The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.
So that's where my taxes went.
Much like the Pentagon operated through surrogate rebels to oust Muammar Gaddafi, the Fed and Treasury seem to be calling upon Uncle Warren to bolster the collapsing financial industry and prevent another 2008. (Reported denials of this fact read like Pravda.) At this point, more bailouts would seem desperate and spook the market, and thus Timmy and The Bernanke have called upon a man who in his dottage has become his own personal financial-political complex.
Anyone that has read these pieces for a while knows where I stand on Warren Buffett. Namely I can’t stand him. It has nothing to do with the fact that he has so much money. I am not an envious person and moreover I think having wealth anywhere near his is more of a curse than a blessing. The reason I can’t stand him is because he is a fraud. While he may have been a great investor at one point, he is more of a great actor than anything else. Here is one of the richest people in the world. He sits there in Nebraska, chuckling, drinking his cherry coke and eating hamburgers in this pathetically obvious attempt to convince the masses he is “just like us.” The term wolf in sheep’s was invented for guys like this. Like most people out there I don’t like bad guys. The trick; however, is that the most dangerous bad guys don’t come out and tell you they are bad guys and how they are going to fleece you. What they do is pretend they are the good guys. Pretend that they are on the side of the little guy or working for the “collective good,” which is a preposterous statement because there is no such thing. Human desires and notions of what is a good life are as varied as the stars in the sky. Once we start allowing officials or rich people to define “collective good” you can be sure we are finished.
The truth of the matter is, as I and other have exposed these last several years, is that he essentially runs a financial services company. When the system itself was threatened the status quo was threatened. Buffett stepped in and became a government agent once he saw the writing on the wall. He did not step up for America. He did not step up for the people. He stepped up for himself and his legacy. He stepped up to save the status quo because he is the status quo. All of this raises a very serious issue in America right now and one that needs to be dealt with in the next crisis (which has arrived) or we will never be able to recover into the world’s most vibrant and dynamic economy again. A lot of people lament the lack of upward mobility in the U.S. right now and I share those sentiments. However, equally important is downward mobility. What makes the concept of America unique is not merely the concept that the poor can become rich but that the rich can become poor. It is this second part that is the most dangerous to social cohesion when it disappears. Unfortunately, the system that we have today of an unholy alliance between Wall Street, Washington D.C. and the multi-national corporations (including the military industrial complex of course) stands there holding onto all the levers of power to serve as gatekeepers of their own empires.
[snip]
The Wolf Invests in Bank of America... Gosh where to start. First of all, this $5 billion preferred investment by Uncle Warren in preferred stock is extremely bearish for the market, the economy and the financial system. This is not an investment, it is political-economic strategy. It tell us so many things that we probably already suspected. It tells us that Bank of America did indeed need capital. Even worse they probably need so much that they went to Uncle Warren for five big ones so that people would just look the other way and gain “confidence.” This is how out to lunch these guys are. They don’t understand that the root of the lack of confidence is that the people see a country devolving into a Banana Republic led by greedy oligarchs and politicians stealing everything in sight as the ship sinks. So then they roll out the number one crony capitalist in America, tell us he is investing in Bank of America and expect that to lead to confidence!! What a bunch of maniacs run this nation. This is 1789 France folks as I have said many times before.
Second, the fact that TPTB are resorting to Uncle Warren for everything now may mean the Fed is out of the game. No one has confidence in the Fed to come save the day so they need the next thing. That next thing is Uncle Warren. Unfortunately it’s not working and it is not going to work. You can see it in the market today. People are waking up. They are starting to see through the matrix. Buffett is a fraud and a shill. If you follow him it will be right over a cliff.
The Baby Boomer generation is getting old and their ideas about how political systems and economies operate are getting even older. My generation is coming into its own and we will determine our own destinies. You can step aside gracefully or you can be pushed aside. Either way your days of running the lives of this planet are numbered. The Fourth Turning is here.
There's still the question of will the BofA deal work?
I'm reminded of the phrase, "Bear Stearns is fine!"
As I'm sure you know by now, America's patron saint of Multiculturalism, Black Empowerment, and White Guilt has been memorialized on the Washington Mall, in gargantuan fashion.
There is, of course, a patent incongruity to the Black civil-rights activist sharing the same grounds as aristocratic salve-holders and a 19th-century nationalist who sought to “de-colonize” the American Negro back to Africa.
But in the end, the massive, laughable kitsch that has been erected is a fitting tribute to the man, as well as to the federal government that, in so many ways, has been reconstructed in his image.
Many have expressed alarm that the commissioned sculptor was Chinese, and that the work has a certain...Maoist...quality to it. They shouldn't be surprised. When it comes to MLK depictions, for decades, artists have been stuck in an aesthetic rut, remaking the heroic, statist works of prewar totalitarianism.
In a wash of Holocaust memorials and cool corporate abstraction, the only kind of public art that is allowed to express brute masculinity must involve Negro advancement.
Take, for instance, Patrick Morelli's “Behold,” which graces Atlanta's corrupt and dilapidated King Center for Nonviolent Social Change (which functions mainly as a tax-payer funded cash cow for various King offspring.) “Behold” was erected in 1990, and yet, when I first laid eyes on it, I sensed that the artist must be, quite consciously, channelling Arno Breker. (I hesitate to associate such an ghastly work with Breker, whose genius has been unfairly shrouded by his association with German National Socialism.)
I'm reminded as well of the massive mural that hovers above the baggage-claim exit of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which I am convinced was painted by a crypto-bigot as some kind of elaborate joke.
(Interestingly, by the '60s and '70s, Communists sculptors had moved beyond the pompous style of the '30s and embraced postmodernism and abstraction. Tito, for instance, commissioned some of the most bizarre creations extant.)
So much for aesthetics. Stephan Kinsella, an expert of copyright law, has alerted me to the fact that the King family charged the not-for-profit foundation that lead the MLK project some three quarters of a million dollars for the rights to the Good Reverend's words.
The New York Postreports:
WASHINGTON -- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 to use his words and image -- and at least one scholar thinks that Dr. King would find such an arrangement offensive.
The memorial is being paid for almost entirely through a fund-raising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.
"I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has beenpaid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. King. ". . . [He would've been] absolutely scandalized."
Financial documents revealed that the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by the King family. They also showed that a $71,700 "management" fee was paid to the family estate in 2003.
This kind of thing certainly makes one question America's system of patents and copyrights. (Kinsella advocates doing away with the concept of “intellectual property.”)
And the King family's actions becoming doubly dubious when one remembers that Martin Luther King plagiarized most of the writings for which he has become world renowned.
When Boston University founded a commission to look into it, they found that that 45 percent of the first part and 21 percent of the second part of his dissertation was stolen, but they insisted that "no thought should be given to revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree." In addition to his dissertation many of his major speeches, such as "I Have a Dream," were plagiarized, as were many of his books and writings. For more information on King’s plagiarism, The Martin Luther King Plagiarism Page and Theodore Pappas’ Plagiarism and the Culture War are excellent resources.
King apologists like to claim that their idol shouldn't be held accountable for plagiarism, since he was raised in a Souther Baptist milieu in which borrowing and sampling from other preachers was the norm. Whatever the case, if you want to use a text that King once pilfered, then you should expect to pay. He done stole it first, it seems.
The arc of the moral universe is long, and let's hope it bends toward the truth. Until that day, one can only conclude that the MLK legend, and its attendant industry, has reached a state of self-parody.
I am saddened to learn of the death of Elizabeth Wright, the long-time editor of Issues and Views and a frequent writer for this online magazine. In AltRight's infancy, Elizabeth made outstanding contributions, including devastating critiques of the Tea Party movement, all of which are worth revisiting.
I hesitate to use casual language, but if I could sum up Elizabeth's writing in a phrase, it would be that she was willing and able to cut through the crap—to dispense with pretty lies and taboos in search of the truth, regarding race, politics, culture, and a host of other matters she examined. On a number of occasions in private conversation, my friend Paul Gottfried compared Elizabeth's penetrating and undeceived mind to that of Sam Francis. A high compliment, indeed.
That Elizabeth was one of a kind, and irreplaceable, makes her death all the more heart-breaking. Without question, the history of the 20th century would have been different if Black Americans had looked to conservatives like Elizabeth, as opposed to the civil-rights industry, for wisdom and guidance.
She will be missed
***
Jared Taylor's remembrance of Elizabeth can be read here.
Ding, Dong, the oppressive dictator is dead! And don't fret, Libyans, that civil order has been destroyed, for soon NATO will install wonderful “Democracy” in your homeland! ...
While my guess is that the American public couldn't care less about the recent toppling of the Gaddafi regime, if it's aware of it at all, the event has revealed, once again, the small, windowless box in which the commentariat reside.
A left-liberal professor, who from 2003-2008 defined the anti-war blogosphere, is solemnly quoting Niebuhr as he openly supports Obama's NATO intervention and the rebellion.
It took Washington and NATO an embarrassing five months to topple the regime of a colorful tin-pot dictator, proving, definitively, that the world's supposed “Superpower” is barely capable of small “Jonah Goldberg wars,” fought through surrogates; big ones against regional powers like China and Russia would most certainly prove disastrous. And yet for a Beltway liberal who styled himself a “realist” in the Bush years, Libya marks a “win” for Washington. (Steve Clemons isn't the only “realist” living in a dreamworld...)
The “conservative” response, as represented by people like former UN Ambassador John Bolton, is to cheer on “democracy,” but fret that some “Islamicists” might be among the rebels NATO has been backing. (Libyans must learn to elect good men.)
All are on the same page that America is an interventionary force that must spread its political and economic system abroad—and by the D word, they certainly don't mean the will of the people, which in the Middle East and North Africa is likely something close Hamas, nor even liberalism. Democracy means, as the South Park song goes, a pacified, mass population getting the opportunity to choose between a Douche and a Turd, both of whom don't pose the slightest challenge to Washington's dollar-debt-oil world order, as Muammar Gaddafi most certainly did.
And in many ways, the ongoing implosion of America's debt-financed empire reveals Washington's motivations all the more starkly.
Iraq and Afghanistan might have evolved into pointless quagmires; however, when they were launched, they had the shine of the Force of History and Progress sweeping across the desert. The question was how to restrain, or at least ethically harness, American omnipotence.
From the beginning, the Libyan campaign has seemed like something desperate and pathetic—at best, Samantha Powers's fever-dream; at worst, a blatant power grab.
It's worth remembering that on March 19, shortly after NATO became involved, the rag-tag crew of anti-Gaddafi rebels decided to launch a new private central bank, an arrangement more to Washington's liking than Gaddafi's stated desire to begin pricing oil in a gold-backed Dinar. And does anyone doubt that NATO's European underlings will expect the oil to flow?
However the chips might eventually fall, Washington's latest overseas “victory” bespeaks nothing but full-spectrum decline.
The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.
The Walmart Wedding.
A landmark article went online a few days ago in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The study was prepared by a team of 32 researchers headed by the University of Edinburgh’s Gail Davies and entitled “Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic.” The study’s methods do not lend themselves to easy explanation unless you’re at home with SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and inverse variance weighted models used to capture “the variance in the trait that is due to linkage disequilibrium between genotyped SNPs and unknown causal variants.” But the bottom line of the article is reasonably simple. Using nothing but genetic information, the team of researchers was able to establish that the narrow heritability of crystallized intelligence (the kind that can be more easily affected by education) is at least 40 percent. The narrow heritability of fluid intelligence (the kind that involves pure problem-solving ability, independently of acquired knowledge) is at least 51 percent. Note the at least. The study’s authors explicitly state that these estimates are lower bounds.
Shelves of books and articles denying or minimizing the heritability of IQ have suddenly become obsolete. Those who continue to claim that IQ tests don’t measure anything real inside the brain also have their work cut out for them.
The good ship Herman Cain has had an amusing run, but it should sink in today's Iowa straw poll . And why wouldn't he cast dispersions on Captain Underoos's religion anyway? If I was a Republican candidate, I would totally demand that Mitt Romney show everyone his underwear. Does anyone remember how he answered CNN's important "boxers or briefs" question?
The sad thing is that the Republican candidates simply don't understand America. Ron Paul could have sewn up the nomination early if he'd simply answered "thong, baby, thong".
1. Michele Bachmann 4,823 votes
2. Ron Paul 4,671
3. Tim Pawlenty 2,293
4. Rick Perry 1,718 write-in votes
5. Rick Santorum 1,657
6. Herman Cain 1,465
7. Mitt Romney 567
8. Newt Gingrich 385
9. Jon Huntsman 69
10. Thad McCotter 35This effectively ends the Pawlenty campaign, unless he's running for vice-president. It should also end the Romney campaign, but it won't yet since he's got all that money to spend. Paul will be ignored by the media unless he can manage to win something outright; pity he has moved in the wrong direction on immigration at precisely the wrong time.
Bachmann becomes the "Huckabee" candidate that the Establishment will throw to the social conservatives if necessary, but Perry becomes the de facto replacement for Romney as the chosen candidate. Cain will stay in as a sideshow, this really isn't a bad showing for him. Santorum, Gingrich, Huntsman and McCotter all look pretty irrelevant now, not that some of them didn't before.
Once more, White, conservative Americans will embrace a rootin', tootin' Texan who will give them the impression that they've just "taken their country back," while in fact hastening the pace of their dispossession.
By no coincidence, Rick Perry is slated to be the next neocon tool. (And it gets worse.)
I must admit, I'd never thought the S&P downgrade would happen this soon. Indeed, I never thought it would happen at all. My image was of a coming inflationary depression in which the regime and its connected entities would announce to its citizens something to the effect, “Move along. Nothing to see here. All is well” The unemployment rate, credit ratings, GDP statistics would each be cooked to give a veneer of prosperity, while bank runs would became mundane, EBT cards would be traded on a derivative markets, and formerly middle-class Americans would begin living in self-storage units.
Nevertheless, as a friend quipped on Friday, “Today, America's first Black president just got 'red-lined!'”
Below are some interconnected thoughts on this next chapter in America's economic collapse.
1) Commentators are grasping for narratives to explain the recent plunges in the Dow Jones and (quasi ironically) S&P indices, but these lines of causality are operative only in their minds.
If investors were really taking Standard and Poor's words seriously—i.e. that Washington can't cut spending and thus will either default on and or inflate away its bills—then the stock market would not have crashed; investors would have, instead, fled those double-A Treasuries.
In reality, the world hurled itself, lemming-like, into the “safe haven” of the asset that just got downgraded.
2) As Robert Prechter has noted, financial commentators often like to find “causes” for market downturns in the headlines of the world papers; in reality, they are, misunderstanding a purely market event and forcefully connecting it with an external happening that was, at the very most, a catalyst.
Take, for instance, your typical liberal-centrist HuffPost commentator. They warned that if the debt ceiling were not raised, economic chaos would ensue. When the debt ceiling was raised, and chaos ensued anyway, they could only retreat into self-righteous nationalism and blame—how dare the S&P diss America! We've only begun to reap our Diversity dividends!
Now imagine if the Tea Party had won the day and scuttled the debt-ceiling deal. When the Dow plunged, the HuffPost Establishmentarians who are now questioning S&P's sanity would be praising the organization for its perspicacity and blaming Middle American conservatives for everything.
3) One of the main reasons why I was so surprised by the downgrade is not because Washington doesn't deserve it, but because S&P is almost as much a state enterprise as Fannie Mae: all three major credit rating agencies are regulated and licenced by the SEC and can't be expected to be particularly “independent.” Without question, one of their central motivations for awarding now-infamous AAA ratings to bundled subprime mortgages in the 2000s was that they recognized that financing “The Ownership Society” was a national priority and they'd better play along.
One must consider the possibility that the Fed and government wanted some kind of downgrade in order to spur capital to leave the bond market and either flow into the stock market or get spent. (Such a scheme has obviously failed in the short run, but it's ultimate implications might be quite different.) A year ago, a Fed governor was suggesting that the Fed raise interest rates in order to give investors the feeling that inflation was around the corner, and that they should start spending their money more quickly as opposed to locking it up in Treasuries.
4) Following the inflationary '70s, the U.S. Treasury has experienced a truly miraculous 30-year run of rising bond prices and falling yields. Though it might seem strange to think about it in this way, this bull-market has culminated in the crash of 2008 and the subsequent depression—as U.S. sovereign interest rates fell and capital was invested in completely unproductive government debt.
When this trend turns around, watch out.
In reading up on the latest Flash Mobs, I encountered two successive paragraphs from a local news report that encapsulate, almost perfectly, American Whites' willful blindness to what is happening to their country.
The incidents Thursday night come as the State Fair board over the last decade has worked to increase diversity at the annual fair, expanding its entertainment lineup and marketing to appeal to a younger, more multicultural audience. Diversity was a priority for State Fair Park Chairman Martin Greenberg, who spoke often of making it "truly the people's park" - a "place of inclusion, not exclusion."
Thursday night's Main Stage performer was rapper MC Hammer, but a number of people who attended the concert said the show wasn't to blame at all for the disturbances at the fair. One woman said the crowd watching Hammer was mostly white and adult and any children there seemed to be with parents.
First, the State Fair board is shocked—shocked!—that sponsoring racial diversity"might actually increase racial tensions. Second, while Blacks were berserking in the streets, in a neighboring arena, White liberals calmly watched a hip-hop performance by an aging '90s rapper who, at this stage of his career, must be something akin to Cowboy Curtis from "Pee Wee Playhouse."
You have to admit it's getting worser, a littler worser, all the time...
Witnesses describe mobs, some people claim racially-charged attacks
By Jay Sorgi and the WTMJ News Team
5 August 2011WEST ALLIS - Witnesses tell Newsradio 620 WTMJ and TODAY'S TMJ4 of a mob of young people attacking innocent fair-goers at the end of the opening night of State Fair, with some callers claiming a racially-charged scene.
Milwaukee Police confirmed there were assaults outside the fair.
Witnesses' accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.
Authorities have not given official estimates of the number of people involved in the attacks.
"It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people," said Norb Roffers of Wind Lake in an interview with Newsradio 620 WTMJ. He left the State Fair Entrance near the corner of South 84th Street and West Schlinger Avenue in West Allis.
"They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever."
"It was 100% racial," claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.
"I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn't do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody's windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it."
Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.
"That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, 'There's not enough cops to handle this.' There's no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles."
Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "it was like a scene you needed the National Guard to control."
"To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie," claimed the anonymous witness.
"I have not seen anything like this in my life. It was a huge mob, and it was a fight that maybe lasted one to two minutes."
Roffers claimed that as he left the state fair with his wife, crowds near that entrance were large, and someone in that crowd .
"As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road, and nobody was even laying there. He wasn't even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn't cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like 'Let's get the heck out of here.' The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I'm like, 'What the heck is going on here?' I heard my bell ring."
A quite useful website has also cropped up, documenting the various rampages across the country. You can contact the site's author here to report more Flashmob violence.
My two main analytical articles on Flashmobs can be read here and here.
Here's the full list, as of August 5, 2011.
Date
City
# of Participants
Casualties/Damage
Source 1
Source 2
8/4/11
Milwaukee
Dozens to Hundreds
Mayhem and multiple assaults at Wisconsin State Fair
7/31/11
Pittsburgh
~100
Teens causing mayhem and fighting swarm McDonalds, Trader Joe's, and a Target store
7/29/11
Philadelphia
30-40
Teens assault and rob pedestrians, damage property
7/26/11
Winfield, NJ
150
Fighting and arrests at firefighters carnival
7/25/11
Washington DC
4
Victoria's Secret store in Georgetown looted midday
7/23/11
Greensboro, NC
Hundreds
Man assaulted in park, former mayor's business vandalized
7/23/11
Ottawa, ON
35-40
Convenience store ransacked
,
$800 in merchandise taken
7/17/11
NYC
5
Assailants assault and rob subway passenger
7/16/11
Denver
4-5
Baseball-bat wielding thugs hit couple in the head, rob purse (same M.O. as Denver 6/26 attack)
7/8/11
Redford, MI
15-20
Convenience store ransacked
7/7/11
Minneapolis
Unknown
Mother and daughters assaulted
7/5/11
Atlantic City
100
15 men fighting, 2 shot
7/4/11
Milwaukee
15-20
Two gas station convenience stores ransacked, employees assaulted
7/3/11
Chicago
~10
Assault with stabbing
7/3/11
Bayonne, NJ
13-20
Young man brutally assaulted
7/?/11
Dallas
Dozens
Convenience store ransacked
6/28/11
Atlanta
30-35
$15k in high end merchandise stolen from Sole boutique
6/28/11
Fairfield, CA
5
Convenience store robbed, owner assaulted and killed
6/27/11
San Francisco
4
Teens rob one man of camera, iPod, and bicycle. Twenty minutes later, same teens stab another man and steal his backpack
6/2611
Denver
4-5
Couple assaulted with baseball bat, stole purse
6/26/11
Cleveland
75-100
Fighting at Coventry Street Arts Festival
6/25/11
Washington DC
Dozens
Fighting after Caribbean Carnival
6/25/11
Philadelphia
30-40
Several assaulted
6/24/11
Peoria
50-70
Mayhem in residential neighborhood
6/23/11
Upper Darby, PA
35-50
Sears store ransacked
6/23/11
St. Louis
5
Teens assault and rob man near MetroLink station
6/21/11
Chicago
50
Walgreens store ransacked
6/20/11
Columbia, SC
8
18 year old brutally assaulted
6/18/11
Northern VA
5
Two incidents of robbery + assaults
6/15/11
Kansas City
25-30
Mayhem in residential neighborhood
6/15/11
Solon, OH
5
Teens threaten and chase victim after he declines to give them a cigar
6/15/11
Vancouver, BC
Thousands
140 injured and $5M CAD in property damage after Stanley Cup game
6/7/11
Chicago
15
Mob stormed CTA buses, stole electronic devices - Two separate attacks
6/6/11
Bessemer, AL
Dozens
Fighting at amusement park
6/4/11
Chicago
15-20
Harassing, refusing to let pedestrians go past on sidewalk
6/4/11
Chicago
15-20
68 year old man robbed while sitting on bench
6/4/11
Chicago
15-20
Man robbed of his iPod on bicycle path, then a bicyclist assaulted and robbed of wallet, bike, and iPhone
6/4/11
Chicago
15-20
Man assaulted while sitting on his scooter
5/30/11
Chicago
Unknown
Fighting, harassing
5/30/11
Nashville
Hundreds
Crowd causing mayhem shuts down water park
5/30/11
Boston
<1000
Fighting
5/31/11
NYC
Hundreds
Fighting
5/22/11
NYC
15-20
Dunkin Donuts store ransacked
5/1/11
Las Vegas
35
Convenience store ransacked
4/29/11
Washington DC
20-30
Clothing store robbery
4/19/11
Harrisburg
8
Bicyclist assaulted
4/17/11
Atlanta
20-30
Delta employees assaulted on MARTA train
4/16/11
Los Angeles
Hundreds
One man shot on the Venice Beach boardwalk
4/10/11
Chicago
70
Mayhem at McDonalds
4/9/11
Rock Hill, SC
8
Group attacks gay man outside of convenience store
4/?/11
Chicago
100
Bicyclists assaulted
4/?/11
Washington DC
20-25
Clothing store robbery at Georgetown Tee's
2/28/11
Irvington, NJ
5
High school students attack math teacher
2/23/11
St. Paul
30-50
Convenience store ransacked
2/20/11
Sacramento
6-8
Local news reporter and photographer assaulted
2/13/11
South Orange, NJ
500
Mayhem in suburb
1/26/11
Memphis
~10
Photojournalist assaulted, camera damaged
1/21/11
NYC
5
Teenage girls attack Wendy's cashier after she asks them to behave or leave (they were fighting and throwing food)
1/2/11
Milwaukee
Dozens
Mayhem at Mayfair Mall
1/?/11
Chicago
11
The North Face, Filene’s Basement, Express, and AX Armani Exchange store robberies
12/25/10
Bradenton, FL
Dozens
Marine and wife assaulted at theater
12/3/10
Birmingham
6
Convenience store ransacked, store owners assaulted
11/19/10
Seattle
5
Teenage girls attack pregnant girl on bus
11/17/10
Madison, WI
4
Teens chase, assault, and rob teenager
10/23/10
Buffalo
5
Teens beat and robbed five University of Buffalo students
10/9/10
Harrisburg
> Dozen
Husband, wife, and two friends assaulted near Restaurant Row
10/?/10
St. Paul
20
BP convenience store ransacked, store clerk assaulted
(See video at 1:18 mark)
9/24/10
Monroe, OH
5
Teen girls shoplift over $1,600 in merchandise from mall
9/23/10
Champaign,IL
4
Man assaulted
8/21/10
Des Moines
30-40
Assaults at Iowa State Fairgrounds
6/17/10
Cleveland
Dozens
Fighting at Coventry Street Arts Festival
6/14/10
Pittsburgh
8
26 year old bicyclist attacked and robbed of backpack
5/8/10
New Orleans
6
Two men assaulted and robbed near French Quarter
4/24/10
Chattanooga
250
Five people shot, no fatalities
4/10/10
Kansas City
700-900
Assaults on the Country Club Plaza
4/4/10
NYC
>100
Four people shot in Times Square
3/2?/10
Cleveland
6-7
Teens pull 73 year old man from car, viciously assault man and passenger
3/20/10
Philadelphia
<1000
Assaults
3/3/10
Philadelphia
50-100
Fighting
2/16/10
Philadelphia
150
Macy's store vandalized
1/17/10
Atlanta
9
Three cars stolen, then $50k in jeans stolen during smash-and-grab from Focus Clothing in downtown Atlanta, then another smash and grab at convenience store
1/10/10
Atlanta
4
Smash-and-grab robbery at liquor store
12/18/09
Philadelphia
70-100
Assaults
12/3/09
Philadelphia
70
30 Asian students assaulted by fellow black students
9/24/09
Chicago
Dozens
16 year old beaten to death with wooden plank
7/4/09
Akron
<50
Family assaulted after watching fireworks
8/1/09
Stockton, CA
20-25
Convenience store ransacked
7/?/09
Stockton, CA
20-25
Convenience store ransacked
6/6/09
Columbia, MO
7
Man brutally attacked in parking garage
5/30/09
Philadelphia
>100
One male severely beaten, cars damaged (taxi stolen), convenience store ransacked, other individuals assaulted
5/20/09
Atlanta
4
For third time in a month, optical store is victimized by smash-and-grab robbery; this time $50K in designer eyeglass frames are stolen
5/13/09
Washington DC
9
Clothing store robbery
10/26/08
NYC
5
Teens beat and rob subway passenger for iPod and mobile phone
10/25/08
Seattle
5
Five teens beat beloved Tuba Man to death
7/26/08
St. Louis
>20
Family of five returning home from airport attacked near MetroLink parking lot
6/10/08
Unknown
~100
Convenience store ransacked
6/1/08
Mt Clemens, MI
12-20
Group beats man unconscious, assaults another - Later, group robs and assaults man at gas station
4/14/08
Maywood, IL
5
Chicago women rob clothing store, crash car
4/?/08
Polk County, FL
8
Teenagers beat up student to post video on MySpace and YouTube
3/26/08
Philadelphia
5
Five teenagers beat innocent SEPTA passenger, trigger asthma attack which kills him
11/23/07
Tuscon
100
Convenience store ransacked
4/1/06
NYC
4
Teenagers attempt to rob college student, chase him into street where he is hit by a car and killed
3/30/05
Columbus
30
Four girls assaulted and verbally accosted
9/29/02
Milwaukee
16
Man beaten to death after confronting youngsters who threw an egg at him
4/20/02
Santa Clara, CA
Dozens
Fighting, convenience store ransacked
Unknown
Miami Beach
15
Retail store ransacked
Unknown
Unknown
>50
Convenience store ransacked
Unknown
Unknown
10
Retail store ransacked
This baboon troop suggests that the drive to domesticate dogs, work cooperatively with them, and even accept them as family members isn't exclusively a trait of Homo Sapiens; indeed, it may very well have predated his rise.
From the film Animals Like Us.
Markets are breaking down, all over the world. Apparently our beloved Democratic officials weren't able to save us by raising the debt ceiling. What a shock and disappointment.
This phenomenon, certainly reminiscent of 2008, has a lot to do with the interconnectedness of markets and the “global bubbles” John Authers has written about. Its proximity to the “debt ceiling” theatrics also brings to mind Barack Obama's irresolvable dilemma, which I discussed last fall. Obama wants a “recovery,” of some kind, in order to get reelected; the Treasury Department, on the other hand, requires an equities collapse. Why? Because, as we saw today, there's nothing like a massive crash to convince investors to buy all the new debt the Treasury just issued.
Barack Obama is caught in a financial Catch 22.
On the one hand, his party’s fall re-election prospects rest on the stock market consolidating its gains since March 2009 (Dow 10,000), if not rising. Since his first day in office, the president has announced that the country is experiencing a great economic “recovery,” and any serious downturn in the major indices would give middle- and upper-class Americans whiplash and be politically devastating .
On the other hand, in order to remain viable, the Treasury Department needs an equities collapse -- and probably not just a slow bleed but a dramatic crash -- in order to herd millions of investors into the U.S. dollar and government debt.
The will of the Treasury will prevail, and the president and his party will be left high and dry. Furthermore, the crash will greatly empower the Treasury and federal government … for a time.
{snip}
If investors, especially the big ones like China and Japan, got the inkling that Washington were going to print its debt away (and thus cause massive inflation), then demand for bills, notes, and bonds would collapse and interest rates, soar. The government, and the currency underlying it, would deconstruct.
This perilous situation is heightened by the fact that, as of this writing, around a quarter (20-30 percent) of U.S. debt is in short-term Treasury bills, which mature in less than one year. (Clinton’s Treasury Robert Rubin (formerly of Goldman Sachs) can lay claim to developing this financing arrangement, which came to bear his name.) If the market expects monetization, then in order for the Treasury to roll its debt over, interest rates would have to be increased every three months. A classic Vicious Cycle. And rates wouldn’t actually have to go to stratospheric levels for Washington to be doomed. If they simply returned to where they were in, say, 1980, the Treasury would pay close to a trillion each year just to service its debt.
The prospects for monetization would be much improved, however, if the Treasury could lock investors into long-term Treasury debt, bonds that don’t mature for decades and which investors would have a difficult time exiting from.
This is where the equities crash comes in.
The Crash of 2008 was notable not only for the steep decline in stocks and commodities, but the dramatic increase in the demand for “cash” -- that is, liquidity in the form of the U.S. dollar as well as Treasury debt of all sorts. ...[I]n the gloomy days of November, long-term interest dipped below 1 percent -- short-terms yields went, absurdly, negative! Investors were hurdling headlong into Treasuries.
Hurray! Our democratic leaders have rescued the nation, once again, from a crisis of their own making!
After the debt-ceiling was (inevitably) raised, and Gabby Giffords was wheeled out to take part in the exercise in bi-partisanship, the frequent refrain was sounded that “both sides” engaged in “painful comprise.” The reality is that nothing really happened and nothing really changed.
The initial increase in the debt ceiling of 900 billion (or what’s actually 2.1 trillion) is “matched” by cuts of $1 trillion... over the next 10 years. One hundred billion per annum will, of course, put but a mild dint in the projected growth of the federal government; no component will actually go away. Such “cuts” will, moreover, be quickly overwhelmed by the growth of debt, whose current clip is 4 billion per day.
Put simply, America remains strictly debt-financed—this includes its military empire, entitlement programs, and multicultural obsession. And until that happy day when this system collapses—or is destroyed by geopolitical actors—Washington will get away with it.
What still amazes me, though perhaps it shouldn’t, is the way in which the media and so many political activists—even AltRighters and White Nationalists—got caught up in the “crisis,” which was fabricated by Tim Geithner through his arbitrary and mythical “August 2nd deadline.” (As Jim Rickards points out, Geithner creates media events in a real Timmy Geithner kind of way—passive aggression and the projection of weakness.) Despite the millions of warnings of default, interest rates on Treasuries remained at historic lows. No one actually believed that a country that can emit its own currency would ever stop paying interest and its bills.
And there’s another important, and deeper, element to this that should be stressed. Despite the frequent claims by liberals that the Tea Party is a group of libertarian extremists, none of them—indeed, no one in the entire country—actually wants to reduce government.
Or put another way, Washington has covered its bases: The Red States get a debt-financed military, a debt-financed Military Industrial Complex, and debt-financed Medicare and Social Security. Liberals get debt-financed liberalism. Blacks get debt-financed public employment and debt-financed affirmative action. Hispanics get free entry into the country and the chance to feed off the debt-financed welfare state. Jews get debt-financed grants to Israel. Wall Street gets debt-financed bailouts. Und so weiter... Each side thinks that the other side’s programs are “wasteful” and “pork” and that its own programs are “essential.”
Though Congress might be unpopular, an Economistpoll revealed last year that the vast majority of Americans don’t want to change anything about Washington. With the exception of the easy-to-hate foreign aid, ending any major entitlement is opposed by a supermajority of voters.
What this reveals, in the final analysis, is that with debt-financed “democratic capitalism,” the U.S. has achieved a more lasting and insidious form of egalitarianism than anything attempted by the Soviet Union of old.
Domestically speaking, by the middle of the 20th century, “America” signified, perhaps for the first time, a real nation. After the mass Third World immigration inaugurated by the 1965 Immigration Act, America was transformed into an economy (or a place where all people from around the globe can “achieve their dreams”). At the beginning of the 21st century, America is not even an economy but some kind of egalitarian, obviously unsustainable credit bubble that makes terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” seem irrelevant.
A recent Pew Research Center study has highlighted the widening gap in wealth between American Whites and Blacks and Hispanics. It inspired quite a few op-eds on why America isn't "post-racial" enough and why more work must be done.
The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009.
These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession that ended in 2009.
What's most interesting, at least to me, is the Pew Center's conclusion: the gap wasn't increased by a decline in federal employment, nor even corporate layoffs, so much as the housing bust:
The Pew Research analysis finds that, in percentage terms, the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.
As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth; and the typical white household had $113,149.
Moreover, about a third of black (35%) and Hispanic (31%) households had zero or negative net worth in 2009, compared with 15% of white households. In 2005, the comparable shares had been 29% for blacks, 23% for Hispanics and 11% for whites.
Hispanics and blacks are the nation’s two largest minority groups, making up 16% and 12% of the U.S. population respectively.
These findings are based on the Pew Research Center’s analysis of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), an economic questionnaire distributed periodically to tens of thousands of households by the U.S. Census Bureau. It is considered the most comprehensive source of data about household wealth in the United States by race and ethnicity. The two most recent administrations of SIPP that focused on household wealth were in 2005 and 2009. Data from the 2009 survey were only recently made available to researchers.1
Plummeting house values were the principal cause of the recent erosion in household wealth among all groups, with Hispanics hit hardest by the meltdown in the housing market.
From 2005 to 2009, the median level of home equity held by Hispanic homeowners declined by half—from $99,983 to $49,145—while the homeownership rate among Hispanics was also falling, from 51% to 47%. A geographic analysis suggests the reason: A disproportionate share of Hispanics live in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were in the vanguard of the housing real estate market bubble of the 1990s and early 2000s but that have since been among the states experiencing the steepest declines in housing values.
Most who have cited the study have blamed evil subprime lenders for the plight of Blacks and Hispanics. Looked at another way, though, it was precisely this kind of affirmative-action lending (which Steve Sailer first talked about in his piece "The Diversity Recession") that was the primary means of racial wealth re-distribution throughout the first half of the 2000s. Taxing rich (mostly White) people, funnelling the money through Washington's massive bureaucratic apparatus, and then issuing it to minorities isn't as effective as, in essence, "financial socialism." America could be made more "post-racial" by giving minorities 30-year mortgages at 20:1 leverage, underwritten by a government agency and packaged as derivatives by Goldman Sachs.
Since it's becoming clear to all that the housing bubble can't be blown up again, a new means of instituting equality will, no doubt, have to be found...
