Gov. Chris Christie’s address on Tuesday, at the Reagan Library, was more rambling than Reaganesque. It was also a little baffling. In the second paragraph, Christie says,
“Ronald Reagan believed in this country. He embodied the strength, perseverance and faith that has propelled immigrants for centuries to embark on dangerous journeys to come here, to give up all that was familiar for all that was possible.”
What’s up with this? Was Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, an immigrant? And why mention immigrants at the onset of your coming-out-as-presidential-candidate address? By so doing, Ann Coulter’s crush is probably attempting to convey that to speak of America is to speak of immigrants.
America=immigration.
John Jay had a different take. He conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what his descendants are taught.
NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic
MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.
NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”
Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.
In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.
None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.
The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!
One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!
In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.
First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.
You have been warned.
**** Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.
UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized:
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds that Obama earns 44% support to Paul’s 34%. Thirteen percent (13%) prefer some other candidate, and nine percent (9%) remain undecided.
This time last month, the two men were essentially even shortly after Paul’s second-place finish in the high-profile Ames, Iowa straw poll. The president posted a narrow 41% to 37% lead over the congressman in July.
Ron Paul still has time to catch up, but the congressman needs some competent campaign strategists. In my opinion (whose less negative line on Israel Paul recently adopted, despite the fact that it was written for him years ago), Paul has come this far despite the help.
For real, clear economics, it’s hard to beat financier Peter Schiff. Here is some of the text of his testimony to the gathering of crooks known as Congress. Pearls before swine, if you ask me:
“We stimulated our way into this problem [“the housing bubble and the financial crisis of 2008”]. We are not going to stimulate our way out. In fact the stimulus is actually a sedative. The stimulus is preventing the free market from unraveling the problems of years of bad monetary and fiscal policy have created. We don’t need more spending. We need the opposite of spending. We need under consumption, what the economy lacks is savings, investment, production and if we try to preserve the jobs of the bubble economy with more reckless money printing and borrowing and government spending all we are going to succeed in doing is preventing the restructuring that we need and preventing more productive jobs from coming into existence.”
“And I wanna talk specifically about jobs, I’m an employer, I employ about 150 people. I would probably employ a 1000 more if it were not for government regulations that inhibited my ability to hire and grow my business and forced me to move portions of my business overseas in order to escape the regulatory burden here. But the question is why do I hire people where are these jobs coming from, you know, jobs in a free market, ah, they come from two things, they come from profits, or the profit motive or they come from capital. You need both to create jobs. And in a free market there’s gonna be jobs and if they’re aren’t enough jobs, Congress has to ask: ‘What are we doing to inhibit this process? How are we preventing jobs that would normally be here from coming into existence?'”
“Now, in order for me to hire somebody, I have to be able to make a profit. That means that the person I hire has to deliver to me more value than the cost of the employing them. And the cost of employing them is not just the wages I’m paying them but it’s all the mandatory benefits, the taxes, and more importantly the legal liability that I incur when I hire somebody. Source: LYBIO.net In fact, one of the riskiest things you can do in America is to hire somebody. And because of that reason, because of all the liability from Government, from lawsuits, that you have put on employers, most small businesses their main concern is how not to hire people. How can I grow my business and hire as few people as possible. That is not something that happens in the market. That is something that happens as a consequence of Government…”
“…Demand doesn’t come form government spending; inflation comes from government spending. Demand comes from supply. You can’t consume something that isn’t produced. You have to make things first. …”
“There are millions of employed Americans. How do you increase the demand for labor? You decrease the cost of labor. Regulations substantially increase the costs of employing people and as a result fewer people are employed.”
Schiff recommended that no more regulations be added and that congress begins to repeal existing regulations. Minimum-wage laws for example.
“You can’t lose your rights because you hire somebody; you can’t give workers some kind of special privily and then call it a worker’s right. Everybody has individual rights and you shouldn’t lose them because you hire somebody.”
“Bad regulation did not start under Obama. The problem with well meaning regulation is that the consequences are the exact opposite of the intent. Infrastructure spending doesn’t stimulate the economy; it drains the economy of resources. Infrastructure only helps in the long run if it raises the productivity of the nation. China can afford to put in roads. We are broke. We need to start making stuff before we can consider how to make our roads prettier.”
“99% of a [small/medium-size business’ income] is taxed at the marginal rate, so that the marginal rate is my rate. Feds take 35% of my income, another 3% for Medicare, local tax in the state of Connecticut (7%), and this is before I pay any property or sales taxes. I am already moving business to Singapore, the Caribbean. We are a high tax country, not a low tax country.”
“You can only borrow if someone is saving. There is a lender. The has to be something in it for the lender has to have something in it. Currently the banks are getting money from the government and buying treasuries, monetary policy that is stifling the savings that we need to grow the economy. You can always see the jobs that government creates, you can never see the jobs it destroys. All government can do is re-arrange the resources; it cannot create resources.”
“A sales tax should replace income tax. It would be much more conducive to tax people when they spend their wealth, not when they accumulate it.”
“Deficit spending is more damaging than taxation….”
“Interest rates [as we know] are being kept low. When they rise to approximate market rate, what effect till this have on business? banks which are kept afloat by the cheap money from the Fed will go insolvent. Their portfolios are loaded with low-yielding, long-term government bonds … keeping interest low creates inflation…”
“Henry Ford paid his workers $5 a day. Highest in the world at the time; an ounce and a quarter of gold. $2500 a week. They were paying no federal incomes taxes and no payroll taxes; there were no minimum wages and no unions. We paid the highest wages in the world but produces the best least expensive products. that was possible b/c we had the smallest government. Minimal regulations and no taxes. …”
[SNIP]
Notice how silent Dr. Heather Boushey, to Schiff’s right, has fallen—she is a popular panelist on the panel parade that infests cable, PBS, and the other networks.
Another thought: Ron Paul, who does not argue nearly as crisply and clearly as Schiff does, will need to make common cause with Mr. Schiff. Peter Schiff: United States Secretary of the Treasury in a future Paul cabinet.
