Let me tell you something.  The real barbarians are those who live under a barbaric order and accept it.  Barbarians are quite okay with the fact that the existing regime treats some of its “own” people barbarically.

The barbarians are INSIDE the gate.

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By HOLBROOK MOHR
Associated Press Writer

LAUREL, Miss. –

The largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history has caused panic among Hispanic families in this small southern Mississippi town, where federal agents rounded up nearly 600 plant workers suspected of being in the country illegally.

One worker caught in Monday’s sweep at the Howard Industries transformer plant said fellow workers applauded as immigrants were taken into custody. Federal officials said a tip from a union member prompted them to start investigating several years ago.

Applauding as your fellow workers are arrested — their only crime to sneak into this country hoping to provide for their families?

One person snitching is one thing.  Other people complacent, I could understand.  But standing there like someone who has no clue what his or her own real place is in the world — with no clue that the bosses only distinguish between workers to the extent that they can get away with screwing some of them more than others — with no intuition born of long, hot days, let alone historical knowledge, that workers have always been helpless when disunited — and banging your hands together like a buffoon, as if they were doing all this for you?  As if your birthright were being reclaimed, when your status as a wage slave is simply being confirmed?

In Mississippi, things used to be all black and white — literally.  If you were white, you could speak out; if you were black, you kept your head down to stay alive.  Mind you, if you were white and you didn’t agree with any of this, you were well advised to keep your mouth tightly shut.

Immigration, on any sizable scale, is a pretty new thing in Mississippi.  Like most of the South, it historically received far fewer immigrants than the rest of the country.  But historically, and still today, it has the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.

Despite that, it’s one of the most Republican states, because the whites vote so overwhelmingly for the party of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

It wasn’t always like this.  Back in the days of the one-party Democratic South, Mississippi was the second-most Democratic state in the country (after South Carolina).  This started changing in 1948, when Truman came out for civil rights, but as late as 1960, no Republican presidential candidate had secured even 40% of the vote in Mississippi since 1872 — back during Reconstruction, when Black people could actually vote.

Then came 1964.  Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection after shepherding the historic Civil Rights Act through Congress, banning most forms of racial segregation and discrimination.  The Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, who had led the opposition to the bill.

Johnson won 61.1% of the national popular vote — the highest percentage since they started tabulating a national popular vote in 1824.  Goldwater got only 38.5%.

In Mississippi, however, Goldwater got 87% of the vote.

Now, bear in mind that in those days, black people pretty much couldn’t vote in the state.  Because of literacy tests and other laws designed to disenfranchise them, administered by racist registrars, plus the ever-present threat of violence, the black registration rate in Mississippi was only 5%.

Johnson, after winning his landslide reelection, got the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.  Black voter registration stunningly went up to 70% in time for the 1968 election.  Democrat Hubert Humphrey got 23% of the Mississippi vote — almost all of it from blacks — while segregationist George Wallace romped to a landslide victory with 63.5%.  Richard Nixon, en route to the White House, came in third with a mere 13.5% of the Mississippi ballot.

The Republicans have been winning the state ever since, presidentially, and, more recently, on the Congressional and state levels as well.  They can’t get 87% of the vote any more — the Voting Right Act saw to that.  In the delta region along the Mississippi river, where African-Americans have been the majority population since slavery days, most local offices have passed from ultra-racist whites to blacks since the civil rights movement.  But statewide, racist, Confederate-sympathizing whites can still outvote anyone of a different hue or persuasion.

As in the rest of the Deep South, wages are low and laws privilege corporations over workers with a Victorian savagery, with few of the nuances of job safety, state minimum wage laws, and organizing rights seen elsewhere in the country, however inconsistently.  Unions are profoundly unpopular among whites, because of memories of strikes carried out by overwhelmingly black unions — and because unions can only function when ALL working people, black, white, brown, or otherwise, band together.

Mississippi:  the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The wackadoos are in full command. Not only do they have two of the three branches of the government in their pockets, but the Congress is theirs for the asking too (see the right-wing extremist FISA bill they’re about to pass).  Now their judicial arm has created a new Constitutional “right,” just for the wackadoos.  Brass knuckles are illegal, but guns are too safe for the government to ban.  God bless America.

Incidentally, the above-quoted AP lede is dead wrong–it was by no means “the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.”  The Supreme Court had ruled AGAINST the Second Amendment having any relevance to gun control laws over and over again in rulings going back to the 19th century.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Until the reign of general idiocy that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is only just beginning to end, no one but gun wackos bothered quoting that irrelevant Amendment–or rather, quoting the second half of it, since the “well regulated militia” part never did their cause much good.

“Keep and bear arms”?  Nobody does that any more.  Members of the National Guard–which is today’s Congressionally-designated militia–do not keep their guns at all; they’re in an armory, and they’re the same issue the Army gets.  They DO bear arms when in uniform–unlike those who carry around a gun for self-defence or hunting, who are merely carrying arms.  In the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was drafted, to “bear arms” had a specifically military meaning (see the Oxford English Dictionary).

This explains the otherwise mysterious connection between a militia designed to protect the state and a right of the people.  Simply put, the feds can’t keep people from serving in their state militias–nor from keeping the weapons they’d need to do it, if any states still let militia members keep their own weapons (which they don’t).  It’s a right of the people to serve in their state’s military service–obviously subject to the provision that the state has to want them there (or the militia would hardly be “well regulated”).

Through the alchemy of our ever-obscurantist Supreme Kangaroo Court, this has transmogrified into a right to own a handgun for self-protection in the District of Columbia, which doesn’t have a militia.  Just about as logical as saying you have to stop counting votes because continuing to count them might at least temporarily swing the outcome, giving the impression that the person who’s going to be implanted into office anyway wasn’t really elected.  It’s the same five Justices–well, not quite, two having been replaced by the pseudo-president thereby implanted (and subsequently reimplanted through massive fraud).

What really worries me is the folks in D.C.  A lot of them are going to die because of this.  All in order to “reinforce the illusion, irrelevant to capitalist production but essential to its propaganda, that the individual stands self-sufficient above all symbolic restraint”–legal restraint in this case (quotation from page 21 of my big essay).

The March 28 cartoon by the brilliant Khalil Bendib.

Commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on race, Charles Kaiser says,

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in America: “What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Unlike the approach of every Republican candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion should be used in American politics.

In Obama’s words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory—an echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Well put, Mr. Kaiser. However, in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, just before he got to the “with malice toward none” bit quoted above, he had something else to say. As the Civil War approached its close, here are the words–almost inconceivable today in their eloquent bluntness–with which the American president dared to combine religion and race:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

“God damn America,” indeed. It strikes me that old Abe was in some ways closer to Reverend Wright than to Obama–praiseworthy, thought-provoking, and indeed groundbreaking though Barack’s speech was.

To be fair, Lincoln made clear that he hoped God wouldn’t damn America, and the out-of-context snippets from Wright’s speeches we’re being bombarded with don’t make that clear (not that that proves anything one way or the other about Wright). Nonetheless, Lincoln said explicitly that if God did damn, or more precisely curse, America, in the cruelest possible way, that it would be just. More–that perhaps he was already doing so, in the form of the war that cost more American lives than any other. And that the North’s own centuries-long complicity in slavery and benefit from the wealth it extracted meant that the North, too, was liable to God’s justice. Had the North not had slavery, and then, after slowly abolishing it, kept the Southern slave system alive through its political acquiescence? Had Northern mills not woven Southern cotton? Does our economy not today rest in no small part on the backs of our own black and brown grunt laborers and on the cheap products of overseas sweatshops? Does it not further depend on the colossally murderous gunboat diplomacy to which Wright made such maligned mention, whereby countries around the world are kept open to American trade and business at the point of a knife?

I wonder what outcry must have greeted Lincoln, or would have had he confronted an American populace like the one of today. “He’s taking political correctness to a new extreme! Slavery isn’t my fault–I’m a Northerner and can’t even own slaves. Why should I be punished for it?”

He gives to both North and South this terrible war.

If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…

the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

These words are carved into the Lincoln Monument. They should be seared into the nation’s soul as a protection against the stupendous denial of collective responsibility into which we have fallen–and the vicious anger that greets any attempt to break through it.

PART 1: LINE IN THE SAND

It’s hard not to cheer the way Ron Paul is raising real issues when he discusses Iraq, Iran, and civil liberties in the Republican presidential race. He does it in a way that most of the Democratic candidates are not even doing, and he speaks clearly, forcefully, and eloquently against the united derision of his opponents. Indeed, there’s no reason NOT to cheer his raising these issues, and even to hope he does well enough in the primaries to raise them some more. It’s quite another matter to cheer Ron Paul.

Those of us whose memories stretch back a few years remember him as one of the most consistently right-wing congressmen in the Clinton and early W eras, before Bush’s fall from popularity transformed the political scene. Among the now-swollen ranks of the anti-war crowd, the young and the amnesiac at heart may not know this. Hence the alarming prospect of a candidate whose base of support continues to be ultra-right gaining traction, and perhaps even votes, from the progressive community.

But it’s not just the easily enthused who are catching the Ron Paul bug. No less sharp a mind than Glenn Greenwald has declared him a “principled conservative.” I’m not quite sure what that would mean–selling out the people to corporate interests the good, old-fashioned, Barry Goldwater way? Never disenfranchising without a constitutional rationalization? Jingoism with a conscience? Anyway, presumably being principled is supposed to exclude outright bigotry.

Unfortunately for those who crave to find something redeeming within the Republican party, Ron Paul has a history of vitriolic racism. Moreover, this history, far from being anomalous, is seamlessly enmeshed within a vicious Social Darwinism that is the basis for Paul’s whole worldview, of which his libertarian “principles” are no more than an eloquent expression.

In 1992, Ron Paul, then an ex-congressman, published a piece on the Rodney King riots in his 8-page monthly newsletter, a zine with roughly 7,000 subscribers. In rhetoric far more resonant with the “values” campaign of the Republican party four years later than with what most people associate with libertarianism, the piece gets going with this shot:

We now know that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality.

As a result of the riots’ disruption of transit, the newsletter continues, “White people found themselves walking alone many blocks to get home, running the minefield of black gangs out for their blood. ” Perhaps, you say, the author is merely pointing to the existence of violently anti-white gangs among L.A. blacks at that time? But no, for the piece goes on to refer to “the anti-white ideology in the thoroughly racist black community.” Lest anyone think he only despises “underclass” blacks, the author later says this:

They wanted the cops jailed and the murderers, arsonists, and thieves set free. This came not from the underclass, but from middle-class blacks and black political activists, who hold opinions not markedly different from the Crips and the Bloods. But the Crips and the Bloods, it turns out, have been “misunderstood,” according to Ted Koppel who interviewed two of these animals. After spending several hours with them, he decided he liked them. Unfortunately, they didn’t pull him out of his stretch limousine. [In this and all subsequent quotations, emphasis is added.]

Throughout, the piece excoriates the media for taking the side of black people, criminals, and the welfare state–bizarrely enough considering where the media actually were in 1992, and today. But the author, with populist faith that the common people share his racism, continues optimistically:

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficulty avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

…The [National Center on Institutions and Alternatives] reports that 70% of all black men in Washington are arrested before they reach the age of 35, and 85% are arrested at some point in their lives. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

…We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational.

In conclusion, the author bewails the fact that

The riots, burning, looting, and murders are only a continuation of 30 years of racial politics…. Blacks have “civil rights,” preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black beauty contests, black tv shows, black tv anchors, black scholorships and colleges, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.

Presumably, the fact that African-Americans sometimes get hired as TV anchors and sometimes get elected as mayors, that some TV shows have heavily black casts, and that most of the government officials in some mostly black communities are themselves black, strikes the author of this piece as grossly unfair…whereas the existence of white TV anchors, white mayors, and white-dominated TV shows and bureaucracies is perfectly fine. For the author, whatever whites have is prima facie evidence that they deserve it; whatever blacks have is prima facie evidence that they were given something they didn’t deserve.

Now, who WAS the mysterious author of this piece? On the face of it, it might seem very simple. The material appeared in the Ron Paul Political Report, a source acknowledged when it was preserved for posterity by a known white supremacist named Dan Gannon, who posted it on the web. No author is mentioned. Any reasonable person would conclude that Ron Paul was the author.

In 1996, when Paul was again running for congress, the Houston Chronicle exposed this piece. According to the Chronicle, Paul responded that “he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of ‘current events and statistical reports of the time.’” Furthermore, the Chronicle reported, “A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.”

In other words, he copped to writing the piece, then tried to defend it as non-racist, hoping few people would bother to look at the nitty-gritty of its contents, which aren’t exactly reminiscent of Jesse Jackson.

In 2001, however, Paul told Texas Monthly that he hadn’t written the piece: “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around.” Based on this, Paul’s fans have rushed to exonerate him. “Don’t say he wrote that piece without knowing THE FACTS. The facts PROVE HIM INNOCENT!” Therefore, the whole issue can be dismissed, and the lovefest can resume.

This suggests a Monty Pythonesque courtroom scenario. “How do you plead?” “Not guilty.” “All right,” says the judge, “case dismissed!” According to the reasoning of Ron Paul’s exonerators, if you say you didn’t do something, that’s enough.

In actual fact, Paul’s 2001 denial has little evidentiary value. Read the rest of this entry »

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

He only got two things wrong.

One, this split has already occurred.

Two, it’s the ugly dimwits who are the ruling elite. The intelligent people have been made into the underclass.

Instead of wasting his time and ours using his scientific credentials to present bogus speculation as “hard” science, this guy might want to check out a “sci-fi” movie from the 80’s that tells it like it is…right now.

Or just take a look at the people who are actually running the New World Order.

To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.

–Abraham Lincoln, 1847

Bet you never knew ole Abe was a Commie, didya? The labor theory of value rears its non-grata-since-the-end-of-the-Cold-War head — and on the side of the worker, no less! What a subversive, anti-American punk this guy must have been!

Here are some other good Abe quotes:

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed by this resolution, must cost the State some ten or twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

–from his “Speech in the Illinois Legislature Concerning the State Bank,” January 11, 1837 (emphasis added)

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are worthy of protection as any other rights.

I guess he wasn’t a Commie after all. He thought capital had rights — why, I don’t know. And yet, why is it that no one says such things any more?

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin [Luther King] was still alive. One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans–and for their sakes, after all–a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be located–i.e., there are no American people yet…. Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. However that may be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.

–James Baldwin

Libertarianism was the darling ideology of the nineties — a decade when bread-and-butter progressivism was considered oh-so-passe. Nothing beats it if you want to pose as a rebel without ruffling any feathers within the corporate world order.

The attraction libertarianism has for a good many liberals either indicates their ignorance or is very revealing about their true politics. But it isn’t sufficient to denounce libertarianism on the grounds that, “I’m a liberal/progressive/leftist, so I’m for government.” Left/right isn’t pro/anti-government, and the libertarian promise to get the government out of your life is a lie.

Under libertarianism, when you sign a work contract that does not protect you in any way because you need to put food on the table, get injured on a job with no safety rules, get fired with no recourse, get evicted with no advance notice, and try to sneak your family onto someone’s property to get a night’s sleep, you’ll find out in a hurry how the government “stays out of your life” — just as soon as the cops get there.

What a libertarian government stays out of is protecting people against anything short of outright bodily assault. It is property that libertarianism is really designed to protect, and to that end, a libertarian government is just as mean as it is lean — small in size, but as ruthless and violent as any other government, with fewer restraints.

For most people, libertarian “economic freedom” simply means wage slavery.

Of course — people will point out — this stuff is already true under capitalism. Quite so, with some qualifications. It’s strange that some people think this is an argument in libertarianism’s favor.

Libertarianism takes capitalism in all its inequality and oppressiveness and makes it harsher and more absolute. It attacks every restraint imposed on capitalism by workers, consumers, environmentalists, political parties, and so forth, in the name of an absolutist version of property rights and contractual obligations that, although stated in terms that sound equal and fair, is actually ultra-favorable to the rich — those who already have property and are already in a good contractual bargaining position.

I mean, think about it…suppose you were living in a medieval village with standards of hygiene that were, well, medieval. To avoid the filthy streets, would you prefer to live inside the outhouse? Maybe you would, if you’d lived in filth for so long you thought shit was good for you.

Who knows…people are strange. If you can believe shit is good for you, you might even believe capitalism’s good for you.

The rest of us can hope for indoor plumbing. Or socialism — an almost forgotten concept no government ever tried to implement. (The name socialism, of course, used to be very popular in some parts of the world.) Or, if that’s too much for you, stitch up the social safety net, and keep your needles out — because the capitalists are going to keep ripping it open every chance they get.