Pat Conroy, writing in “The Prince of Tides” about the 21st Century — thinking (mistakenly) he was writing of the 20th:
“Patrick Flaherty was the perfect manifestation of the modern American man. I listened in amazement as he began to speak, anesthetized by his heroic, unblemishable command of every cliche in the language. His tongue was a hermitage for banality. Every movement he made and every word was buttery with condescension. He was the quintessential organization man and all his i’s were dottted and all his sentences were diagrammed by a portentous vacuity. Clean and supple and lacking in all vestiges of compassion, Patrick Flaherty stood before us as an eyesore on our aberrant, hallucinating century. His voice flooded the gymnasium with a whole lottery of statistics. It was a coppery, inanimate voice and all the words seemed dusted with bright and deadly notes of silica. In silence, we listened as he explained how our town was going to be moved house by house and brick by brick.”
***************
… “Soon they will turn our beautiful town into a place dedicated to the destruction of the universe. And I have not heard a single man or woman from this town say ‘No.’ I keep asking myself, ‘How many sheep can one town produce?’ I keep asking myself, ‘Where are the lions? Where are they sleeping?’
Since the announcement by the federal government that they were going to steal my town, I’ve done what any Southerner would do: I’ve turned to the Bible for solace and strength. I’ve tried to find in the Bible some message that would give me comfort during this time of distress. I’ve looked to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to see if I could find some comparison between those two wicked cities and Colleton. Now, I admit to you I found nothing. Colleton is a town of gardens and pleasure boats and church bells on Sunday. It is not evil in any way that I can judge evil. Its only fault that I can see is that it produced people who didn’t love her enough, people who would sell her to strangers for thirty pieces of silver. So I kept reading the Bible, hoping to find a message from God that would grant me succor during the wrath of the Philistines. Because, if I don’t try to save the one town in the world I truly love, then I want God to turn me into a pillar of salt because I did not look back. I would rather be a lifeless pillar of salt in Colleton than a Judas Iscariot covered with gold and the blood of his hometown anywhere else in the world.”
What would be required to restore New York to its former prosperity and greatness would be the combination of the elimination of public welfare, the abolition of rent controls, and the privatization of the city’s transportation system.
The seven preceding sections have described various major aspects of the campaign for capitalism. Here it is appropriate to bring some of those aspects together in the form of a specific program that, over the course of less than a decade, would bring about the economic and cultural revival of America’s leading city, New York. I choose to focus on New York not only because it is the country’s leading city, but also because, of any major American city, it best represents the destructive economic and social consequences of contemporary American “liberalism,” of which it is the intellectual home.
What would be required to restore New York to its former prosperity and greatness would be the combination of the elimination of public welfare, the abolition of rent controls, and the privatization of the city’s transportation system.
The abolition of welfare, of course, would have to be preceded by the elimination of minimum-wage and prounion legislation and of restrictions on child labor over the age of fourteen. In the absence of the outright repeal of minimum-wage and prounion legislation at the national level, it would be necessary for the city to obtain a special congressional exemption from that legislation. These preliminary measures would be necessary so that, as I have said before, the present welfare recipients would have a realistic opportunity of finding employment. As I have also said before, the elimination of welfare would need to take place gradually, say, over a ten-year period. The elimination of public welfare and restrictions on employment would make possible a radical improvement in the lives of the poorest portion of the city’s population, whose members would then live by working and recognize their responsibility for their own well-being, and who thus could advance to far higher economic levels than could ever be possible for them while on the welfare rolls. At the same time, and for much the same reasons, it would make an enormous contribution to the reduction in crime and thus to the improvement of the lives of the rest of the city’s population, if large numbers of those who otherwise would have been out committing crimes–namely, unemployed, impoverished juveniles and the hardened criminals they grow up to become–were instead busy earning money by working.
The abolition of rent control, of course, would radically and progressively improve the city’s housing stock. It would also bring about the return of the middle class to the city. Another important consequence of the repeal of rent control would be a great increase in the revenues of the city government that were derived from property taxes. Property tax collections would soar by virtue of bringing the value of all the housing and land in the city that is presently under rent controls, up to the free-market level. The great increase in property-tax revenues, combined with the elimination of expenditures for welfare, would make possible the elimination of much or even all of the city’s income and sales taxes, which would further improve the quality of life in the city and promote the return of industry and commerce. As a result of the vast increase in the property-tax base, even the property-tax rate could probably eventually be reduced.
The privatization not only of the city’s subway system but also of its bus lines, accompanied by the phasing out of restrictive taxicab licensing requirements, would achieve major improvement in the city’s transportation system. This too would represent an important improvement in the daily life of the average New Yorker and serve to encourage the return of industry and commerce to the city.
No doubt, repeal of victimless crimes legislation and the consequent ability of the city’s police department and judicial system to concentrate all of their resources on apprehending and punishing those guilty of crimes against the persons or property of others would be a further measure vital in restoring the life of the city.
Needless to say, success in enacting the above program in New York City would operate powerfully to promote the cause of capitalism in the entire country.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
(Natural News) New research published in the journal Current Psychology suggests that narcissistic individuals with psychopathic tendencies tend more towards left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression than right-wing hierarchical embrace.
According to the research involved, opposing hierarchical power structures as many liberals do is a sign of mental illness, as these individuals should apparently embrace the hierarchical structure as normal and acceptable. Those who refuse might be narcissists with psychopathic tendencies, the paper claims.
“We were interested in the psychological factors behind authoritarianism,” said study authors Ann Krispenz, a postdoctoral associate, and Alex Bertrams, head of the Educational Psychology Lab at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
“There is a wide range of literature and research in the field of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). However, research on authoritarianism observed in individuals who are supportive of left-wing political ideologies are still rare.”
(Related: Remember when a woke liberal male claimed to be a transgender “woman” just on Wednesdays during work hours so he could obtain a political position illegally reserved just for women? This is what left-wing politics forces marginalized demographics like straight, white males to do just to maintain access to the same opportunities as special interest demographics like trans “women.”)
Today’s leftists prefer to silence their opposition rather than agree to disagree
To gain a better understanding of left-wing authoritarianism, or LWA, the researchers looked at another recently published study that conceptualizes LWA as consisting of three correlated dimensions: anti-conventionalism, top-down censorship, and anti-hierarchical aggression.
“Authoritarianism can be found on both sides of the political spectrum,” Krispenz and Bertrams admit, noting that both the right wing and the left wing are still attached to the same bird.
“Indicators of authoritarianism on the political left are anticonventionalism (i.e., the absolute endorsement of progressive moral values), top-down censorship (i.e., the preference for the use of governmental and institutional authority to suppress any speech that is considered as offensive and intolerant), and antihierarchical aggression (i.e., the motivation to use force and aggression to overthrow established hierarchies).”
One example the study puts forth is the idea that someone who adheres to LWA might declare others who oppose his or her “progressive values,” whatever they might be, as being “old fashioned.” Such an individual might thus attempt to silence the opposer through elimination or suppression of free speech, using violence if necessary.
Krispenz and Bertrams looked at two separate studies to make their determination that left-wing authoritarianism often goes hand-in-hand with narcissism. To measure narcissism, they used the Five-Factor Narcissism Inventory, a self-report measure with 60 different items.
“The FFNI assesses narcissism on three subdimensions: antagonism, agentic extraversion, and neuroticism. Altruism was measured using the Self-Report Altruism Scale, which consisted of twenty items assessing prosocial behaviors (e.g., ‘I have given money to a charity’),” explains Eric W. Dolan, writing for PsyPost.
“Participants rated how often they had engaged in these behaviors in the past on a 5-point scale ranging from ‘never’ to ‘very often.’”
“To assess proneness to socially desirable responding, the researchers used the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. Socially desirable responding, also known as social desirability bias, refers to a tendency of individuals to respond to surveys or questionnaires in a way that presents themselves in a more favorable or socially acceptable light.”
Left-wing authoritarianism was also measured using the Left-Wing Authoritarian Index, which is based on 39 items and uses much the same line of questioning as the above indexes.
Based on all this, the researchers found that LWA individuals tend to have high levels of neurotic narcissism, meaning they care very much about what other people think about them. They also experience high levels of shame and have a strong need for admiration. Conversely, the researchers found no relationship between LWA and altruism.
The latest news about left-wing libtardism can be found at Libtards.news
Openly Communist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) simply called on Democrats in Congress to ignore the debt ceiling. This is her answer for everything. If you don’t like a law or procedure — just do away with it. So long as it serves the Marxist-fascist cause.
Being lectured by AOC on fiscal responsibility is like watching the Titanic sink from a lifeboat and hearing one of the illiterate kitchen maids sternly remind you of your manners while on board a great ship.
In a twisted way, the twit is right. Since all we have is fiat currency unhinged from a gold standard or any other market-based objective standard, why bother with a debt limit? The government can simply use the Federal Reserve to “print” or create more money. On our present premises, the government might as well just give everyone $15 trillion per year. On our present course, our glorified Monopoly game money will be worthless, once inflation and hyperinflation ruin it. One way or another, you, I or our children will — before much longer– be starting over. For details, check out Venezuela today, or the 1930s Weimar republic shortly before the election of Hitler.
My solution to the debt: DEFUND the federal government. Shut it down. Return power to the states & the people. We’ve had enough.
You can’t reconcile totalitarian government with economic freedom. America needs a divorce.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.
Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.
In 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.
That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s ongoing spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics meted out to dissidents on both the right and the left.
Yet while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.
Indeed, the FBI’s love affair with totalitarianism can be traced back to the Nazi police state.
As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
Since then, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and used them repeatedly against American citizens.
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.
Consider the extent to which the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves resemble those of their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo.
Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).
Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.
Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.
Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.
Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.
Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s attempts to target and spy on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.
The Gestapo became the terror of the Third Reich by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”
In fact, borrowing heavily from the Gestapo, between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity .”
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.
The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, denounced the government’s abuses:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”
The report continued:
“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”
Whether 50 years ago or in the present day, the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney, author, and founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. This article is a revised version of a piece that originally appeared on the Rutherford Institute website, http://www.rutherford.org, and is reprinted by permission.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.
Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.
In 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.
That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s ongoing spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics meted out to dissidents on both the right and the left.
Yet while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.
Indeed, the FBI’s love affair with totalitarianism can be traced back to the Nazi police state.
As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
Since then, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and used them repeatedly against American citizens.
With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.
Consider the extent to which the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves resemble those of their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo.
Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).
Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.
Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.
Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.
Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.
Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.
Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s attempts to target and spy on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.
The Gestapo became the terror of the Third Reich by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”
In fact, borrowing heavily from the Gestapo, between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents. As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity .”
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.
The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, denounced the government’s abuses:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.”
The report continued:
“Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”
Whether 50 years ago or in the present day, the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney, author, and founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. This article is a revised version of a piece that originally appeared on the Rutherford Institute website, http://www.rutherford.org, and is reprinted by permission.
Regardless of what happens with the debt ceiling, Republicans WILL get blamed for any disaster, real or imagined. They will get blamed because the media, which is 99 percent Communist, associates Republicans with capitalism, and Communists hate capitalism. They hate capitalism, but they sure LOVE money — their own money, that is. DemComs want a super wealthy elite of psycho-wokesters, along with an impoverished underclass to depend on them, because this makes their soulless, parasitical psyches feel significant. (This is why they love these poor migrants flooding the border.) But you must understand they want NO middle class. That’s what these Wall Street/L.A./Janet Yellen Commies have in common with the old fashioned Soviet and Castro Commies: an uninhibited, bottomless thirst to eradicate the middle class. It’s what Communism does.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 