Category: In-depth coverage

The browning of America

A review of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America, by William H. Frey. By Christopher Caldwell

“We believe our diversity, our differences, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger, makes us more creative, makes us different,” Barack Obama pronounced at a citizenship ceremony last Fourth of July. Until half a century ago most serious historians would have called such an opinion ignorant or naïve. Ethnic diversity implies cultural diversity—if it did not, ethnic diversity would soon disappear.

Cultural diversity means division, division means weakness, and weakness means, eventually, unfreedom. Such, at least, is the traditional view, and history appears to vindicate it. “Diversity” has been an attribute of subject populations: medieval elites communicated in Latin, laborers in various vernaculars. Diversity has been the form of belonging that typifies empires, just as nationality has been the form that typifies republics.

The British Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Empire—these were diverse. England, Italy, and Austria, until recently, were not. The motto E pluribus unum is a sign that the founders saw diversity as a challenge to be mastered, not a resource to be tapped. Yet “diversity” today is a sacred term.

It carries lots of power but resists easy definition. It entered popular constitutional understanding with the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Justice Lewis Powell held that an affirmative action program that reserved spots for minorities at the U.C. Davis medical school violated the equal rights of white applicants, but that “the goal of achieving a diverse student body is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race in admissions decisions under some circumstances.” Diversity thus became a euphemism, allowing authorities to connive at public-policy goals that they could not openly avow.

The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey would seem a good candidate to lead readers to a clear, propaganda-free understanding of what diversity is. The title of his new study on ethnicity and population change is Diversity Explosion. While he never defines the word explicitly, he means the decline—in both population and vitality—of America’s European-descended population, and its replacement by more recently arrived population groups from everywhere in the non-European world.

Frey sometimes describes this change as “the browning of America.” More than half (53%) of the country’s 3,100 counties had declining white populations by the first decade of the century. In the current decade the white population has begun to decline in the nation as a whole. Metropolitan New York and metropolitan Los Angeles have each lost a million white people since 1990. Fewer than half the babies born in 2011 were in the U.S. Census category of “non-Hispanic whites.” Three years from now most Americans under 18 will be “minorities” of one kind or another.

In 1970, there were only two cities with more than a million black residents: New York and Chicago. Now there are seven. Los Angeles County and adjoining Riverside County have 6.1 million Hispanics. In days when people spoke more freely about such matters, dramatic change in the dominant population of the world’s dominant power would have been occasion for speculation and worry. About whether, for instance, as more of its citizens come from non-European backgrounds, the United States will change its idea of its cultural heritage. Or whether, considering the occasional tawdriness of whites’ behavior toward minorities in centuries past—displacing Indians, enslaving Africans, deporting Chinese—there is cause to worry about race relations once the shoe is on the other foot. Or whether European civilization, which from the time of Columbus to the time of Goodbye, Columbus, seemed to roll ever westward as if by a law of nature, is now beginning to ebb.

Frey’s attitude toward these changes is much the same as President Obama’s: demographically, America is bound for glory. “Rather than being feared,” Frey writes, “America’s new diversity—poised to reinvigorate the country at a time when other developed nations are facing advanced aging and population loss—can be celebrated.”

Any “resistance” to diversity can be explained by Americans’ “fear of change, fear of losing privileged status, or fear of unwanted groups in their communities.” Now there are certainly good reasons to be glad of the size of our recent immigration. The U.S. labor force will grow 5% between this decade and 2030, and it would have shrunk considerably otherwise. Yet Frey could do with a reminder that what he is celebrating in passages like these is youth, not diversity, that natives ought to be as capable of bearing the next generation of children as the foreign-born, that their failure to do so may be an effect of something dire rather than the cause of something to be “celebrated,” and that policymakers have seldom been able to predict the outcomes of wholesale demographic change.

Clashes await. Frey sometimes has a sharp eye for them. Only 23% of those born in the Baby Boom generation and before believe America’s new diversity is a “change for the better”; 42% call it a change for the worse. The interests of America’s aging, infertile white population and its young, fecund immigrants will necessarily diverge, in ways that have nothing to do with anyone’s good or ill will. Both groups are dependent on government services, but in different ways. Sixteen percent of whites are over 65, versus 7% of minorities.

The former, broadly speaking, want cheap drugs, lavish pensions, and a labor market in which young people will push wheelchairs and fix meals for next to nothing; the latter want new schools for their children, government-funded day care, and a so-called living wage. This year, for the first time, white families are supporting more dependent seniors than children. For them, the welfare state is no longer in any sense an “investment,” the way its social-democratic designers used to claim. It is, to use an appropriately Baby Boom expression, a drag.

Such statistics lend themselves to reflections about decadence and to questions about what it is we are really importing. It is not so much diversity, perhaps, and not so much labor, as traditional families. A third of Hispanic households consist of families in which a married couple lives with children, and a third of Hispanics are under 18.

A third of Asian-American households consist of these families, too, and the country’s Asian population is now ten times what it was in 1970. Among whites, by contrast, such families make up only a fifth of households—except in those rare communities nationwide where the white population is growing. There, white habits resemble those of immigrants, with a third of families consisting of married couples and children. Frey notes that over time Hispanics “tend to become ‘Americanized’ with regard to family and household relationships.”

But, for now, new immigrant groups—or at least those individuals visible to the IRS—bear a disproportionate burden. Pay-as-you-go welfare states, in which all benefits are drawn directly from present earnings, are spectacularly unfair to those who procreate. Everyone, in time, has a claim to the benefits. But one group pays almost all the costs of producing, nurturing, and educating the next generation’s workforce: parents. For taxpayers, welfare states offer massive disincentives to having children.

Both the old (who have already paid for others’ benefits) and the young (who will pay in the future) have legitimate but incompatible claims on the welfare state. Trying to honor both is one reason the country is now in such a fiscal predicament. Frey’s solution is to “persuade seniors that the key needs among striving young minorities—education, affordable housing, and steady employment—will work to benefit the Social Security and medical care programs that seniors will need in retirement.” Persuade all you like, but it’s not true, or at least not soon enough. In a pay-as-you-go system, there’s a lag of half a generation or a generation before education produces benefits (which, of course, not all education does). Politicians might reasonably ask seniors to consider posterity; but if anyone were capable of doing that, we wouldn’t have got ourselves so deep in debt in the first place.

An economy built around mass immigration may lead to underinvestment in the future. Indeed, this may constitute an off-balance-sheet liability that makes the apparent economic benefits of immigration illusory.

Frey’s book includes an innovation that renders his statistics either clearer or less trustworthy, depending how you look at it: he treats the U.S. Census category “Hispanic” as a race. That is a fateful change, because Hispanics account for more than half of the country’s new “diversity.” Is this move defensible? “Hispanic,” as defined by the Census Bureau, as well as by common sense, is not a race. It is rather a designation of immigrant provenance that has been applied in ways ever more bizarre as the years have passed. It classifies people by national language—not the language of the immigrant—so that a youngster from the Dominican Republic gets lumped together with an Indian from the Bolivian highlands (even if that Indian does not speak Spanish), not with a Haitian who grew up ten miles away (even if that Haitian does).

The problem is that government, however punctilious its definitions, has treated Hispanics as if they were a race. Ethnic lobbies, too, mix foreigners and Americans, non-citizens and citizens, under the same “Hispanic” category, in a way that renders meaningless many of the statistics that rank their progress. The prospects of Ramón “El Pachuco” Rodríguez of Maryvale, Arizona, who arrived from Sinaloa in his 30s a couple years ago without a high school degree or even a green card, are deemed somehow relevant to those of Lowell “Skippy” Rodriguez of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Groton. The linguistic/national nonce-adjective “Hispanic” gets passed on as if it were a genetic inheritance so that Skippy (who may be “Hispanic” only because his great-grandfather owned the largest newspaper in Buenos Aires) can collect, on behalf of newly arrived El Pachuco, a “diversity” bonus that will allow him to bump a more deserving applicant from a spot at Yale.

“It is safe to predict that racial classifications will be modified in the future as multiracial marriages and populations proliferate,” Frey writes. But this prediction is not safe at all. There now exists a market of racial classifications. Whether such classifications as “black” and “Hispanic” get modified will depend on whether they continue to produce jobs, promotions and college placements.

In the case of “Hispanic,” if a classification is something you can be incentivized to belong to, then it doesn’t meet anyone’s commonsense definition of a race. A faulty classification produces a faulty reading of society. To argue that Hispanics should or should not be eligible for programs of racial integration designed for blacks in the shadow of Jim Crow is to put the cart before the horse. We have these categories in the first place only to promote people’s insertion into race-based programs.

Frey is more interested in tracing the arrival, spread, and assimilation of immigrants than in examining the centuries-old divide between whites and blacks. Black population growth is steady but not spectacular—midway between the exploding populations of new immigrants and the declining one of whites. Still, his discussion of black population trends contains some of the book’s most surprising data. For the first time since slavery, immigration accounts for as much population growth among blacks as it does in the country at large.

Over the past 20 years millions have arrived from West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Caribbean—a wave so large that a tenth of American blacks are now immigrants. Meanwhile, the trickle of native blacks to the American South, which began in the 1970s, has in the last two decades become a torrent. It has reversed the migration to Northern cities that went on uninterrupted for most of the 20th century.

The South is the only part of the country that is gaining native-born blacks, but it is gaining a lot of them, and the gains in Georgia have been particularly large. Atlanta recently passed Chicago as the country’s second-largest black metropolis.

Blacks are moving to the South in part because they are being welcomed there. The five most residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the country are Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The ten least segregated cities are all in the South or Southwest, including Charleston, Raleigh, Greenville (South Carolina), Lakeland (Florida), and Augusta (Georgia). This may be because Southerners are nicer than Northerners, but Frey argues persuasively that the federal government was more able to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in new housing than in old, and most new housing built after 1968 was in the Sunbelt.

By measures not just of segregation but also of income, poverty, and educational attainment, blacks today do considerably better in states that were segregated until the 1960s than in states that were not. The Supreme Court has been much criticized for deciding, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), that the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that call for special scrutiny of Southern institutions were unconstitutional. But if voting institutions resemble the ones Frey describes, it would have been arbitrary to rule otherwise.

Since the 1990s, when Frey noted that whites were fleeing areas of high immigration, the separation between whites and all minorities has, he says, “softened.” He speculates that immigration may have helped blacks and whites get along because other minorities have provided a “buffer” between them, although he offers no data to back up his assertion. A sixth of newly married whites are married to someone of another race, but it is not easy to figure what this means since the non-racial category of Hispanics is, again, involved.

Such intermarriage may be rising because whites are growing more tolerant or because new “races” have been introduced into American life that stand outside the historic black-white clash. White-Asian marriages outnumber white-black marriages, despite a vastly higher black population. Yet white-black marriages have been rising since the 1960s, by about 50% per decade, and now amount to roughly one eighth of the number of black-black marriages.

Frey finds a strange asymmetry in such racially mixed marriages: three quarters are between black men and white women. Frey does not give an explanation of where this imbalance comes from, though in a footnote he hints that it might involve a trade of the man’s economic status for the woman’s social status. Whatever the cause, something other than straightforward assimilation is at work—some social force that acts very differently on whites than on blacks.

In a 1973 episode of “All in the Family,” Archie Bunker spoke of a co-worker everyone called Black Elmo, “so’s not to get him mixed up with regular Elmo.” Sophisticates have long belittled the worldview that white people are the only “regular” Americans. Yet we have built our official racial policy around exactly this conception. Our politics, as rejiggered by civil rights laws and affirmative action, assumes a mainstream culture, and the ebbing of the white majority in the United States is going to present genuine governing problems.

Frey consistently fails to see this. “Although whites are still considered the mainstream in the United States,” he writes, “that perception should eventually shift.” But how can it and why should it? Affirmative action has become such a lucrative source of privilege that lobbying has made it impregnable, even in a country that has shown, by twice electing a black president, that it has no need of it. But our regime of affirmative action requires a majority sensitive to pangs of conscience.

When Frey offers policy prescriptions, he focuses on closing this or that “gap” between minorities and whites—as if the case for vigorous government action then required no further elaboration. Activists and government make a similar assumption. But once whites are a negligible part of the electorate, whose incomes (or life expectancies, or college achievements) are aggrieved minorities’ to be contrasted with? If blacks remain poor when whites are merely another L.A. minority, what kind of remedies will be suggested by the Mexican-American power structure and its Asian supporters? If whites are poorer than, say, Asians, against whose incomes will the poorest minorities’ be calibrated? Assuming whites cannot be transformed from a repentant majority into a scapegoat minority (on the model of European Jews historically, or the Chinese in Southeast Asia more recently), then our ability to make “voluntary” inter-ethnic transfers of money, jobs, and prestige may be nearing its end.

We have not prepared a regime to follow our half-century-long experiment with affirmative action. The transition will be more complicated than we assume. Should whites cease to be the majority, they will then become, by definition, just another subgroup. They show signs of following the interest-group logic that, since the 1960s and especially in the last decade, has “racialized” the politics of all other subgroups. “[T]he social, economic and demographic makeup of the white population is becoming ever more distinct,” Frey writes, also noting their increasing tendency to vote Republican. Whites, even the very youngest, favored the underwhelming Mitt Romney in the last presidential election by between 7 and 23 points, depending on age cohort.

This is not as extreme a polarization as that of nonwhites, who in 2012 gave Obama margins of victory between 58 and 64 points, but it is a significant change. It will have repercussions for our politics. In Georgia last fall, Democrat Michelle Nunn, an impressive candidate and the daughter of a long-beloved U.S. senator, lost after getting only 23% of the white vote. Weeks earlier, political analyst Nate Cohn had written in the New Republic that by 2016, due to the influx of blacks to Georgia, it should be possible for a Democrat to win Georgia with that many white votes. A racially polarized democracy is a terrible prospect. “Future elections like this one,” Frey writes of 2012, “will not be demographically sustainable.” One fears he means politically sustainable.

Like “multiculturalism,” the word “diversity” is both a sociological description and an ideological program. Prop-aganda is baked into it from the beginning. Frey is as independent-minded a demographer as there is working today, and yet he cannot employ the term without getting sucked into the bien-pensant maelstrom: Given the growing, more diverse racial populations that are central to the nation’s future, it is imperative that the kinds of laws and policies put in place to ensure equal access to employment, housing, education and voting are enforced, monitored, and—where necessary—augmented to accommodate new groups and needs, including the integration of immigrants and their families. …[T]he demographic die is cast…racial minorities will not just “fit in” but will hold sway….

A need to atone for slavery and segregation was once the justification for the “laws and policies” Frey describes. Many and perhaps most Americans have lost the thread of this historical narrative. These laws and policies now seem to require no justification. So to whom, ultimately, will the “new groups” address their “imperative” demands for “equal access” when “sway” is held by people with no felt responsibility to atone for America’s historic sins?

Into what kind of society will these new groups fit? Of what will these “augmented” monitoring programs consist, and against whom will they be directed? “Diversity” is leading us down an ominous and unfamiliar stretch of road.

Source: www.claremont.org

Outsourcing in America

You’ve spent twenty plus years loyally working in Information Technology (IT) for Southern California Edison, and eighteen months ago your boss tells you that they are going to study outsourcing but not to worry, “your position is safe.” On the one hand you are worried because you know many stories of American IT workers losing their jobs to outsourcing, but on the other you feel comforted that you’ve been loyal to SCE and provide a critical service. Then eight months ago they tell you that they are outsourcing most IT functions and that they want you, get this, to train your guestworker replacement. If you say no, SCE will terminate you with cause and you would lose not only a severance package but also eligibility for unemployment insurance. This is the common story I heard from many workers at SCE.

The work that the 400 SCE IT employees do isn’t disappearing, instead it and their jobs are being taken over by foreign guestworkers here on H-1B visas. Those guestworkers are employed by the two leading India-based outsourcing firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

The SCE workers are wondering: “Why should I lose my job when the work still needs to be done? Why is the government doing this to me and my family?”
Adding to the injustice of losing their jobs, the SCE workers are being forced to do something that is so common in the industry it is a term of art: “knowledge transfer,” an ugly euphemism that means being forced to train your own foreign replacement. The SCE workers are, “demoralized; in disbelief; beyond furious; down in the dumps; feeling anguish; depressed; feeling dehumanized; feeling humiliated; worrying about the future; worrying about paying the bills.”

The SCE workers rightly place the culpability squarely on SCE executives, the president, and Congress. One worker simply said, “Shame on Edison for doing this and shame on our politicians for enabling it.”

H-1B visas are temporary work permits issued by the U.S. government that are good for up to six years. The intent is for these visas to be used only when an American worker cannot be found. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor states, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.”

In practice, the H-1B visa has been used for years to undercut American workers with lower-wage, and often lesser-skilled, workers brought in from overseas. How does this happen? Congress sets the wage floors for H-1Bs, and it has set it far below market wages. And the Department of Labor has chosen not to investigate the rampant abuse of the program. As a result, over the past decade, outsourcers like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys have become the dominant users. Just over the past four years, Tata and Infosys received more than 33,000 new H-1B visas. That’s 33,000 jobs lost due to those two companies alone. They use the program to replace American workers domestically while using their H-1B workforce stationed in America to facilitate the transfer of work and jobs to India. These are not immigrants in waiting, the firms sponsor virtually none of their H-1B workers for permanent residence (greencards). Instead of a way to fill skills gaps, the H-1B program has become a way to suppress wages and pad profits.

The practice of replacing American workers with cheaper H-1B guestworkers is widespread. It is so endemic in the H-1B program that last year the majority of the visas went to outsourcing companies. Indian Government officials have dubbed the H-1B as the “Outsourcing Visa.”

Why do companies replace Americans with foreign guestworkers? The SCE workers rightly believe the motivation is “pure greed.” According to a recent consulting report commissioned by SCE, the typical SCE IT worker is earning $110,000 while government records show Tata pays its H-1B workers $66,000 and Infosys pays $71,000. The savings go beyond just wages. H-1B workers have very limited bargaining power since the employers control their work permit. It should come as no surprise that H-1B workers are easily exploited. Those significant cost savings far outweigh the one-time H-1B legal and administrative fees of about $5,000 per worker.

The SCE workers I spoke to have a message for Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez: use your statutory authority to investigate and stop the H-1B abuse. If you find abuse debar those employers from using the program.

And their message to Congress is: close the loopholes that allow employers to use H-1Bs for cheap labor. Given all of these facts, you would think that Congress would be hard at work fixing the H-1B program. Instead, many are moving in the other direction, writing legislation to triple the number of H-1Bs while doing nothing to close the loopholes. The Skills Visa Act, introduced by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), in the last Congress, and the bipartisan I-Squared Act recently introduced by the Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) would threaten tens of thousands more middle class jobs. However, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have been working for a decade to fix the program. They propose: raising the H-1B wage floors to the average wage; ensuring that American workers have a first and legitimate shot at jobs; and, ensuring that American workers aren’t being replaced by H-1Bs. This would mean the H-1B program is being used for truly skilled workers and not simply cheap labor.

Ron Hira is an associate professor of public policy at Howard University, a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, and co-author of the book Outsourcing America

Puny job ambitions fuelling Washington consensus on Ukraine

If we’re going to risk armed conflict with Moscow, the underlying causes ought to be grander than the highest-ranking woman at the Pentagon’s job aspirations

By Scott McConnell

Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell inform us on “Meet the Press“ that there is complete Republican and Democratic unity on Ukraine policy. Who can doubt the assertion?

On the Sunday talk shows, all of them, virtually no one argues against American military escalation of the conflict by sending arms to the Kiev government. True, on “Meet the Press” the English journalist Katty Kay uttered a few sentences to counter the combined hawkish barrage of Todd, Mitchell, and David Brooks, and on Fareed Zakaria’s show “GPS”, Stephen Cohen—also one against three—was given 40 seconds to point out that Ukraine was a visceral strategic issue for Moscow and not for anyone else.

But there’s virtual opinion unanimity: red-blooded American straight-shooters want to stand up and make Putin pay a price for aggression. The only substantial disagreement, it would seem, comes from those lily-livered Europeans, France—the well-known surrender monkeys—and Germany’s Angela Merkel, who speaks so diplomatically in public that differences between her and the administration are difficult to discern.

During the Cold War, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published a book called Manufacturing Consent describing how the media always slanted the news to favor the right wing in any left-right dispute. I was a cold warrior and am glad that communism, a terrible and murderous social system, is mostly gone.

But I didn’t anticipate that the same process of “manufacturing consent” would continue its forward march after the Cold War was won, not by slanting the news against leftist insurgencies in the Third World, but rather by slanting it always in favor of aggressive American meddling, including military intervention, seemingly everywhere. The monopoly capital explanation, favored by Chomsky and Herman, certainly can’t account for it in this instance. Most American corporations gained little from the Iraq war, and probably more would gain than lose from continued detente with Putin’s Russia than a new cold war. So what is the answer?

First let’s narrow the question a bit more. In the narrative now favored by virtually everyone in Washington, Putin is committing aggression against Ukraine, first by annexing Crimea (which, despite its Russian population and longstanding ties to Russia, was “given” by Krushchev to Ukraine one night in 1954) and secondly by giving weapons and other military assistance to anti-Kiev pro-Russian separatists.

According to these narratives, the history of Ukraine and Russia begins sometime in February 2014. But in the view of everyone else, in Ukraine, in Russia, and among those lily-livered European appeasers, history starts well before that. One relevant starting point can be found in the first plans to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders. As Steve Walt helpfully reminds us, the very think tank people now assuring us that escalating the conflict by arming the Kiev government will cause Putin to back down are the same people who told us in the 1990s that expanding NATO eastward would cause no difficulties with Russia at all.

It begins also with the longstanding campaign, openly boasted about by the neoconservative Victoria Nuland, the former Cheney aide who remains on John Kerry’s staff, to channel billions of dollars to Ukrainian dissident groups so that Ukraine could freely choose “the European future they deserve.” These moneys were supplemented by unofficial funds (grants from George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy) and open side-taking in Ukraine’s political crisis by American politicians, all leading up the ambiguous and still mysterious revolution/coup d’état of February 2014.

Any historically minded person will have some understanding of the depth of Ukraine’s anti-Russian sentiments: it is a land of deep-rooted hatreds, and Ukraine in the 1930s and ’40s, tossed between Stalinism and Hitlerism, was the most blood-soaked place on the planet. In any event, the history didn’t all begin last year—except, apparently, for American decision-makers inside the Beltway.

The best explanation for the Beltway unanimity now expressed by members of Congress, journalists, and think tank people is the career ambition and the groupthink encouraged by the imperatives of the deep state. The last is a term for that large, many-layered complex: the top officers of the armed forces, top career officials of the intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and think tanks that perpetuate themselves and maintain their budgets by overstating threats and never, ever getting caught underestimating them.

The best current analysis of how this works come from Tufts professor Michael Glennon, in an important essay that deserves wide attention. One conclusion Glennon draws is that the only way you can advance to a bigger, more influential job is to be seen as “hard-hitting” and “tough minded.” And that means you can never ignore a foreign policy problem, or argue that an issue really isn’t such a big problem, or, perish the thought, muse that “this is not really our concern” in an official meeting and expect to be taken seriously in Washington.

The most compelling explanation of why the Obama administration seemed to be shifting towards a more hawkish policy (arming the Kiev government now) is that key players in the administration have begun maneuvering for jobs in a future Hillary Clinton administration. Reflexive (but not shrill) hawkishness a necessary form of careerism in the foreign policy bureaucracy set. As an explanation for important events, it’s a close cousin to Hannah Arendt’s observation that Eichman was a banal and mediocre figure.

Personally, I would prefer that the Chomskyite monopoly capitalism explanation was more credible. If we’re going to risk armed conflict with Moscow on Russia’s borders, which brings into play the possibility of nuclear war and the incineration of our civilization, the underlying causes ought to be grander than Michele Flournoy’s job aspirations.

Orwell’s 1984 character Winston Smith wrote that if there is hope, it must lie in the proles. For us, it must lie in the Europeans. Not with Donald Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”, those former Soviet satellites so eager for American acceptance that they embraced the Iraq war with enthusiasm and readily hosted CIA torture sites. But Old Europe, grown skeptical and crusade weary.

German chancellor Angela Merkel does not favor arming Kiev, and advocates patience and sanctions. But she has no public persona in America; in Washington she speaks through a translator and and takes pains to minimize differences with the administration. France’s President Hollande, a far less powerful figure than Merkel, does not favor escalation either. France’s largest party in the polls, the much-maligned National Front, is increasingly pro-Russian and anti-NATO, or at least many of its foreign policy intellectuals are.

Perhaps most interesting is Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France and still the best-known figure of the French center-right. At a conference of his UMP party last weekend, Sarkozy told the audience that France and Russia shared a common civilization. He made reference to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and said, essentially, that Russia is linked to France in a way China and Vietnam are not. He added that the Crimeans had every right to choose to link their future to Russia; that if we supported independence from Serbia for Kosovo, there was no legitimate reason to deny the same right to the Crimeans. The assembled delegates of this very establishment party applauded enthusiastically.

America had different interests than Europeans, Sarkozy stated, but “We do not want a revival of the Cold War between America and Russia.” Kiev, he continued, pointing towards the obvious diplomatic solution of a neutral Ukraine, ought to be a bridge between Russia and Europe, and is not destined to join the European Union.

European politicians have a sense of tragedy that comparable American figures mostly lack; they recognize that civilization-destroying wars can begin over seemingly minor matters; they are almost all better educated; and having parents who experienced Hitler, they aren’t given to facile analogies between Putin’s demographically shrinking Russia and expansive Germany of the 1930s.

The beltway consensus that Russia is a totalitarian state on the march, that Ukraine is an aggressive Vladimir Putin’s first morsel before marching on Poland, is widely shared but not deeply felt. American politicians’ first political instinct is cowardice on foreign policy questions—there is no political percentage in challenging the consensus. But that consensus seems powerful only because it has not been challenged.

If European leaders speak out forcefully—sketching out clearly the risks of war, the necessity of a negotiated settlement, and the absurdity of starting a war with Russia over a region vitally important to Russia and of little concern to the U.S., Americans must make every effort to amplify their voices here.

Much is at stake. Even if we assume that escalating the war in Ukraine (as the think-tankers urge: increase the pain for Putin by increasing Russian casualties) does not lead to a tragic escalation, the ancillary consequences border on the ridiculous.

Already the United States has ceased cooperating with Russia over securing its loose nuclear material. Is that an American interest, to make an enemy of an important player in any nuclear non-proliferation program? Is it in America’s interest to push Russia closer into China’s orbit? Are either of those outcomes, already well underway, balanced by the theoretical gain of incorporating Ukraine into the Western bloc, an outcome which, to be honest, very few European taxpayers desire?

This article originally appeared in The American Conservative

Will Russia remonetize in gold?

The “perfect-storm” of geopolitical instability, diplomatic isolation, severe currency depreciation, and economic decline now confronting Russia has profoundly damaged Moscow’s international standing, and possibly for the long-term.

Yet, it is precisely such conditions that may push the country’s leadership into taking the radical step that will secure its world-player status once and for all: the adoption of a gold-exchange standard.

Though a far-fetched idea at first glance, many factors suggest that remonetization in gold may be a logical next step for Moscow.

First, for years Moscow has been expressing its unwillingness to remain at the monetary mercy of the US and its NATO allies and this view has been most vehemently expressed by President Putin’s long-time economic advisor, Sergei Glazyev.

Russia is prepared to play strategic hardball with the West on the issue: the governor of Russia’s central bank took the unusual step last November of presenting to the international media details of the bank’s zealous gold-buying spree.

The announcement, in sharp contrast to that institution’s more taciturn traditions, underscores Moscow’s outspoken dismay with dollar hegemony; its timing suggests coordination with the top rungs of government to present gold as a possible currency-war weapon.

Second, despite international pressure, Russia has been very wary of the sell-off policies that led the UK, France, Spain, and Italy to unload gold over the past decade during unsuccessful attempts to prop up their respective ailing economies — in particular, of then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s sell-off of 400 metric tons of the country’s reserves at stunningly low prices.

Moscow’s surprise decision upon the onset of the ruble’s swift decline in early December 2014 to not tap into the country’s gold reserves, now the world’s sixth largest, highlights the ambitiousness of Russia’s stance on the gold issue. By the end of December, Russia added another 20.73 tons, according to the IMF in late January, capping a nine-month buying spree.

Third, while the Russian economy is structurally weak, enough of the country’s monetary fundamentals are sound, such that the timing of a move to gold, geopolitically and domestically, may be ideal. Russia is not a debtor nation. At this writing in January, Russia’s debt to GDP ratio is low and most of its external debt is private.

Physical gold accounts for 10 percent of Russia’s foreign currency reserves. The budget deficit, as of a November 2014 projection, is likely to be around $10 billion, much less than 1 percent of GDP. The poverty rate fell from 35 percent in 2001 to 10 percent in 2010, while the middle class was projected in 2013 to reach 86 percent of the population by 2020.

Collapsing oil prices serve only to intensify the monetary attractiveness of gold. Given that oil exports, along with the rest of the energy sector, account for 45 percent of GDP, the depreciation of the ruble will continue; newly unstable fiscal conditions have devastated banks, and higher inflation looms, expected to reach 10 percent by the end of 2015. As Russia remains (for the foreseeable future) mainly a resource-based economy, only a move to gold, arguably, can make the currency stronger, even if it does limit Russia’s available currency.

In buying as much gold as it has, the country is, in part, ensuring that it will have enough money in circulation in the event of such fundamental transformation. In terms of re-establishing post-oil shock international prestige, a move to gold will allow the country to be seen as a more reliable and trustworthy trading partner.

The repercussions of Russia on a gold-exchange standard would be immense. Above all, it would mean the first major schism in the world’s monetary order. China would quite likely follow suit. It could mean the threat of a severe inflation in the United States should rafts of unwanted dollars make their way back across the Atlantic — the Fed’s ultimate nightmare. Above all, the country will avoid the extreme debt leverages which would not have happened had Western capitals remained on gold.

“A gold standard would be politically appealing, transforming the ruble to a formidable currency and reducing outflows significantly,” writes Dr. Enrico Colombatto, economics professor at the University of Turin, Italy.

He notes that the only major drawback would be that the imposed discipline of a gold standard would deprive authorities of discretionary political power. The other threat would be that of a new generation of Russian central bankers becoming too heavily influenced by the monetary mindset of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Fed.

As Alisdair MacLeod, a two-decade veteran of off-shore banking consulting based in the UK, recently wrote, Russia (and China) will “hold all the aces” by moving away from any possible currency wars of the future into the physical gold market. In his article, he adds that there is currently a low appetite for physical gold in Western capital markets and longer-term foreign holders of rubles would be unlikely to exchange them for gold, preferring to sell them for other fiat currencies.

Mr. Macleod cites John Butler, CIO at Atom Capital in London, who sees great potential in a gold-exchange standard for Russia. With the establishment of a sound gold-exchange rate, he argues, the Central Bank of Russia would no longer be confined to buying and selling gold to maintain the rate of exchange. The bank could freely manage the liquidity of the ruble and be able to issue coupon-bearing bonds to the Russian public, allowing it a yield linked to gold rates. As the ruble stabilizes, the rate of the cost of living would drop; savings would grow, spurred on by long term stability and lower taxes.

Foreign exchange also would be favorable, Mr. Butler maintains. Owing to the Ukraine crises and commodities crises, rubles have been dumped for dollar/euro currencies. Upon the announcement of a gold-exchange, demand for the ruble would increase. London and New York markets would in turn be countered by provisions restricting gold-to-ruble exchanges of imports and exports.

The geopolitics of gold also figure into Russia’s increasingly close relations with China, a country that also has made clear its preference for gold over the dollar. (Russia recently edged out China as the world’s top buyer of the metal.) In the aftermath of the $400 billion, 30-year deal signed between Russian gas giant Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Company in November 2014, China turned its focus to the internationalization of its own gold market. On January 15, 2015, the Shanghai Gold Exchange, the largest physical gold exchange worldwide, and the World Gold Council, concluded a strategic cooperation deal to expand the Chinese gold market through the new Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

This is not the first time the gold standard has been seen as the ultimate cure for Russia’s economic problems. In September 1998, the noted economist Jude Wanninski predicted in a far-sighted essay for The Wall Street Journal that only a gold ruble would get the the country out of its then-debt crises. It was upon taking office about two years later, in May 2000, that President Putin embarked upon the country’s massive gold-buying campaign. At the time, it took twenty-eight barrels of crude just to buy an ounce of gold. The gold-backed ruble policy of those years was adopted to successfully pay down the country’s external debt.

As a pro-gold stance is, essentially, anti-dollar, speculation about how the US would react raises the question of whether an all-out currency war would follow. The West would have to keep Russia regionally and militarily marginalized, not to mention kept within the confines of the Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of England (BOE).

Nor is that prospect too far-fetched. As Dutch author Willem Middelkoop has written in his 2014 book The Big Reset: War on Gold and the Financial Endgame,

A system reset is imminent. Even before 2020 the world’s financial system will need to find a different anchor. … In a desperate attempt to maintain this dollar system, the United States waged a secret war on gold since the 1960s. China and Russia have pierced through the American smokescreen around gold and the dollar and are no longer willing to continue lending to the United States. Both countries have been accumulating enormous amounts of gold, positioning themselves for the next phase of the global financial system.

Source: Von Mises Institute

Cynical slogans as black abortions spike

“Black lives matter” has become the slogan of anti-police protests across the nation, but the target of the protests is so misplaced that the motives of the so-called civil rights leaders behind the movement must be questioned. Do they really care about black lives? Or are they cynically exploiting isolated incidents, such as the death of Michael Brown, to inflame the black population and advance their own political interests?

Today, on the somber anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, it’s time for black leaders to face up to the real danger threatening black lives in America. It isn’t the police. According to an anti-police brutality organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 313 blacks were killed by “police, security guards and vigilantes” in 2013. It isn’t even black criminals, who, as Rudy Giuliani famously pointed out on “Meet the Press,” are responsible for 93 percent of violent deaths among blacks. Sources estimate that between 6,000 and 8,000 blacks are murdered each year.

No, the greatest danger to blacks is found precisely where we ought to be safest: in our mothers’ wombs. In 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 138,539 black babies were aborted.

Thankfully, abortion is on the decline in America, down 3 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Strikingly, the number of surgical abortion clinics has plummeted, from 2,176 in 1991 to 551 today. Nevertheless, the CDC report that in 2010, a staggering 765,651 abortions were performed in the United States. Black women continue to have the highest abortion rate of any ethnic group, with a gruesome 483 abortions for every 1,000 live births.

The bottom line? I’ll say it again: 138,539 black babies, nearly one baby in three, were killed in the womb in 2010. According to the CDC, between 2007 and 2010, innocent black babies were victimized in nearly 36 percent of the abortion deaths in the United States, though blacks represent only 12.8 percent of the population. Some say the abortion capital of America is New York City. According to LifeSiteNews, the city’s Department of Health reported that in 2012, more black babies were aborted (31,328) than born (24,758). That’s 55.9 percent of black babies killed before birth. Blacks represented 42.4 percent of all abortions.

Legalized abortion is working out exactly as Margaret Sanger intended. Sanger, the founder of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, was part of the eugenics movement back in the 1930s. Her goal was to use abortion to cull what she considered inferior races from the human gene pool. According to Sanger, “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.” She opened her first abortion clinics in inner cities, and it’s no accident that even today, “79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in black or minority neighborhoods.”

We mustn’t forget that babies aren’t the only victims of abortion. Sadly, more and more of the mothers are suffering and dying as well. Though many people continue to deny it, the link between abortion and breast cancer has been amply documented, and this deadly consequence of abortion is plaguing greater and greater numbers of black women.

Ironically, black women used to suffer from breast cancer less frequently than white women. Not any longer. The Black Women’s Health Imperative notes that according to an American Cancer Society report, black women now develop breast cancer almost as frequently as whites, and are more likely to die from the disease. LifeSiteNews also cites an American Cancer Society report that black women under age 40 now are more likely to develop breast cancer than their white counterparts. They can thank Margaret Sanger — and some of today’s so-called civil rights leaders.

Sanger relied on black ministers to act as Judas goats leading their sisters to abortion mills. According to LifeSiteNews, Sanger wrote in 1939, “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Some black leaders are still acting as Judas goats today. LifeSiteNews cites black pro-life activist Ryan Bomberger: “Back in 2005, the NAACP praised the high black abortion rate as compared to the percentage of the population at a NARAL fundraising gala. When more black babies are aborted than are born alive in NYC and the NAACP responds by supporting Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo’s radical abortion expansion via the misnamed ‘Women’s Equality Act,’ one can understand how the targeting of minorities continues unabated.”

Abortion is the greatest threat to black lives in America today. People who claim to represent the black community while also abetting the black holocaust — abortion — are hypocrites. Any “civil rights leader” who genuinely believes that “black lives matter” should be working to see that every black baby is accorded the very first civil right — the right to life.

J. Kenneth Blackwell is a policy board member of the American Civil Rights Union.

Source: Washington Times

Putin’s favorite white philosopher

A rundown of beliefs espoused by Ivan Ilyin, Russia philosopher who most influenced the current Russia president

By Paul Robinson

In his speech to the Russian parliament on 4 December, Vladimir Putin quoted philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who died 60 years ago. Putin supervised the repatriation and reburial of Ilyin’s body in 2005, and has laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave.

He has quoted him several times before. Ilyin’s Our Tasks (Nashi Zadachi) was one of three books distributed by the Kremlin as recommended reading to regional governors and senior members of the United Russia party in early 2014.

And on December 22nd of this year, members of the Duma, Federation Council, and Presidential Administration will meet in Moscow for a round-table discussion of his work.

If Putin has a favourite philosopher, Ilyin seems to be the man. So who was he and what did he believe in?

Born in 1883, Ilyin studied law at Moscow State University and completed his thesis The philosophy of Hegel as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and humanity in 1916.

Resolutely anti-communist, he was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 along with some 200 other intellectuals on the infamous ‘philosophers’ steamboat’.

He then took up residence in Berlin, where he made contact with members of the exiled White army of General P.N. Wrangel, who nicknamed him Belyi (White) on account of the pure belizna (whiteness) of his opinions.

Ilyin became the unofficial ideologist of the White Army in exile, and much of his work thereafter was as much political as it was philosophical, and was aimed at a wider audience than other philosophers.

Ilyin’s work covered a large variety of subjects, including the philosophy of Hegel, law, politics, the ethics of violence, the nature of the Russian nation, and the tasks incumbent on Russian émigrés.

He was in many respects a religious philosopher, in that he regarded spiritual matters as more important than material ones. He believed that the Russian revolution was a product of the spiritual failings of the Russian people.

Russia’s resurrection depended on the revival of the correct spirit, including a love of God, a love of Russia, respect for the law, a sense of duty and honour, and devotion to the state and the common weal rather than personal or party interests.

It is difficult to reduce the writings of such a complex thinker to a few lines, but three themes stand out: gosudarstvennost’ (statehood); pravosoznanie (legal consciousness); and natsionalizm (nationalism).

Gosudarstvennost’. Ilyin was a firm believer in a strong state. Gosudarstvennost’ can be viewed in purely descriptive terms as meaning the system of government, but it is also a value-laden term.

It implies a belief that the interests of the state should come first. In this sense it can be contrasted with obshchestvennost’, which is often translated as ‘public opinion’ but more accurately describes the liberal stratum of Russian society and its beliefs, and it can be contrasted also with partiinost’, the ideology of the Communist Party, which placed the interests of the party first.

Ilyin believed that to view the state as a balance of competing material interests was profoundly mistaken. The state should work for the general good. To this end, it must be strong.

In Russia, a weak state would result in anarchy. ‘Russian state power will be strong, or it won’t exist at all’, he wrote. Ilyin rejected federalism and demanded a unitary state, ‘dictatorial in the scope of its powers.’ He favoured autocracy, but one filled with ‘creative spirit … a dictatorial-aristocratic-democracy.’

The state should be absolute in those areas in which it had competence. But it should not have competence over everything. ‘At the head of the state must stand a single will,’ he wrote, ‘It cannot and should not regulate everything. The totalitarian state is godless.’ The state had to be bound by law and accountable to the people.

Pravosoznanie: A lawyer by training, Ilyin was a firm believer in the importance of law. One of Imperial Russia’s greatest failings was its undeveloped ‘legal consciousness’, that is to say its people’s sense of what was right and wrong and whether they should obey the law.

One of the most important tasks of the autocratic state would be to develop the people’s legal consciousness until eventually it reached a level at which the people would become capable of self-government.

Until then, however, attempts to impose liberal democratic forms of government would be disastrous. Thus, in The essence of legal consciousness, Ilyin wrote:

‘The political structure and legal consciousness form a living, inseparable unity insofar as not a single reform is possible until a definite improvement in legal consciousness takes place, and any reform that is disproportionate to the state of popular legal consciousness will turn out to be absurd and ruinous for the state. The single true path to any reform is a gradual education in legal consciousness … in its idea the state can be reduced to self-government of the people. However, the sole and objective end of the state is so high and requires from the citizenry such mature legal consciousness that historically the people turn out to be incapable of self government. … Political philosophy must uncover the root of this divergence; state power must find the path to healing it.’

Natsionalizm: Ilyin was a nationalist. Love of country was a central part of his philosophy. Russians he felt, should put Russian interests first. This contrasted with the internationalist philosophy of the communists.

Furthermore, every nation, Ilyin said, should develop in its own way. Thus the West had no right to tell Russians how to run their own country; conditions in Russia weren’t the same as in the West. ‘Western Europe, which doesn’t know Russia, has not the slightest basis for imposing any political forms whatsoever on us,’ Ilyin declared.

At the same time, Ilyin’s vision of Russia was as a multi-national empire. He did not believe that every small nation had a right to self-determination. Ukrainian independence was anathema to him.

But, precisely because Russia was a multi-national country, and precisely because each nation should develop in its own way, Russians should not seek to assimilate the minorities within the country but leave them to develop their own culture.

In 1938 he fled Germany for Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life, dying there in December 1954.

This article originally appeared here. 

Fracking, climate change, solar in the security mix

The global oil market is going through an upheaval, with non-OPEC production led by North American producers surging while OPEC’s traditional price-setting role changes. First, US oil production and proven oil reserve growth over the past several years is astonishing. Despite the current oil price decline, US oil production growth in 2015 is expected to grow around 1 million barrels per day. However, those growth rates probably won’t be sustained over the long term.

Second, if you look at the world’s largest oil reserve holders and countries that have reserve-to-production ratios in excess of 100 years, they are almost exclusively OPEC members. The cartel’s market influence has diminished in the face of robust non-OPEC production, but the group’s power is likely to endure over the long term purely due to the sheer volume of oil its members collectively control.

The Saudis will remain the de facto leaders of OPEC until another country can build comparable spare production capacity, which in the Saudis case is currently around 2 mmb/d. Saudi Arabia has 266 billion barrels of proven high-quality, cheap-to-produce oil reserves. The US, in contrast, boasts only 44.2 billion barrels of mostly expensive-to-produce oil reserves. Technology is a wild card that has the potential to unlock additional petroleum resources and reduce production costs, but it would be a mistake to discount Saudi Arabia’s power as an oil country, particularly over the long term.

That means, of course, that the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet will remain a key asset. Add the Iranian nuclear talks, the predations of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and the simmering tensions between Israel and its neighbors to the oil that flow through the Strait of Hormuz and there seems little doubt we will keep substantial naval, air and expeditionary forces in the area for the foreseeable future.

Oil-sea-routes-map

But these shifting energy markets raises larger strategic questions.

Colin spoke with one of the wisest analysts about the energy sector and its national security implications, Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A former senior Pentagon and NATO official, Cordesman also served as director of policy and planning for resource applications at the Department of Energy. He doesn’t foresee any immediate major strategic shifts created by the energy market changes. At the same time, he acknowledges that major technological and market shifts have usually gone unnoticed until they hit us in the face.

Cordesman points to the solar and nuclear markets, where we have all been expecting or hoping for major technological breakthroughs “since the Nixon administration.” Then he notes that, in the oil market, “no one predicted that the most critical technological breakthrough would prove to be fracking.” Can we expect a breakthrough in the solar, nuclear or biofuel arenas? “It may take 25 to 50 years or it will happen almost without warning,” he predicts.

The current situation in the alternative energy world: We’re seeing the strong growth of renewable energy, albeit from a low base. The growth rate of installed US solar power capacity has been impressive, but that growth rate has slipped in the past few years as the technology has gained market share. “U.S. solar power capacity would need to grow at an annual rate of 22 percent in order for solar to provide 10 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2030, from less than 1 percent now,” Breaking Energy recently reported.

Wind and solar are used to generate electricity but coal will remain a significant source of US power generation for decades, although its market share looks likely to decline — for environmental reasons. The renewable energy story is important, and while it is changing the way utilities do business, wind and solar are only beginning to compete with fossil fuels on price. In most cases, their competitiveness is a result of tax incentives often referred to as subsidies. Also, the intermittent nature of these resources is a technical challenge that must be overcome in order to efficiently integrate large volumes of wind and solar energy into the power grid during times of peak demand. Creative financing and technological advances – particularly in energy storage – will help renewable electricity sources compete over time, but coal and natural gas will remain significant components of the US power generation mix for the foreseeable future.

At the international level, the issue of burning coal to generate power is far more complex. It is cheap and represents a comparatively cost-effective way to electrify large portions of the global population that currently have no access to power. Indeed, nine countries are collectively about to build roughly 550 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity over the next two and a half decades.

And Then, Climate Change

In many ways, reducing emissions from coal-fired power generation is the key to dealing with climate change. China has been acting to address coal plant emissions due to its dangerous air pollution levels, which is an important piece of the climate change puzzle.

This poses a great conundrum for China. The Communist Party’s leaders are trying to forge a China united between rural and urban areas and that requires huge and fast economic development — much of it dependent on the use of cheap and readily available coal. Weaning themselves off of coal may be promising in terms of reducing emissions, but Cordesman says they are unlikely to be able to accept the economic tradeoffs.

For the same reasons, many other developing countries including India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are increasing their coal-fired power generation fleets.

Some think the ship has already sailed on preventing the impacts of climate change and now focus on adapting to extreme weather and other consequences as opposed to mitigating emissions such that they limit global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Optimists remain however, and international agreements are not the only thing to focus on when thinking about what the world is doing to address the issue. “At every level—individuals, families, cities, states, provinces, even multinational corporations—efforts to cut CO2 are underway,” David Biello, associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American, wrote in a recent post. He goes on to point out, “these are first steps and they are coming at a quickening pace, which suggest a possible future free of catastrophic climate change. More and faster should be the new slogan for action to address global warming. How much more and how much faster should be the only issue for negotiation.”

‘Racist’ Israeli group campaigns against Jewish-Arab marriages

A far-right Israeli group that agitates against Arabs in the name of religion and national security is forcing the Jewish state into a legal and political balancing act as it tries to contain sectarian violence.

Among their activities, Lehava activists yelling “Death to the Arabs” picketed the wedding in August of a Muslim to a Jewish woman who converted to Islam. Now three members have been charged with an arson attack on a cross-faith school in Jerusalem last month.

Members of Lehava protesting outside an Arab-Jewish wedding
Members of Lehava protesting outside an Arab-Jewish wedding

Communal tension has been rising following last summer’s Gaza war, in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died, and feuding over access to Jerusalem’s holiest site. This has spilled over into Palestinian street attacks on Jews, including the killing of four rabbis and a Druze policeman at a synagogue.

Illustrating the risk of sectarian violence, a Palestinian youth was burned to death in July by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the killing of three Jewish teens by militants in the West Bank.

The authorities are under pressure to deal with anyone encouraging Jewish retaliation against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Efforts to tackle Lehava, however, may be complicated by guarantees of free speech and sympathy for the group among a minority of Israelis.

Lehava, whose name means “flame” but is also a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land,” denies wrongdoing and says it is the target of a political witch-hunt.

Police rounded up 21 Lehava members, including its leader Benzion Gopshtein, after the attack on the school where Jewish and Arab children study together. The raids suggest a crackdown on Lehava, and maybe a ban, is in the works.

The three men charged with the arson attack have yet to enter a plea, while Gopshtein argues he is being targeted for what he says, not what he does.

“I’m being investigated for public comments I made about co-existence, even though I never advocated violence,” he told Reuters after being released from police custody. Lehava’s policy was to stay within the law, he said, but he declined to condemn the school attack.

Gopshtein, who put the number of Lehava members at 5,000, said the authorities “are bothered that we have such broad support, which is why they’re carrying out arrests.”

An Israeli official described the Lehava arrests as part of a drive to stamp out hate speech. Among those facing charges are eight Palestinians from East Jerusalem accused of encouraging attacks on Israelis over social media. But the official said securing convictions against Lehava activists on possible charges of inciting racist attacks would be harder.

“Their public statements have been less unequivocal,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is a complex matter, especially as we do not want to intrude on legal rights to freedom of expression.”

Incitement to violence on racial or religious grounds carries a 5-year prison sentence in Israel, 20 percent of whose citizens are Arabs. When felonies are committed as a result of such incitement, hate-crime legislation empowers judges to double the standard penalties.

Hard-core views

Lehava’s core cause is discouraging romances between Jews and gentiles, saying it is campaigning to preserve Judaism.

While such relationships are rare in Israel, the group has disseminated names and pictures of Arabs suspected of courting Jewish women, and critics accuse it of using vigilantes to threaten the men with violence.

Lehava has also urged Israeli businesses not to employ Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, branding them as “tomorrow’s terrorists.”

Gopshtein was a disciple of the late Meir Kahane, a U.S.-born rabbi who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Gopshtein, 45, said he had previously had run-ins with the police for disorderly conduct while active with Kahane’s movement Kach, which was banned from Israeli politics as racist in 1988.

Asked whether Lehava might similarly be outlawed, the Israeli official said: “That possibility will be examined.”

Mainstream Israeli leaders have condemned the arson attack and other racist incidents. The arrests were led by a police taskforce set up last year to tackle violent far-right Jews.

Tamar Hermann, a sociologist and pollster with the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), said state action against Lehava had only followed repeated complaints by left-leaning petitions and media commentators.

Such pressure on police, Herman added, may be offset by the growing ranks of Israelis who sympathize with Lehava. An IDI poll to be published next month found 21 percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as “religious nationalists,” she said, while about three percent hold “hard-core” views against gentiles.

“The rise of extreme religiosity that we are seeing in the Middle East, and even in Europe and the United States, is happening in Israel, too, and I don’t see it as merely a counter-reaction to Arab hostility,” Hermann said.

Menachem Landow, a retired official of the Shin Bet security agency, argued against banning Lehava, saying its ideology “would simply morph and find a new legal home.”

“The trouble-makers here are generally from a certain sector of Israeli society, dislocated young men from pious backgrounds, who simply hate Arabs as part of a race theory and are looking for a framework in which to act on that hatred,” he said.

“They have to be tackled individually,” Landow added, noting police had used these tactics against Israeli soccer fans whose anti-Arab taunts have at times escalated into race riots. – Reuters

Black and white justice: Oscar Pistorius and the Xhosa King

The question of whether Oscar Pistorius is a murderer or not will now be argued in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) following the successful application by the State to have his culpable homicide conviction reviewed.

Judge Thokozile Masipa handed down her ruling in the High Court in Pretoria on Wednesday.

Pistorius was sentenced to five years in prison for the Valentine’s Day shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

But the State just can’t explain why DA-darling Xhosa King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo has for five years managed to avoid a 15-year jail sentence for culpable homicide, while the State dithers over what to do about him.

SCA sources have confirmed that no appeal papers were filed by either side in the case. As there’s no appeal, Dalindyebo should have started serving his 15-year sentence, but he remains free.

“We are still dealing with the matter. We are unable to divulge any details at this point,” Nathi Mncube, national spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said last week.

“It will be resolved soon.”

The Star had asked again why Dalindyebo wasn’t in jail, following the collapse of an appeal in the matter in early August.

He was convicted in 2009 of culpable homicide, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, arson, kidnapping and attempting to defeat the ends of justice, relating to disciplinary actions he ordered against his subjects in 1995 and 1996.

He was sentenced to an effective 15 years in jail.

Dalindyebo never filed appeal papers with the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), and in early August, the Department of Justice said the appeal had lapsed as he was now out of time.

He was expected to go to jail, but didn’t.

At the same time, the NPA explained the lack of action against Dalindyebo by saying it had also appealed against the culpable homicide conviction. But the NPA also never filed any appeal papers.

Dalindyebo openly admits to smoking dagga and has been accused of assaults, including on relatives.

Clearly the prosecutor in the Pistorius case loved the international media attention he was getting by attacking the famous white athlete. Gerrie Nel complained that the mercy shown Oscar Pistorius was “over-exaggerated”.

Nel called the sentence “shockingly inappropriate”, openly playing to the race-baiters.

“It’s like taking someone charged with murder and then convicting him on, say, public violence. It cannot be,” Nel ranted, while appealing the acquittal on murder of Pistorius.

Open letter to Angela Merkel from Otto von Bismarck

My dearest Angela:

You know, I have always disagreed with ladies’ presence in public affairs and to this day have not changed my view on this. I’ve been lucky twice in life: First, I lived when ladies were absolutely barred from politics. Second, I was born on April Fools’ Day, and did justice to that fact by becoming a diplomat.

So, mein beliebt Frau Bundeskanzlerin, I have been watching you rule the country from the family vault and my patience is finally exhausted. You have to listen to what I tell you from my estate in Friedrichsruh. A pity you never visit my grave to seek my counsel. It does seem as though I did the right thing sending the grenadiers to give the Poles a rough ride because no one else in Europe deserved a good thrashing more than they. Yes, you got it right, I mean your grandfather, a Pole by origin. He inherited the national traits of his tribe and made you inherit them too.

Now I’d like to make you remember the rules I introduced for German diplomats a century and a half ago. Breaking them boded ill for the nation.

This is the first rule, Angela: Stupidity is a gift of God that should not be used.

To put it bluntly, a stateswoman should not be more stupid than her loving citizens. The most serious form of stupidity is to believe that you are smarter than they. Think then say—how many Germans endorse your alliance with the Anglo-Saxons? How many of our people approve of your enmity to Russia? Are you sure you see the difference between a big political game and a woman’s intrigue?

Let me remind you the second rule of German politics so that you would not get confused: The only sound basis for a large state is its self respect, not fiction.

Where is our country’s pride in your policy? Is it in your commitment to kneel to the US President? What hope against hope. Whatever you sacrifice to placate Obama, it will bring bad luck to Germans. Americans have a reason to stir up trouble in Europe, do not help them. Do not forget the third rule of German politics: Whatever is at rest should not be set in motion. A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but proceed straight ahead.

Germany has once chosen Ostpolitik and that was the best choice. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union you fell victim to greed. You wanted Russia to be pushed furtherand further. Now you and the Americans are turning Europe into an armed camp.

Germany’s dear soldiers stepped on inoffensive Serbia. You forgot what I said: “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

You spent billions on Kosovo. The first thing I would do being in your shoes is to hang those Albanian murderers that you brought to power. There is nothing to expect from them but deceit and plunder.

Finally, you messed with the Russians having forgotten the main secret of German politics: Keep the peace with Russia.

You should read my memoirs and learn by heart what I said in my time: “Never fight the Russians. All your cunning will be answered with their unpredictable stupidity. This inviolable state of the Russian nation is strong in its climate, its spaces and the scarcity of its needs.”

You should also take into account, Angela, that a Russian harnesses his horse slowly but drives fast. Putin’s patience has its limits. If he does react you’ll be in a deep trouble. Cease colluding with Anglo-Saxons. Nothing could be more stupid.

Those dangerous fools cannot grasp that Yeltsin’s Russia is gone. A new Russia has appeared headed by Putin. It’s not weak and pliant any more. Today’s Russia is strong again and ready to stand up for itself. You should realize who you deal with. Read once again what I wrote: “Do not expect that once we have taken advantage of Russia’s weakness, we will profit forever. Russians always come for their money.” And when they come—do not rely on agreements signed by you, trusting girl. They are not worththeir paper. Therefore, with Russians you play fair or do not play.

Angela, perhaps you opted to provoke them into the Ukraine mire because you remember my words that in order to deprive Russia of its power, you need to separate it from Ukraine? Please! You cannot formulate a concrete goal if it is based on flawed speculation. Many European politicians say that without Bavaria Germany will become a weedy castrate, but nobody is going to try it, no matter how many idiots are dreaming of secession from Germany.

You follow Anglo-Saxons who don’t think about depriving Russia of its imperial status. They want to destroy it. Do you really believe Germany would benefit if there were no Russia in Europe? Do not buy the baloney about European values and common interests. Remember I was rebuked for not forming coalitions. A French newspaper said I had nightmares over Germany becoming part of a coalition. True, I was afraid of coalitions because I could not sleep at nights scared my partners would steal our possessions. I was also accused of creating a secret fund to bribe the press and of calling journalists semi-literate alcoholics and poisoners of wells. You know what I thought of them. A journalist is someone who has mistaken his calling. They persecute people because of inferiority complex. I bribed them to make German wells safe for drinking. These creatures have poisoned German minds, as well as yours I’m afraid.

No need to take seriously those diplomatic dumbbells trying to reshape the world so it would look like a Christmas tree in a Prussian barracks. Believe me, the world wants no reshaping, and there is no need to do so. Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best no matter how abhorrent it may seem. In Russia I learned the word nichevo, “it is nothing”, used when they face really hard times. This word connotes with great wisdom and patience the qualities you yourself should acquire, Frau Reichskanzler, and that would be my last advice to you.

Love always,

Your Otto

Source: The Strategic Culture Foundation

Hard-core Nazis in power in Kiev

“Their children will hole up in basements!” screeched Ukrainian “President” Poroshenko, the oligarch and “Chocolate King.” “This is how we will win this war!”

He was talking about the children of the people of East Ukraine, whose cities are being bombed from the air by the US-supported Ukrainian military.

Thousands have been killed, mostly civilians: Ukraine’s war on its own people has displaced nearly a million people. Many have fled to neighboring Russia, while a little under half a million are classified as internally displaced refugees.

The Ukrainian military, which claims to be fighting “terrorists,” is using cluster bombs – weapons that are banned in the civilized world, but freely used by Ukraine’s military, which includes the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

Formally inducted into Ukraine’s US-backed military machine, the Azov Battalion was organized by openly neo-Nazi groups, and has been such a success that their deputy commander, Vadim Troyan, has been appointed the city of Kiev’s chief of police.

Troyan is a member of the “Patriot[s] of Ukraine” uniting openly neo-Nazi Ukrainian organizations.

Before Troyan’s elevation to the top law enforcement position in the country’s capital, he and his fellow neo-Nazis were quite well-known to the police in Kharkiv, where they regularly beat up their political opponents as well as foreign students, migrants, and homosexuals.

And if you’re a reporter covering the conflict in Ukraine, and you have any interaction with the Ukrainian government – specifically the Ukrainian intelligence service known as the SBU – be advised that you will be dealing with Yuri Michalchyshyn, formerly the chief ideologist of the neo-fascist Svoboda party, who has been appointed head of the SBU’s “Department of Propaganda.”

Michalchyhyn is a real piece of work: as the former head of the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center,” he isn’t shy about his advocacy of National Socialism.

Among his political activities: organizing a torchlight parade replete with Nazi symbolism. Michalhyhyn considers the Holocaust “a bright episode in European civilization.”

Yet there has been almost zero coverage of this in the Western media, which is content to echo the US State Department’s line about how Democracy is marching onward in Kiev as Ukraine “chooses Europe” over the East.

The ugly reality is that the Ukrainian “revolution” was nothing of the sort: it was a coup rather than a revolution, and its leadership, rather than being aspiring democrats who want to be members in good standing of the West, are in fact a collection of thieving oligarchs, like Poroshenko, neo-Nazi thugs, and the usual opportunists who hang around every Western-backed “color revolution” looking for the main chance.

Standing behind them are the Western intelligence agencies who ginned up this phony “revolution,” and are now homing in on the Russians, hoping to provoke a full-scale invasion of Ukraine so as to justify their plans for a revival of the cold war.

As for the future of Ukraine: it is being set up for a full-scale fascist takeover with campaign posters featuring impaling a Jewish oligarch on a Ukrainian trident.

The selling of the Ukrainian “revolution” as a “democratic” uprising that established a “pro-Western” liberal government in Kiev has got to be one of the public relations triumphs of the century. The masters of spin who pulled this off have managed to turn black into white – but the truth is slowly emerging.

Source: Justin Raimondo/Antiwar

Fresh war in Afghanistan

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was fired amidst significant foreign-policy leaks on Saturday morning.

The New York Times reported that the United States will expand its mission in Afghanistan in 2015, with US troops participating in direct combat with the Taliban.

This flies in the face of Obama’s very public announcement six months ago in the Rose Garden that US troops in Afghanistan would be shifting into a “training and advisory” role next year.

American airpower will furthermore support Afghan forces. This bombshell was strategically leaked ahead of a holiday week in which Americans will be shopping for bargains in a very bleak economy.

The Afghanistan reversal is a new hawkish posture and Hagel’s departure after he helped to manage a withdrawal from Afghanistan and shrink the Pentagon budget, will be regarded as a logical step.

Obama’s decision, made during a furious White House debate in recent weeks with his senior national security advisers, came over the objection of some of his top civilian aides, who argued that American lives should not be put at risk next year in any operations against the Taliban when Al Qaeda is actually rising in Iraq.

But the military pushed back and curiously Hagel’s departure directly coincides with the new aggressive attack plan for Afghanistan.

ISIS’s rapid emergence, it’s unhindered oil sales and other foreign-policy crises possibly contributed to Hagel’s ouster.

The United States is changing course toward a more aggressive foreign policy: it is recommitting to the war in Afghanistan, which is by far the country’s longest, spanning two two-term presidencies.

The number of troops in Iraq has doubled, and the administration will soon seek an authorization from a Congress that is extremely unlikely to include a provision that outlaws direct combat by US troops, in a distinctly interventionist climate.

Pat Buchanan questions ‘endless war’

Pat Buchanan, a former US Presidential candidate, is a leading voice of American Conservatism.  In excerpt from an article that appeared on his website on Tuesday, he is less than flattering about the Republican Party:

“How do you like the Journal’s war?”

So boasted the headline of William Randolph Hearst’s New York flagship that week in 1898 that the United States declared war on Spain.

While Hearst’s Journal, in a circulation battle with Joe Pulitzer’s World, was a warmongering sheet, it did not start the war.

Yet the headline comes to mind reading the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages seem to have concluded that on Nov. 4 America voted for new wars in the Middle East, and beyond.

On Nov. 15, its lead editorial declared that the great “question before President Obama and Europe is how to stop the Napoleon of the Kremlin.”

Putin is Napoleon? Has the Journal lost it?

Vladimir Putin is 62. By age 40, Napoleon’s empire encompassed nearly all of Europe. France had swallowed Belgium, Holland, parts of Germany and the Italian coast to Rome. The Emperor had alliances with Austria, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and a truncated Prussia. Virtually all the resources, industries and populations of Continental Europe were at the service of the French Empire.

Putin has reacquired Crimea, which belonged to Russia before the United States was a nation, and is about the size of Vermont.

Napoleon made it to Moscow. Does the Journal think Putin will make it to Paris, as Czar Alexander I did, or to Berlin, as Stalin did?

The Journal hails the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 18-0 vote to arm the Ukrainians, and urges Congress to do the same.

And what would be the result of U.S. heavy weapons arriving in Kiev?

Would Putin recoil in shock and awe and scurry out of Crimea?

Probably not, as the Journal itself concedes, “In 15 years running Russia, Mr. Putin has never stood down.”

And if Putin, seeing U.S. weapons arriving in Kiev, sent in the Russian army to annex Luhansk and Donetsk, took Mariupol on the Black Sea coast, established a land bridge to Crimea, and then offered to negotiate, what would Kiev do?

Even with U.S. weapons Ukraine cannot defeat Russia.

What would we do? Accept defeat? Send U.S. advisers or troops into Ukraine? Launch strikes on Russian forces? Blockade Crimea? Are we really prepared for war with Russia, over Donetsk?

Since Nov. 4, the Journal and its neocon allies have been cawing for U.S. troops to fight ISIL in Iraq and Syria, for U.S. air strikes on Assad’s regime, for bombing Iran, and for arming Ukraine to fight the Russians in a war that Kiev would surely lose.

Was this what America voted for on Nov. 4?

Is this what the Grand Old Party has on offer – endless war?

‘Save our Swiss gold’

‘Gold wars’ are intensifying ahead of the polling day in the Swiss Gold Initiative.

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) and establishment parties went “all in” during the week and intensified their campaign. They suggested that passing the Swiss Gold Initiative would be a ‘fatal’ for Switzerland and would be positive only for speculators.

The ‘yes’ side countered by saying the SNB’s assertions were alarmist and over the top. They say that it is not an invitation to speculators as there would be a five year transition to gold being 20% of Swiss reserves. They warned that there is a real risk of another debt crisis and a global currency crisis and that gold reserves would protect the Swiss franc and the Swiss economy.

Because if Germany failed miserably to obtain 674 tons of gold from the US Federal Reserve in 2013, it is assured that Switzerland will find absolutely nothing in its quest to obtain more than double, or 1,500 tons, of gold as a successful November 30 referendum outcome would require.

Then again, considering it was Obama’s action that destroyed the Swiss banking sector after the US crushed the centuries-long tradition of “Swiss banking anonymity”, this could be just the right action with which “neutral” Switzerland could finally take its revenge on the regime that cost it what was for centuries the primary source of capital inflow.

In 1992, after a concerted political campaign spearheaded by some of the country’s political parties, Switzerland joined the International Monetary Fund following a national referendum.

Under IMF rules, adopted in the latter part of the 1970s, IMF member countries cannot link their currencies to gold. After joining the IMF, Switzerland was therefore constrained in how it could subsequently revalue its gold reserves since IMF Articles of Association prohibited IMF member countries from linking their currencies to gold.

Well known Swiss banker, financial adviser and author of ‘Gold Wars’ Ferdinand Lips believed that Switzerland had been put under enormous foreign pressure and duress to sell half of its gold reserves, and he wrote in 2002 questioning “Is the SNB on New York’s leash?”, saying that “In my opinion, the once strong, proud and independent SNB has been degraded to an ‘Off-shore Branch’ of the U.S. central bank (the Federal Reserve) and reports directly to Alan Greenspan and his cohorts in New York.”

Lips added that “It is a given that the Swiss gold sales will help New York money center banks to survive a bit longer. It will help them manipulate the gold market. But, gold’s time is still to come. If the SNB does not stop its sales, Switzerland will have to buy back its gold one day but at a higher price. The question is: With what?”

With the SNB now in full media mode arguing against a 20% gold holding in the reserves however, perhaps some of the Swiss media might care to interview Dr. Jean-Pierre Roth who can now be found sitting on the boards of Nestlé, Swiss Re and Swatch.