Majorityrights Central > Category: U.S. Politics

Just time for one last blast before the US election - this one from Martin Hutchinson at Prudent Bear.
GW

The number of economically damaging policy ideas imposed on the United States has greatly increased in the last few months. However from the statements of the Presidential candidates, the next few years may turn this storm of bad ideas into a blizzard. Those with an emotional attachment to the US economy should brace themselves for trauma.

The new salience of bad economic ideas is not particularly surprising. The US economy is heading into an economic downturn that promises to be at least as severe as those of 1974 and 1980-82, whose memory is already fading a generation into the past. Additionally, the 2000-07 period was one in which US voters made very small if any income gains, with such gains arising only through refinancing of ever more gigantic home mortgages. Meanwhile the distant and dislikeable titans of Wall Street apparently scooped up all the money generated by the economy.

Now the housing bubble has burst, the average jaundiced voter naturally sees the free market system and the George W. Bush administration as responsible for the recent not-particularly-pleasant years and the economic horror that has followed. Claims by Republican politicians that the debacle was all the fault of the housing finance agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while partly true are wholly unconvincing.

With voters miserable and facing a disastrous economic position that they believe was caused by free market excesses, it is not surprising that they are looking favorably on statist nostrums. Both political candidates have propounded bad ideas; Obama more than McCain largely because he has more ideas in general. In addition, there are a few bad ideas that have embedded themselves into the system, accepted by both political candidates and the political class as a whole.

READ MORE...

By Bo Sears

A mystery has revealed itself before our eyes.  It lies in the concluding portion of US Senator Joe Biden’s speech at a Seattle fund-raiser.  His unsettling prediction is that a test of the next president will be “manufactured“ early in his incumbency.  But, most oddly, it will require ordinary Democrat voters and Obama supporters to show solidarity with their man and use their “influence within the community”.

What kind of test can Biden mean?

Here is the text taken from Alexander Cockburn’s piece on CounterPunch posted this weekend.

“Mark my words,” Biden said solemnly at a Seattle fundraiser last Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden went on. He mentioned the Middle East and Russia. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

What exactly is Biden hinting at in that last sentence? From the context of that whole paragraph it’s clear enough to me he’s suggesting that despite hopes nourished by the sort of people at that Seattle fundraiser that post-Bush/Cheney America might backpeddle from hasty military confrontations, President Obama will stand tall and lose no time in going eyeball to eyeball with those who would test his resolve.

So let’s try to answer Cockburn’s question.  These are the key elements Biden provides.

1. “President Obama” is going to be tested early, as Kennedy was tested in Cuba in 1962.  Possibly by Russia.  Possibly in the Middle-East.

2. He will respond militarily, not diplomatically.  This response will appear flat-wrong to many Americans.  National unity itself will be at risk.  The same kind of belief and support that elected Obama to office will be required to keep him there.

My colleagues and I have considered all kinds of situations in which a new president might need local community leaders to follow him blindly in some new foreign adventure.  The only one we can see that would be nation-shaking … the only one that would fit in the model of a black president and a dangerous military entanglement abroad, and which would give rise to the circumstance where lots of local support had to be brought behind him, would be the re-introduction of the draft.

Young white Americans may not be willing to risk their lives for a black Commander-in-Chief.  For sure, it is hard to believe that present-day American college students are any more eager to be cut up, shot, and killed in 2009 than they were in Johnson’s Vietnam. 

The image this calls to mind is the draft-dodging of the Vietnam era.  But Canada has already signalled its willingness to reject young diverse white Americans fleeing from a draft (along with other young Americans).  So the easy escape is blocked:-

… there’s a catch for those who flee to Canada. In the era of the Vietnam war, American draft dodgers and deserters could easily take up residence in Canada, and stay as long as they liked.  Now, however, Canadian law has changed.

“Well, legally what’s changed is that there’s a general policy in Canada now that to apply here you must apply from outside the country. And that’s not really an option that American troops could do,” said Jeffrey House, a Vietnam veteran who fled to Canada. “Because they’re gonna be sent to Iraq next week or next month.”

I don’t expect we’ll see the rebellious young with flowers in their hair this time.  And their natural recourse won’t be the ideals of the radical left and won’t be black civil rights, because these are the values of the political Establishment today.

But have you got any other ideas of substantive policy initiatives that couldn’t be implemented with only the powers in the presidency and the Congress … initiatives that would require wide-ranging local public support?

Bo Sears is a director of ResistingDefamation

The Philadelphia Daily News, a struggling tabloid owned by the Catholic, former Bush publicist Brian Tierney, has managed to inform its - as Bo and Stanley would say - diverse white American readership that they or their cousins are “crackers”.  Here’s the offending extract from John Baer’s column on Tuesday:-

I think McCain’s camp is banking on Pennsylvania’s “cracker factor.”

I think the campaign believes the Democratic view - expressed by Ed Rendell last winter and Jack Murtha last week (and James Carville 22 years ago) - that there are racist tendencies among Pennsylvania voters.

Think about it.

Rendell in February said, “There are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.”

He even put a point spread on it, saying that being black in Pennsylvania costs a candidate 5 percentage points.

Murtha, a veteran Johnstown congressman, last week said, “There’s no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area.”

He put the black penalty at 4 percentage points.

These guys are among the state’s most successful, longest- serving politicians: Rendell has been in office 22 years and is a former national party chairman; Murtha has been in Congress 34 years.

(Carville in 1986 famously said everything between Philly and Pittsburgh is “Alabama without black people,” which today insults Alabama; it has four times more black elected officials than Pennsylvania, according to U.S. Census data.)

So, if you take the most recent polling - an Allentown Morning Call poll Sunday is reflective of others and puts Obama 12 points up, 52-40 - I figure McCain’s folks figure, well, heck, that’s really only 7 points and since most polls have a 3-point margin of error, maybe just 4 points, and that puts us right in the game.

Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign, in TV ads and on the stump, is calling Obama’s tax- cut proposal a “government handout” and “welfare.” McCain yesterday said it’s “just another government giveaway.”

Whom do you think that’s aimed at?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe lower-income, less-educated white voters for whom “welfare” and “government giveaway” means black people?

So how did that go down?  Do Bo and Stanley have a point?  A considerable majority of the 294 comments says they do.  Here is a selection of the later ones:-

READ MORE...

By Stanley Womack

Over the course of the Democratic presidential primary a less than savoury pattern of behavior by US Senator Barack Hussein Obama II and those around him emerged.  Each time a racist-stereotypical remark slipped out of the candidate’s mouth it was met with a studied refusal to retract or walk away from it.  No guilt was acknowledged, no censure accepted.

This was the mirror image of the Great Macaca Scandal that helped to shoot down US Senator George Allen’s campaign when he ran for governor of Virginia in 2006.  Allen, you will remember, used the word “macaca” to describe an Indo-American spy sent in by his campaign opponent.  For this label, used in North African Jewish circles to describe North African indigenous workers, Allen was pilloried mercilessly.

Today, Allen’s humiliation is a source of high amusement for Obama supporters among the supposedly offended demographic.  Obama isn’t as obvious as Allen.  But he knows that he can play the race-card and he knows that he, unlike Allen, can get away with it every time.

He’s been doing it since before his election to the Senate.  For example, in his Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention in November 2004 he offered this thought:-

“Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”

“Acting black” said by any white politician in any context would destroy his career, the immediate presumption being that it attributed negative behavior to blacks as a group.

Alright, when Obama says “acting white” he isn’t implying negative behavior in that same way.  But he is employing a common slur - in the mouth of a black, the “white” in “acting white” is not a friendly or respectful term.  Pretty close to “macaca”, actually.

Of course … no apology from Obama.

READ MORE...

By Dr K R Bolton

Now that Obama has won the Democratic nomination it becomes ever more relevant to explore the connections of his backers and advisers, as this will give an indication on the direction the USA will head should he win the presidency.

To consider this as primarily a racial matter, whether in terms of white racism or conversely of liberal anti-racism, is to obscure the role of the Money Power in seeking to control the USA and hence much of the world.

Obama seems to have arisen from virtually nowhere. Yet he was able to dominate the field with the assistance of bigger funding. A Reuters report carried in the Dominion Post (Obama raised $45 million, Feb. 22, 08) stated that Obama had raised just over $US36 million back in January, three times more than McCain; while Clinton had raised $US13.9 million.

There is much talk of “change”, of a “new direction”. It is the type of “populist” or even mildly “left-wing” rhetoric that serves as a façade for plutocracy while championing “The People”, just as the Bolsheviks were said to be fighting for the “proletariat” while receiving plutocratic largesse.  As Oswald Spengler observed early last Century, “there is no proletarian, not even a communist movement, that is not run in the interests and direction of Money”, to paraphrase from his Decline of the West. The same can be said for other movements of supposed reform, whether liberal, socialist or social democrat, in which we might include the Democrats.

READ MORE...

He said: “If you look at, er, folks, er-er, of color, er-e-a-e, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic party than they are in the white, er, excuse me, in the, ha, Republican party ...”

Parapraxis, or the Freudian slip, is the escape of a repressed thought.  Given the well-known characteristics of the typical politician, it is safe to assume that a Freudian slip by a man like Dean constitutes a little moment of honesty in a lifetime of deceit and distortion.  So what truth did he let out of hiding here?

Not, I think, that the GOP is the white party.  Too boring, too obvious.

No, he is talking about the Democrats.  He is saying that the party itself, its values and its policies for America are for “people of color” and “even women”.  He is saying that if you are a white male American you are totally outside of the ministrations and ambitions of his party.  He is saying that as a party of “color and women” the Democratic Party does not like white male America, does not serve white male America, indeed exists to undermine the proverbial hegemony of white male America.  He is saying that the Democratic Party is as fixed and as singular in its antipathy to white male America as it is traditionally towards the GOP.  He is saying, frankly, the GOP can have white male America.

But, of course, it wasn’t meant to come out quite like that.

“Big Brother” - the king of reality shows - is, they say, coming to the end of the road.  But then along comes Obama to prove that our life as passive consumers of shallowness and narcissism is not over yet.

The 44th President of the United States, apparently, graced Britain with his presence on Friday - a busy schedule of private meetings and no more engagement with the public than the inevitable sight-seeing photo-calls and a quick appearance outside No.10 (the impudent demand to address both houses of Parliament having been rejected on grounds of protocol).  That left little opportunity for we Brits to guage the exact degree of “greatness” Obama is supposed to have about him, falling from his lips and his fingertips like so much fairy gold.  Just as well, really.  We are in a politically carnivorous mood, and probably not well dispositioned towards snake-oil salesmen.

But not so the 200,000 “people of Berlin“ who renounced critical thinking to stand for 45 minutes and listen to what, I suppose, the American media will sell as Obama’s JFK moment.

Because every Democrat candidate has to lay claim to something of Kennedy.  Jimmy Carter had his hairstyle.

Now, everyone should read Obama’s testimony to his own coming greatness and all-round magicality.  So I reproduce the speech in its entirety here:-

“A new generation ... common humanity ... the greatest danger of all ... my father ... give our children back their future ... the moment to stand as one ... listen to each other ... keep the promise of equality and opportunity ... banish the scourge of AIDS in our time ... the road ahead will be long ... the walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrant cannot stand ... learn from each other ... Christian and Muslim and Jew ... aspirations are bigger ...  America cannot turn inward ... will we welcome immigrants from different lands…  trust each other ... this is the moment ... shun discrimination ... our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom ... you too know that yearning ... live free from fear and free from want ... Berlin ... people of”

There.  I think I got it all.

Well, it flirts with a truckload of vacuity.  Can’t deny that.  Alright, there was some foreign policy substance: Obama wants to withdraw American forces from Iraq over a sixteen month period, though only to commit them to Afghanistan.  Or possibly the Horn of Africa because, you know, what‘s happening down Darfur way shames the world, and America cannot turn inward.  Etc.  But getting out of Iraq is certainly a positive.  And, though it wasn’t part of his speech, so is the left-Dem line on NAFTA that he has taken thusfar.  But beyond these and a few other scarcely detailed policy hints, everything but everything is 100-octane aspiration.  John Gast should be raised from the dead to paint it.

Now, obviously, it’s mighty tempting to swing a wrecking ball at anything that has 200,000 naïve Germans swooning over a junior American politician on a dais in Berlin.  But let’s set temptation aside, and also cease accusing this poor man of shallowness, narcissism and having unfortunate ears.  Instead, let’s consider what Obama-speak might portend for white America.

READ MORE...

By Bo Sears

Slurs that never happened

USA TODAY ran an article on 4/8/08 headlined “Obama’s grandmother set own trail”.  It shines a light on US Senator Barack Obama’s willingness to lie about his own grandmother using negative language about one panhandling African-American at a bus stop in Hawaii:

Obama and Soetoro-Ng lived with their grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and later with their mother, Ann Dunham, in 1970s Honolulu, where white people were routinely the target of discrimination.

Sam Slom, a Bank of Hawaii economist then, who is now a Republican state senator in Hawaii, recalls that as a part of the white — or “haole” — minority in Hawaii, he would regularly see housing ads that made no effort to hide racial preferences. He says he remembers ads that read, “No haoles” or “AJAs (Americans of Japanese ancestry) Only” or “No Japanese.”

“That’s the way it was,” Slom said. “Did people talk about race? We had local jokes … like that ‘pake’ (Chinese) guy or the ‘yobo’ (Korean) who did this or that. I certainly got my share of haole jokes.”

Madelyn Dunham’s views on race came into play in a speech Obama gave March 18 in Philadelphia designed to both denounce and defend his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In the speech, Obama linked Wright and his grandmother when he said, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Obama’s campaign declined to make Dunham available for interviews or to say whether the Illinois senator alerted her before delivering the speech.

Dunham has repeatedly declined to comment to reporters, and Soetoro-Ng declined to comment on Obama’s speech about Wright or their grandmother’s attitudes on race.

Others who know Dunham were caught off guard by that mention in Obama’s speech.

“I was real surprised that he indicated that,” said Dennis Ching, who was a 23-year-old management trainee under Dunham beginning in 1966. “I never heard her say anything like that. I never heard her say anything negative about anything. And she never swore.”

“I never heard Madelyn say anything disparaging about people of African ancestry or Asian ancestry or anybody’s ancestry,” Slom said.

One of Obama’s two books describes his learning of his grandmother’s allegedly abusive language from his slacker grandfather who confided that alleged information to Obama. But Obama in neither of his books mentions any slurs toward any demographic said in his presence by his grandmother. The article referenced above states that there is no record and no witness to corroborate Obama’s remarks.  One witness even confirms that the grandmother never engaged in hateful speech. So Obama is not just involved in left-wing racialist politics and hate speech (“acting white,” “white resentment”), he appears willing to lie about his own grandmother (“a typical white person”) on that point. In contrast, his former pastor, Rev. Wright, made remarks in his recent PR binge this past week that he would never accept slurs against his own parents—apparently that lesson didn’t stick with Obama.

Haole and beatings

But the second thing to notice in the article is the matter-of-fact way in which the writer (Dan Nakaso) speaks of “haole” as an accepted name for the diverse white Hawaiians even back in the 1960s, and of rampant discrimination against them.

This is a cautionary tale that says, while we wait for the general awakening and the return of the freedoms of association and contract, we must act to resist defamation for our children’s sake, to preserve their right to a decent sense of self-respect. Although it is not mentioned in the article, it is well-known on the West Coast that the last day of school in Hawaii is what we have on May 1 in schools here in California, namely a “beat-up whitey” day. In California it is known in graffiti as “JWD” day, an acronym for “Jump Whitey Day.”

Yes, even though Resisting Defamation is limited to fighting slurs, hate caricatures, negative stereotypes, and white-baiting canards, it appears obvious that a second measure that will need to be taken will be the creation of self-defense voluntary units to protect young diverse white American and European students.  What can the white Hawaiian parents be thinking to allow their children to be targeted for slurs and beatings just because of the color of their skin?