Category Archives: Democracy

Summers Time

Business, Debt, Democracy, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy, Uncategorized

LAWRENCE SUMMERS, director of the White House’s National Economic Politburo, says “[m]istakes on Wall Street in the mortgage area led to the subprime bubble that led to houses appreciating, that led to the situation where millions of people got loans that they were no longer able to service and faced foreclosure.”

Credit errors made on Wall Street brought financial institutions to the brink of insolvency that left no choice but to commit taxpayer funds.

Summers has the podium and the power. He does not have to be honest about the exuberance on Wall Street being part of a creative response to crippling legislation. He could come clean, but he does not have to.

And if he wishes to remain in office, he dare not admit to the force that propels the banks and the bandits in office. In the words of Bob Higgs:

“[T]he American people have little interest in liberty. Instead, they want the impossible: home ownership for those who cannot afford homes, credit for those who are not creditworthy, old-age pensions for those who have not saved, health care for those who make no attempt to keep themselves healthy, and college educations for those who lack the wit to finish high school. Moreover, they want it now, and they want somebody else to pay for it.” …

Update IV: Another Democratic (Or Demonic) Uprising

Christianity, Democracy, Ethics, Objectivism, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Sex

In 2008, on this space, I inquired naively, “Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the allegations and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued is American through-and-through.

But, two years hence, Americans can boast of one lucrative EXport, or shall I say SEXport!? The repressed memory mythology, and my priest-did-me syndrome have been adrift at sea, but have finally dropped an anchor across the pond.

My favorite Pope, Benedict XVI, has stood up admirably against the exported $2 billion lawsuit industry:

“Christ guides us towards goodness and does not let us be disarmed by ingratitude.” He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.

The Pope represents an aristocracy of the mind. The Catholic Church, in its wisdom, has put in place a much-needed hierarchy for the worshiping mass of humanity.

Against this, the religion of Democracy preaches the rule of the mob and the masses—in particular instituting the lowest common denominator in all spheres of life, from morals to aesthetics. The Catholic Church is among the last historical institutions where the masses are ministered to by their betters (mostly). The impetus and instinct to bleed it dry is a manifestation of a democratic—or is it demonic?—uprising. It is driven by those who’ve, in the Pope’s words, “fallen to the lowest, vulgar levels … into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”

Reread “SEX, GOD & GREED” by Daniel Lyons for a dissection of the veracity of the sexual abuse claims against the Church.

Update I: The “Another” of the post’s title alludes to the health care revolution, ushered in by the Obama coup.

Update II (March 30): What did I miss? Was there a priestly ritual murder? Plain murder? Boer murder? Evidence beyond hearsay of all the rest? You’d thinks so, wouldn’t you, at least from Schmidt’s hyperbole hereunder. I suggest, as I already have, the reading of Daniel Lyons’ “SEX, GOD & GREED.”

Update III: In reply to Hugo: Thanks for your always provocative posts. Still, it’s baffling to see an Objectivist poo-poo standards of evidence and due process—class action suits being but one legal emblem of the abuse of the principle of a case-by case adjudication.
Also perplexing is it to encounter an Objectivist, which I know Hugo to be, blame genocide in Rwanda on anyone other than the barbarians who, with malice aforethought, took machetes to their innocent neighbors (I was just revisiting that for my book).

Update IV (March 31): A discussion on Hardball with Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, of cover-ups and papal culpability. No discussion of the veracity and standards of the evidence, though.

In Memoriam Anika Smit

Crime, Democracy, Race, Racism, South-Africa

As you’ve gleaned by now, my book about South Africa is not an insta-book. By the time Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa is completed (almost there) it will have taken three years to write. The other day, I had to make a sad addition to the book:

When he bid his bonny (and only) child goodbye before leaving the home they shared in north Pretoria, Johan Smit did not imagine that he’d never again see Anika alive. On Wednesday, March 12, 2010, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off. Naked and mutilated is how her father found her on returning that day from work.

In South Africa the preying majority is killing off the powerless minority. In America, the demos is drunk on the power of the state to assist it in pilfering from its betters.

Democracy.

Police State Shaking In Its Goose-Stepping Boots

Democracy, Democrats, Fascism, Law, Terrorism, The State

It’s the leading story on just about every cable network. “House Democrats are concerned about their security due to increased threats since Sunday’s vote to pass the health care bill.”

A grim-faced House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer held a news conference, where he bemoaned that “a significant number, meaning over 10” Democrats “had reported either threats, vandalism or other incidents. Capitol Police officials have briefed House Democrats on reporting suspicious or threatening activity and taking precautions to avoid ‘subjecting themselves or their families to physical harm,’ said Hoyer, D-Maryland.”

Hoyer was flanked by a chap called Jim Clyburn who mouthed cliches about the lessons of history, and threw the kitchen sink of civil rights, holocaust, homophobia in for good measure.

Most other news outlets ran with this story, against a backdrop of besieged Democrats speaking about the need for security details to guard their homes and families and wallowing in horror stories about a handful of disenfranchised voters who seem to have lost faith in the vaunted American mobocracy. (Your wishes to be left alone are ignored in a democracy?! You don’t say.)

Good luck to you in trying to get a security detail should your family come under threat or should your boyfriend threaten to kill you. The sponger class has no perception of how rarefied and cloistered is its worthless, parasitic existence.

How ludicrous and contemptuous for the political class (and its media sycophants), backed as it is by the tanks that took out tots at WACO, to put on this show—aimed at depicting a tiny number of angry voters who dared to step out of line as Timothy McVeighs in the making.