US Government to build American ‘competitiveness’ atop socio-economic retrogression and misery.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sunday, 12 March 2017 06:52.

Zebra Crossing Aesthetic v2

Before you complain

An American once said to me that whenever they see me post an article about the United States now, they just have to brace for a total assault on their morale, and that “it is almost like seeing something like Tokyo Rose’s work in written form.”

I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, since despite her best propaganda efforts, Iva Toguri D’Aquino was ultimately not able to convince the Americans to stop supporting the United States. Perhaps some of the Americans did have pause though, perhaps they did think occasionally, “You know, those things that Tokyo Rose is saying on the radio, could there be something to all that?

But really, it’s not like I have to go out of my way to come up with these socio-economic angles against the ‘Make America Great Again’ concept. They present themselves to the world daily in such a high volume that it’s almost like trying to catch a cup of water from a firehose of negative developments. One has to be very selective about which part of the non-stop blast of negative news one is going to select, interpret, and develop a piece on, on any given day.

Today’s selection is going to really induce a feeling like when you’re sparring with someone and they forget to hold back, and next thing you know their foot is trying to tickle your kidneys or something, and it’s just like, “Oh wow, this pain is real.” It’s pretty bad. I apologise for the pain that you’re going to feel in advance.

True to the tradition I’ll get things started by putting the music on.

How things reached this stage

When Donald Trump was inaugurated on an overcast day about two months ago, he stood in front of the lectern and in a stern voice spoke the words that initiated a miserable new trade war:

TIME, ‘Trump Inauguration: Transcript of Donald Trump Speech’, 20 Jan 2017 (emphasis added):

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

It may seem on the face of it that Donald Trump was saying that all the decisions he would make would be based on whether they will benefit American workers and American families. His mouth said that somewhere in there, but is that what protectionism actually does in the longrun?

We know that it does not benefit ‘workers and families’ in the longrun. 

There is widely understood empirical evidence which shows that in the present era, free trade is what benefits the broad mass of the people, not protectionism. Free trade is what enables wider access to products at a cheaper price. Free trade enables this indirectly by facilitating regional division and specialisation of production to enhance productivity on a planetary basis. 

Broadly speaking, tariff and non-barrier barriers are mostly retrogressive, as it is low income consumers who spend a greater percentage of their income on food, clothing, consumer electronics and vehicles, which tend to be most highly protected under the kind of tariff regime proposed by Donald Trump’s White House and supported by his Alt-Lite and Alt-Right supporters.

So if American ‘workers and families’ do not really stand to benefit, does this mean that I am saying that Donald Trump is not putting America ‘first’? By no means. The misunderstanding that many have is that they conflate rhetoric about a country’s interest with the interest of the broad mass of the people. Trump essentially tailored his speech to exploit that misunderstanding.

In fact, America is indeed being ‘put first’ by Trump, but that is not a positive thing. The policies which he is advocating ensure that those who really stand to benefit are primarily the American financiers and the upper-bourgeoisie stratum of big and middle-sized manufacturers, who feel themselves to be under stiff competition from their counterparts in Europe and Asia. This scenario comes at the end of a long cycle of a widening pattern of global investment during and after the Cold War environment, which had led to the repair and economic rehabilitation of that section of the world that America had razed to the ground in the process of destroying Axis. 

The repair and rehabilitation was possible because the leaders of various European and Asian economies opted to play the longest of long games, accommodating the liberal global order that the American victors had maintained for their own diplomatic and geostrategic benefit (to economically contain their next opponent, the Soviet Union), but which were used by the former Axis countries and other Third World countries to build something again from the ashes of the Second World War and to take advantage of the mutual benefits that came from having the economic vitality and thus the military wherewithall to deter the Soviet Union. 

A hegemon’s dilemma

The flourishing of any world order in which a hegemon has to allow power to devolve into the hands of outsiders, is a world order which will eventually unravel itself as the hegemon will come to fear its own deputies. Much as the Greek Empire unravelled itself when each of the governors, tribes, and exarchates which had been permitted to accrue power so as to encircle common enemies, suddenly realised that they had reached a stage where they could bid for global power in their own right, so too the American liberal world order is coming to a close as this cycle of capital accumulation draws to a close.

The productive capacity which had been offshored from the United States and implanted into the European and Asian periphery so as to reinforce economic containment and encirclement against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now becomes in 2017 the potential weapon which the American high-bourgeoisie fears will be turned against it in a multipolar world, the first chapter of which is now opening. America’s old Cold War gendarmes of capital, are now gendarmes that are increasingly operating autonomously, and the United States is struggling to chart a course to address that new reality.

The American high-bourgeoisie wants what it views as ‘its wealth’ back. But they are not the actual owners of it. The wealth, limited though it is, and not without imperfection in its distribution, which is presently enjoyed by the peoples of Europe and Asia was re-built through hard years of work by the generation of people who survived the Second World War, and who, seeing their ideals crushed by the Americans, resolved to build their countries again during the Cold War.

The American high-bourgeoisie knows that it cannot fight the world alone, since it is only a small class of people, and therefore it must assert leadership and bind the other American classes to itself. They do this by appealing to a form of populism, where people like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, knowing that they cannot appeal to a class consciousness, instead appeal to a civic nationalist mantra: “Make America Great Again.”

What is America that anyone should want to make it ‘great’ again? That is the most astounding development in this whole sequence, particularly in the context of the Alt-Right and other nationalist opinion-formers such as David Duke, who largely made themselves responsible for having enabled all of this. For example, Hunter Wallace at Altright.com said late last month: 

Hunter Wallace / Altright.com, ‘We Are The Vanguard’, 24 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

The primary reason the media is so interested in us is because it is our ideas that have entered the political mainstream. For years now, we have been the ones calling for an America First trade policy, an America First foreign policy, an American First immigration policy, rapprochement with Russia, scrapping the refugee resettlement program, stressing our interests as opposed to liberal ideology, strong borders and a crackdown on immigration, assaulting political correctness, making peace with the labor movement, etc., etc. [...] Now, we are living in the digital world of social media and young people are watching us on YouTube and Periscope. They are interacting with us on Twitter. We don’t need the “mainstream” to network or spread our ideas.

[...]

We are the vanguard now. The world has changed, the “mainstream” is dead and the media is trying to catch up with the times. Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard are at the nadir of their influence over the Right. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if flyover country conservatives are familiar with Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right. If our ideas are triumphing over David Frum’s ideas and Bill Kristol’s ideas, it doesn’t matter. If our discourse triumphs over and displaces “mainstream” discourse, then we are having a massive impact whether the “mainstream” cartel acknowledges it or not.

The same kind of people who for years had operated under the suspicion that the United States was possibly falling under a ‘Zionist Occupation Government’, are now the very same kind of people who are actually trying in these days and hours to fight as hard as they can to attempt to defend and perpetuate the global reach of the United States government and its centrality as a manufacturing centre now that it is  transparently going into openly-verifiable overdrive in that regard. Now that the ‘occupation’ is openly parading itself in their faces from the White House in verifiable statements that have been reproduced in mainstream media outlets, they suddenly and magically cannot seem to see it.

Perhaps it may be that it is difficult to understand why that contradiction exists until you look at the socio-economic class dimension. Perhaps they choose not to notice the Zionism issue now, because it’s the case that it is inconvenient for them financially, given that most Trump voters are middle class and may believe that they stand to gain from the Trump administration’s budgetary, financial and economic policy direction. Or perhaps it is the case that they are just really bad at politics and aren’t paying attention to what is happening, and are more interested in identitarian form and signalling, than in actual policy. Or maybe it is the case that there is a kind of ongoing entryism which is usually not visible to the public but which only is revealed in short glimpses, such as, for example, when it emerged that Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine had actually been writing for the old AlternativeRight.com website in 2010. Or it could be some combination of all of these things.

Whatever the case happens to be, for all those who ever believed in anything that those people previously said, these present developments can only be seen as a betrayal. If they are ‘the vanguard’ and this is what they have produced, then they have a considerable amount of explaining to do.

Unfortunately with the situation as it is, I am not expecting that an explanation will be coming from them, but I am expecting that the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite opinion-formers will continue to act as a kind of grassroots support for the Trump administration, one which will have a high resilience and effectiveness because it couples a tacit support with a consistent pseudo-denial of actually being on the same side as the administration. We hear on the one hand the Alt-Right continually saying that they are ‘not Trump’, but then on the other hand they like the specific actions the administration is doing and its overall direction which they see as a ‘stepping stone’ (to where?), they just wish that that those actions would be done with more intensity.

The effective function of the Alt-Right internet presence is basically that they remain engaged on social media as a ‘grassroots’ presence which continually presents narratives and arguments that serve to socially legitimate Trump administration spokespersons, supporters and key cabinet figures and their policy preferences in a way that is completely independent of the state, as it is done at arms length, behind a veil of denial and disavowal by the White House itself. The bonus that the White House receives in all of this is that there is no-one who has to be paid or instructed to do this for them. The Alt-Right doesn’t need to be paid, they do it for free.

Introduction

Dossier Begins

Getting started: This article is about one facet in the process of the Trump administration making its programme operational. The first operational step that the American high-bourgeoisie are taking is that they are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy as their second step, with minimal interference at home. That second step is outside the scope of this article and will be covered at a later date. The first step is what will now be described here today.

Enhanced dictatorship of the high-bourgeoisie

There are four major actions that the Trump administration is carrying out right now which would allow the American high-bourgeoisie to enhance their structural power domestically. These actions are as follows:

1. H.R.985 - Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.
2. H.R.720 - Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act.
3. The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States.
4. The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation.

Let’s go through them in the order I’ve listed them. And in case you are trying to guess what the four items have in common, yes, what all of these things have in common is that they pertain to the ability to form a class so as to bring a class action lawsuit against companies or government agencies, and to raise funds to carry out that endeavour.

H.R.985

When people are facing systemic abuse from companies or from government agencies, class action lawsuits are a vital tool that is used to bring a halt to their behaviour. By bringing about a class action lawsuit, a few people can stand in for a larger number of people in a lawsuit against a perpetrator and seek either injunctive relief (where the perpetrator must cease a bad practice) or compensation (monetary damages).

The bill, H.R.985 which passed in the US House of Representatives by recorded vote 220 - 201 on Thursday 09 March 2017, and will next be placed before the US Senate, is a bill that makes it more difficult for people to bring class action lawsuits.

Bill H.R.985 makes it harder for people to form a ‘class’ by further restricting and constraining the criteria under which people may come together to bring a case, and placing various hurdles in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, thus decreasing the incentive for lawyers to take on class action lawsuits.

The net effect of this is that it will sharply reduce the ability of people to seek injunctive relief or compensation in any scenario where they are being harmed by a company or a government agency.

The architects of the bill and its proponents, such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), have tried to mask their intentions by presenting it to the media as a bill that is designed to prevent supposedly-existent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, by which they mean a kind of ‘trolling’ litigation which is designed to enrich lawyers rather than address any actual grievance of the plaintiffs. By masking their intentions with such a cover story, the lawmakers have sought to conceal the actual reality of the attack which they themselves are conducting against working people and families.

The factor which exposes their cover story as a lie, is the simple fact that if they really thought that they needed to write a bill to prevent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, then they wouldn’t have written a bill that attacks people’s ability to seek injunctive relief, in which money is not awarded but practices are changed, as well as compensation. However, that is precisely what they have done, and in doing so, their motive was revealed along with the effect.

On the issue of the hurdles placed in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, the bill deliberately limits lawyers’ fees in injunctive relief cases to “a reasonable percentage of the value” of the relief. This of course makes no sense, by design, because it is quite impossible for a court to determine what the monetary worth of a non-monetary action is, so as to calculate such a percentage. The effect is that lawyers would be disincentivised from taking the risk of bringing an injunctive class action case.

Furthermore, the bill also places a condition on the timing of the payment of lawyers’ fees to the date of full monetary recovery. This could even sometimes deny lawyers the ability to be paid their fees altogether, since some cases have a term of settlement that is longer than the remaining lifespan of the lawyers who are working on the case. For example, in a case where full settlement is expected to take fifty years, it would mean that the lawyers would not be paid until the end of those fifty years. Even with that potentially disastrous scenario aside, with regards to the duration of the litigation itself, the condition incentivises defendants to drag out and prolong litigation.

The possibility of never receiving lawyers’ fees or having to wait years to receive them, will act as an enormous deterrent for any law firm that absolutely requires those fees to pay their staff and keep their business running.

H.R.720

H.R.720 the so-called ‘Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act’ is a cunningly named bill which will actually require all federal judges to penalise any lawyer who brings what they consider to be a ‘frivolous lawsuit’. Up until now, it has up to the judge’s discretion to decide whether to do this.

The interesting thing about this is that for a lawsuit to actually make it to the point where it has come before a jury, it means that a judge clearly already considers it to be a valid lawsuit. Legislation like H.R.720, simply incentivises the behaviour where a defendant can continually protest that everything that is happening is ‘frivolous’, and it disincentivises lawyers from trying to bring a lawsuit to find out how it will be regarded.

In practice, this means that the legislative and executive branches of US government are seeking to attack lawyers for trying to help people to seek relief or compensation through the court system. After all, a corporate defendant would likely start out from the stance that any lawsuit brought against their esteemed selves is definitely ‘frivolous’.

The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS

An ‘originalist’ Judge Neil Gorsuch, having previously been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by George W. Bush on 08 August 2006, has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Donald J. Trump. A decent summary of his background has been written at FiveThirtyEight.

Beltway conservatives immediately feted him as having come out of the mold of another now late ‘originalist’ Judge Antonin Scalia, or at least something close to that. Evangelicals celebrated Gorsuch’s statements about his belief in the ‘pro-life’ stance, as that is a pet issue of maximal all-consuming importance to them. 

The Alt-Lite and Alt-Right’s reaction to the nomination was in a sense no more sophisticated or diligent than that of any of the other groups. Hunter Wallace published a very strange article at Alt-Right.com which referred to Gorsuch as a “real American”, as though this were a reason for why he wanted to see Gorsuch nominated in and of itself. Richard Spencer produced an article which had a similarly strange central thrust, referring to Gorsuch as “America’s wise, WASPy dad—an avatar of the ruling class of days gone by.” Spencer’s view was echoed by James Edwards on the Political Cesspool, which carried Spencer’s article verbatim. 

In my view none of this matters anyway, but while ‘Gorsuch’ may be an old Anglo-Saxon name, the man himself is ancestrally Irish. Additionally, Gorsuch was raised as a Catholic, and then he converted to Episcopalianism later, so he is not a ‘WASP’. He’s also not America’s ‘dad’, he’s a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, for goodness sake.

Unfortunately no real analysis of Gorsuch’s views on class action lawsuits has been done by anyone in the nationalist sphere. If anyone had chosen to do so, then some extremely meaningful patterns, all of which are negative, would have emerged into view immediately.

SCOTUSblog gives us an interesting look in with the summary containing this excerpt:

Amy Howe / SCOTUSblog, ‘A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions’, 08 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

Covering the Wal-Mart decision for this blog, Lyle Denniston described Scalia as the court’s “most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation.” Whether Gorsuch, if confirmed, would follow in Scalia’s footsteps remains to be seen. During his decade on the bench, Gorsuch has participated in relatively few class action cases. In the cases involving class action issues in which he has participated, he has generally, but not always, ruled for the defense. Notably, both in cases in which he has ruled for the defense and those in which he has ruled for the plaintiffs, Gorsuch has emphasized the need for courts to stay in their lane, so to speak – that is, not to exceed their authority, particularly when it comes to decisions that are in his view best left to Congress.

[...]

The Bazelon Center has a review which also contains some example of cases that were not class action lawsuits, but seem to give some idea of how Gorsuch interprets civil rights law in general:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Hwang v. Kansas State University, 753 F.3d 1159 (10th Cir. 2014), Judge Gorsuch wrote an opinion ruling against a longtime professor at a state university who had taken a six-month leave of absence to recover from her cancer treatment. At the end of that period, she requested a short period of additional leave at the advice of her doctor in order to avoid a severe flu outbreak on campus that could endanger her already compromised immune system. The university refused to grant additional leave. Judge Gorsuch began his analysis of Professor Hwang’s claim by asking: “Must an employer allow employees more than six months’ sick leave or face liability under the Rehabilitation Act? Unsurprisingly, the answer is almost always no.” Although the ADA and Rehabilitation Act say nothing about the length of leaves granted by employers and specifically require that that such accommodation requests be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, Judge Gorsuch held that a leave of absence as long as six months would “turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.” He also described Professor Hwang as “a problem other forms of social security aim to address”—even though the professor was willing and able to resume her duties through online classes immediately, or through in-class teaching after the additional short leave. Judge Gorsuch also rejected her argument that the university’s inflexible six-month leave policy was discriminatory, instead reasoning that applying the same leave policies to all employees, without providing reasonable accommodations for qualified employees with a disability, would protect employees with disabilities from being “secretly singled out for discriminatory treatment.” Judge Gorsuch thus concluded that the six-month leave policy was “more than sufficient to comply” with the Rehabilitation Act. [...]

I’m sure everyone can guess where these examples are going. Here’s another:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Wehrley v. American Family Mutual Insurance Company, 513 F. App’x 733 (10th Cir. 2013), a panel including Judge Gorsuch found that the plaintiff had not established that he had a disability that entitled him to the ADA’s protections. Wehrley, an insurance field claim adjuster, injured his knee and back in a workplace accident, and his employer fired him because of his inability to work on claims that involved going onto roofs. At trial, Wehrley introduced evidence of significant limitations in major life activities, including a medical report stating that he could not walk or stand for prolonged periods, that his pain disrupted his sleep, and that he had to change positions every 30 minutes while sitting. Judge Gorsuch and the panel concluded, however, that Wehrley had not shown that these impairments were substantial because the report did not say that he was unable to “walk or stand in the ordinary course of a day,” nor did it describe the extent or severity of the disruption to his sleep. Without sufficient evidence of a substantial impairment in a major life activity, the panel found that he did not meet the definition of a person with a disability.

And one more:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Adair v. City of Muskogee, 823 F.3d 1297 (10th Cir. 2016), Judge Gorsuch joined an opinion affirming summary judgment against the plaintiff after finding that he was unable to perform an essential function of his position. The plaintiff, a firefighter who held the position of HazMat Director, injured his back during a training exercise. The city required that he complete a functional-capacity evaluation, which showed that he had some restrictions on his lifting ability. He sued the city under the ADA for disability discrimination, alleging that he was constructively discharged when the city encouraged him to retire rather than be terminated because it regarded him as disabled. The plaintiff argued that he was capable of performing the essential functions of the HazMat Director position even with the lifting restrictions, testifying that he did not need to lift in his position and had never performed regular firefighter duties during his four years as HazMat Director. However, Judge Gorsuch and the panel discounted the plaintiff’s testimony and instead deferred to a state law listing the ability to lift up to 200 pounds as an essential function for all firefighters, regardless of specialized roles. Since the plaintiff suggested no potential accommodations other than being relieved of the lifting duty, the panel concluded that he was not a qualified individual under the ADA.

Being an ‘originalist’ and a ‘textualist’ seems to involve being deliberately absurd in ways that happen to be generally convenient for the defence. The addition of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States meshes with the thrust of the pieces of legislation, H.R.985 and H.R.720, which were described earlier and which are presently making their way though the US Congress, in a way that enhances their effect.

The addition of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court returns it to the balance that existed when Judge Antonin Scalia was still alive. It is not beyond possibility that sometime in the next four years another judge will be replaced, and at that point Donald Trump may even be able to appoint an additional ‘originalist’ and ‘textualist’ to the court, such as for example Judge William Pryor.

But it is sad that no one is paying any attention to these developments. Choices made during the Trump administration will shape the character of the American system for a generation or longer.

The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation

They suggested that it was going to happen, and now they are moving toward doing it. See here:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Work on the first Trump administration budget has been delayed as the budget office awaited Senate confirmation of former Representative Mick Mulvaney, a spending hard-liner, as budget director. Now that he is in place, his office is ready to move ahead with a list of nine programs to eliminate, an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to reorder the government and increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

[...]

Eliminating all funding for the Legal Services Corporation is the same thing as abolishing it. Some people may be wondering what it does, and such people would now be wondering about that at a time when it is too late to make a difference. Although the United States Constitution contains language that promises equality in the provision of justice, the language is operationally meaningless unless it can also be said that all people have the ability to access legal services and legal remedies.

Defendants in criminal cases are guaranteed the right to have a lawyer because of the outcome of the United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), but the same right to a lawyer does not actually exist for civil cases.

The beginning of the United States government’s effort to provide legal assistance Americans with low-income for civil cases, emerged during Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, which gave rise to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. In 1965, the office created the Legal Services Program, which provided assistance all over the United States.

However, the Legal Services Program was up for White House review in 1969, and the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was in existence because of the Economic Opportunity Act which was scheduled to expire in 1970.

President Richard M. Nixon, who took office in January 1969, asked the US Congress in February 1969 to extend appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Ash Commission, headed by former United States Army Air Corps Captain Roy Ash, found “virtual unanimity that organizational improvement of the Executive Office of the President is needed.” Among the recommendations made on this issue, the Ash Commission advocated that Nixon ought to create an independent corporation which would receive funds from the US Congress to disburse to local legal aid organisations.

Nixon made the memo public in February 1971 and in May 1971 he sent a special message to the US Congress proposing the establishment of the Legal Services Corporation.

On 25 July 1974, Richard M. Nixon signed the Legal Services Corporation Act.

The Legal Services Corporation has not been without controversy during its existence, and several unsuccessful attempts to abolish it have been attempted over the years. The most recent unsuccessful attempt to abolish it was in 2005:

TexasLawyersHelp.org, ‘Eliminate LSC and Other Programs, Says Republican Study Committee in “Operation Offset” Budget Report’, 30 Sep 2005 (emphasis added):

A recent report issued by the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of nearly 100 conservative House members, calls for the elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation. U.S. Representatives Mike Pence (R-IN), RSC’s chairman, and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), RSC’s budget and spending task force chairman, issued the 23-page report on September 21, 2005. The report—called “Operation Offset: RSC Budget Options 2005”—urges Congress and the President to eliminate federal expenditures as far-ranging as Medicaid and Medicare, graduate school student loan subsidies, foreign aid, the National Endowment for the Arts, matching grants for presidential candidates, and LSC. [...]

Yes, that is the same Mike Pence who is presently the Vice-President of the United States. It’s interesting how that has happened to work out.

Another interesting fact is that the Heritage Foundation which submitted the list from which Donald Trump selected Judge Neil Gorsuch’s name to nominate him to the United States Supreme Court, is also visibly active in crafting and giving legitimation to the budget which will abolish the Legal Services Corporation:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017:

[...]

Stephen Moore, another Heritage Foundation economist who advised Mr. Trump during his campaign, acknowledged that powerful constituencies were behind many of the programs that are on the chopping block. But he said now that Republicans are finally in control of the government, they must make a valiant effort to fulfill the promises they have been making to voters for years.

“I think it’s an important endeavor to try to get rid of things that are unnecessary,” Mr. Moore said. “The American public has a lot of contempt for how government is run in Washington, in no small part because there is so much waste.”

If you know anyone who seriously believes that the Heritage Foundation along with all the other personalities I’ve mentioned here are just innocently trying to ‘get rid of things that are unnecessary’, send that person to me, because I have a bridge to sell them — and it’s on the moon.

Conclusion

Particular factions among the American ruling class are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically in an environment in which they have total power over all branches of the government and are receiving virtually no criticism from their own constituency on any economic issues. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy.

Everything that the American ruling class is doing to pacify and constrict the power of their own constituents at home, is a preparation and a prerequisite for them being able to efficiently conduct a trade war against European, Asian, and Latin American states.

Enacting a tariff regime as a necessary centre-piece of the trade war is an action which will raise the cost of inputs for all American manufacturers. One of the ways that they will offset that cost will be to enable American companies to act in cost-cutting ways that disregard the interests of American workers and families without having to worry about being subjected to lawsuits brought by those workers and families.

Passing H.R.985 and H.R.720, as well as appointing Judge Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court and abolishing the Legal Services Corporation, are four key actions that are part of the process of them ‘moving the ball down the playing field’ in that regard.

Evidence has been presented here which illustrates that the entire edifice of ‘Make America Great Again’ is going to be constructed atop a foundation of socio-economic retrogression and misery.

Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.


Comments:


1

Posted by DanielS on Sun, 12 Mar 2017 14:09 | #

Great piece Kumiko, absolutely great piece. I have no disagreements but want to articulate something that is just off the radar of the post.

Kumiko: The wealth, limited though it is, and not without imperfection in its distribution, which is presently enjoyed by the peoples of Europe and Asia was re-built through hard years of work by the generation of people who survived the Second World War, and who, seeing their ideals crushed by the Americans, resolved to build their countries again during the Cold War.

DanielS: Turning attention to the American situation for a moment: down as I am with being down on America, let me focus on the case of White Americans: it cannot be said that they have not worked hard (workaholics if anything, albeit working in a way that will keep afloat the wrong ship - The USS race mixer and war monger against the wrong opponents); nor can I say, moreover, that among that working element there would not have been those whose ideal (ethno-nationalism) would have been crushed as well by the propositional ideal of America, their voice drowned out by its Jewish-liberal hegemony.

Any ethno-nationalist element would stand in stigmatic contrast to The American Constitution and to America’s halo post World War II and was liable to be thwarted no later than voiced - an ethno-nationalist ideal crushed by the propositional ideal; but even that was not entirely the fault of America or Americans: in the context of America, what could you say against Jews, blacks and by contrast on behalf of your EGI after Hitler got done going over the top and got defeated in his didacticism?

There are patterns among these hard working White Americans who want ethno-nationalism - that would, by definition, mean opposing ZOG, Zionism and its supremacsim, going against the right-wing broadly. That has been the default WN position (albeit insufficiently articulated), and will remain for those who are thinking and worth a damn.

This does not challenge your thesis, it merely calls attention that there is a latent, if unarticulated element in your post that is naturally allied and has both the productive work aspect along with the concrete connection to appreciate the necessity of social accountability provided in Left Nationalism - which is radically different from American patriotism. This contradicts nothing of what you say, but adds mention of an altercast of an unspoken ally - White Left ethno-nationalists.

My concern, of course, is that they will fail to recognize their allied cause in this if not granted the respect of an altercast that is both positive and accurately recognizing of their motives; they might not hear the message soon enough for wont of a simple distinction - they being the White Left as opposed to the White Right, “Alternative”, “Lite” or otherwise.

You may respond, well, not all right wingers are pro-Trump, some of them strongly oppose him - like the people at Renegade. My answer to that it is that right wing volatility and non-accountability has created susceptibility to the elitist quid pro quo sell out of group accountability - as the Alt Right has already done. Whereas in the case of Renegade - and other right wingers sympathetic to German National Socialism circa WWII - they take a detour through leftism inasmuch as it applies NS German social accountability, but remain, like Hitler, right wingers at heart, extending weak to no social accountability to other groups. Thus, even though they are treated as charming rogue fellow travelers of the Alt Right, theirs is a hubris that is bound to meet with disastrous conflict. This is obvious. This has the effect of making them untrustworthy, stigmatic, near impossible to cooperate with; and thus increases the tendency of other right wingers who are not naturally inclined to go with a German supremacist narrative and accountability (either because they are a mix of different Europeans or because they are of a European ethnicity which cannot relate to Nazi German identity), it makes them more susceptible as they remain on the right to go along with a White elitist, imperialist narrative, in reaction - none of those “petty distinctions” should be made from San Fancisco to Lisbon to Vladivstok - an amorphous White imperialism, conveniently flying in the face of ethno-nationalism to the satisfaction of the border shattering, hand rubbing Jewish interests who are pandering to offer their service in a quid pro quo with Jewish and Zionist supremacist imperialism ... to run rough shod over White ethno-nationalsms and its alliances.

That is why it is so important to offer this altercast of White Left ethno-nationalism, its accountability by contrast to the no-account Right, Alt Right and Alt Lite altercasts that Jews promote for Whites.


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Posted by DanielS on Sun, 12 Mar 2017 16:56 | #

DanielS: There are a few crucial issues that a person coming from foreign interests might not readily see when calling upon Whites to show ethno racial gumption in The Unites States: firstly foreigners might be unduly liberal for lack of experience and secondly unduly calling upon conservative or radical action, not realizing that if anyone did have sense enough to try to take on the issues despite the objectivist rubric of America, overt action would be a death knell; rather, they would have to take racial initiative implicitly if not covertly (which therefore would keep the ethnonationalist foreigner from awareness of what White American gumption exists). 

But to begin, they might not know from experience just how disconcerting having to deal with blacks in numbers can be in the everyday reality (in reality as opposed to TV and movies).

Secondly, foreigners might see Democratic policies abstractly, not as they apply to that offensive category of people as well, if not predominantly, and think to themselves, “hey!, the Democratic policies are pretty good, why would people vote Republican?” And it is true, they are right that they should not vote Republican, of course, certainly not for dog whistled implicit White racial interests either,  issues which are a concern of Republicans only inasmuch as they can be used by Jews and objectivists, to marshal the broad White American public votes their way - but implicit White response to Republican dog whistles among the poor is nevertheless a symptom in some, of desperation combined with their ignorance. Ok, you don’t need me making excuses for them and I won’t - but I am talking about the less powerful and educated ones now, not the ones chalking up 70K per year, with much leisure time to boot.

I realize that you are saying that they should have voted, preferring other Republican candidates, but if we are moving to a true radical position, the position is against ZOG - i.e., against both Democrats and Republicans, all of it.

And really, my to whom it may concern message is directed to the ones, the audience who are latent White ethno-natinalists, who didn’t vote for Trump at all.

Their voice, the voice that is supposed to rise up against the Republican Party, against the American system, against ZOG altogether is really up against a daunting challenge. It has been this way for decades and White class organization is only up against more difficulty as your piece shows. As my comment above points out, it has always been extremely difficult, stigmatic and dangerous in the context of America post WWII; not only to organize as explicit White ethnonationalists, but especially to vocalize opposition to Jews in recognition of their antagonism - look at the news items calling to action for the fight against “anti-Semitism” that I have placed under the piece discussing Jez Turner’s persecution. All I had to do was post the news articles that Google Alerts fed me on the topic for the past few days! Particularly given crypisis and the circumstances of America, its proposed opportunities in contrast to penalties for ant-Semitism post World War II, and I can say, yes, it has not been highly practical to try to bring down ZOG by means of the ballot-box nor by attempt to promote the explicit anti-Semitism necessary to under-gird knowledge to sustain a revolution.

On the other hand, there has been an implicit understanding of the problem of blacks, Jews and the unspoken-for White Class: While I do not want to be taken as an apologist for Nixon - don’t think he was a great man nor a great President - he did have some understanding of the lay of the land and the problems as such that were revealed through recordings of him. He was not radical enough and was obligated to approach the issues that he did get correctly in too indirect a way, but nevertheless, he does provide some essentially accurate insight into the problem of managing EGI given blacks, Jews and a proposition nation to run.

Democrats, because they are stupidly ok with blacks and Jews, can be more explicit about articulating social policies and, in a way, like Jews, often wield ideas that would be good..IF they were exercised over a heterogeneous populace and if, they were not weaponized by Jews against ordinary Whites, which they are. This is the part that foreigners lacking experience of America as a propositional nation confronted with Jews and blacks do not appreciate. Policies advocated by the democrats might be ok if not for the presence of blacks and Jews…let alone the agitation of the Soviets who tried to incite blacks and black interests against Whites.

Kumiko says, quite accurately and quite interestingly the following:

Kumiko: The beginning of the United States government’s effort to provide legal assistance Americans with low-income for civil cases, emerged during Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, which gave rise to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. In 1965, the office created the Legal Services Program, which provided assistance all over the United States.

DanielS: More than well and good IF these programs are not abused by blacks and Jews, which of course they will be given that blacks and Jews are thrown into the mix.

Kumiko: However, the Legal Services Program was up for White House review in 1969, and the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was in existence because of the Economic Opportunity Act which was scheduled to expire in 1970.

President Richard M. Nixon, who took office in January 1969, asked the US Congress in February 1969 to extend appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Ash Commission, headed by former United States Army Air Corps Captain Roy Ash, found “virtual unanimity that organizational improvement of the Executive Office of the President is needed.” Among the recommendations made on this issue, the Ash Commission advocated that Nixon ought to create an independent corporation which would receive funds from the US Congress to disburse to local legal aid organisations.

DanielS: this is in addition to other indications that Nixon had a decent, socially conscientious side - perhaps stemming from his modest, Quaker background.

Nor would we want for him to have not backed such program as the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Legal Services Program - but rather would want White ethno-nationalists, latent or otherwise, to NOT HAVE TO share the program with blacks (nor with Jews, knowing what Jews were about - which most of them did not yet).

Interestingly, however, Nixon got it in a sense -had a motive to make social programs available for the White Class while inhibiting black and Jewish exploitation thereof, despite recognizing that he couldn’t explicitly inhibit Jews and blacks from abuse of White social capital.

Nixon and Billy Graham on Jews.

Etc. That’s pretty well known.

But less well known is Nixon’s fairly charitable position with regard to the circumstances of the White Class as confronted by blacks:

Nixon was not against the caveat that I espouse (that blacks are a different animal, the nature of which liberals and foreigners might not understand - such that it requires that they not have the same access to White social resources), with his having famously said that it is key to keep blacks from taking advantage of social programs without punishing poor Whites.

I’ve heard an exact audio of Nixon saying, basically, “the key is how to keep from hurting poor Whites when taking defensive measures against blacks; you can’t say it publicly, but the problem is the blacks; they’ve never created and adequate civilization.” 

I can find the context, but not that exact part so far (only a paraphrase)...and I am surprised, as I distinctly recall having heard it.

Here is what is on line indicating that he was trying to protect White class interests from being taken advantage of by blacks:

Chicago Tribune, “Haldeman Gives Us The `Real’ Nixon”, 18 May 1994:

Nixon: ’‘The problem with the overall welfare plan is that it forces poor whites into same position as blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality.”

The Nation, “Fortress America”, 27 Sept 2016:

“Nixon’s reluctance to fund black-community initiatives was rooted in racism. “There has never in history been an adequate black nation,” Nixon opined to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “and they are the only race of which this is true.”

Here he would have said (to paraphrase): Nixon: “the key is how to keep from hurting poor Whites when taking defensive measures against blacks - you can’t say it publicly, but the problem is the blacks; they’ve never created and adequate civilization.” 

Drew Dellinger, “What’s missing from the stories on Ehrlichman, Nixon, and the racist “War on Drugs”? Haldeman’s corroborating quote.”, 25 March 2016:

President Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Daily Kos, “Quote From the Diary: “… the whole problem is really the blacks.”, 16 Feb 2016:

“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue … that we couldn’t resist it.” The other German Shepherd, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary in 1969.

“[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that while not appearing to.”

NY Times, “Haldeman diary shows that Nixon was wary of Blacks and Jews”, 18 May 1994:

Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.

The Nation, “Fortress America: How 20th-century liberals helped create our age of mass incarceration.”, 27 Sept 2016:

Once Nixon became president, Hinton writes, he wasn’t the law-and-order innovator that many have suggested; instead, he followed in Johnson’s (and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy’s) footsteps. The newly created Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, an outgrowth of Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Act, would prove piv­otal. If Johnson developed the idea of funneling federal dollars to states for the War on Crime, Nixon perfected it: During his presidency, the LEAA’s budget grew more than a dozenfold, from $63 million in 1969 to $871 million in 1974. Only about 2 percent of the LEAA’s support for urban police departments went to tenant patrols or other community-based law-enforcement programs. Nixon’s reluctance to fund black-community initiatives was rooted in racism. “There has never in history been an adequate black nation,” Nixon opined to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “and they are the only race of which this is true.”


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Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 03:22 | #

Well, I wasn’t keen on getting into the details, but yes, the unreserved approving nod I gave to Richard M. Nixon in my article for his having developed the Legal Services Corporation, was entirely intentional and was supposed to be on the subtlest level of subtext, as it is a signal that I didn’t actually want everyone to immediately pick up. Usually when people choose to praise Nixon for something, they will qualify it or moderate it by mentioning that they didn’t like the broad thrust of his presidency, or something like that, but my omission in that regard – the fact that I simply presented the nice story and carried on without ‘balancing’ it against something negative – was supposed to be a subtle signal that I was giving a nod to the people who had supported Nixon.

Since you did mention all of that, though, I will address it. From my perspective, yes, Nixon seemed to be brutally aware of the realities that were unfolding all around him, he was what could be referred to as “kindof sortof our guy” (to the extent that it is ever possible to have a ‘guy’ in America) if you look at the trajectory he was on.

New order

It was after all Richard Nixon who went to China and shook hands with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, at just the correct time as Japan was also signing the treaty of amity and friendship (read: shared enemies and cash-money) with China, during the phase when the Sino-Soviet split was occurring. Something was clearly happening and the world was being reordered. That moment in China, now immortalised in a photograph of Nixon and Mao smiling at each other, would form an inflection point in not only the Cold War, but human history itself, as that moment was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

The completion of the economic encirclement of the Soviet Union, through allowing China to become host to a new wave of economic development from the technologically more sophisticated West which wanted to break free of the post-war Keynesian Atlantic ‘shackles’ and to circulate capital into a new market, was an action that has produced one of the greatest and most surprising success stories in history. David Rockefeller was later to comment that “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.” That’s what he meant, and he was correct.

I would add to that that they may have had a little help from the fact that Britain and the United States tacitly permitted Central Asian drug trafficking groups to ram whole mountains of heroin into Russia as a social disruptor (the fully awesome effect of which would not be visible to the global public until after 1991), and that inducing Russia to consume time and resources in an increasingly absurd arms race on all geographic sides, along with the demoralising effect on their population and armed forces which set in after Russia’s disastrously stupid decision to cut-and-run from Afghanistan (the moment that they did that, they had discredited in the eyes of their citizens and even in the eyes of the veterans themselves, the only social institution in the USSR that nationalists and separatists had really feared – the Red Army which up until then had seemed ‘invincible’), left the Russians with very little room for manoeuvre in the social domain.

Actors at the time were not able to fully understand just how much they had actually devastated the Soviet Union, and how the devastation that they had inflicted from outside would merge with the endemic problems of the Soviet economy and the barely-lidded pot of ethno-racial repression which was simmering, and so they were not able to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It’s like when you punch someone, you don’t always know immediately just how badly you’ve hurt that person. But with the advances in the social sciences since then, and numerous studies into how it happened, it has become possible to gauge the resilience of a rival social order and estimate the probable time of its defeat so that it becomes possible to act even more comprehensively. The lessons of that comprehensive – and frankly, deserved – beating which was administered to Russia are still applicable today, but I won’t focus on it too much because that is not my intention in this thread.

Some lost potential

The biggest downside that was present during Nixon’s presidency – one which he basically inherited – was of course the Vietnam War, since while all sides of that conflict were able to get the kind of experience in every area of modern combat (everything from some of the more sublime elements of communications operations, right across into new – at the time – manufacturing techniques for weapons platform manufacturers) and a lot of the best practices that are taken for granted now were learned by trial and error during that war on either the American or Vietnamese (and semi-covertly, Chinese) side; at the same time it was an incredible waste of resources when looked at from the perspective of ‘what were the global priorities?’

If the United States had not gotten sucked into the Vietnam conflict – which was essentially a nationalist conflict presented through an economic lens rather than a function of Soviet internationalism – and had instead applied the concepts that they were exploring in Low Intensity Warfare to conflict zones in Central Asia and strategic areas of Africa with special forces of a limited size, who can possibly ever guess what enormous benefits could have been brought to the millions of people who really genuinely needed to be brought out from underneath the really-existing Soviet internationalist boot-heel?

Demand destruction and money laundering as a progressive force

Regarding the ‘War on Drugs’, again you are saying very openly something that I wonder if it’s right to speak openly of. It is possible for a person to say that the ‘War on Drugs’ was the perfect scheme since it would allow the United States to address – in its own strange way – the problem of social disorder caused by African-American gangs since they were associated with the consumption of the products and could thus be legally attacked by law enforcement as a result of the efficacy of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution being weakened. From the other angle, having the product be illegal and culling the consumers themselves, artificially elevated the price of the product so that Latin American, Asian, and European state and non-state actors who were either overt or implicit ‘allies’ of the United States could dump the product inside the United States for massive profit and use those easy cash flows to fund certain covert actions off-the-books, or alternately rinse the money through financial centres in the geographical locations that were undergoing vital economic development at the time.

‘Normal people’ might find that confluence of agendas to be morally shocking, but those who understand the components of state formation would find it completely pedestrian, and in fact necessary. Which is why, while it is possible to say it, I wouldn’t advise a person to say it among ‘normal people’.

Lobbyist wars

And yes, I agree that you are correct when you say that it seems on the basis of the taped recordings and diary entries of key figures in that administration, Richard Nixon was aware of the problems of the Zionist lobby in Washington. He would be one of the first Republicans to actively face it down in its post-war form, and the last Republican to try to actively fight against it on the hill would be George H.W. Bush in 1988, who characterised himself as “one lonely guy” against “a myriad lobbyists on the hill.” On the side of the Democratic party, the last administration to actively try to fight it was Barack Obama’s, as the Obama administration endeavoured to cement the Iran deal as a matter of basic bread-and-butter geostrategy and found itself immediately under attack from a concerted array of psychological operations from Israel and its assets, which finally culminated in Israel getting four-square behind the candidacy of Donald J. Trump as their ‘solution’ to that deal.

I understand that history is ‘complicated’ – and this post barely begins to scratch the surface of it – and that there was always a struggle over the direction that the United States would end up taking. I just believe now that in the present period, the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ concept has really manifested in a way that is not a theory anymore, but an actual reality. The people who first came up with that concept as a way of describing some of the things that they were seeing, were not wrong, they were simply ahead of their time. If they were around now to see the Trump administration, they’d see that it is now a terrible reality.

There was never simply ‘America’. There was really a fluid situation as America was ‘for sale’ as all governments are functions of the outworking of economic processes intersecting with social groups (class, race, etc), in which it was always a question of whether there would be a ‘certain kind of America’. Perhaps four or five possible futures were in the cards and different interest groups were invested in each of those futures. It’s possible to know that the future-vision which has become a sad reality is a confirmed ‘Zionist Occupied Government’ now, because it has this week reached the point where diplomats visiting the United States don’t even visit the State Department first in order to find out what’s going on anymore. Instead, the pattern is now that diplomats tend to make appointments with the White House to see Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, or Gary Cohn. That’s the level of ‘jacking that things have reached now. Quite deadly seriously.

That particular revealed preference on the part of diplomats, shows that there is wide perception in the world that it is Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, and Gary Cohn, who hold the most decisive pull within the network of relationships in the Trump administration. For those analysts who are racially aware (ie, all analysts), this will not be an insignificant observation. It is a strong signal about the way the United States is now being run.


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Posted by DanielS on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 04:42 | #

Kumiko: Regarding the ‘War on Drugs’, again you are saying very openly something that I wonder if it’s right to speak openly of. It is possible for a person to say that the ‘War on Drugs’ was the perfect scheme since it would allow the United States to address – in its own strange way – the problem of social disorder caused by African-American gangs since they were associated with the consumption of the products and could thus be legally attacked by law enforcement as a result of the efficacy of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution being weakened. From the other angle, having the product be illegal and culling the consumers themselves, artificially elevated the price of the product so that Latin American, Asian, and European state and non-state actors who were either overt or implicit ‘allies’ of the United States could dump the product inside the United States for massive profit and use those easy cash flows to fund certain covert actions off-the-books, or alternately rinse the money through financial centres in the geographical locations that were undergoing vital economic development at the time.

‘Normal people’ might find that confluence of agendas to be morally shocking, but those who understand the components of state formation would find it completely pedestrian, and in fact necessary. Which is why, while it is possible to say it, I wouldn’t advise a person to say it among ‘normal people’.

DanielS: In regard to White ethno national consciousness and the working out of the necessity, they should agree with your point that the “war on drugs” was a valid covert means - although indeed a necessarily covert means of working out a different social system for dealing with blacks within the American system, Whites should not necessarily be against the American war on drugs - not inasmuch as it is meant really to combat black crime with the excuse of going after dealers and consumers; but a problem that I’m calling attention to is that the covertness did create problems for the understanding of the ordinary White and obviously for foreigners who did not know the necessity and means for combating black hyper assertiveness. It made Whites seem unfair and retarded in the eyes of those who were looking at these things from a distance and on the objective surface, and contributed an argument to their anti-racism.

DanielS: An outstanding comment with a brilliant, laser ending:

Kumiko: There was never simply ‘America’. There was really a fluid situation as America was ‘for sale’ as all governments are functions of the outworking of economic processes intersecting with social groups (class, race, etc), in which it was always a question of whether there would be a ‘certain kind of America’. Perhaps four or five possible futures were in the cards and different interest groups were invested in each of those futures. It’s possible to know that the future-vision which has become a sad reality is a confirmed ‘Zionist Occupied Government’ now, because it has this week reached the point where diplomats visiting the United States don’t even visit the State Department first in order to find out what’s going on anymore. Instead, the pattern is now that diplomats tend to make appointments with the White House to see Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, or Gary Cohn. That’s the level of ‘jacking that things have reached now. Quite deadly seriously.

That particular revealed preference on the part of diplomats, shows that there is wide perception in the world that it is Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, and Gary Cohn, who hold the most decisive pull within the network of relationships in the Trump administration. For those analysts who are racially aware (ie, all analysts), this will not be an insignificant observation. It is a strong signal about the way the United States is now being run.

DanielS: It seems to me that we have enough knowledge accumulating about Jews, blacks and Arabs/Muslims (and liberals for that matter) that we can handle being more explicit and in fact probably need to be - “covertness” now is more a matter of style - not being blatant and unnecessarily vulgar. If our aim is not genocide and exploitation we have nothing to hide. Openness will allow us to deal with their “good” and formidable sides as well as dealing with their destructive sides in a way that articulates a reasoned criteria - such that it cannot be libeled as “irrational prejudice.”


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Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Mon, 13 Mar 2017 06:07 | #

In principle it would be nice to be able to just openly describe the world as it is all the time, but people just don’t seem to be ready for that. Even here among people who claim to be “aware of racial interests”, I am subjected to consistent criticism from certain quarters of the so-called ‘movement’ because I say a lot of things that are inconvenient to Israeli interests.

For example, recall that Colin Liddel told me that my views are “Nazistic in the extreme”, and recall that Ted Sallis describes me as “an oriental creature” who engages in “Jew-baiting”, as though baiting were even required at this point.

That is from people who you would think ought to know better than to be literally acting like the ADL’s pet parrots, so if I cannot even get people in a movement that is commonly understood as being ‘against Israeli power’ in the popular perception to show me basic courtesy and to entertain my viewpoints, then imagine how much more difficult it is among ‘normal people’ who don’t know anything other than what popular media and their American schooling told them to believe about Israel?

Quite often, the only way to effectively counteract Israeli lobbyist influence is to do it behind 1001 layers of abstraction and obfuscation. Especially when talking to White Americans, since the extent to which they are confused about everything cannot be underestimated.

Even among self-described ‘anti-Semites’ they seem incapable of actually producing anti-Zionist results. I mean take for example the Alt-Right. We are talking about a group of people who non-ironically helped to elect Donald Trump’s administration on purpose while professing to be ‘anti-Semitic’ – or ‘counter-Semitic’ as some of them like to call themselves now – and who then proceeded to call anyone who disagreed with this absurdity ‘anti-White’.

There’s a meme on 4chan that goes, “What timeline are we in?” I sometimes have to wonder that aloud, when we are presently in an epoch where Mexican restaurant owners in El Paso, Texas; Indian students in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Japanese real-estate developers in New York; and Chinese and Korean dilettante princesses spending their parents’ money in Los Angeles, California, have – objectively speaking – been doing more to harm Jewish interests in America by mere historical accident than the concerted and supposedly informed efforts of the nucleus of the Alt-Right have done during this electoral cycle and probably any future one.

The Alt-Right has actually produced such an incredibly retarded outcome with the election of Donald Trump, that it makes you think that if the deliberate assets of Zionist Israel had been presented with this scenario and had been asked to choose an electoral playbook, they would have chosen nothing different from what the Alt-Right has actually done.

So the situation is pretty bad, and seeing how it is now, I don’t know when it will be getting better, if ever.


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Posted by Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017 23:22 | #

I don’t think so…the free trade mantra is the tired old “Blairite” orthodoxy of the past few decades.  First, the world develops - free trade and open borders liberalism may have been a solution to previous problems (though I doubt it) though it is not the solution now or in the future.

The imbalances of this approach have been shown by the export of manufacturing jobs to China, of IT jobs to India, the suction effect of population from Europe and the Middle East to Germany etc.  Making everything “free” or “open” does not work in the long term - a conservative approach to what each society needs and wants - i.e. democracy - is what matters.

As regards the US this is especially obvious.  The economy has benefitted a minority and disadvantaged everyone else.  The US SHOULD BE immensely wealthy and something is going badly wrong if it isn’t…that is the long and short of it.  I doubt that Blairism was every the answer….it certainly isn’t the answer for today or tomorrow….


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Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sun, 19 Mar 2017 04:28 | #

I don’t think that I’m doing Blairism, what I’m doing is simply reality. So I’ll respond to each section of your response:

Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017, wrote:

First, the world develops - free trade and open borders liberalism may have been a solution to previous problems (though I doubt it) though it is not the solution now or in the future.

I never said “and open borders”. I neither said anything supportive of ‘open borders’ for human travellers at any point in my article, nor did I say anything that would even lead to such an outcome as an eventual consequence.

Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017, wrote:

The imbalances of this approach have been shown by the export of manufacturing jobs to China, of IT jobs to India,

It’s weird how a scenario in which America gets to have everything is seen as “balance” by you, and a scenario in which other population groups get something and are able to move toward a multipolar world is called “imbalance” by you. For you to have got those definitions so completely backward is a symptom of how much the United States has been able to control the narrative.

In actuality, the real imbalance would be having most of the world’s top jobs contained inside of the United States, and thus having the United States being the most powerful country on earth which can use its structural economic power to guide monetary policy for the entire planet (Federal Reserve leading), which in turn imbues the United States with outsized soft political power on a global level. That would be imbalance.

Balance on the other hand would be the offshoring of productive capacity out of America and into the semi-periphery and the periphery, for example, toward countries you mentioned such as China and India, and a diffusion and dilution of American power as a consequence. Imagine a world in which rather than acting unilaterally and then having everyone else adapt to what they do, the United States instead would have to seriously consider what the economic reaction in say, Tokyo, Beijing, Madrid, Warsaw, London, Seoul, or New Delhi, etc, was going to be, before deciding to do something. That would be balance.

Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017, wrote:

the suction effect of population from Europe and the Middle East to Germany etc.

Mass migration into Germany is not caused by free trade policy.

Rather, it is caused by an obfuscated form of protectionism, coupled with the fact that the German government actually wants to kill Germans.

The latter reason needs no explanation since it’s been covered a thousand times here. So I’ll address the former reason alone.

In all cases of advanced economies, you are either generally going to have two options:
1. offshore old manufacturing jobs and have low migration (assuming your government isn’t trying to kill you), or
2. retain all old manufacturing jobs and pay business owners to be inefficient, and have high levels of migration to staff those inefficient jobs.

Germany is presently on option two. Rather than offshoring its manufacturing jobs to the rest of the world and cutting the size of its population, Germany is instead deciding to invite all of Eastern and Southern Europe and now most recently Arabia to reside in Germany and increase the ‘German’ population so that German businesspeople can keep all the productive capacity in Germany and thus under German legal and political jurisdiction.

ECB policy preferences are used to accomplish this by enforcing fiscal austerity and tight monetary policy, which acts as a kind of obfuscated protectionism for German industry, cloaked in a moral phraseology about ‘thrift’ and ‘responsibility’. Germany has refused to support other countries’ fiscal flexibility and has almost always refused to back measures to help with pan-European growth whenever they happen to involve risk-sharing across the Eurozone. Despite being repeatedly told by the IMF and the OECD to increase spending so as to assist growth, Germany has basically refused. Its current account surplus is now 7% of GDP, and they are in the midst of inviting the whole of Iraq and Syria into Germany to ‘get jobs’.

That is not free trade. That is actually an obfuscated form of protectionism.

Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017, wrote:

Making everything “free” or “open” does not work in the long term - a conservative approach to what each society needs and wants - i.e. democracy - is what matters.

What does this even mean?

Peter J on Sat, 18 Mar 2017, wrote:

As regards the US this is especially obvious.  The economy has benefitted a minority and disadvantaged everyone else.  The US SHOULD BE immensely wealthy and something is going badly wrong if it isn’t…that is the long and short of it.

The United States is in fact the wealthiest country in the world, period, by a significant margin. That is actually the manifestation of a problem and it is a sign that something went badly wrong quite a while ago.

You know what would be really nice? Wealth and geopolitical clout-potential (wealth is a means to an end after all, not an end in itself) accumulating in places other than America and Germany. That would be nice.

If you disagree, it just means that you and I are working at cross-purposes to each other.

My basic summarised stance is this: I don’t believe that the purpose for human existence is to create market distortions which are specially crafted to seize my money and jam it into the wallets of whining American or German businesspeople, regardless of whether the instrument used to jam my money into their wallets is via new tariffs and fiscal policy on the one hand (overt) or via monetary policy on the other hand (obfuscated). No amount of crying or storytelling by them is ever going to get me to endorse their effectively protectionist border taxes, be it the overt protectionist tax that Trump is now introducing or the obfuscated array of protectionist stealth-taxes that Merkel has been quietly using all along. I don’t want to pay.


8

Posted by Kami-Shirataki station on Sat, 14 Sep 2019 16:31 | #

Railway company plans to close station - then it discovers who only customer is

Daily Mirror, 14 Sep 2019:

Anybody who has to commute on a regular basis will know the pain of cancelled services and unreliable timetables all too well.

Wouldn’t it be great if the services would revolve around our lives and turn up exactly when we need them to?

So you can just imagine the groans and despairs from commuters when the Hokkaido Railway Company announced it was going to close down a rural station in the north of Japan.

Well, not quite. It turned out the remote station was being used by only one person each day.

Every school day at 7.04am, a girl would hop on the train at Kami-Shirataki station, then at 5.08pm she would return again, the Telegraph reported .

After the railway company discovered the identity of the station’s only customer, it did something amazing.

Rather than press ahead with the closure, Hokkaido decided it would keep the station open until the girl graduates from high school.

When the story of the train company’s incredible gesture surfaced on Reddit, users were quick to point out the difference between Japan and other countries.

One person said: “That’s a society that values education.”

Another added: “Providing access to rail is considered to be a social responsibility, so much so that large portions of the network (into rural Japan) are entirely unprofitable and rely on subsidisation by the rest.

“The average citizen holds the same belief, however, and so is happy to pay the ‘inflated’ ticket prices.”

It certainly had a huge impact to the girl who was still able to make it to class each day.


9

Posted by mancinblack on Sat, 14 Sep 2019 17:35 | #

lol Kami means spirit in Japanese, so is it a ghost station? Unfortunately for the story (and for the standards at the Mirror) the station in question is actually Kyu - Shirataki which is two stops down the line from Kami- Shirataki. One might say it’s a no Kyu station.


10

Posted by Japanese street food exotica on Tue, 21 Apr 2020 18:30 | #

This Japanese scene is incredibly exotic.


11

Posted by mancinblack on Wed, 22 Apr 2020 12:45 | #

Record of the musket (Teppo-ki) 1606. Japanese account of the first meeting with Europeans (Portuguese).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZnaCel6LdU



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