cracking Tarzan jokes and pretending to beat tom-toms whenever African affairs were brought up at National Security Council staff meetings. Kissinger himself, on the way to a White House dinner for the Organization of African Unity one evening, asked Senator William Fullbright the following: "I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like?"

Such racist sentiments from our top officials are obviously nothing new, and can be found all through U.S. history. George Washington believed that Indians and wolves were but two different species of animal, writing in 1783, that "the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape." Thomas Jefferson considered Indians "backward" and felt it inevitable that whites would have to "drive them, with the beasts of the forests into the Stony mountains." Jefferson wanted to ship blacks to Africa or the Caribbean, in order to leave U.S. bloodlines "without blot or mixture." In short, he wanted a genetic wall at the border, not a mere physical barrier.

The horrendous racism that maintained slavery in the U.S. for two-and-a-half centuries (and Jim Crow for another century) infected the thought of U.S. presidents throughout the 19th century. But the theory of blood on which it was based (white blood was "civilized," non-white blood was "savage") created murderous contempt for all non-Nordics. To pick just one example among many consider the Schurman Commission. Reporting back to Congress from a visit to the recently conquered Philippines in 1900, the distinguished panel pronounced Filipinos totally incapable of self-government. Chairman (and future U.S. president) William Howard Taft assured then President William McKinley that “our little brown brothers” need “fifty or one hundred years” of careful guidance (by Washington) “to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills.”

Taft and his fellow panelists went on to explain that the islands were inhabited by many “tribes” and three races, but no people, and so it was that seven million Filipinos were expelled from the human race. Reflecting his zoology and botany training at the University of Michigan, Professor Dean Worcester’s inventory of Philippine tribes looked eerily similar to work he would later publish as “Hand-List of the Birds of the Philippines.” The Indonesians of Mindanao, instructed Worcester, had light skin and (therefore) “are very clever and intelligent.” The darker Malayans were “ignorant and illiterate” but possessed “a considerable degree of civilization” and were largely “Christianized” in accordance with President McKinley’s wishes. The Negritos, on the other hand, were “little, wooly headed, black, dwarf savages,” absolutely lacking in talent for civilization. In a later National Geographic article Worcester would rank them “not far above the anthropoid apes,” and enthusiastically anticipated their extinction: “They are a link which is not missing but soon will be!”

After McKinley's vice-president Teddy Roosevelt became president, he fulminated about "damned dagoes" obstructing his efforts to wrench Panama away from Colombia (Panama originally was part of Colombia),and proved quite insistent that those he chose to regard as inferior races (non-Nordics) had no rights a white man needed respect. He declared Indians "as yet incapable of self government as China," meaning that they were as worthless as he regarded the Chinese as being. He considered the annihilation of the Indians an inspiring example of "race destiny," and declared the notorious Sand Creek massacre (1864) "righteous and beneficial."

TR also saw “coloreds” as degenerate, and looked on Latin American peoples as little more than children. Southern Europeans he found scarcely more tolerable. When a New Orleans mob lynched a number of Italian immigrants, he told his sister that the lynchings were “rather a good thing,” an opinion he aired at a dinner with “various dago diplomats...all wrought up by the lynching.” A passionate devotee of Nordic supremacy, he celebrated settler colonialism in the West as “the spread of the English speaking peoples over the world’s waste of space.” Never did he doubt that the indigenous peoples deserved extermination: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” In his popular book series, “The Winning of the West,” he argued against respecting Indian sovereignty on the pretext that “this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages…"

As president, TR found Haitians “utterly incapable of existing in independence.” His Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips explained that U.S. intervention in Haiti was necessary because of the “complete incompetence” of the Haitians and the “failure of an inferior people to maintain the degree of civilization left them by the French, or to develop any capacity of self government entitling them to international respect and confidence.”

TR's cousin Franklin Roosevelt assumed the white man's burden with great facility, helping suppress revolution in Mexico and assisting the U.S. occupations of Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1917-1924). Such forays civilized the “backward” countries, he believed, which in Haiti’s case referred to people who constituted “little more than primitive savages.” When U.S. Marine Corps Major Smedley Butler machine-gunned fifty-one Haitians to death at Fort Riviere, Roosevelt made sure he got a Congressional Medal of Honor for it. He declined to comment on the civilizing effects of slave labor on the corvee or the thousands of Haitian deaths resulting from the U.S. occupation itself, but the imposition of American political forms on the island called forth this boast: “I wrote Haiti’s constitution myself, and if I do say it, I think it was a pretty good constitution." He was optimistic on the prospects for racial progress, which he defined as how fast black people adopted white habits: “I cannot agree...that just because the Haytian native population does not use knives, forks, cups, etc. that they never will use them. As a matter of fact I feel convinced that during the next generation the Haytian population will adopt the living standards more generally in vogue.”

As president, FDR never uttered a word against lynching, even as continually urged to do so by NAACP president Walter White, who finally resigned in protest as FDR continued to hold himself aloof from an anti-lynching movement that included long lists of mayors, governors, clergy, journalists, writers, artists and college presidents. While Jesse Owens received the best treatment of his life in Hitler's Germany at the 1936 Olympics, FDR maintained complete silence as black men were regularly seized, tortured, mutilated and burned, in at least one case, right in Washington DC itself. In Germany, Hitler boasted that Germany treated Jews better than the U.S. treated blacks.

As is well-known, FDR also locked over 100,000 Japanese American civilians in concentration camps on suspicion alone, and commonly referred to the Japanese as "Japs." He was taken by bogus empiricism claiming that Japanese skull development proved they were a race apart (and far behind their Nordic "superiors"), and he privately stated that they should intermarry with more peaceful peoples. Specifically, in hopes of eliminating their “barbarism” he expressed interest in a plan to crossbreed Japanese with “docile” Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt's successor Harry Truman called the Japanese "savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic." He rated the atomic extermination of over 100,000 Japanese at Hiroshima "the greatest thing in history."

Highly educated Woodrow Wilson (he was the only president to hold a Ph.D) found blacks amusing, always fit subjects for “darky” stories in Cabinet meetings, but ludicrously unfit for high office. In 1901, as a Princeton professor he had asserted that non-white peoples were incapable of Anglo-Saxon virtues like self-government, because they were still in the “childhood of their political growth.” When he became President of Princeton, he announced that Filipinos “must obey as those who are in tutelage” and be denied independence until they learn the “discipline of law.” Throughout his tenure at Princeton, he maintained blacks were unfit for admittance to the university, a policy unique among Ivy League institutions at the time. For Wilson, it was a matter of racial destiny. He attributed the purging of blacks from voting rolls and public offices in the wake of Reconstruction to the “inevitable ascendancy of the whites.”

When he went to Washington, Wilson prepared to reverse longstanding U.S. practice by appointing white Ministers to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As president, he restored segregation to federal offices, provoking W. E. B. DuBois to inquire after a black man who had apparently been locked in a cage while at work. Wilson explained to journalist Oswald Garrison Villard: “I honestly thought segregation to be in the interest of the colored people as exempting them from friction and criticism in the departments...a number of colored men with whom we have consulted have agreed with us...”

In 1915, Wilson gave a big boost to the revival of the KKK by screening D. W. Griffith’s racist classic, “Birth of a Nation” at the White House, pronouncing the White South’s version of Reconstruction “all so terribly true.” He openly endorsed the film, taking no offense at the depiction of white womanhood threatened with black rape while a prostrate South was led down the primrose path to savagery by ape-like black legislators. Throughout the country, the incidence of lynching increased with public viewing of the film.

Even when Trump assailed Mexico for "sending rapists and criminals" to the U.S., he never offered a high-minded rationale of a presumed racial inferiority, as Wilson did in the following passage from his book, "A History of the American People." (Wilson was a well published historian): “Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe had made up the main stream of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital force of the country.... But now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population...”

More recent administrations have evidenced a similarly vulgar outlook. Ronald Reagan's White House was notoriously racist and sexist. Reagan's Education Secretary Terrence Bell conceded that terms like "Martin Lucifer Coon," "sand niggers" (referring to Arabs), and "the lesbians' bill of rights" (referring to anti-discrimination legislation), were common in the administration. Reagan himself was a big fan of apartheid South Africa ("They have eliminated the segregation we once had in our own country," Reagan absurdly claimed in 1985) and its proxy Jonas Savimbi, whom he generously helped go on the rampage in Southern Africa, killing over a million people. The Reagan administration classified Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and employed "constructive engagement" (i.e., appeasement) with its client government in Pretoria while the rest of the world recoiled in shocked outrage at the apartheid regime (except Israel, which enthusiastically collaborated). In 1986, Reagan vetoed a bill calling for mild sanctions on South Africa. On the home front, he pursued a viciously racist "Drug War" that criminalized black and hispanic life, ultimately helping achieve the largest prison gulag in history, with vastly disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos locked away on a more or less permanent basis, while factory jobs that might have employed them were shipped to the Third World.

After Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush was elected on the strength of campaign ads stereotyping black men as leniently treated rapists (see Willie Horton controversy).

As governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton had the dubious distinction of presiding over one of only two states in the union without a civil rights law. In his first 100 days as president of the U.S. he sent fleeing Haitian refugees back to their killers in Port Au Prince and turned Africa policy over to a Bush appointee, encouraging Jonas Savimbi to go on the rampage in Angola. On the way to the White House he openly insulted Jesse Jackson (over the Sister Souljah affair, whose remarks Clinton cynically distorted), the greatest black politician in U.S. history and the last Democratic candidate to mobilize anything like the full Democratic base. The meaning was clear: blacks were to stay at the back of the Clinton victory bus while the poorer half of the Democratic base remained mute and unrepresented.

Barack Obama chastised young black men for "siring" children, a term from animal husbandry. He also appointed Larry Summers Treasury Secretary. One of Summers' claims to fame was having recommended Africa as a toxic waste dump, the reasoning being that Africans tend to die young from a multitude of causes already, so dumping toxic waste in their backyards has less economic impact than doing so in more "advanced" countries where education levels and life spans are higher and longer. Though the sentiments are rational enough under the perverse incentives of capitalism, try to imagine Martin Luther King hiring such a man.

Let's get real folks. Donald Trump is an amateur at showing contempt for other races. But yes, he is an ignoramus (hardly a badge of distinction among politicians), but so are the media commentators confidently denouncing him as "unpresidential" material. Trump as a billionaire businessman can't be expected to know the history outlined in this post. Journalists, on the other hand, should not only know it, but report it.

Why don't they?

Sources:

Blanche Wiesen-Cook, "Eleanor Roosevelt: The Defining Years, 1933-1938," (Penguin, 1999)

Lawrence Wittner, "Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1978)

Noam Chomsky "Deterring Democracy," (Hill and Wang, 1992)

Seymour Hersh "The Price of Power - Kissinger in the Nixon White House," (Summit, 1983)

John W. Dower, "War Without Mercy - Race & Power in the Pacific War," (Pantheon, 1986)

David Levering Lewis, "W. E. B. DuBois: The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963," (Henry Holt, 2000)

Richard Drinnon, "Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating & Empire Building," (Schocken, 1980)

Reginald Horsman, "Race and Manifest Destiny," (Harvard, 1986)

Gore Vidal, "The American Presidency," (Odonian, 1996)

Noel Kent, "America in 1900" (M. E. Sharpe, 2000)

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Social Media, Consciousness Control & 911




  
As 911 commemorations of the historic attacks take place alongside newer assaults on collective awareness by our mind managers, we need to understand that the menaces we are propagandized to see originating from evil outsiders are usually provoked and prolonged by western governments, most especially the USA and Israel. Unfortunately, the false picture of the world that we get doesn’t only come from major media but also from what we call social media as well.

When horrible photos of a dead Syrian baby went “viral” –meaning it was seen, by design, everywhere anyone could possibly see it – the motivation of decent people was to protect escaping refugees from the horrors suffered by that poor child and hordes of others seemingly being denied by Europeans not allowing them into their homelands. Rarely was anyone moved to think that we might stop the need for people to escape the horrors of wars in Syria and other nations by ending our support, direction, funding and participation in those wars. This thought needs to go “viral” but that will only happen when media becomes truly social and is out of the control of the anti-social forces presently manufacturing ignorance among its subjects, however sincerely well intentioned those subjects may be.

When news of a hunter slaughtering a lion in Zimbabwe went “viral” some weeks before, the same well meaning action of a manipulated audience produced outrage, demonstrations calling for the murderer’s execution and worse, just as the current refugee situation has judgmental people nearly shrieking about heartless Europeans, fascists and racists everywhere but here, where heartless leadership distracts by showing selected ugliness to masses of people with no explanation offered except that “they” – evil others – are responsible. In this case, a human baby rather than an animal – greatly feared by most Zimbabweans, however misguided many americans may be about its loving qualities – was the reason used to touch people’s hearts while removing from their minds any capacity to think. But the end result is the same, much desired by the manipulators and much to the loss of the public so lied to while being honestly moved: wrath or compassion directed at symbols with no historic, political or economic awareness of social problems greater than the electronic over dramatized moments of personal tragedy for some that misses national disasters for millions.

The middle east bloodbath which has at this point murdered hundreds of thousands, reduced millions to refugee status and destroyed places which were european created nations but at least had secular leaderships running materially developed political economies is overwhelmingly a creation of the USA, and its junior- senior partner, Israel.

First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, more recently Syria and Yemen and other nations in the middle east were all direct results, though of a much longer colonial history, of the 911 attack on America. And that much longer history looms large in the treatment of Iran as some form of menace to humanity, so dubbed for having served as a subject of western domination and having the unmitigated gall to desire its own rather than outside control of its national destiny by having a revolution and booting out its foreign overlords. How much longer can this situation go on without some of the worst fantasies and fabrications of the “terrorist” lobby in Usrael not forcing the horrid nightmares it creates to become physical reality? With an attack much larger than 911 taking place somewhere in the USA? Or Israel?

We have created far more enemies and hatred for us by our national destruction and human displacement policies which have reduced the geographic area from what used to be secular nations to territories controlled by groups driven by religious zealotry to drive out infidels and murder any unfortunates seen as patrons or followers of those infidel invaders. While the financing and backing of the various fundamentalists offers a field day for the western conspiracy cults who see no results of imperial backlash that are not attributable to the empire itself, some almost claiming they originate on the white house lawn, the more serious reality is that we have brought about a dreadful situation in the world and most americans are still led to believe it is all about nasty people who want to kill us for no reason or who won’t take in refugees with little thought about why there are refugees in the first place.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the continued depiction of Russian, or Putin, as a threat to global capital (or puppies or kittens or health spas, it gets almost that stupid) escalates with civil war in the Ukraine allegedly causing sleepless depression among sensitive USA leadership and its NATO lap dogs. That Russia might have some concern, given that the Ukraine not only is on its borders but was an invasion pathway during a war that killed millions of its people, and also numbers many Russians among its population, is hardly given a thought. After all, what does another nation or people matter when we contemplate the surface story with no background we are given about anything, except that we mean well and everyone else is monstrously evil?

Most of this foreign policy nightmare is reported to the American people as often infantile anecdotal trivia, with less meaning than exchanging restaurant menus or selfies on spacebook, but with far more dangerous implications than simple acts of personal vanity or carefree fun. Nations which are nuclear powers are being provoked by situations that all relate to struggles involving the continued desire of some to dominate others, and all because they think themselves a master race of self appointed chosen people who have been given the responsibility of running the planet by some universal power unknown to the rest of us but having something to do with markets, branding, private profits and public losses.

The problem is that more and more profits are accruing to less and less people, while more and more losses are building up for more and more people. Those suffering the horrors that we are made to see as bits of electronic information that often pass in an instant without any context and do no more than get an emotional reaction which does nothing to solve the greater problems from which they stem. These images become a perverted form of selfies, which go viral to keep us unconscious, and do so under the control of those who manipulate us to help them gather even more profits, at our loss.

When what is called social media is used to bring people together pursuing solutions to problems that truly help rather than cause more pain and suffering, they strengthen humanity and not just a few using a device to connect with a few others. But when the system is under the control of forces which use any and all devices to further their domination over us, they become anti-social media, and part of an anti-social political economic structure that must be changed in its entirety and not just in control of the devices we use to communicate with one another.

The filters between us see to it that what goes “viral” is frequently what markets well, but does not bode well for humanity’s future. We need to be more careful about everything we see and hear, and not just in and on major media but in and on the little devices we use for shopping and other personal pleasures, assuming we have any besides shopping. We need to be more critical and thoughtful of everything we see and hear before rushing off to judgment with nothing but a surface view of what often has extremely deep historic, cultural and economic roots. Most of what we get, whether on broadcast corporate media or on “personal” corporate media, warrants that we remember the adage: text without a context is a pretext. That was true before 911, but has become even truer since.



Saturday, September 5, 2015

A Fair and Balanced Look At Ann Coulter's "Adios America"

"The reason we can't use immigration to bring in the best people is because our best people don't want immigrants competing with their kids."

-----Ann Coulter, Adios America

One enjoyable thing about reading "Adios America" is encountering regular references to "elites" and the "Third World." Although Coulter lacks a thoroughgoing class analysis, she at least sees that immigration policy is as much in the interest of the one-percent as any other, a point that tends to be lost on "progressives" and what passes for a left in the United States. She also criticizes the unfairness of publicly subsidizing only a tiny minority of the population, namely the one percent. "Immigration is the only area where the rich are allowed to externalize their costs without anyone complaining." Externalize costs! Where is the chorus of leftist voices rising up in support of this right wing populist hitting the nail on the head? And she goes on to ask, hardly rhetorically: "Why shouldn't employers be on the hook when their labor becomes a public charge or commits a crime?" Why indeed?

On the other hand, precisely because she lacks a class perspective, she cannot see why peoples all over the world have claims to make against the U.S. government, claims that don't necessarily mean they are owed a green card or U.S. citizenship, however. "What do we owe the Third World?," she asks rhetorically. Plenty. Capital flows from the Third World to the First World, with the poor heavily subsidizing the rich both within nations and between nations. This pattern provides the impetus for mass immigration of the poor to the developed world, which should be of interest to those, like Coulter, who want to see it stopped. Unfortunately, she remains completely unaware of this whole dimension of immigration, which is the central one.

Coulter is at her best in fearlessly puncturing empty liberal rhetoric. Building a wall on the border is absurd and impossible? "China built a thirteen-thousand-mile wall several centuries before Christ, and it's still working." Trying to stop the flood of immigration at its source can't possibly work? "The NEW WAY of stopping tubs from overflowing is to use mops and blow-dryers. Sure we can always turn the water off, but that won't work because it could always spring a leak. Let's just keep mopping."* We have to grant amnesty to Central American children flooding the country? "To stop the surge at the border, we need to reward the people surging across it." Tear-jerking stories of the plight of individual immigrants are hardly an answer to this logic.

As a work of debunkery "Adios America" has considerable merit.** For example, the claim that Obama is "deporter in chief" is only owed to the fact that the Obama Administration redefined deportation to include "illegal aliens" turned away at the border. In short, the 400,000 annual deportations Obama is said to be responsible for mostly consists of would-be illegal immigrants prevented from entering the country, not actual ones living illegally in the country. It's kind of like calling your landlord "Evicter in chief" because he continually expels people from your apartment who aren't on the rental agreement. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, border patrol is deportation, locking the front door at night is attacking the homeless, who might otherwise be able to sleep in the warmth of your home. But, but, but, . . .mass immigration of the poor is good for the economy because the Gross Domestic Product swells in reaction to the population increase. Says Coulter: "So does your household budget if I move into your extra bedroom." Touche´.

Coulter is particularly convincing in her dismissal of the charge of racism. Anyone who says, "we liked America the way it was," she notes, is instantly denounced as a racist. And no, "liking America the way it was," does not include Jim Crow policy, which Coulter does not defend nor yearn for a return of in any way. Her complaint is that being against the swamping of the U.S. with impoverished peoples from the Third World is ipso facto regarded as racist, making it impossible to argue for the undesirability of such practices on grounds of the national interest. What she wants is an immigration policy based on merit, not on being a pity case. Absent an explicitly racist definition of merit, it's difficult to see how this constitutes a racist desire.

Coulter does argue that not all cultures are created equal, and that the U.S. has proven itself better able to create wealth for a broad middle class than the vast majority of societies elsewhere (Rwanda being her pick as the representative average achievement level for humanity at large). She adds that people who feel, as she does, that "we liked America the way it was" are simply expressing a desire that that cultural success not be destroyed by mass importation of impoverished people from the Third World. We are not, after all, a rising industrial economy as in the days of yore, but rather, an outsourcing Empire whose middle class is in visible and steady decline. Is it really racist to argue, "first come, first served?"

Like most right-wing populists, Coulter is incensed about immigrant crime: "Americans are utterly unprepared for the cultures being imposed on them, and the media cover-up can't hide the truth forever. People notice when their little girls are raped and killed by Mexicans, their Arab shopkeepers commit honor killings, their Hmong neighbors are pimping out little girls and clubbing German shepherd puppies to death, their Indian landlord is importing concubines, and their Chinese acquaintances are murdering their wives out of 'humiliation.' They notice when Albanians and Russians move in - and suddenly their communities are hotbeds of human trafficking, Medicare fraud, and 'crash for cash' auto insurance frauds. They can see when their natural parks are closed because Mexicans have dumped trash, set wildfires, planted pot farms, and scrawled graffiti on ancient Indian petroglyphs." The usual liberal response is to say that crime rates are lower in communities with large immigrant populations, which misses the point Coulter and others are making. If an American citizen commits a crime, it is something Americans have no choice but to deal with. If an immigrant without a legitimate right to be in the country commits a crime, it is NOT something Americans are obligated to deal with. So the OVERALL crime rate is irrelevant, not to mention Coulter would disagree that heavily immigrant communities have a lower crime rate than non-immigrant communities, since her main contention is that the line between immigrant and U.S. citizen has been hopelessly blurred by "diversity" politics run amok.***

Ostensibly about helping workers, immigration for its own sake is being promoted by a Democratic Party largely lacking a worker constituency. Coulter points out the Democrats' have shed their worker base in preference for identity politics that exacerbate our immigration plight rather than relieving it. "The Democrats have moved from a party of blue collar workers to one of the urban elite - feminists, vegans, drug legalizers, untaxed hedge fund operators, and transgender rights activists." The party is now nearly bereft of working class members, but it is importing a "working class amenable to left-wing politics and violent political demonstrations" to make up for it. By "left wing," of course, she means Democrat. Unfortunately, so does nearly everyone else.

Coulter's proposed solution to our immigration woes, however, IS racist. She wants us to imitate Israel, which is a Jewish state founded on Arab land, with full rights for Jews only. If your objection is to foreigners coming and and displacing an established culture and way of life, proposing Israel as a solution is like proposing water as a solution to drowning. Nevertheless, Coulter LOVES Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because they are pursuing Jewish supremacy with the enthusiasm that characterized WASP "Manifest Destiny" in the 19th Century. This is OK, because settler colonialism by a master race of chosen people inevitably advances the human race:

"Without the white settlers, what is known as 'America' would still be an unnamed continent full of migratory tribes chasing the rear end of a buffalo every time their stomachs growled."

In short, Jews and Anglos have the capacity to rise and evolve; others do not. Racist? You bet. But this is a very bipartisan racism, as can easily be verified by the enthusiasm with which both Democrats and Republicans shout themselves hoarse in support of Israel's ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

As for the U.S., only Donald Trump has won Coulter's approval, largely for statements like these: "The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans -- including immigrants themselves and their children -- to earn a middle class wage."

You know you're in trouble when a shrieking neo-fascist hysteric and a billionaire political baboon make more sense than "enlightened" liberals.




*The bathtub analogy, while funny, begs an important question.  If human beings differ from water, as they do, then a version of events comparing a flood of people to a flood of water will have to take account of those differences. Coulter fails to do this. Obviously, the flood of humans has largely to do with an economic system that cannot provide decent employment to support them where they are from, whereas water is simply a fact of nature. Coulter offers no insight into how the economic failures of capitalism might be properly dealt with.

**However, Coulter repeats the false claim that "illegal immigrants don't pay taxes," which is only true of those who work exclusively for cash and don't report the income, a tiny minority of the millions of them currently working in the U.S. Anyone listed on a payroll, even those working under a false name, have taxes deducted from their pay.

***[Unfortunately, the particulars of Coulter's crime claims do not inspire a lot of confidence. She says, for example, that according to "extremely conservative figures" from the Government Accountability Office, "Mexicans alone . . . have murdered a minimum of twenty-three thousand Americans in the last few decades." In a footnote, she reveals her calculations. There are a "minimum" of 351,000 criminal immigrants in prison in the U.S., of which between 66 and 68 percent are Mexicans. If 68% is correct, then there are 238,680 Mexicans in U.S. prisons. One percent of all criminal aliens have committed murder in the U.S. Therefore, she says, over 23,000 murders have been committed by Mexicans against "Americans." Aside from the issue of how many of the murder victims might not qualify as "Americans" by Coulter's standards, we have the fact that one percent of 238,680 is 2387, not "over 23,000."]





Thursday, September 3, 2015

China Leads: U.S. Follows? Yeah, Right

China To Cut Military By 300,000

Wednesday, September 2, 2015 11:20 PM EDT


President Xi Jinping of China announced on Thursday that he
 would reduce the country’s military personnel by 300,000,
 using a speech marking 70 years since the end of World
War II to present the People’s Liberation Army as a force
 for peace and regional stability.

He advised citizens of the USA
not to hang by their lips waiting
 for their government to take such action.

The Internet Will Save Us

"The emerging cybercommunity takes refuge in virtual reality, while real communities are transformed into an immense desert filled with people, each of whom lights a candle to his own saint, each of whom is encased in his own bubble. Forty years ago, according to polls, six out of ten North Americans trusted most people. But the trust index is down: today it's only four out of ten. This sort of progress just promotes separation. The more relations between people get demonized - they'll give you AIDS, or take away your job, or ransack your house - the more relations with machines get sacralized. The communications industry, that most dynamic sector of the world economy, sells abracadabras that open the doors to a new era in human history. But this so-well-communicated world looks too much like a kingdom of loners and the mute."

-----Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

UP WRITING?




Legalienate is responding to the requests of numerous readers who are sick, tired and disgusted with up talking? They have asked us to consider a neglected population of upwriters, as yet not acknowledged by mainstream America? Consider this our effort to support another minority suffering at being kept silent by uptalkers who dominate community space and leave no room for americans who are every bit as patriotic, loyal and dedicated to marketplace values but are angry at their neglect?

Have you noticed that even speakers of English as a second language now engage in uptalking? In foreign accents? Don’t you wish that they would also use the written word to communicate with up writing? And writing has no accent, so maybe if they get jobs as telemarketers they can text dialog and never be difficult if not impossible to understand?

Shouldn’t our ballots, tax forms and vital instructions include up writing for those who find it clearer and more concise than having declarative sentences sound like they are declaring something? Why shouldn’t we teach standard written English in our schools with the inclusion of up writing as an accepted form of written communication, however maddening it might be to many readers? As crazy making as listening to uptalking can be to legions of people whose voices do not rise at the end of every sentence? As if they were asking a question? Even when they are stating a fact?

It is long past time for the up writing minority to take its place among the growing number of minority identified groups that help keep us a divided and conquered population? They must be heard, even if in vocal silence with text? Insist that all candidates for president include up written political statements in their propaganda? In fact, demand that they shut the fuck up and just submit their lack of ideas with up writing?