Category Archives: Socialism

UPDATE II: Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment (& The Killing Continues)

Founding Fathers, Labor, Old Right, Political Economy, Republicans, Russia, Socialism, South-Africa

Excerpted from “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” now on WND:

“During the final presidential debate, Republican contender Mitt Romney got my hackles up (unnecessarily) with the following invocation of apartheid:

‘I would also make sure that [Iran’s] diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.’

Why unnecessarily? Romney is unremarkable among Republicans. Pushing revolutionary radicalism on the Old South Africa was the goal not only in high diplomatic circles, but among most Republicans.

With a few exceptions.

As I document in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ ‘For advocating ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, members of his Republican Party issued a coruscating attack on Ronald Reagan.’

Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans. In 1986, the Soviet Union, which had until the 1980s supported a revolutionary takeover of white-ruled South Africa by its ANC protégés, suddenly changed its tune and denounced the idea. Once again, the US and the USSR were on the same side—that of ‘a negotiated settlement between Pretoria and its opponents.’

Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, President Reagan has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’

South Africa was just one more issue on which Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Saint Nelson Mandela and the functionaries who run the dominant-party state of South Africa. That is, run it into the ground. … ”

The complete column is “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE I (Oct. 27): IT’S ALL ABOUT FACTION. As was noted in “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” “…the ANC … is powerless to stop intimidation. In South Africa, the sacked workers are in the habit of killing scabs who want to work.”

Reports RT:

South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse striking miners who tried to foil a rally of the nation’s largest union. The miners say the union reached an unfavorable deal with Amplants mine without their consent.
­The Anglo American Platinum mine in Rustenburg has announced an agreement to reinstate 12,000 miners fired earlier this month for staging illegal strikes and failing to appear at a disciplinary hearing. The credit for the deal was taken by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
“[Amplants] agreed to reinstate all the dismissed workers on the provision that they return to work by Tuesday,” the NUM announced Saturday, a day after the breakthrough in talks.
But the Amplants workers said they were neither aware of nor happy with the deal.
“We know nothing about it. We were not consulted, we only heard about it on the radio,” Ampants miner Reuben Lerebolo told AFP.

UPDATE II (Oct. 27): The indefatigable Adriana Stuijt (@AdrianaStuijt) tweets out:

“Oxford-educated SA investment company owner Alexander Theo Otten murdered at #Velddrift http://bit.ly/ThZFld”

Mourn The Death Of Mining In South Africa (The Canary In The Proverbial Mine)

America, BAB's A List, Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Founding Fathers, Inflation, Labor, Private Property, Socialism, South-Africa

A close acquaintance writes from South Africa: “With the unrest in mining, cash flow has gone for a ball of sh-t. No one can hire. Practically all mining has come to a halt. Bloody f-ucking Malema [ANC Youth League president]! Into The Cannibal’s Pot [my 2011 book] says it all. Thank you.”

[SNIP]

I don’t expect Americans to comprehend the loss of South Africa. Americans are, as Pat Buchanan once put it so well, a silly people living through serious times. Other than adjectival overkill (“a deeply silly people in deadly serious times), I’d add to Buchanan’s aphorism that, like Esau did, Americans have squandered their birthright—“the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization”—and replaced it with a mess of pottage.

Americans, moreover, lack an understanding of the philosophical inheritance they’ve frittered away. How then can such a silly people comprehend the loss of South Africa?

Mining has been “the main driving force behind the history and development of Africa’s most advanced and richest economy.”

Mining is dying in South Africa.

The mining sector is the canary in the proverbial mine.

Barry Downs is an American who knows better. Formerly based in South Africa, this mining sector investor knows a thing or two about what matters and what creates value. He emails with these invaluable insights:

“The mining industry unrest in South Africa is deepening, with militant senior trade unionist even talking about expropriation of assets and nationalization.

Shares of SA gold and Platinum mining companies remain under pressure as many miners remain on strike and non striking miners are being intimidated. The ANC government, meanwhile, appears powerless to turn the deteriorating situation around.

Just think: South Africa, over a 100 year span, produced 41,000 metric tons ( 1.3 billion ounces) of the only real money in the world, i.e., gold, and they still have identified 6,000 metric tons of mineable gold and with some high powered exploration will only increase reserves.

The ANC government and Reserve Bank regime fails to understand that the continuing global economic crisis will ultimately be focused on the global fiat paper money system, which is breaking down, and in the end there will be a massive run from paper and into gold.

There has been talk in this country about the US being eventually forced to stabilize the American economy by backing the dollar again with gold, and they will use the 1933 Bretton Woods formula that came up with $35 an ounce. To come up with the new gold price, they will take the US monetary base, which is $2.7 trillion, and divide it by the US Treasury gold holdings, which is 262 million ounces. The number becomes $10,300 and ounce.

The ANC government, if it had any smarts, should be going everything possible to protect it’s gold mining industry, knowing that future revenues from the industry will likely expand many times over as the gold price rises.

Nationalization will mean that the 6,000 metric tons of gold reserves may never be mined and the industry will just end up closing down. The 1,000 metric tons of gold South Africa produced, annually, 40 years ago, has declined to only 200 tons annually. It may end up at zero. Is it possible that the ANC government will just watch the goose that lays the golden egg killed off?

Given the mentality illustrated throughout your book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot,, I think the answer is yes.”

For the Love of Obama

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Elections 2008, Journalism, Media, Republicans, Socialism, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Speaking to “a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser,” on a Sunday in April 2008, one presidential candidate slimes small-town America as bitterly clinging to their guns, bigotries and bibles. The media listens in, but decides to keep a lid on the rant, because, in the words of a reporter who like the rest was rooting for the candidate, she “didn’t want to bring down the campaign.”

Four years later, another presidential candidate states a few plain facts about an electorate of which “47 percent ‘will vote for [Obama] no matter what’; “who are with him,” no matter what, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”; who regard as an”entitlement” the fruits of another man’s labor, and think “government should give it to them,” and who “will vote for this president no matter what… people who pay no income tax.”

The same reporters who refused to pull back the curtain to reveal Obama’s contempt for small town Pennsylvania are hyperventilating over Mitt Romney’s unvarnished assessment of a large portion of the Democratic Party’s constituency.

One is, seemingly, forbidden to point out that while some people work for their living, others vote for their livelihood.

Thankfully, Romney is not groveling, this time, but simply affirming the figures and his,

concern about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work.

A Good Country For Dead Beats

Business, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Law, Private Property, Rights, Socialism

Initially, every parasitical official seeking to renew or secure a grip on the public teat was demanding a halt to what are mostly perfectly legitimate foreclosures on delinquent homeowners. Now cities across the US are considering using eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages. One dreadful cur, Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno, claims that the effort will “boost a recovery of the housing market.”

Fox Business’ Melissa Francis hammered Moreno for his scheming.

“Chicago is threatening to undermine whole system,” blasted Ms. Francis. “If you seize these mortgages from the banks and you just rip them up, why would a bank ever lend money again?” Good for her. But why not use the words “contract” and “property rights”? Why use “system,” so vague and meaningless?

Public discourse never rises above the utilitarian: what works, what doesn’t. Rights be damned. Anything to get away from making a principled distinction between what is mine and what is thine. In a word, property rights.

It is almost always true that a necessary condition for a foreclosure is for the homeowner to have failed to make his mortgage payments. Some even “argue” for all-out sweetness and love for the foreclosed upon. They say that because the banks are embroiled in the fractional reserve system, they should suffer this fate.

That’s like saying that because a legal system is corrupt, murderers should go free; or because an owner who sells a parcel of land partakes in the property tax theft, the buyer should not have to pay him. Or because businesses often act like exuberant idiots during a phase of the business cycle—some as offenders; others as victims—their customers need not pay them. And on and on.