October 25, 2005
MY VERSION - Commentary of Elizabeth Wright


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Blacks, past and future, and the case against joining the Republican Party


Of course, lots of people got it right about the implications of what we all saw during the New Orleans hurricane disaster. In the predicament of the flood victims, we all got a view of the welfare state writ large. From the plaintive calls for rescue, water and food, as if these were all due by right, to the bungling of those Keystone Cops known as government bureaucrats, beginning with the New Orleans Mayor and working its way to the top of the Feds -- we witnessed scenes that we hope will never be repeated.

It's also clear that, instead of this being an opportunity to expose blacks to the reasons for the destitute circumstances in which so many are mired and the conditions that make escape so difficult, black leaders are going to make sure that it's business as usual. There will be no attempts at enlightenment coming from this crew.

Days into the disaster, a gaggle of prominent blacks lined up to spew forth their orthodox rationalizations to explain why thousands of blacks found themselves in such a helpless quandary, totally at the mercy not only of Nature's fury, but of a government system on whom many of them depend for sustenance from cradle to grave.

There came the cream of the Talented Tenth, repeating the kinds of dogmas that young blacks do not need to hear from authority figures. Front and center was New York Congressman Charles Rangel, telling blacks, in effect, that if they're poor, they might as well be dead: The storm, he said, showed that "if you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience; it's a death sentence."

Of course, Al Sharpton was not far behind Rangel, as he concurred with co-host Michael Hardy, on Sharpton's New York City radio show, that nothing was done over the years to fix the levees, because New Orleans is majority black. There is "clear proof," declared Hardy, that "deliberate indifference" to blacks was at the heart of why the levees were never repaired.

In sync with Rangel and Sharpton was the irrepressible Louis Farrakhan, and, like a blast from the rhetorical past, came author Randall Robinson, regurgitating propaganda reminiscent of a 1970s diatribe. Here was yet another financially well-off black urging ordinary blacks to look upon their lot as though they were "slaves in chains."

Of course, there is an agenda at work here. These men and others of the black "intelligentsia," along with sycophants of the black clergy, have their eyes on the long-term prize of "Reparations." Their only justification in calling for billions more dollars in money and services for blacks is that such funds be used to alleviate the existing social dysfunctions among the poor, which, claim these deceitful elites, are the direct "residual effects" of slavery. Since this claim is the heart of their case for reparations, it stands to reason that these worthies would hope to nurture said residual effects for as long as possible -- or, at least, until the first bundles of funding begin rolling in.

After Katrina, while some prominent figures were grandstanding and stoking race resentment, wiser heads were helping to clarify the implications of what we had seen of Louisiana's fragile bottom classes over our TV screens. The distraught women, children and elderly, who had no place to go and no means to get there prior to the storm's landing, were more than just symbols of generations of poverty.

As social researcher Charles Murray puts it, through those impromptu TV images, Americans "rediscovered the underclass." In ("The Hallmark of the Underclass" (American Enterprise Institute, 9/29/05), Murray writes that the middle and upper classes "haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years," since, in most towns and cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets, while those in higher income brackets are protected in safe enclaves.

The general observer might believe that much has changed among the black poor since the 1980s, when the word "underclass" was a common term. But those recent images of the impoverished appealing for rescue ought to dispel such beliefs. What we saw primarily were women and children. But where were the able-bodied men? Forty years after the prophetic wisdom of the Moynihan Report, [officially entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action] and after all the evidence that has been accumulated since, among the black poor there continues to be a scarcity of adult males engaging in their roles as husbands and fathers. Back in 2000, when social observers were lauding the plunging welfare rolls and falling crime rates, Murray grimly warned "nothing has really changed." Right now, in 2005, he writes, "The deteriorating socialization of young males, concentrated in low income groups, is overwhelming."

Young black males, of course, are being socialized, and they do have role models. Among these models are the community "activists" -- a unique class of blacks who came into their own as credible "leaders" in the 1960s. Since then, almost every black neighborhood has incubated its own Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson wannabes, all posturing braggarts whom the mainstream society rewards, as they exploit the very poverty they decry. Thanks to such dignitaries, young blacks learn early that profitable, "respectable" livelihoods can be achieved, which require little more than verbal bluster attached to nothing of significance.

Youths also have models among another set of men, i.e., their relatives -- brothers, uncles, cousins and fathers -- who intermittently are incarcerated in the penal system. As these men periodically come and go from their neighborhoods, they leave behind young people with little foundation to build upon. Where positive socialization has failed, a negative conditioning fills the vacuum, and continues to produce an intransigent underclass.

Murray offers this reality: "Most members of the underclass have low incomes, but its distinguishing characteristics are not poverty and unmet physical needs, but social disorganization, a poverty of social networks and valued roles, and a Hobbesian kind of individualism in which trust and cooperation are hard to come by and isolation is common." He cites a 1950s statistic, which shows that "80% of black children were born to married parents."

While the qualities of trust and cooperation still existed among blacks in those stable two-parent neighborhoods, what was needed most was the continuance of the factors that made such stability possible. Not forced integration, and not even the vote. In fact, it could be argued that it was the distraction of forced integration that led to the social and economic downward spiral.

Above all else, continued economic development was the greatest urgency. Even before blacks had wider freedoms, thousands of them were well on their way towards making something of the communities in which they lived. Long before slavery was over, scores of freed blacks had already figured out the capitalist ropes and were putting their entrepreneurial skills to use. By living in their own enclaves, they were doing what all immigrant groups did -- developing capital among themselves and creating businesses.

A great many black businessmen had a clear understanding of whether the horse of economics or the cart of integration should come first. People like S.B. Fuller, for example, beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, created companies that provided employment to a multitude of blacks (as well as whites), while A.G. Gaston, in the 1950s, was the major employer of blacks in Alabama. These men were representative of the many enterprising blacks who, by the 1940s, owned 843 businesses in Atlanta, 506 in Memphis, 252 in New Orleans and 694 in Washington, DC. Before the crash and the 1930s Depression, blacks were the owners of banks that provided capital for thousands of enterprises. In cities and towns throughout the country, wherever a black population began to grow, it gave birth to a middle class whose behavior patterns, moral standards and attitudes towards thrift became models for emulation.

In Chicago, in 1917, a group of black realtors devised a systematic plan to create a city district, by buying apartment buildings between 31st and 63rd streets, which would rent primarily to blacks. At the time, this district was predominantly white. These realtors managed to acquire some capital, but needed more.

When they were turned down for loans by various Chicago bankers, who, in attempts to undermine the plan, also refused to renew mortgages on property already purchased, these black entrepreneurs did not whine and scream "discrimination." Instead, they took themselves to places where they could borrow money, namely, to black-owned banks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Richmond, Virginia. On returning to Chicago, they set about moving one Negro family into each apartment house purchased. As whites gradually began to move out of the neighborhood, no one set up a wail about "white flight," since this was the objective.

A newspaper report of the events (Cleveland Advocate, April 14, 1917) quoted Eugene Manns, president of the South State Street Business Men's Association, explaining, "The Negro population is increasing so rapidly that we must have a larger section of the city to live in. More than 20,000 Negroes have come from the South this winter, and they are still arriving, at the rate of about 3,500 a week."

The Black Belt district of Chicago eventually gave birth to hundreds of businesses, including several black-owned newspapers with national distribution, a couple of film production companies, insurance firms, hotels, and a plethora of restaurants and stores.

In later years, such communities would be dismantled by blacks themselves, as if they possessed no inherent value. The contempt that would be shown towards the indigenous achievements of blacks was expressed earlier and succinctly by a foreign visitor to the United States. In 1899, the Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin (who billed himself a "communist anarchist") was informed of the dissident factions among the leaders of this country's Negro population. When told that Booker T. Washington was considered a "conservative" leader, Kropotkin scoffed and sarcastically asked, "And what do they have to conserve?" His derisive question reflected the spirit of many, both blacks and whites, who believed that the former slaves held nothing of value among themselves.

What Blacks needed most in the 1950s was the removal of those unconstitutional Jim Crow laws, many of which prevented them from expanding economic mobility for themselves. They did not need a movement to tear them away from their familiar institutions and intimate associations. What blacks did not need were the selfish goals as established by a grasping middle class, eager to ride the wave of forced integration, in order to use the coercive power of government to guarantee entry into more lucrative occupations and to acquire prestige in mainstream white society. When the doors of segregation were opened and the black middle class abandoned their home communities, where their standards and economic resources were the indispensable glue that held things in place, all bets were off for the poor. And when thousands of these privileged ones, in concert with white liberals, contrived an entire poverty industry off which to feed, the ongoing demise of the poor, rather than their uplift, proved to be in the best interests of these elites. The needs of the bourgeoisie, many of whose families had been middle class for generations, in no way matched the needs of the poor.

Black schools should have remained intact, thereby keeping stable black neighborhoods intact, thereby keeping intact that 80% marriage rate cited by Murray, and thus helping to sustain black responsibility. It was the disruption, or call it the premature demolition, of those close-knit communities, the kind in which new immigrants are nurtured before entering the mainstream, that is the root of why things might never get better.

There is, however, a small, but growing cadre of blacks who believe they have a handle on how to resolve the predicament of the masses. They call themselves "conservatives," but, more accurately, should be described as flaming Republicans. As with most of today's Republicans, their commitment to true conservative ideals is open to question. For blacks to escape their present quagmire, according to these partisans, more politics should be applied, only now it's time for politics to be practiced on the Republican side of the fence.

For at least the past few years, as their numbers have grown, we've all been exposed to the bombast of these pundits and proselytizers. They are syndicated columnists, book authors, pamphleteers and bloggers. And they are everywhere. Many of them take as one of their major mentors the man who, before mutating into a born-again Republican apologist himself, was the loudest voice preaching against political involvement as a path out of poverty. That man is economist Thomas Sowell, who used to advise blacks to take their cues from the ethnic groups whose members disdain politics, while they climb the economic ladder of success.

Since the Democrats are correctly castigated for creating the "wrong" government policies to deal with the poor, Sowell seems to be suggesting that now it's time to count on the Republicans to create the "right" policies. This, from the scholar who, in Markets and Minorities, praised Chinese-American leaders for making a "deliberate decision to keep out of the political arena, while concentrating on economic progress." He agreed with such a stance, "in view of the historic unpredictability of government policy toward ethnic minorities."

Elsewhere, Sowell warned blacks to be careful of the fickleness of the political pendulum, which, he claimed, swings back and forth, from left to right, in unpredictable ways. He never failed to ruthlessly castigate black leaders for misleading blacks down the path of politics and, in Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? he accused them of politicizing race "despite the unpromising record of politics as a means of raising a group from poverty to affluence." He charged such leaders with feathering their own nests at the expense of their people. "However catastrophic the politicization of race may be in the long run, from the point of view of individual leaders it is a highly successful way to rise from obscurity to prominence and power."

Sowell made clear that political activism will not lead the poor to where they need to be, and benefits only ethnic leaders. "It would perhaps be easier to find an inverse correlation between political activity and economic success than a direct correlation," he wrote. Nowadays, along with the mini-crusade of black Republican pundits and talk show circuit riders, with whom he seems to be in harmony, Sowell sings the praises of the Republican camp, while urging blacks (and whoever else is listening) to consciously join its ranks. In addition, he has strong feelings about just who should be in his party.

In one of his columns, he expresses concern when a Republican of whom he approves loses points in Congress to other members of the party, who are not deemed by Sowell as true torchbearers of the conservative cause. It seems that the party does not belong to John McCain, Arlen Specter or Olympia Snowe, all of whom he has characterized as lacking "party loyalty." They, obviously, are not "real" Republicans. It makes you wonder what liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits would have made of such reasoning. Today, might Javits be deemed disloyal or even a traitor? Of course, he served as Senator, when the Republican party still possessed two wings and a center.

All of which raises the question, What are most blacks missing by not being Republicans? Just what is it that they might achieve through involvement with the Republican Party that they cannot achieve as registered Democrats or Libertarians, or as members of any number of independent "third" parties, or as members of no party at all?

Might some of the benefits lie in the excessively ballyhooed "Faith-Based and Community Initiatives," a program of grants promoted by the White House, which promises $40 billion in handouts to religious organizations and churches? Is this the ultimate in cynical political strategies, designed to seduce influential leaders, like black preachers, for instance? As many blacks can attest, the preacher class often can be bought at a moderate cost. It was not long ago that a score of black clergy wound up in legal troubles, and some in jail, due to the temptations brought on from the money that flowed during the heady days of the Great Society. The Reverend Bacons of the land, undoubtedly, are paying close attention and are salivating over the prospect of faith-based Great Society II.

Do blacks really need another layer of crafty "Reverends" and others peddling yet more programs funded by the U.S. government? The "faith-based" advocates have already begun setting up agencies in various states, which will result in another vast network of lobbyists with an interest in keeping the Republicans in power forever. We are told that these faith-based programs are needed to "unleash armies of compassion." But isn't it more likely that such armies will fill up with predators and varying shades of con-men?

Or maybe the benefits of Republicanism lie in the party's impact on the judicial system. Many Americans have not forgotten the crime waves of the 1960s-80s. During that period of mayhem, New York and other cities became notorious for a form of "turnstile justice," whereby arrested criminals, thanks to obliging, lenient judges, were often out the door of the courtroom and back on the streets, before the arresting officers had finished their paper work. In New York City, the tabloids dubbed one such judge "Turn 'em loose" Bruce.

Then, after years of permissive treatment of felons, the justice system bounded off in another direction -- to the present extreme of presumption of guilt. Courtroom power shifted away from glib, superstar defense attorneys to rule by prosecutors, who often stack the deck against defendants. Even more pernicious than prosecutors who suborn perjury, reward false testimony and withhold exculpatory evidence is the intrusion of mandatory minimum" prison sentences. This means that, for certain crimes, judges no longer have the discretion to weigh the role played by a defendant in a particular case, but is forced to impose a fixed mandated sentence, without possibility of parole.

Thanks to this excessive reaction to the earlier permissiveness, we have first-time offenders serving 10-year prison sentences for "crimes" that in a saner America were considered pranks worthy of a severe reprimand and/or 60 days in the county jail. We have families torn apart when mothers of young children act as minor participants, sometimes unwittingly, in the distribution of a small amount of drugs, or for the personal use of a drug. Such people can serve as much as 15 years, even though they have never been involved in any previous illegal activity.

Economist and author Paul Craig Roberts tells of misdemeanor crimes that have been ratcheted up to felonies by an overzealous, punitive system of justice, where the careers of ambitious prosecutors are tied to their conviction rates. Roberts writes, "Most of the almost two million people currently in U.S. prisons are there because they violated one of the hundreds of thousands of federal and state regulations that increasingly govern our lives." Today, the criminalizing of civil infractions is slowly becoming a norm. Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation describes this phenomenon as "overcriminalizing law."

It is probably fruitless to expect the self-described "anti-regulation" Republicans to call for a review of these deplorable statutes, in a quest for fairness. Don't wait around for such a response, especially from a party that now brazenly stands for internment of American citizens without trial.

You would think that removing discretionary power from judges was enough perversion of constitutional principles, but in 2003, along came Republican Congressman Tom Feeney with an amendment to make sentencing regulations even more stringent. Among other things, Feeney's amendment, which had the blessing of Attorney General Ashcroft, placed further restrictions on judges, to insure that there are no "downward" departures from the current sentencing mandates. Woe to the judge who tries to limit prison time for, say, a young mother, because he does not want to see her incarcerated for the span of her children's youth.

Like others, Thomas Sowell reflects the punitive mindset shared by Feeney and so many of his fellow Republicans. In one of his syndicated columns, he complains about a Supreme Court ruling that set aside the execution order of a convicted murderer, who would instead spend the rest of his life in prison. It seems that the world is thrown off kilter, if even just one soul escapes the noose. Among this vindictive clan, few appear to have heard the admonition to temper justice with mercy.

So, is it for reasons of "law and order" that blacks should become Republicans? Are there benefits to be derived from membership in a party that is eager to punish not only the bad guys for serious crimes, but anyone else who can be ensnared by duplicitous laws as well? Society must possess the power to punish its incorrigible lawbreakers, but gratuitous meanness, which is actively promoted through law, should be relegated to totalitarian societies.

On the immigration front, of what benefit to blacks is the ongoing stream of cheap laborers who cross our borders every day? As it is, black politicians, as represented by such luminaries as John Conyers, Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson-Lee, refuse to stand against this illegal flood, which is detrimental to the employment prospects of poor blacks, as well as other Americans. Along with their counterparts among white politicians, members of various black caucuses fear political backlash and the changing racial demographics of their own districts. Why would blacks foolishly support a political party whose chief scorns patriotic citizens as "vigilantes," for acting as watchmen on our borders, a task that ought to be performed by our National Guard? And, speaking of the Guard, it's hardly necessary to ask of what value to blacks is participation in a political party that contemplates a series of wars around the world, as it hypes fear and plays on the average American's current desire for security at any price.

Is there anything different in the Republicans' approach to the race issue? Or do they milk and exploit civil rights symbols and icons in the same manner of the Democrats? It appears that those on the right have appropriated the civil rights cause in its unadulterated leftwing form. They are as likely to engage in the language of racial smear as the leftist masters of the genre. For the right, even "hate" has become a catch-all word of denigration -- the term originally applied by liberals, back in the late 1980s, to all rightwing talk show hosts.

Since the goal is to win over the black masses from the opposition, whatever works for the Democrats is fair game -- even to the point of handing out ATM cards to hurricane victims. By becoming enthusiastic riders on the "diversity" bandwagon, as well as indulging in an unprecedented form of cronyism, Republicans prove that merit means no more to them than to the people they so vigorously disparage.

For all their bluster to the contrary, Republicans have internalized the liberals' orthodox views on race and culture, including the notion that these views only should have a place in our society. As we have witnessed, like politically correct liberals, Republicans will eagerly throw a white man to the wolves (a la Trent Lott), if they think such pandering will win them political capital with the "minorities."

Have you noticed that today's Republicans relate just about everything to whatever Democrats do, or did, or never did, or might do? Most of the rationalizations for their own actions appear to be wrapped around the aura of Bill Clinton. If they cannot draw a parallel to some Clintonesque action, policy or remark, they seem lost.

It has long been said that, if you wait long enough, Republicans eventually adopt the platforms and agendas that the Democrats initiate. Whoever coined that cliché knew whereof he spoke. Do blacks need a rehash of the same old story, with a Republican twist?

No subject is considered more urgent to the progress of blacks than that of education. In the misguided crusade for "equal education," this nation was sent into social turmoil, from which it has not recovered. After all the years of experimental curricula inspired by politically correct liberals, are black children to be set back further by school systems that succumb to the demands of ardent crusaders harboring ideological beliefs that go counter to centuries of accumulated knowledge?

In other words, is it wise to affiliate with a political party full of hide-bound ideologues who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old? For the sake of black youth, many of whom presently teeter in an educational wasteland, shouldn't we be anxious that they receive the kind of educational training that will prepare them for future competition among the world's brightest minds? Vouchers are worthless, if children are to be offered a steady diet of pet doctrines, this time generated on the right, instead of being solidly grounded in basic secular studies, which, needless to say, include the hard sciences. Is the school curriculum now to be shifted from the sometimes strange and even perverse academic innovations formulated by particular liberal educators in the recent past (think "whole language"), to a perhaps even weirder form of social engineering espoused by their ideological opponents?

Finally, the political party that is most vociferous about its adherence to the Constitution now shows its true colors in the treatment of American citizen José Padilla. Although they would bitterly deny it, Republicans could not make it clearer that "we don't need no stinking Constitution." What more is there to glean from a party whose members posed no challenges to the Executive branch that has usurped the power to declare American citizens as "enemy combatants," in order to lock them away forever without due process of law? How can there be respect for a party that has allowed its leaders to shamefully set up quarters abroad where, in the name of the United States, they cage and torment human beings?

So, what is it that blacks need to do? They need to come to their senses and extricate themselves from their intense commitment to politics. They need to turn all that energy now spent on building the careers of politicians and other opportunists to the economic development of every predominantly black neighborhood. Their concentrated focus should be on bringing wealth to those neighborhoods and keeping it there. They need to reach back in time, to those "bad, old days" when blacks were forced to cooperate with one another, and take their cues from practical, wise men like Fuller and Gaston and those Chicago realtors. By building wealth, blacks could no longer be the pawns of manipulative leaders, whose only assurance of power comes through maintenance of the status quo.

Blacks need to be more than conscientious voting citizens. Leaving the world of racial politics behind, they must pay attention to the meanings beneath the platitudes and propaganda. However, becoming alert voters will mean nothing, if there is no serious campaign to track with certainty how their votes are counted and who gets to count them. Masses of blacks should join the campaign with other Americans to take the initiative in overseeing the development of infallible, fool-proof voting methods, so that we never again experience the singular blunders of the year 2000 or undergo the electoral confusions of 2004. This is a civic duty and should not be tied to partisan political factions.

Most importantly, however, blacks need to take to heart Thomas Sowell's truism uttered in his earlier incarnation: "Groups that have the skills for other things seldom concentrate in politics."


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One more thought . . .

Pat Robertson's comments [about assassinating Venezuela's president] shocked many people who worry the Christian right is losing its soul in its support for increasingly uncritical nationalism. What is needed here is a time of reflection. Christianity does not regard every enemy of the nation-state as worthy of execution. It prefers peace to war. It respects the right to life of everyone, even those who have objectionable political views.


-- Father Robert Sirico, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty


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THE NEW AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
THE FREEDOM FIGHTER JOURNAL ^ | November 7, 2005 | Ronald Barbour


Posted on 11/07/2005 8:42:34 AM PST by Cato_The_Younger


Monday, November 07, 2005

THE NEW AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

The hate displayed recently by the Left for the Right is something not seen in this country since the era leading up to the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

Please consider the following examples of this hatred and calls for violence by a random cross section of mainstream Leftist politicians, writers, entertainers and the rank & file.

QUOTE:

"It's become more and more apparent to me over the past five years that all the activism and non-violent protesting in the world will do precisely squat. When you're dealing with evil people who have no shame, the old rules of the game don't and, indeed, can't apply if you have any hope for success. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched, millions of letters have been written, tens of millions of votes cast, and hundreds of trillions of electrons expended pontificating on blogs...for nothing. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Not unless it comes in the form of something akin to the French Revolution.

We need terror. We need horror. We need the streets running awash in rivers of blood of these thugs and criminals and zealots. Activism didn't prevent 60,000 deaths in Vietnam. All the activism of the Civil Rights era has gotten African Americans precisely nowhere. Segregation may not be the law of the land anymore, but it's still the de facto state of America."

--Raybin, DAILY KOS

Repeated calls for the assassination and threats against President Bush by key Leftist politicians, writers and entertainers:

Senator Mary Landrieu

Sen. Mary Landrieu threatened the president of the United States with physical violence on Sunday, saying that if he or any other government official criticizes New Orleans police for failing to keep civil order in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - "I might likely have to punch him - literally."

Al Franken

"And so basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed” because “outing a CIA agent is treason,” left-wing author and radio talk show host Al Franken asserted Friday night, to audience laughter, on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman. Franken qualified his hard-edged satire: "Yeah. And I don't know how I feel about it because I'm basically against the death penalty, but they are going to be executed it looks like." Franken later suggested that President Bush is at risk of receiving the same punishment, since Karl Rove likely told him what he did, but he added a caveat: “I think, by the way, that we should never ever, ever, ever execute a sitting President."

Jane Smiley

"In a just world, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings would be standing before a Senate committee investigating their catastrophic failures, and Packer's book would be Exhibit A." No. In a just world, these people would be taken out and shot."

Nicholson Baker

"In Nicholson Baker's new novella, Checkpoint, a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.

It's a work of the imagination and no attempts on the president's life are actually made, but the novel is likely to be incendiary, as with Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11."

President Bush deserves to die because he is Adolf Hitler reborn according to many elite Leftists who make statements like these.

QUOTE

"Ah, yes, the reductio ad Hitlerum. Why meet a conservative with facts or logic when you can simply tar him with the Nazi brush? Thus we had Nancy Giles on the "CBS Sunday Morning show" sourly tying Rush Limbaugh's "edgy" radio manner to you-know-who's. "Hitler would have killed in talk radio," Giles declared. "He was edgy, too." Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News struck a similar note in commenting on "The Reagans," the canceled miniseries. "If Hitler had more friends," she told The Washington Post, "CBS wouldn't have aired [its Hitler miniseries] either."

Of course no one came in for more Hitler comparisons this year than George W. Bush. Third Reich references were practically a staple of antiwar rhetoric.

The president "is not the orator that Hitler was," acknowledges leftist commentator Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch.org. "But comparisons of the Bush administration's fearmongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by Hitler and Goebbels . . . are not at all out of line."

The following profanity laden commentary is from Democratic Underground, the premier mainstream Leftist website which documents daily the hatred of the Left for Americans whose major sin is that they stand for traditional Christian values and constitutional norms:

QUOTE: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Let me first say, I'm not going to call anyone out.

DU'ers: What the fuck is wrong with you? It's one thing to be cynical, it’s another thing to be a "realist" but when you start spouting Repuke talking points while you whine about how "we wuz robbed" or "I'm not happy with the investigation" or "the prosecution was lame" or "It's over, we're screwed"

Bullshit. Why don't you at least learn everything you can about it before you make an ass out of yourself? You're freakin' out because there's only been one indictment? You think that means it's over?

For fuck's sake people, Fitzgerald once indicted 1 person in order to put pressure on the others, and ended up with 60 FUCKING INDICTMENTS! Read the transcript from the press conference! Fitzgerald said several times that he's not done, he's going to get to the bottom of it, that he feels this is a very serious crime and he'll not rest until he can look anyone in the eye and say he did everything he could! He said that this crime PUT US ALL IN DANGER! The guy charged and prosecuted Gambino Mafiosos and Al-qaeda terrorists goddammit! You think he's going to let some traitorous domestic terrorists get away? FUCK NO!

If you don't want to help us by researching, writing letters, emailing stories and following leads, that's fine. But please, for the love of (insert deity), don't provide aid and comfort to our enemy by taking the same position and regurgitating the same talking points!

STAY POSITIVE, STICK TOGETHER, WORK TOGETHER! The only way the pukes can win is if they divide us! That's what they've done in every election, and that's what's happening on this board!

The Repukes are in their 'last throes' Let's drop a holy smart bomb of truth on their lying greedy criminal fat anal-cyst crusted hypocritical fascist theocratic ASSES!

Trolls: FUCK YOU! You know you're fucked! That's why you're coming here to disrupt! Why don't you special ed. flunkies go to Iraq already and fight them there before they come to your house and steal your Nascar jacket and burn your confederate flag and nazi memorabilia. You're so insignificant, not even an IED would waste itself blowing you up.

I feel better now...I'm gonna drink one more beer and go to bed." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

QUOTE: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- They're FUCKED.

And we can help. THIS IS WHAT THE DU IS ALL ABOUT!

And I don't want to turn on my TV without seeing ads telling the awful truth about Bush, and how his arrogance, mental-retardation, incompetence and illiteracy is killing the country and the world.

They're down. They're extremely vulnerable. Now's the time to kick them right in their nuts while they're down!

Finish them.

End them.

Kill them! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

QUOTE: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Winston_Smith_101 (21 posts) Mon Oct-31-05 03:18 PM

Response to Reply #46

61. Like Al Franken said

"Execute Bush, Cheney and the rest of those Fascist Pigs!" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The end result to this decades long verbal and written assault by the American Left ruling class can only end in violence, since the decision of the ballot box by a majority of their fellow countrymen is the rejection of the largely unstated Leftist dogma of socialism and atheism in favor of constitutionalism and Christianity. The Left worships the State; The Right worships God. There can be no compromise.

It is a fact of history that no ruling class has went quietly into the night. When in 1860 with the election of Lincoln as President, the South realized that the Southern domination of the Union was fast coming to an end and that their only recourse was separation from the Union and violence if that separation were opposed.

The contemporary situation runs on parallel tracks: a decades long increasingly bitter public debate that has been marked by numerous attempts at compromise and peaceful transfer of power on the part of a rising new ideology and renaissance of faith, the political ideology of capitalism combined with the moral force of Christianity, has meet a roadblock in the form of an atheistic and socialistic political, academic and governmental establishment.

The optemist wants to believe that this roadblock can be removed by peaceful and lawful means; the realist understands the cold hard truth that such diametrically opposed forces can only resolve their differences on the battlefield as was the case in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, which many Christians believed was a terrible judgment of God against the nation for the sin of slavery.

How much worse is the collective guilt as a nation for the sin of abortion? At least the slave was granted life and could by his efforts hope to free himself from in his condition, but the dead have no recourse. Thus the sin of abortion that is nowhere listed as a civil rights of Americans in the U.S. Constitution and is a sin against law and God.

Thomas Jefferson when addressing the consequences of slavery in the United States said, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVIII, 1782. ME 2:227

Jefferson could be speaking today about the issue of abortion which has claimed the lives over 30 million innocent Americans.

Indeed all Americans should tremble for the wrath of God in the form of civil war is terrible justice. Please mark the words of Shakespeare concerning an ancient Roman civil war that stands only a few years in the future for America. It will be a civil war without the benefit large standing armies fighting on battlefield but a war fought in neighborhoods, towns, villages, countryside and cities against a ruthless domestic enemy who will fight by means of bombings, assassinations and arson and all other the black arts of terrorism with the danger of a dictatorship of the Left or the Right as the outcome of conflict.

"Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war; All pity choked with custom of fell deeds: And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial."

Four Thousand Years of Price Control - Mises Institute

Basic economics
Dec 7, 2005
by Walter E. Williams ( bio | archive | contact )

Email to a friend Print this page Text size: A A With all the recent hype and demagoguery about gasoline price-gouging, maybe it's time to talk about the basics of exchange. First, what is exchange? Exchange occurs when an owner transfers property rights or title to that which is his.

Here's the essence of what transpires when I purchase a gallon of gasoline. In effect, I tell the retailer that I hold title to $3. He tells me that he holds title to a gallon of gas. I offer to transfer my title to $3 to him if he'll transfer his title to a gallon of gas to me. If this exchange occurs voluntarily, what can be said about the transaction?

One thing we know for sure is that the retailer was free to retain his ownership of the gallon of gas and I my ownership of $3. That being the case, why would we exchange? The only answer is that I perceived myself as better off giving up my $3 for the gallon of gas and likewise the retailer perceived himself as better off giving up his gas for the $3. Otherwise, why would we have exchanged?

Exchanges of this sort are called good-good exchanges, namely "I'll do something good for you if you do something good for me." Game theorists recognize this as a positive-sum game -- a transaction where both parties are better off as a result. Of course there's another type of exchange not typically sought, namely good-bad exchange. An example of that kind of exchange would be where I approached the retailer with a pistol telling him that if he didn't do something good for me, give me that gallon of gas, I'd do something bad to him, blow his brains out. Clearly, I'd be better off, but he would be worse off. Game theorists call that a zero-sum game -- a transaction where in order for one person to be better off, the other must be worse off. Zero-sum games are transactions mostly initiated by thieves and governments.


Some might argue that there's unequal bargaining power between me and the gas retailer. That's nonsense! The retailer has the power to charge any price he wishes, but I have the power to decide how much I'll buy, including none, at that price. You say, "Gas is a necessity, and we're forced to buy it." That too is nonsense. If I voluntarily purchase the gas, I do so because I deem it better than my next best alternative. Of course, at a high enough price, I wouldn't deem it as such.

In the wake of the spike in fuel prices, many Americans demand that politicians do something. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. Despite a long history of their economic calamity, some Americans and politicians are calling for price controls or, what amounts to the same thing, anti price-gouging legislation. As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo points out in "Four Thousand Years of Price Control," price controls have produced calamities wherever and whenever they've been tried.

Economic ignorance, misconceptions and superstition drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s. The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why? Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more.

Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.


Dr. Williams has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980.

Black Noise

December 5, 2005


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by Erik Rush

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Due in part to the cyclical nature of news and in part to the news media’s objectives, we’ve been exposed to a great deal lately concerning pre-war intelligence, the border with Mexico, Supreme Court nominees, outed intelligence operatives and secret CIA dungeons. Something that’s still rather fresh in my mind is Hurricane Katrina, and I’ll tell you why: It was a quintessential stratagem, a two-pronged (the media and politicos on the Left) attack reflecting the Left’s agenda with respect to Black Americans (institutional undereducation, propagandization, and the culture of victimhood being among these) and other designs to alienate Blacks from mainstream America and traditional values. The fact that a natural disaster was used to further estrange Blacks from their fellow countrymen and their government was mind-boggling. Had not the Left’s propaganda been so effective over the last few decades, those who suggested that the Bush administration “left Blacks to drown” or even generated the storm itself with clandestine technology would have been laughed off of podiums, cameras, and microphones across America.

Occasionally it escapes the reader’s notice that I am a person of color, specifically Black. With regard to most issues it usually doesn’t matter, but when I speak with authority on race politics and someone makes the assumption that I’m White, of course - they freak.

I grew up in the metropolitan New York area during ‘Sixties, and (as I’ve indicated elsewhere) lived down the street from Betty Shabazz (Malcolm X's widow) and her children, so of course we knew them well. Not to name drop, the point is that I’ve been conscious of race politics for a long time.

In the ‘Sixties, I recall having Black neighbors who, despite the inequities in our society at that time, owned businesses, rental property and portfolios and were retiring with money in the bank. Within a very short span of years, however, their sons and grandsons were dropping out of school, shooting dope and impregnating underage girls. I was witnessing a microcosm of what was happening throughout Black society in America. It made me wonder: Why, after all of the struggles, were Black Americans choosing this juncture to self-destruct en masse, when the greatest strides for equality were just being made?

I could say I’ve no idea how that happened, but here’s exactly how it happened:

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, one political party had a reputation as being possessed of an imperious mien, and this was the Democrat Party. It was also widely known as the party of segregation. When civil rights concerns came to the fore during the latter half of the century, they began to sell themselves as champions of civil rights, despite the fact that Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in higher percentages than Democrats (House: 80% Republicans, 63% Democrats; Senate: 82% Republicans, 69% Democrats).

Riding on the coattails of the affinity Blacks had for Jack and Bobby Kennedy (who were perceived as champions of civil rights), Democrats courted Blacks via corruption of their clergy. Blacks were actually among the most socially conservative groups in America, and their leaders, rather than political icons, had been their clergymen. Thus, the ranks of Black leadership emerged from within this body, which was won over either through altruistic con jobs or the promise of personal aggrandizement. Those who gained fame became embroiled in the political machinery: blinded by greed and self-importance, they were groomed as foremen for the White international socialist overseers in the Democrat Party.

Fast-forward to 2005: Although a minority of the minority have begun to wake up to the fact that they’ve been whored out politically for 40 years (to the teeth-gnashing ire of the overseers), the Left has gotten richer, its machine more efficient, and - much the worse – now has representation among professional Black activists and amoral young Black entrepreneurs who have no problem whatsoever in becoming fabulously wealthy selling Black kids spirit poison and libertine secular-socialism.

In his article “It Takes More Than A Village”, Christopher Schrimpf, a research associate with the black leadership network Project 21, shreds the proposal cited in Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village”, which perverted that African proverb to assert that community is the most important factor for proper child development. Diminishing the importance of the family is right out of Lenin’s playbook, of course, as are the vast majority of machinations used by the Left over the years with regard to Blacks in America.

It’s been said that if there’s anything the Left hates more than a conservative it’s a conservative of color, and this has been borne out time and again in their racist rhetoric against high-profile (and some not so high-profile) conservatives of color.

It is an imperative that conservatives of color be poised to strike back at left-leaning media outlets and politicians – White or otherwise – hard and fast when they capitalize on the double standard of racist rhetoric being accepted on their part, and when they proffer their divisive, bizarre and unbalanced arguments in the arena of race politics. We must be vigilant, remembering that their propaganda machine is indeed efficient, practiced, and well-entrenched.

As I said in my recent column “Whose Will be Done?”: “We must make war upon the far Left power brokers and their acolytes; the intimidators, the character assassins, the invective – all must be ignored, and failure is not an option.”

And the more people of color we have in our ranks, the better.

Erik Rush


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Erik Rush is a black conservative columnist, author and sometime radio host. Visit his website at erikrush.com.

Wife 1.0

We got this in an e-mail. We don't know from whom or where. We reprint by popular demand.





Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity: applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, Hunting and Fishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6. I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks,
A Troubled User.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dear Troubled User:

This is a very common problem that men complain about. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed to not allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife1.0 and work on improving the situation. I suggest installing the background application "Yes Dear" to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to give the APOLOGIZE command before the system will return to normal anyway. Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as Clean and Sweep 3.0, Cook It 1.5 and Do Bills 4.2. However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program Nag Nag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0 ! WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support

Completing the French Connection(The reasoning behind the forged Niger Documents)
Self | 21 November, 2005 | Paperjam


Posted on 11/21/2005 6:34:19 AM PST by paperjam




Completing the French Connection


(The reasoning behind the forged Niger Documents)











On January 2, 2001 the Niger Embassy in Rome was broken into. A short time later the home of Aarfou Mounkaila, the second secretary, was also broken into and ransacked. Both incidents were reported to the Italian Carabinieri and since nothing of importance seemed to be missing, the stories received scant attention. However, we now know that the incidents were very important as the break-ins were the source of forged documents that reportedly detailed attempts by Iraq to purchase 500 tons of Yellow Cake uranium. President Bush mentioned it his State of the Union address in January, 2003 and set off a firestorm of heated debate ever since. This single item is a hot point of contention used by those against the war to infer that Bush lied to the Americans and to the world in the run up to the war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction (WMD.)





What follows next is a story that would put the Bond 007 story writers to task, as we now have the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Niger document scandal, the major players involved and why. It’s a twisted story of OIL, MONEY, and POWER. But, it wasn’t the United States who made the grab for it, it was the French and I think the proof is right here in these pages.





Let us start out by thanking the Italian government for continuing to follow up on a story that seemed lost on most of us. They managed to get Rocco Martino, a known agent for hire to admit to magistrates in Rome that he was working for the French Government and that it was they who created the forged Niger documents. Without that bombshell piece of information we wouldn’t know now what we know today.





He originally told the international press that it was the secret services arm of the Italian government who had put him up to passing forged documents to bolster the American and British case for war with Iraq. He said at the time that he thought the documents were real, but after the Digos, Italy's anti-terrorist police, found numerous documents in Mr. Martino's home he freely admitted his role in the forgery scandal much to the infuriation of the French.

It’s also reported that Rocco Martino has since tendered his resignation with a letter to the French DGSE intelligence service.





But the biggest question of all and still remaining to be answered is “Why?” Why would the French want to pass forged documents onto the international stage in what appeared to be an attempt to “bolster” the US and Britton’s case for war? What could they possibly gain from such a stunt and how could the forged documents change anything? Well it seems that they had a lot to gain and they were relying on the forged documents to change more than just the run-up to war, those documents were meant to change the world as we know it.





Hang on to your seats it’s going to be a bumpy ride.





In investigating the background of former US Ambassador, Joseph Wilson IV and the outing of his third wife Valerie Plame, I did what everyone did and used public information and his own words to look into his life. This is the very thing that led to the eventual outing of Valerie in the first place. Be that as it may, it seems that his second wife Jacqueline is quite a woman of mystery. Very little is known of her and it seems to all who look into her life that she shares one at least as intriguing as Valerie, at least that was before Valerie was outed as an agent in the employ of the CIA.





As a former French Diplomat, the last known location of his second wife Jacqueline was in Gabon under the employ of the President Omar Bongo's daughter, Pascaline Mferri Bongo. Between August and November 2000, she was paid $60,000 to write letters to the office of National AIDS policy at the White House. That’s quite a lot of money for simply writing a few letters. She’s reported to have worked for them at least through November of 2000 and is currently whereabouts unknown. I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Joseph Wilson IV was the US Ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995.





In looking at the former French colony of Gabon, it turns out that Gabon is a pretty big oil producer in Africa. One of the oil companies in Gabon is a French oil company called Elf Aquitaine. Created in 1965 by Charles de Gaulle, Elf was a state controlled oil company. It also served as an important intelligence service agency for France covertly collecting information on the African nations. The company privatized in 1994 but the intelligence services have reportedly remained in tact and fully functioning.





In 1999, the French oil company Total, merged with the Belgian oil company PetroFina to form TotalFina and in 2000, Elf Aquitaine merged with them to form TotalFinaElf. Total, a French company, is a product of Iraq itself. Originally created by French industrialists and financiers in 1924, they took over France’s 23.8% share of Iraq Petroleum (then known as Turkish Petroleum.) The French Government purchased a 25% share in Total in 1930 and later increased it to 34%. The company, as far as we know, has retained its independence and its executive management free from the typical French government control exerted on most French corporations, especially those in which France has a national interest.





Total is the world's fourth largest integrated oil and gas company. Based in Paris, it operates in 120 countries with exploration and production activity in 44 countries and production in 27. The company has 2.4 million barrels per day of production, which compares with 4.2 million barrels daily for Exxon Mobil Corp. and 3.5 million barrels/day for BP plc. The company has 11.2 billion barrels of reserves and has been averaging a 2.5 percent annual growth in production. Between 2001 and 2002 its growth rate in production jumped to10 percent.





In 1972, Iraq nationalized its entire oil industry. Total was forced out of all its interests in production and development in Iraq but returned in 1991 to pursue expected development of the Bin ‘Omar oil fields after UN sanctions were lifted after the first Gulf War. While unable to work in Iraq due to continued sanctions, TotalFinaElf started working with the Iranians. They are operating under contracts to help develop the South Pars gas field. It is the Iranians’ portion of what is probably the largest gas field in the world. The other part of the field, in Qatari waters, is known as North Field and TotalFinaElf is pursuing contracts to develop that field as well. With the South Pars project, TotalFinaElf has become the foremost oil company in partnership with Iran and has bolstered its position in the Middle East.





To curry support from the UN Security Council members and bring an end to the sanctions against Iraq, Saddam Hussein negotiated huge oil and gas contracts worth billions to France, Russia and China. For example;





In a completely lopsided $6 billion deal, Russia’s second largest oil company Lukoil was negotiating the development of the West Qurna-2 fields west of Basra near the Rumaila field. They held a 68.5 percent share in a production consortium with its partners Zarubezhneft and Mashinoimport. They each held a 3.25 percent option with the remaining 25 percent going to the former Iraqi Oil Ministry. With an estimated production potential of 800,000 to 1 million bbl/d it represented a huge amount of potential capital.





Russia's state owned company Gazprom, tied directly to the political arm of Russia also negotiated options to develop the al-Anfal gas field in western Iraq near the Syrian border. It holds a proven reserve of 1.8 Tcf (Trillion Cubic Feet) and estimated reserves of about 4.5 Tcf. Another huge gas field was discovered in the Akas region of western Iraq containing an estimated 2.1 Tcf of gas reserves but it’s still unclear if the fields are associated or not.





It might also be notable that in 2003, Yukos which was Russia’s largest private oil producer at the time was charged by the Russian state with tax evasion. The company’s owner was arrested and the company itself was eventually broken up and sold to the highest bidder. That highest bidder turned out to be none other than Gazprom.





Not to be left out, China's National Petroleum Company (CNPC) along with China North Industries Corporation (Norinco) signed on to conduct a 22-year-long exploitation of the Al-Ahdab field located in southern Iraq. They had also shown high interest in developing the 4.5-billion-barrel Halfayah field in southern Iraq.





The French oil company Total had managed to secure contracts to develop the massive Majnoon and Bin Umar oilfields in southern Iraq. Those contracts were worth billions. In fact, estimates put their value at over $100 billion. David Perle, former US Assistant Defense Secretary said “What’s distinctive about the Total contract is that it’s not favorable to Iraq, it’s favorable to Total.” He called the contracts “extraordinarily lopsided” in favor of the French oil company and the well connected Canadian shareholders.





Those well connected Canadian shareholders turned out to be Power Corporation’s owner Paul Desmarais and his family. Together, they hold a controlling interest in Total. The 75 year old Paul Desmarais couldn’t get much more connected. His son Andre Desmarais married France Chretien, the daughter of the former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. Jean Chretien is known to have sat on the board of Power Corporations subsidiary Consolidated Bathurst Inc.





Jean Chretien stepped down as Canada’s Prime Minister on 12 December, 2003. His first trip after leaving office was to lead a delegation to China on trade deals. His next trip was to Iran on behalf of an oil company. Mr. Chretien went to Iran as a "special adviser" to the Calgary oil company PetroKazakhstan, which wanted to ship Kazakhstan’s oil to China and Iran. His job was to convince the Iranians that it was is a good idea. His work was part of the Silk Road Group that had been founded in the early 1990’s. The goal of the group is to create new oil routes for a number of major companies, among them TotalFinaElf and PetroKazakhstan.





Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and his mentor Maurice Strong, senior advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, each have worked for Power Corporation and are reportedly good friends of Paul Desmarais. Maurice Strong, if you recall, is in trouble with Kofi Annan’s son Kojo in the Oil-For-Food scandal. Paul Volcker, the former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, who currently heads up the Independent Inquiry Commission into the Iraqi Oil-For-Food scandal, has also held a seat on Power Corp’s international advisory board as did former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt.





Volcker’s number two man on the Independent Inquiry Committee, Reid Morden, has close connections to Paul Desmarais in his role of selling nuclear plants to China and others for companies dominated by Desmarais. He’s also known for serving as Canada’s former Intelligence Chief, the US equivalent to CIA Director.
Power Corporation has ties to the Iraqi Oil-For-Food program through the New York branch of the Banque National De Paris-Paribas or BNP Paribas. This is the bank that controlled the Iraqi accounts under the Oil-For-Food program that started in 1996. It’s through this program that Saddam is reported to have skimmed over $10 billion dollars in kickbacks.





In February 2001, one of Belgium’s top 10 companies Groupe Bruxelles Lambert which is 25% owned by Power Corporation, acquired control of BertelsmannAG. (BAG) is Germany’s largest publishing empire and is reported to be even bigger than Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The publishing empire employs some 80,000 workers in 51 countries and posted an overall cash flow of $18.3-billion in 2002. Paul Desmarais’ son Andre, who serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Power Corp., was named to the BAG board after taking control of the company.





Andre Desmarais also sits on the board of the China International Trust & Investment Corp (CITIC). It’s described as the alleged investment arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) which is the more formal name of the Chinese military. Through its subsidiaries, the CITIC is probably the largest manufacturer of weapons and arms in the world.





China has a great need for natural resources and in the coming years will face an energy crisis of its own if steps aren’t taken to avert them. It seems that they may have found a friend not only in Canada but Hong Kong as well through an individual named Li Ka-Shing. Li Ka-Shing is the owner of Hutchison-Whampoa and is the world’s 19th richest man. Li Ka-Shing operates in the critical markets of port operations, petroleum, mining, and telecommunications.





His company Hutchison-Whampoa is a shipping monolith. Hardly a product or commodity that ships by boat can get by without being handled by one of his ports. His company also runs the Panama Canal Ports company operating at each end of the Panama Canal which President Jimmy Carter gave up in the Carter-Torrijos Treaty in 1978. The official hand over occurred on December 31, 1999. In 2000, the Panama Ports Company completed construction of the Cristobal Cruise Terminal-Peir 6 and officially opened the port of Balboa Container Terminal at the other end.





Interestingly, Li Ka-Shing, also owns Gordon Securities where Jean Chretien once worked before becoming the Canadian Prime Minister.





Expanding his holdings further, Li Ka-Shing is in the process of purchasing Husky Oil of Canada. Husky Energy Inc. employs approximately 3,000 people and holds almost $13 billion in assets. They also own the largest holdings in the oil sands of northern Alberta, which is reported to be the largest single oil deposit in the world.





He’s also in the process of purchasing the Canadian mining giant Noranda. Noranda recently merged with Falconbridge after acquiring 58.4% of available shares in an ownership buyout and retained the Falconbridge name after the merger. Falconbridge is the world's largest producers of zinc and nickel and a significant producer of copper, primary and fabricated aluminum, cobalt, lead, molybdenum, silver, gold and sulfuric acid. Falconbridge is also one of the world's largest recyclers and processors of metal-bearing materials. They employ approximately 14,500 people and have operations and offices in 18 countries.





French President Jacques Chirac recently made Li Ka-Shing a member of the national order of the Legion of Honor. This was after he carried out a friendly takeover of France’s Marionnaud perfume retail group, in a deal worth 900 million euros ($1.17 billion.) The deal made the Watson unit of Li Ka-Shing’s retail conglomerate the world’s largest company in the toiletries sector.





With the help of people like Li Ka-Shing, China continues to position itself in the world. The China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) recently won a bidding war to buy Canadian oil company PetroKazakhstan for a whopping 4.18 billion US dollars.





So just where, do the forged documents fit in? Hang on, were almost there.





In 1986, 12 countries became signatories of the Single European Act. It had the effect of creating "an area without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty." It went far to fulfill a major goal of Charles de Gaulle and the tenets of European Economic Community (EEC) with the combining of their national monetary systems. By 1992, the EEC would evolve into the European Union (EU).





In 1999, the Euro became the new currency for eleven member states representing more than 300 million people and comprising 23 percent of the world's GDP. The single monetary policy was introduced under the authority of the EU, Economic Control Board. It was the final stage of monetary unity among the member states. Electronic transfers between banks would be conducted only in euros but member states had up to three years to convert publicly held currency to the new notes and coins.





On Sept. 24, 2000, in a little reported but monumentally significant event, Saddam Hussein demanded to be allowed to sell Iraqi oil in euros only. Iraq had also banned the United States, Japan, Britain and Switzerland from selling anything to Iraq under the Oil-For-Food scheme. The ban of sales under Oil-For-Food was viewed as punishment by Saddam for the continued sanctions but the changeover to the euro was seen by many as inexplicable as there seemed no clear beneficiary.





The UN Security Council’s Iraqi sanctions committee, known as “the 661 Committee,” created under the UN Security Council Resolution 661, initially balked at the changeover. However, one individual, French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, Senior Diplomatic Adviser to President Chirac, pressed hard to permit the Iraqis to sell oil under the new currency. Finding no legal reason or precedent to prevent the denomination from dollars to euros the UN finally gave Iraq approval to sell oil for euros but only after November 6th, 2000. At the time, many financial experts believed that Iraq stood to lose millions in making the conversion.





However, the move had a tremendous effect on the Euro. Shortly after its initial launch, the euro was trading at around 80 cents to the dollar. Iraq’s denomination from the dollar to the euro in addition to huge sales under Oil-For-Food stabilized the currency on the world markets and provided a much needed underpinning for the currency. At the time, France ranked No. 1 among European countries doing business with Iraq, with over $1.5 billion in trade. From the beginning of the oil-for-food program in1996, France ranked third overall with $3.1 billion in trade. Iraq’s move to the euro smoothed out and even reversed its declining exchange rate. By 2001 the euro had gained 25% against the dollar to approximately USD$1.05 for one Euro.





Seeing that the Euro had achieved parity with the Dollar so quickly and combined with Iraq’s denomination of the dollar for euros, France recognized an opportunity to finally wrest control of the world oil markets from the US. Hoping that the dominos would fall one by one the real possibility of pushing the dollar off the worlds pedestal finally became a reality.





For the French, September 11, 2001 probably couldn’t have come at a better time. A strike against our financial heart tied together a series of seemingly unrelated events.





To quickly recap what we now know; in January, 2001 there is a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Nothing of significance seems to have been taken and the story receives little attention. In the fall of 2001, rumors of attempts to sell uranium to Iraq are floated about the intelligence communities. By early 2002, word reaches the White house that Iraq may be attempting purchases of uranium from Niger. Questions are passed to the CIA, who at the behest of Valerie Plame decides to send her husband, former US Ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, to investigate the allegations. In late February, 2002 Wilson returns from Niger after eight days stating that reported attempts by Iraq to purchase yellow cake are false and tells as much to the CIA in an oral debriefing at his home.





By the fall of 2002, documents reportedly showing Iraqi attempts to purchase yellow cake uranium are being shopped around in Italy. The Italian reporter Elizabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama takes the documents and shows them to her boss who in-turn decides not to publish them but instead instructs her to take them to the US embassy. From there, they are transmitted forward to Washington where they are given to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation and copies are passed to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Additionally copies are given to the CIA, and eventually the Pentagon.





President Bush asked the CIA to verify the information for inclusion in his upcoming State of The Union Address in January, 2003. However, the CIA could not verify the accuracy of the accounts so the decision was made to use the information from the British White Papers drawn up around the same time. They reportedly relied on information from other sources than the French or the forged Niger documents. Those famous 16 words in the State of the Union address read as follows: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”





But that’s not what the French were counting on happening!





The French were counting on exposing the fake documents at the right time to show that the US intelligence gathering was misleading if not outright complicit in attempts to make up intelligence to justify continuing sanctions against Iraq. The goal was to muddy the intelligence information we had on WMD’s and to shame the US into dropping the sanctions altogether. President Clinton had begun to step up bombing in Iraq and continued to press for further sanctions. Once President Bush took office, he too pressed hard for leaving the sanctions in place. France, Russia, and China all stood to lose billions if the sanctions were not removed so the decision was made by France to “set-up” both America and Britton’s intelligence gathering apparatus.





Had the attacks of September 11, 2001 caused more harm to the US economy than it did, the use of the documents might not ever be needed. However, with the quick fall of Afghanistan and the increasing rhetoric from the Bush administration over Iraq, the need became clear that the fake documents would have to be played out.





So what was real the purpose of the forged documents?





The forged Niger documents were to be used in a coordinated effort to keep the US out of Iraq and end the sanctions. France’s greatest fear was that the US might re-enter Iraq and re-denominate Iraqi oil back to dollars that Saddam had converted in September, 2000. After all, this is what provided the much needed underpinning for the valuation of the euro. It would also most likely mean an end the lucrative Oil-For-Food program. The billions of euros in trade enjoyed by European Union countries would come to an immediate and abrupt halt.





One of the final steps taken by France to outright delay if not prevent the inevitable war with Iraq was to threaten Turkey with a “No” vote for admission into the EU membership if they helped the Americans. France, Belgium, and Germany, also opposed NATO support for Turkey that would have allowed them to open their bases for use by American forces to enter Iraq from the north. This is a move seen by many as causing unnecessary American loses by eliminating the ability of Allied forces to attack from two fronts and quickening the pace that Saddam’s army’s could be defeated. It also greatly hindered the US forces ability to close the northern routes out of Iraq through Syria where many suspect the majority of WMD’s were moved to.





As an OPEC member, Iraq being tied to the euro was no small matter. All oil trade in the world is conducted in dollars. Additionally, two-thirds of all corporate transactions are conducted in dollars. This allows the United States to run huge deficits without much harm to its economy. However, should this situation be somehow ended, our national debts might become unserviceable. Rampant inflation would surely result and a devaluation of the dollar would fall to somewhere about 40% of its current value. While I am not steeped in macroeconomics, should this happen suddenly, the outlook for America would be catastrophic.





Since the war in Iraq, France has taken additional strides to increase usage of the euro in the worlds markets and to defeat the dollar further. They have opened trade with Iran, an OPEC member, who in 2002, Iran’s central bank shifted the majority of its reserve funds to euros in what many see as the first big step in converting fully to euros for their oil currency. They have also opened air travel with the Iranians after being suspended in 1997. French exports to Iran have increased 28.4 percent between 2002 and 2003.





Both Russia and China have begun to move their central reserve funds into euros as well. With corporations like Power Corp., and Hutchison-Whampoa controlling huge markets, France is pushing even harder to convince such corporations to conduct their business in euros instead of dollars.





The French have courted Venezuelan President Hugo Chaves, another OPEC member nation. The French oil giant Total, is working to develop the countries oil sands through a consortium called Sincor I and Sincor II. Chaves said in Paris that “Venezuela could double its output from 200,000 to 400,000 barrels a day after several billion dollars were invested.”





France has also gone after Algeria. As an OPEC member and a Mediterranean neighbor, Algeria is Europe’s third largest supplier of natural gas, just behind Russia and Norway. They are also in debt with France for billions. Using the carrot and stick approach, French Foreign Minister de Villipin flew to Algeria on 18 December, 2002 to offer debt conversion if trade and commerce were increased between the two nations. Final arrangements between the two nations were to be hammered out in a final 2003 agreement where more than $60 million in debts were forgiven. However, the country has been continually fighting an Islamic insurrection sparked after canceling parliamentary elections in 1992, a move then that was backed by France, frustrating further economic reforms.





Other activities to expand use of the euro over the dollar are going on daily. However, the main stream media has almost a complete blackout on the subject. I can only surmise that they are hoping for a gradual and subtle change. I just wonder when they expect to let the public in on the news.








As a Follow-up: Iraqi oil was re-denominated back to dollars on 5 June, 2003 after 10 million barrels of oil were offered to the highest bidder from tanks that had been sitting full for some time. The move was made to make room for oil to flow through the pipelines to the ports and restore Iraq’s oil production.





OPEC, in its April 14th 2002 meeting in Spain expressed interest in converting to euros in lieu of the dollar for trade in oil.





On December 7th, 2002 North Korea officially dropped the dollar and began using euros for trade.





Since 2003, the European Union has grown to 25 nation states. Together, they represent a free-trade-block of more than 455 million people who operate under the euro as the dominant currency for trade and commerce. Clearly, the euro is here to stay, but what is so difficult to predict is its future effect on international trade overall and the dollars position in the world as the dominant currency.

This one folks is an oldie but a goodie. It not only bears retelling but recalling also:
A HISTORY LESSON

Beer and evolution and other facts The two most important events in all of
history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel
was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern
civilization, and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity
into two distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered it required grain, and that was the beginning of
agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can was invented yet, so
while our early human ancestors were sitting around waiting for them to be
invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were
formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while
they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the
Conservative movement. Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting
learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ and
doing the sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the
Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became
known as girliemen. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the
domestication of cats, the trade union, the invention of group therapy and
group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the
meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most
powerful land animal on earth,!
the elephant.

Liberals are symbolized by the jackass. Modern liberals like imported beer
(with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water.
They eat raw fish, but like their beef well done.
Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another evolutionary
side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their
men.

Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in
Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the
designated hitter rule in baseball, because it wasn't fair to make the
pitcher also bat.
Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for
their women. Conservatives are rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction
workers, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, soldiers,
athletes, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own
companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and
decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe that Europeans are
more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained
in Europe when conservatives were coming to America. The liberals crept in
after the Wild West was tamed, and created a business of trying to get MORE
for nothing.

Limbaugh Library

Urbanities

How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish
William J. Stern



We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattan’s tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy. What made the Irish such miscreants? Their neighbors weren’t sure: perhaps because they were an inferior race, many suggested; you could see it in the shape of their heads, writers and cartoonists often emphasized. In any event, they were surely incorrigible.

But within a generation, New York’s Irish flooded into the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteachers; those who’d been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a moral transformation, a revolution in values. And just as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture of the English working class that made it unusually industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New York’s Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social problems.

John Hughes’s personal history embodied all the virtues he tried so successfully to inculcate in his flock. They were very much the energetic rather than the contemplative virtues: as a newspaper reporter of the time remarked of him, he was “more a Roman gladiator than a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity.” He was born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, County Tyrone, the son of a poor farmer. As a Catholic in English-ruled Ireland, he was, he said, truly a second-class citizen from the day he was baptized, barred from ever owning a house worth more than five pounds or holding a commission in the army or navy. Catholics could neither run schools nor give their children a Catholic education. Priests had to be licensed by the government, which allowed only a few in the country. Any Catholic son could seize his father’s property by becoming a Protestant.

When Hughes was 15, an event he was never to forget crystallized for him the injustice of English domination. His younger sister, Mary, died. English law barred the local Catholic priest from entering the cemetery gates to preside at her burial; the best he could do was to scoop up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to Hughes to sprinkle on the grave. From early on, Hughes said, he had dreamed of “a country in which no stigma of inferiority would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed one creed or another.”

Fleeing poverty and persecution, Hughes’s father brought the family to America in 1817. The 20-year-old Hughes went to work as a gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Mary’s college and seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Working there rekindled in him a childhood dream of becoming a priest, and he asked the head of the seminary, John Dubois, if he could enroll as a student. Dubois, a French priest who had fled Paris during the French Revolution armed with a letter of recommendation from Lafayette, turned him down, unable to see past his lack of education to the qualities of mind and character that lay within. This was no ordinary gardener, Dubois should have recognized; indeed, as he went back to his gardening chores, Hughes wrote a bitter poem on the shamefulness of slavery and its betrayal of America’s promise of freedom. Not one to forget a slight, Hughes harshly froze Dubois out of his life when he became prominent and powerful. Indeed, in later years, Hughes won the nickname of “Dagger John,” a reference not only to the shape of the cross that accompanied his printed signature but also to his being a man not to be trifled with or double-crossed.

With the good luck that marked his career, Hughes met Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton, who visited Mount St. Mary’s from time to time, and impressed her deeply with all those talents that Dubois had failed to see. A Protestant convert to Rome who had become a nun after her New York blueblood husband died, Mother Seton was a powerful influence on American Catholicism and was canonized as America’s first and only native-born saint after her death. When she wrote to Dubois, recommending the un- educated immigrant laborer for admission to the seminary, her prestige carried the day. Ad-mitted in September 1820, Hughes graduated and was ordained a priest in 1826. His first assignment: the diocese of Philadelphia.

Recognized as a born leader from his early seminary days, he first came to prominence in Philadelphia as an eloquent and courageous crusader against bigotry. Between 1820 and 1830, immigration had swelled the U.S. Catholic population 60 percent to 600,000, with no end in sight. The new immigrants were mostly Irish—impoverished, ignorant, unskilled country folk, with nothing in their experience to prepare them for success in the urban environs to which they were flocking. Hughes believed that the relentless barrage of anti-Catholic prejudice that greeted them in their new land was demoralizing the already disadvantaged immigrants and holding back their progress.

The “nativists,” as the highly organized anti-Catholics were called, included Protestant fundamentalists who saw the Catholic Church as the handiwork of Satan and superstition, intellectuals who considered Catholicism incompatible with democracy, ethnocentric cultural purists who believed the United States should be a land for Anglo-Saxons, and pragmatic citizens who thought it not worth the trouble to integrate so many culturally different immigrants. The nativists counted among their number many of America’s elite, including John Jay, John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, Stephen Douglas, and P. T. Barnum, all of whom spoke publicly against the Catholic Church and the threat to liberty that allowing Catholics into the country would create. In Boston a mob led by Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, burned a convent to the ground; church burnings were common. Samuel Morse tapped out rumors of Catholic conspiracies against liberty on his Atlantic cable long before such trash circulated on the Internet. Books depicting concupiscence in convents and sex in seminaries were everywhere.

Hughes was outraged. He didn’t want Catholics to be second-class citizens in America as they had been in Ireland, and he thought he had a duty not to repeat the mistakes of the clergy in Ireland, who in his view had been remiss in not speaking out more forcefully against English oppression. Resistance was imperative. He began a letter-writing campaign to the newspapers, decrying what he saw as a tendency toward chauvinistic nationalism in his new country. In 1829, for instance, outraged by an editorial in a Protestant religious newspaper about “traitorous popery,” he fired off a missive to its editorial board of Protestant ministers, calling them “the clerical scum of the Country.” During the 1834 cholera epidemic in Philadelphia, which nativists blamed on Irish immigrants, Hughes worked tirelessly among the sick and dying, while many Protestant ministers fled the city to escape infection. After the disease subsided, Hughes wrote the U.S. Gazette that Protestant ministers were “remarkable for their pastoral solicitude, so long as the flock is healthy, the pastures pleasant, and the fleece lubricant, abandoning their post when disease begins to spread dissolution in the fold.” He pointed to the work of the Catholic Sisters of Charity, who had cared for cholera victims without regard for their own safety, and wondered where all the people who spoke about perversion in the convents had gone during the epidemic.

The next year he became a national celebrity when a prominent and well-born Protestant clergyman from New York named John Breckenridge challenged him to a debate. The American aristocrat and the articulate, combative priest, who had developed a large following among Philadelphia’s Irish immigrants, did not disappoint their fans. Breckenridge luridly conjured up the Catholic Church’s Inquisition in Spain, tyranny in Italy, and repression of liberty in France. Americans, he said, wanted no popery, no loss of individual liberty. Hughes countered by describing Protestant tyranny over Catholic Ireland. He related what had happened at his sister’s grave. “I am an American by choice, not by chance,” he said. “I was born under the scourge of Protestant persecution, of which my fathers in common with our Catholic countrymen have been the victim for ages. I know the value of that civil and religious liberty, which our happy government secures for all.” Regardless of what had happened in Europe, he said, he was committed to American tolerance.

Hughes’s performance against a man of Breckenridge’s stature made him a hero with America’s Irish. Not long thereafter, when John Dubois, Hughes’s former teacher and now bishop of New York, grew sick and frail, Rome appointed Hughes, just over 40 years of age, coadjutor-bishop of the New York diocese, which then included all of New York State and part of New Jersey. He was consecrated a bishop in the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral—still standing on Mott Street—on January 7, 1838. James Gordon Bennett, the famous Scottish-born editor and publisher of the New York Herald, was one of the rare souls among New York’s 60,000 Cath-olics (out of a total population of 300,000) who weren’t Irish. He harrumphed that Catholic rituals were pure poetry, especially episcopal consecrations, but to hold such a ceremony before the “general run of New York Irish was like putting gold rings through a pig’s nose.”

After the consecration, John Hughes was ready to lead. Unsystematic, disorganized, impulsively charitable, unable to keep his checkbook balanced, vain enough to wear a toupee over his baldness and combative enough to have to apologize to a valued colleague for “a certain pungency of style” in argument, Hughes was also, in the words of future president James Buchanan, “one of the ablest and most accomplished and energetic men I had ever known.” Hughes’s first New York crusade was to get his flock educated, so that they could benefit from the new nation’s almost limitless opportunity. He passionately believed that the future of the Irish in America depended upon education: indeed, he knew it firsthand from his own experience.

He immediately stirred up a war over the city’s schools, then run by the Public School Society. Though the society received state funding, it was essentially a private Protestant organization that taught Protestantism and used the Prot-estant Bible. Worse, from Hughes’s point of view, it had pupils read such books as The Irish Heart, which taught that “the emigration from Ireland to America of annually increasing numbers, extremely needy, and in many cases drunken and depraved, has become a subject for all our grave and fearful reflection.” Hughes (with the support of New York’s 12,000 Jews) wanted an end to such sectarian education, and he wanted, above all, state aid for Catholic schools, just as the state had funded denominational schools before 1826 (with no one dreaming of calling such aid unconstitutional). The outcome of the struggle pleased no one: the Maclay Bill of 1842 barred all religious instruction from public schools and provided no state money to denominational schools. On the night the bill was passed, a nativist mob ransacked Hughes’s residence, and the authorities had to call out the militia to protect the city’s Catholic churches.

Having at least partly reformed the public schools to help those Catholic children who attended them, Hughes threw his energies into building a Catholic school system that would educate Catholic children the way he thought they should be educated. No need was more urgent, in his view. He did not believe that a society hostile to the Irish and certain they were incapable of accomplishment would produce schoolteachers and administrators interested in and good at teaching Irish children. “We shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church afterward,” he said. “In our age the question of education is the question of the church.”

Hughes’s schools emphasized not just the three Rs but also a faith-based code of personal conduct that demanded respect for teachers and fellow students. Parents had to attend meetings with teachers and do repair work and cleaning in the schools. These schools then, as now, produced children capable of functioning in the mainstream of American life. By the end of his tenure, the original boundaries of Hughes’s dio-cese contained over 100 such schools. Not content to build just primary and secondary schools, he founded or helped to found Fordham University and Manhattan, Manhattanville, and Mount St. Vincent colleges.

In 1845 Hughes began to face his greatest challenge. That year the potato crop failed completely in Ireland, and the Great Famine struck, lasting until 1849. The worst famine in the history of Western Europe, it brought complete social collapse to Ireland and caused some 2 million Irish to flee to the United States between 1845 and 1860, not primarily for religious freedom and economic opportunity but to reach a place where they might eat. Most arrived at the port of New York after crossing the Atlantic on what they called “the coffin ships.” As Thomas Sowell so vividly describes this journey in Ethnic America, the Irish packed into the holds of cargo ships, with no toilet facilities; filth and disease were rampant. They slept on narrow, closely stacked shelves. Women were so vulnerable to molestation that they slept sitting up. In 1847 about 40,000 died making the voyage, a mortality rate much higher than that of slaves transported from Africa in British vessels of the same period.

In New York they took up residence in homes intended for single families, which were subdivided into tiny apartments. Cellars became dwell-ings, as did attics three feet high, without sunlight or ventilation, where whole families slept in one bed. Shanties sprang up in alleys. Without running water, cleanliness was impossible; sewage piled up in backyard privies, and rats abounded. Cholera broke out constantly in Irish wards. Observers have noted that no Americans before or since have lived in worse conditions than the New York Irish of the mid-nineteenth century.

Hughes harbored no illusions about the newcomers. “Most move on across the country—those who have some means, those who have industrious habits,” he observed; “on the other hand, the destitute, the disabled, the broken down, the very young, and the very old, having reached New York, stay. Those who stay are predominantly the scattered debris of the Irish nation.” Lost in a land where many didn’t want them, violent, without skills, the Irish were in need of rescue. This was Hughes’s flock, and he was prepared to be their rescuer.

New York’s Irish truly formed an underclass; every variety of social pathology flourished luxuriantly among them. Family life had disintegrated. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, an exiled Irish political radical, wrote in The Nation in 1850: “In Ireland every son was a boy and a daughter a girl till he or she was married. They were considered subjects to their parents till they became parents themselves. In America boys are men at sixteen. . . . If [the] family tie is snapped, our children become our opponents and sometimes our worst enemies.” McGee saw that the lack of stable family relationships was fatally undermining the Irish community.

The immigrants crowded into neighborhoods like Sweeney’s Shambles in the city’s fourth ward and Five Points in the sixth ward (called the “bloody sixth” for its violence), which Charles Dickens toured in the forties and pronounced “loathsome, drooping, and decayed.” In The New York Irish, Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher report that besides rampant alcoholism, addiction to opium and laudanum was epidemic in these neighborhoods in the 1840s and 1850s. Many Irish immigrants communicated in their own profanity-filled street slang called “flash talk”: a multi-day drinking spree was “going on a bender,” “cracking a can” was robbing a house. Literate English practically disappeared from ordinary conversation.

An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, known in flash talk as “nymphs of the pave,” worked the city in 1850, and Five Points alone had as many as 17 brothels. Illegitimacy reached strato-spheric heights—and tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the city’s streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B’boys, the Roach Guards, and the Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods. The gangs fought one another and the nativists—but primarily they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked in stolen property. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police vans were dubbed “paddy wagons” and episodes of mob violence in the streets were called “donnybrooks,” after a town in Ireland.

Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people in the sixth ward died. In Sweeney’s Shambles the rate was one out of five in a 22-month period. The death rate among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21 percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life expectancy for New York’s Irish averaged under 40 years. Tuberculosis, which Bishop Hughes called the “natural death of the Irish immigrants,” was the leading cause of death, along with drink and violence.

Inflamed by this spectacle of social ruin, nativist sentiment grew and took a nastier, racist turn, no longer attacking primarily the superstition and priestcraft of the Catholic religion but rather the genetic inferiority of the Irish people. Gifted diarist and former mayor George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that “the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.” In the same vein, Harper’s in 1851 described the “Celtic physiognomy” as “simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned noses.” Cel-ebrated cartoonist Thomas Nast constantly depicted the Irish as closely related to apes, while Orson and Lorenzo Fowler’s New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and James Redfield’s Outline of a New System of Physiognomy gave such ideas the color of science.

By 1850 the New York City lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) was filled with Irish, most of them probably hallucinating alcoholics. Doctors of the day had a different view, speculating that insanity grew from degeneracy and violation of the moral law. Compounding the problem, according to Ralph Parsons, superintendent of the asylum, the Irish were people of exceptionally bad habits. They were, he said, of “a low order of intelligence, and very many of them have imperfectly developed brains. When such persons become insane, the prognosis is unfavorable.”

Hughes’s solution for his flock’s social ills was to re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner, moral transformation in them, which he believed would solve their social problems in the end. He put the ultimate blame for their condition squarely on the historical oppression they had suffered at the hands of the English, which he said had caused them “to pass away from the faith of their ancestors,” robbing them of the cultural heritage that should have guided their behavior. But that was in the past: now it was time for them to regain what they had lost. So he bought abandoned Protestant church buildings in Irish wards, formed parish churches, and sent in parish priests on a mission of urban evangelization aimed at giving the immigrants a faith-based system of values.

With unerring psychological insight, Hughes had his priests emphasize religious teachings perfectly attuned to re-socializing the Irish and helping them succeed in their new lives. It was a religion of personal responsibility that they taught, stressing the importance of confession, a sacrament not widely popular today—and unknown to many of the Irish who emigrated during the famine, most of whom had never received any religious education. The practice had powerful psychological consequences. You cannot send a friend to confess for you, nor can you bring an advocate into the confessional. Once inside the confessional, you cannot discuss what others have done to you but must clearly state what you yourself have done wrong. It is the ultimate taking of responsibility for one’s actions; and it taught the Irish to focus on their own role in creating their misfortune.

Hughes once remarked that “the Catholic Church is a church of discipline,” and Father Richard Shaw, Hughes’s most recent biographer, believes that the comment gives a glimpse into the inner core of his beliefs. Self-control and high personal standards were the key—and Hughes’s own disciplined labors to improve himself and all those around him, despite constant ill health, embodied this ethic monumentally. Hughes proclaimed the need to avoid sin. His clergy stated clearly that certain conduct was right and other conduct was wrong. People must not govern their lives according to momentary feelings or the desire for instant gratification: they had to live up to a code of behavior that had been developed over thousands of years. This teaching produced communities where ethical standards mattered and severe stigma attached to those who misbehaved.

The priests stressed the virtue of purity, loudly and unambiguously, to both young and old. Sex was sinful outside marriage, no exceptions. Packed together in apartments with sometimes two or three families in a single room, the Irish lived in conditions that did not encourage chastity or even basic modesty. Women working in the low-paid drudgery of domestic service were tempted to work instead in the saloons of Five Points, which often led to a life of promiscuity or prostitution. The Church’s fierce exhortations against promiscuity, with its accompanying evils of out-of-wedlock births and venereal disease, took hold. In time, most Irish began to understand that personal responsibility was an important component of sexual conduct.

Since alcohol was such a major problem for his flock, Hughes—though no teetotaler himself—promoted the formation of a Catholic abstinence society. In 1849 he accompanied the famous Irish Capuchin priest, Father Theobald Mathew, the “apostle of temperance,” all around the city as he gave the abstinence pledge to 20,000 New Yorkers.

A religion of discipline, stressing conduct and the avoidance of sin, can be a pinched and gloomy affair, but Hughes’s teaching had a very different inflection. His priests mitigated the harshness with the encouraging Doctrine of the Sacred Heart, which declares that if you keep the commandments, God will be your protector, healer, advisor, and perfect personal friend. To a people despised by many, living in desperate circumstances, with narrow economic possibilities, such a teaching was a bulwark against anger, despair, and fear. Hughes’s Catholicism was upbeat and encouraging: if God Almighty was your personal friend, you could overcome.

Hughes’s teaching had a special message for and about women. Women outnumbered men by 20 percent in New York’s Irish population partly because of famine-induced emigration patterns and partly because many Irish immigrant men went west from New York to work on building railways and canals. Irish women could find work in New York more easily than men could, and the work they found, usually as domestics, was steadier. Given the demographic facts, along with the high illegitimacy rate and the degree of family disintegration, Hughes clearly saw the need to teach men respect for women, and women self-respect.

He did this by putting Catholicism’s Marian Doctrine right at the center of his message. Irish women would hear from the priests and nuns that Mary was Queen of Peace, Queen of Prophets, and Queen of Heaven, and that women were important. The “ladies of New York,” Hughes told them, were “the children, the daughters of Mary.” The Marian teaching encouraged women to take responsibility for their own lives, to inspire their men and their children to good conduct, to keep their families together, and to become forces for upright behavior in their neighborhoods. The nuns, especially, encouraged women to become community leaders and play major roles in church fund-raising activities—radical notions for a male-dominated society where women did not yet have the right to vote. In addition, Irish men and women saw nuns in major executive positions, managing hospitals, schools, orphanages, and church societies—sending another highly unusual message for the day. Irish women became important allies in Hughes’s war for values; by the 1850s they began to be major forces for moral rectitude, stability, and progress in the Irish neighborhoods of the city.

When Hughes went beyond spiritual uplift to the material and institutional needs of New York’s Irish, he always focused sharply on self-help and mutual aid. On the simplest level, in all parishes he encouraged the formation of church societies—support groups, like today’s women’s groups or Alcoholics Anonymous, to help people deal with neighborhood concerns or personal and family problems, such as alcoholism or finding employment. In these groups, people at the local level could exchange information and advice, and offer one another encouragement and constructive criticism.

Hughes worked hard to get jobs for his flock. The nuns in his diocese became employment agencies for Irish domestics: rich families knew that a maid or cook recommended by the nuns would be honest and reliable. The nuns encouraged Irish women to run boarding houses for new immigrants and to become fruit and vegetable vendors. Irish women came to dominate the city’s produce business, and some went on to succeed with their own grocery stores.

Hughes encouraged the formation of the Irish Emigrant Society, out of which the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank later grew. The society helped find people jobs in sail making, construction, carriage repair and maintenance, and grocery stores. The society expected those it sponsored to behave properly on the job and work conscientiously, so as to reflect credit upon their patron. Those who misbehaved in-curred the wrath not only of their employers but of the Emigrant Society and the parish priest, both unembarrassed about using shame to encourage good behavior.

When it came to charity, Hughes had nothing but contempt for the way New York officials went about it, warehousing the poor in the municipal almshouse and giving them subsistence levels of food, shelter, and clothing until they died, usually of typhus, ty-phoid fever, consumption, or cholera. Hughes dismissed this approach, which made no effort to re-moralize the demoralized poor, as “soupery.”

By contrast, Hughes imported church groups that had shown elsewhere in the world that they could help solve tough social problems. The most famous was the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a group of laymen who gave personal service to the poor. They visited prisons, organized youth groups, and taught reading and writing. Whenever they provided food, clothing, or shelter, they required the recipients, when possible, to work in return. An order of nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, worked closely with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, visiting the city’s almshouses and prisons and urging the women in them to find work and to conduct themselves according to Church teachings. They founded their own home for immigrant girls, a halfway house between dependency and work, where they provided spiritual guidance, taught such basic skills as cooking and cleaning, and helped women find jobs, usually as domestics.

Faced with perhaps as many as 60,000 Irish children wandering in packs around New York City—not attending school, not working, not under any adult supervision—Hughes encouraged the formation of the Society for the Protection of Destitute Catholic Children, known as the Catholic Protectory, which was in a sense the forerunner of Boys Town. To rescue these children, who in the words of the Protectory’s head, Dr. Levi Ives, were “exposed to all the horrors of hopeless poverty, to the allurements of vice and crime in every disgusting and debasing form, bringing ruin on themselves and disgrace and obloquy,” the Protectory purchased a 114-acre farm near Westchester and erected buildings for boys and girls. The mission was clear: the Protectory staff believed that, in Ives’s words, “by proper religious instruction and the teaching of useful trades they could raise the children above their slum environment.” Ives had no doubt that the children had to be taught sound values before they would have a chance at a productive life.

Though the Protectory received some city and state money, the Irish themselves provided its main support with enthusiastic private contributions. Hughes and Ives made it clear that these children were the community’s responsibility: their own Irish parents—not the nativists or the unfeeling city—had abandoned them to their plight. The Irish, as Hughes and his priests and nuns tirelessly taught, had a moral responsibility to give money to this cause, as well as to the Church and all its other charitable organizations. For Hughes, such community self-help and personal responsibility were the essence of Christian charity.

By 1850 the city’s Catholics had become so numerous that Rome made New York an archdiocese and Hughes an archbishop. He received the pallium, the woolen band that was the symbol of his new authority, directly from Pope Pius IX, a sign of the growing importance within the Church of American Catholics in general, of New York’s Catholics in particular, and of Hughes himself. As the 1850s wore on, the archbishop began to conceive a plan that would give magnificent, concrete expression to the rise of New York’s Catholics. He would build a great cathedral, financed by the Catholics themselves, as proof to the Protestant elites that the Irish, too, knew how to make New York the premier city of the world. More important, such an accomplishment would give an enormous boost to the morale of the Irish community itself—which, however poor, was not too poor to achieve something grand.

Hughes laid the cornerstone on August 15, 1858, before a crowd of over 100,000, their imaginations fired by the hugely ambitious project. He had raised only $73,000 of the project’s estimated $1.5 million cost (a figure that ultimately rose to over $4 million, a staggering sum for the nineteenth century). But Hughes believed that if you took on a challenge, you would perforce rise to meet it. St. Patrick’s was finished in 1879 by his successor, John McCloskey, who raised the final $172,000 by holding a giant fair in the nave of the new cathedral for 42 days.

In 1863, with construction of the cathedral suspended because of the Civil War, the worst urban rioting in United States history broke out among the Irish in New York. Over 1,000 people were killed in three days. The Irish were enraged that the Union army was drafting them in disproportionate numbers because they could not afford the then legal practice of buying their way out of military service. Irish boys, who made up about 15 percent of the Union army, were suffering horrific casualty rates since they were commonly used as frontline troops against better-trained and better-led Confederate soldiers. In addition, rumors spread that once the slaves were freed, they would take Irish jobs or live off taxes on the Irish. The rioting Irish attacked blacks, nativists, and, on the third day, anybody who was around.

A then-dying Archbishop Hughes summoned the leaders of the rebellion to meet with him. However disturbed he might have been that the Irish were being called on to do so much of the dying in the struggle against the South, he supported the war and was totally opposed to slavery, having preached against it since his ordination as a priest in 1826. He told the riot leaders that “no blood of innocent martyrs, shed by Irish Catholics, has ever stained the soil of Ireland” and that they were dishonoring that impeccable history.

The riot leaders went back to their neighborhoods, and the violence melted away. The riot saddened the dying archbishop: he felt he had failed as a prelate. His friend and loyal subordinate, Bishop McCloskey, was saying the prayers for the dying when the end came for Hughes on January 3, 1864.

He had not failed, of course. The Draft Riots of 1863 were the death rattle of a destructive culture that was giving way to something constructive and edifying.

Though just 30 or 40 years before, New Yorkers had viewed the Irish as their criminal class, by the 1880s and 1890s the Irish proportion of arrests for violent crime had dropped from 60 percent to less than 10 percent. The Irish were the pillars of the criminal justice system. Three-quarters of the police force was Irish. The Irish were the prosecutors, the judges, and the jailers.

Alcoholism and drug addiction withered away. By the 1880s an estimated 60 percent of Irish women, and almost a third of the men, totally abstained from alcohol. Many Irish sections in the city became known for their peacefulness, order, and cleanliness—a far cry from the filth, violence, and disease of the Five Points and Sweeney’s Shambles of mid-century. Gone, too, was the notorious Irish promiscuity of those years; New York’s Irish became known by the latter part of the nineteenth century as a churched people, often chided by the press for their “puritanical” attitudes. Irish prostitutes virtually disappeared in the city, as did the army of Irish youths wandering the streets without adult supervision. Irish family life, formerly so frayed and chaotic, became strong and nourishing. Irish children entered the priesthood or the convent, the professions, politics, professional sports, show business, and commerce. In 1890 some 30 percent of New York City’s teachers were Irish women, and the Irish literacy rate exceeded 90 percent. In 1871 reformer “Honest” John Kelly became the leader of Tam-many Hall, and with the election in 1880 of shipping magnate William Grace as mayor, the Irish assumed control of city politics.

How important a figure was John Hughes in American history? Suppose the mass immigration from Ireland of the mid-nineteenth century had turned into a disaster for the country. How likely is it that the open immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been permitted? Nativism would have won, and America would be an unrecognizably different country today—and an immeasurably poorer one.