I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my
recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in
private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course
correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the
behemoth goes over the cliff, you're not dragged down with it. It is
faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal
portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the
dominant global power is a fait accompli. "I don't feel America is quite
a First World country anymore," a robustly pro-American Aussie told me,
with a sigh of regret.
Well, what does some rinky-dink 'roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the
other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia
was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008.
And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz
buck: That's to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety
Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later
I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is
built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three
years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more
still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to
20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn't see
this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething
percent of the American people. The Democrats' plan is to have no plan,
and their budget is not to budget at all. "We don't need to bring a
budget," said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? "We're not coming
before you to say we have a definitive solution," the Treasury Secretary
told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. "What we do know is we
don't like yours."
Nor do some of Ryan's fellow conservatives. Texas Congressman Louie
Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives
who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding
the Ryan plan's timidity. They're not wrong on that: the alleged
terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget
of the Government of the United States until the year 2040. That would
be 27 years after Congressman Ryan's current term of office expires. Who
knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing
decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily.
But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war – the home
team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the
interest payments on the debt. (We'll be bankrolling the entire People's
Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing-Taipei conflict
would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the straits of
Taiwan. Which is why plans for midcentury are of limited value. When the
most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee
the government living within its means within the next three decades,
you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there'll be a
2040, not for anything recognizable as "the United States."
Yet it's widely agreed that Ryan's plan is about as far as you can
push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama
would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney
would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this
point, it's traditional for pundits to warn that if we don't change
course we're going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that,
right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent
of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although
it's worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every
other European nation except Portugal, Ireland and Italy. Or perhaps
they mean that America's current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as
bad as Greece's, although it's worse than that of Britain, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation
except Ireland.
But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America,
failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and
public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in
2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United
States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo,
we're facedown in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute
calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social
Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes
875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent – or getting on
for twice as much as the second-most insolvent Continental: France at
549 percent.
And if you're thinking, wow, all these percentages are making my head
hurt, forget 'em: When you're spending on the scale Washington does,
what matters is the hard dollar numbers. Greece's total debt is a few
rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only
America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is
about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama
administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of Treasury
bonds every month – or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent
on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt
equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India – every year. And those numbers
don't take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by
Americans. College debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the
equivalent of the entire South Korean economy – tied up just in one
small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other
developed nations.
"We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history,"
says Paul Ryan. And he's right. But precisely because it's so
predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a
plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is
the only real menu on the table. There's a famous exchange in
Hemingway's "A Place In The Sun." Someone asks Mike Campbell, "How did
you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," he replies. "Gradually, then suddenly."
We've been going through the gradual phase so long, we're kinda used to
it. But it's coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second
way: sudden, and very bad.
By the way, that decline in the U.S./Australian exchange isn't the
only one. Ten years ago the U.S. dollar was worth 1.6 Canadian; now it's
at par. A decade ago, the dollar was worth over 10 Swedish Kroner, now
6.7; 1.8 Singapore dollars, now 1.2. I get asked with distressing
frequency by Americans where I would recommend fleeing to. The reality
is, given the dollar's decline over the past decade, that most Americans
can no longer afford to flee to any place worth fleeing to. What's left
is the non-flee option: taking a stand here, stopping the spendaholism,
closing federal agencies, privatizing departments, block-granting to
the states – not in 2040, but now. "Suddenly" is about to show up.
The specter of A Jew-Free Europe has been raised again in this chilling post-Toulouse oped by Giulio Meotti:
A new exodus from the Diaspora could now take place. In
the past few years, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel has
doubled. Hundreds of French Jews have bought apartments in Israel. It’s
their “pied-a-terre” in case the situation gets darker in Europe.
According to the statistics available, due to aliyah and
assimilation, French Jewry is projected to experience a dramatic decline
from 520,000 in 2000, to 480,000 in 2020, to 380,000 in 2050, and to
300,000 by 2080. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom will also
decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080.
Why the rise European anti-Semitism after the Holocaust? Meotti continues:
To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “Europe will never forgive
the Jews for Auschwitz.” Europe doesn’t want to live under the
psychological burden of Auschwitz forever. The Jews are living reminders
of the moral failure of Europe. This leads to the projection of guilt
on Israel and the remaining European Jews.
But what did Bell believe and how could his ideas have any relation to the president’s policies today?
The answers to these questions reside in Bell’s 1998 book Afrolantica Legacies, published by Third World Press. I read it over the weekend and will share a series of excerpts this week with analysis.
The myth of the rise and fall of
Afrolantica — a kind of Atlantis where only African Americans can live —
opens the book and provides Bell with a way to tie together his essays,
fictional dialogues, and political parables written through the ’80s
and ’90s. From seven of these essays, Bell extracts these principles to
serve as “rules of racial preservation”:
“and salvation achievable” (Soph: See Obama on collective salvation here)
“one that stretches toward the divine”
“For some a prophetic power”
In Afrolantica Legacies Bell relies on a number of religious, mystical, and occult literary devices. (And I’ll identify them in the upcoming posts.)
This New Age presentation of Critical Race Theory as a secular, political theology mirrors the black liberation theology
Obama imbibed at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United. Politics,
religion, and “blackness” merge together to produce the equivalent of a
cult.
And cults do real damage to people’s lives.
Bell’s ideas have circulated into the culture and left scars. Here’s a
question to ask the biracial members of Generations X and Y: growing up,
did you experience more race-based harassment from whites for being
half-black or from blacks for being half-white?
Critical race theorists like to claim that
only white racism has any significance because only whites have power in
America. Try telling that to someone who lives without power: a
biracial child. How should they react to the story of Afrolantica? Will
they get to go? And what might they think about their own parents upon
reaching page 148 where Bell states, “white men do not find black women
attractive or regard them as ‘women’ as they would white females”?
There are many more pleasant subjects I could spend the week blogging about other than Afrolantica.
But this is personal. I’m not writing with any hope that beating the
drum about Obama’s radical history will turn the outcome of the
election. My objective is to begin a self-fulfilling prophecy of my own:
15 years from now, when I have children, they will not live in a
political culture that protects and trains their tormentors. The
anti-white and antisemitic racists will receive the same condemnation as
the anti-black racists. (As opposed to their own MSNBC shows.)
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’
“Only African Americans were able to breathe and survive there.”
“The first black visitors reported a sense of well-being, a ‘euphoria
of freedom’ one called it, that they had never known in America.”
“Millions of blacks were determined to move to this new land, to begin an ideal society.”
Observe the end goal here. Bell’s utopia is not that Americans of all
skin colors embrace one another. Instead, he sought to inspire a
“euphoria of freedom” through the fantasy of an “ideal society” without
Jews.
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?
In the prologue to Afrolantica LegaciesProfessor Derrick Bell claims whites base their self-worth on skin color:
For without black people in America, what would it mean
to be white? Of what value whiteness, the privilege of preference, the
presumption of normality, the reassurance of majority status? Were the
advantages of color to disappear, how would whites replace their
carefully constructed but ever-fragile self-esteem based on whiteness?
Blacks doubted that many whites would ever ask themselves these
questions, but the questions were not less real because unacknowledged.
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism
I planned to blog about the late Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies from beginning to end. However, recent events in France
necessitate a brief detour to the book’s sixth — and longest — chapter.
“Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews and Games Scapegoats Play” features two
dialogues devoted to Bell’s defense of Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam.
Bell describes a radical student named Nat T (a reference to the slave revolt led by Nat Turner)
who comes to visit him in his law school office. When Bell rejects Nat
T’s violent, kill-all-the-white-people rhetoric the student storms out,
promising to murder him and the other “black tokens” when the revolution
arrives.
As Nat T leaves the building he upsets Ben Hirsch, a Jewish faculty
member whom Bell describes as “a staunch supporter of Israel where he
travels frequently and consults with the government.” Hirsch comes to
Bell to complain, leading to a Socratic dialogue where Bell blows over a
series of Straw Man arguments. Despite Bell’s reliance on cliches
throughout his narratives, this invention of a pro-Israel professor
shows a genuine gift for the surreal.
Page 89:
“… when one black leader makes comments they deem anti-Semitic…”
“his basic sermon… is a quite conservative message of self-help.”
“Unlike those conservatives, black and white, who only preach
self-help to the poor as a crowd-pleasing abstraction, Farrakhan’s
formulas emphasize the Nation of Islam’s experience in educating black
children, rehabilitating black prisoners, ridding black communities of
drug dealers, and rebuilding respect for self — the essential
prerequisite for individuals determined to maintain the struggle against
the racism that burdens our lives and, unless curbed, will destroy this
country.”
“… I am moved to his side [Farrakhan's] by the ‘take no prisoners’ attitude of his attackers; for example, when Benjamin F. Chavis, the
former NAACP executive director, warned his Anti-Defamation League
(A.D.L.) counterpart, Abraham Foxman, that continued A.D.L. attacks on
Farrakhan could create precisely what Jewish leaders say they fear:
black anti-Semitism.”
An Islamic extremist who boasted of killing seven people
to strike back at France died Thursday after jumping from his window,
gun in hand, in a fierce shootout with police, a French minister said.
Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the suspect, who claimed links
to al-Qaida, jumped out after police entered the apartment Thursday and
found him holed up in the bathroom.
The death of Mohamed Merah, 23, ended a more than 32-hour standoff
with an elite police squad trying to capture him alive. Merah was wanted
in the deaths of seven people, three paratroopers, three Jewish
schoolchildren and a rabbi, all killed over 10 days. Another student and
another paratrooper were wounded in his attacks.
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism
Before beginning our journey to Afrolantica, this dialogue opens the book:
Geneva Crenshaw is a fictional character created by Professor Derrick
Bell. She appears in his previous writings as an idealized version of
himself, expressing his opinions with greater vigor.
For Critical Race Theorists to make the case for American racism’s
“permanence” they must annihilate the Founding Fathers’ reputations. If
Thomas Jefferson and the other founders were so stupid that they could
not see the common humanity of non-whites then why should anyone respect
their political values and the legitimacy of our nation?
With this political theology embedded in one’s heart and mind, the emotional desire to “fundamentally transform” America arises:
RELATED: J. Christian Adams published a picture worth a thousand words on this subject:
"America has learned a great deal about Harvard Law professor Derrick
Bell over the last three weeks. His nutty and venomous philosophy,
Critical Race Theory, is now familiar to many Americans. My bookInjustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department shows
what happens when Critical Race Theory gets a foothold in government
policy. My book also has a photograph that perhaps explains Critical
Race Theory better than any article or crazed writing by Bell over could.
I describe where I found this photo in Injustice:
The nation’s premiere voting rights museum—the National
Voting Rights Museum—now sits at the foot of the bridge [in Selma,
Alabama]. The museum is an inadvertent monument to the civil rights
movement’s degeneration. Its outlook is neatly captured in ten words
that begin its timeline display of the civil rights movement. There, we
find a replica of John Trumball’s iconic depiction of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence with the caption, “1776. The Declaration of
Independence signed by wealthy white men.”
The original civil rights giants would never have tolerated this
historically false assertion. They were patriots, driven by love for
their fellow countrymen and a burning desire to make America a better
place for all its citizens. They repeatedly and vehemently rejected
hatred. But the nasty caption captures the bitter spirit of much of the
civil rights movement today and of numerous race-based activist groups
around the country.
I own the copyright to the photo. But feel
free to copy and distribute. The more people learn about these nutty
ideas, and the museum display in Selma, the better.
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die
In the first essay featured in Afrolantica Legacies Derrick Bell puts his words in Bill Clinton’s mouth. This excerpt from page 13 of Afrolantica Legacies imagines a speech in 1998 from the president titled “Racial Liberation Day: The Challenge for White Americans”:
For Bell’s Critical Race Theory political
theology the concept of “racism” shifted from the concrete (Jim Crow)
to an abstraction:
… racism is a system of continuing and cumulative advantage that benefits all whites whether or not they seek it.
Thus, Bell can now use this abstraction as
the ghost in the gears, the necessary, permanent explanation for any
individual black American’s personal failures and professional
inadequacies:
As Americans, we want to believe that our
country is a meritocracy where anyone who has talent and works hard can
be successful. Charges of racial discrimination threaten that image and,
in all but the most blatant cases, many whites find it difficult to
take them seriously. Thus when blacks assert that racism is alive and
flourishing, whites find denial is the easier, the more comforting
reaction.
Perhaps the reasons for Bell’s attacks on meritocracy are more personal than political, as Thomas Sowell observes:
Sowell:
Derrick Bell was put in an impossible position. He was
hired as a full professor at the Harvard Law School when he himself said
he did not have the kinds of qualifications that people have when they
get appointed as full professors at the Harvard law school. And so what
were his options? His options were to be a nobody among world famous
intellectuals or to go off on his own shtick and try to be important or
significant in that way. And he chose the low road… The fundamental
problem was making him a professor at the Harvard Law School when even
he himself knew that was not something that he merited.
In upcoming parts of this continuing journey through Afrolantica
we’ll see more instances of Bell’s commentary that read in a different
light when understood in the context of the professor’s own career.
Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers
Just as Professor Derrick Bell blamed Jews for inspiring antisemitism, he also pointed the finger at disappearing industrial jobs to explain away inner city criminal culture:
… it is massive unemployment and not the lack of family
values that has devasated so many black communities, placed one-third of
young men — denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and
skills — in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of
them for nonviolent drug offenses.
After my previous post on Afrolantica Legacies featured a video of Thomas Sowell revealing Bell acknowledged his inexperience, a question came to mind: how does Bell’s affirmative action experience at Harvard mirror Barack Obama’s?
Here’s Obama quoted in The New York Times in 1990 in an article titled “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review” by Fox Butterfield:
”The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ”It’s encouraging.
”But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that
everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one
of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least
equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or
growing up in a drug environment.
After becoming the president of what should be the most prestigious
law journal in the country, Obama claimed that “there are hundreds or
thousands of black students with at least equal talent” to him.
Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say” comes to mind.
If an individual cannot take responsibility for his failures then how
can he feel any real satisfaction in his successes? What a dark world
one would live in where everything comes down to chance, save for the
instances where bold progressives can implement social justice.
Is that
what Barack Obama thinks deep down? That he just got lucky and that now
it’s his job to spread the “luck” around?
Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property
“…whites have chosen to protect their sense
of belonging based on skin color over alliances with blacks that would
have improved all of our lives.”
Thus, the capitalist system bears
responsibility for a minority of minorities living in poverty. And since
capitalism produces these disparities in racial achievements,
capitalism itself is racist. (Bell rejects race-neutral and cultural explanations
for inner city pathology.) Because free market economies lead to racist
conclusions, this means that anyone who isn’t a socialist is a racist
whether they realize it or not.
“We have not been passive in seeking our
rights but even our best efforts seem to translate into more property
for whites and more promises for blacks.”
When Bell refers to “seeking our rights” here he uses the term in the
same way as Barack Obama and today’s mainstream Democrats, in the
context of what government “must do on your behalf.” Rights = other people’s property that they acquired by luck
and that progressives must redistribute to counteract the innate,
permanent racism in American society. You have a Right for someone else
to pay for your health care. You have a Right to havesomeone else supply your birth control pills.
Of course this political tradition has deeper roots in the Democratic Party than the Alinskyite infiltration of Obama’s cohort…
"Maybe the copy key got stuck on the presidential speechwriter's keyboard."
23 March 2012
• By DANIEL HALPER
Thomas Buch-Andersen, host of the Danish TV show Detektor,
mocked President Obama's political rhetoric in a recent episode. "Obama
used a metaphor from boxing to explain Denmark's role in the world,"
says Buch-Andersen, introducing the segment.
He then roles the tape. "That's fairly typical of the way that Danes
have punched above their weight in international affairs," President
Obama says at a press availability in the Oval Office with Prime
Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark.
"It's nice to be praised," Buch-Andersen remarks. "We punch harder
than our weight class would suggest. But how much should we read into
his words? According to Obama, are we doing any better than, say, the
Norwegians?"
The TV host again turns to the tape, this time showing President
Obama in the Oval Office with Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg.
"I've said this before, but I want to repeat: Norway punches above its
weight," Obama says.
Back to Buch-Andersen. "Hmm. So Norway packs a punch too. But what
about the Netherlands? Here, their head of government, Mark Rutte,
visits Obama."
The tape roles yet again. "We have no stronger ally than the
Netherlands," says Obama. "They consistently punch above their weight."
The TV host continues, pointing to the similar rhetoric Obama used
when Ireland's head of state came to town, and then the Philippines.
Buch-Andersen wonders aloud, "Maybe the copy key got stuck on the presidential speechwriter's keyboard."
Watch the whole segment:
Get yourself cooler
Lay yourself low
Coincidental murder
With nothing to show
When the judge,
Constipation will go to his head
And his wife's aggravation
You'll soon end up dead
It's the same old story
Same Old Song And Dance, my friend
It's the same old story
Same Old Song And Dance, my friend
Gotcha with the cocaine
Found with your gun
(Alt. You shady lookn' loser
you played with my gun)
No smooth-faced lawyer
To get ya undone
Say, love ain't the same
On the south side of town
You could look
But you ain't gonna find it around
It's the same old story
Same Old Song And Dance, my friend
It's the same old story
Same old story
Same Old Song And Dance
Fate comes a-knockin'
Doors start lockin'
Your old time connection
Change your direction
Ain't gonna change it
Can't rearrange it
Can't stand the pain
And it's all the same to you, my friend
