Okay Lane, here is a columnist citing a very credible source, The London Times, saying that both the UK and the US are being destroyed by excessive immigration. Such destruction would have serious consequences for my portfolio, thus this article is not political, right?
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townhall.com
Paul Craig Roberts (back to story)
August 15, 2002
Making colonies out of nation-states
Will Americans ever escape the gag of political correctness? Probably not, but the English are making a last ditch effort. On Aug. 7, the London Times published an article by one of its editors titled, "Britain is Losing Britain"
Third World immigration, hitherto an unmentionable subject, is quadrupling the rate of Britain's population growth and creating a new city of immigrants the size of Cambridge every six months.
Immigration, the Times says, is transforming Britain into "a foreign land." British society is being utterly transformed "against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion," and burdening the health service to the breaking point.
Finding the situation "so extreme and so damaging," the Times editor writes that "silence is no longer an option." Britain is literally disappearing. In many British cities, "you can wander around for hours without seeing a white face, one monoculture having replaced another." Yet, "immigration celebrationists" continue "to brainwash the British public into thinking that it is all for their own good. But almost every reason given to support this immigration is bogus."
"In the past five years," the Times says, "while the white population grew by 1 percent, the Bangladeshi community grew by 30 percent, the black African population by 37 percent and the Pakistani community by 13 percent. ... Whole villages in Bangladesh have been transplanted to northern English towns."
The British political order has broken down. Polls show that without question, "the large majority of British people -- including around half of ethnic minorities -- think there is too much immigration." But public opinion is powerless: "No mainstream political party dare reflect public opinion." British politicians cower before the immigration lobby and fear being called racist, Nazi or xenophobic.
Name-calling aside, the Times says that massive immigration without assimilation leads to social fragmentation. More non-Britons wish to live in Britain than are consistent with the existence of Britain. "The people of Britain have a right to decide who can move here."
The Times assertion that the people of Britain -- and not the immigration lobby -- have the right to decide immigration policy is heresy to multiculturalists. But the very next day (before anyone could burn the heretic), the Daily Mail, Britain's largest circulation newspaper, reprinted the Times article. Thus, debate has begun before hysterical "immigration celebrationists" can shout it down.
Sir Andrew Green, a career British diplomat, together with Oxford University demographer David Coleman, has formed a new organization, Migration Watch UK. These developments are shifting the burden of argument. Now immigration enthusiasts are on the hot seat. They must explain why they aren't racists for wishing to destroy Britain with massive Third World immigration.
Americans are losing their country, too, but Americans are not allowed to say so. Third World immigration to the United States is higher than to Britain. One in five of the U.S. population was born abroad or born of parents who were born abroad. This is a massive change from 1970, when new immigrants counted for only one in 20 U.S. births.
While the British worry about losing cities to Third World immigrants, the United States is losing entire states. Assimilation has broken down. In its place, Americans now endure Third World enclaves or colonies.
As the United States becomes a polyglot, how can it have any foreign policy? How much longer will the United States be able to conduct a pro-Israeli foreign policy and plan invasions of Middle Eastern countries?
The outlines of U.S. domestic policy in the New Immigrationist State (NIS) are already apparent. The tax burdens on native-born whites will rise to meet the needs of the poor immigrants. The burden of the federal personal income tax rests on a narrow base of 35 million taxpayers who are, in effect, slaves of the state. The colonization of these taxpayers will intensify, as millions of needy new immigrants enter the United States each year.
The United States, like Britain, faces extinction as a nation-state. Both countries are becoming colonies for a plethora of Third World cultures.
As one Briton put it, "We resisted Hitler in order to become a colony for Africa, Asia and the Middle East." The United States has done the British one better. We have become the world's colony.
Lane, my mother owns stock in UAL, so the failure of the Justice Department to protect air travel will have a strong negative effect on her portfolio. So, this is not political either, right?
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Robert Novak (back to story)
August 15, 2002
John Ashcroft's liberals
WASHINGTON -- How is it that John Ashcroft's hard-line Justice Department flinches like a gun controller at the thought of arming airline pilots? That tendency can be traced to a veteran career bureaucrat from Pennsylvania named Sarah Hart, brought into the Justice Department a year ago by Attorney General Ashcroft.
Hart not only has attacked guns in the cockpit but also has expressed affection for the COPS program, Bill Clinton's federal subsidy for local police forces that the Bush administration wants to terminate. If Hart shares Clintonian ideals, she has found plenty of company at a Justice Department where holdover Clinton administration bureaucrats abound.
When Ashcroft entered the attorney general's office after a brutal Senate confirmation process, a veteran of previous Republican administrations told me the new attorney general's immediate test would be how he staffed his department. From conservatives, Ashcroft gets an "A" for high-level appointments and an "F" for the mid-level bureaucracy. Assailed by the Left as anti-civil libertarian, he is attacked by the Right for leaving his department unchanged.
Three of Ashcroft's most criticized senior bureaucrats follow:
Lawrence A. Greenfeld, director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS): Starting as a probation officer in Fairfax County, Va., 33 years ago, he joined the Justice Department in 1976 and the BJS in 1982. He was its principal deputy director under President Clinton and was promoted to director by President Bush. He is viewed by conservatives as supporting COPS and other Clinton programs.
Michael Katz, deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division: A University of California at Berkeley professor starting in 1987, he became chief economist -- and staunch regulator -- at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1994. He next became chief economist at Clinton's Antitrust Division, supervising its economic analysis as it attacked Microsoft. Ashcroft has retained him in that strategic position.
Sarah V. Hart, director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ): A Philadelphia prosecutor for 16 years, she became chief counsel of Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections in 1995. Since joining Ashcroft's Justice Department, conservatives complain, Hart has done nothing to reduce NIJ funding for left-wing academic institutions.
Hart particularly distresses conservatives. When Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona planned a critical study of COPS, he could not get help from Justice because Hart indicated support for the program. Kyl's staffers did not even think it worthwhile to contact Greenfeld, who at BJS had the numbers at hand but was known as an ardent COPS booster.
When Congress passed its transportation security act last December, it required Hart's NIJ to report any alternatives in airline cockpits to stun guns or other non-lethal weapons. According to Justice sources, she recommended only "passive" behavior by pilots. Since she has publicly suggested that stun guns may be "impractical," Hart in effect is calling for pilot passivity in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
A draft report to the Senate by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the congressional investigative arm, cites Hart as a source for objection to guns in the cockpit. "Arming pilots," says the GAO draft, "would introduce 10,000-100,000 guns into society, contradicting other efforts to discourage the number of firearms in the population." That aligns a Bush presidential appointee with the gun-controllers. When my office called her, Hart pleaded she was in the midst of a meeting and hung up the phone.
Hart had the power to stop federal financing for an anti-gun study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is expected to be issued just in time for the 2004 presidential election campaign. She did not. John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has called this a one-sided study with a foregone conclusion conceived by the Clinton administration.
Beneath the level of Hart, Katz and Greenfeld, platoons of liberals infest the Justice Department. I have previously reported that Stuart Gibson, a lawyer in Justice's Tax Division, is a liberal political activist elected to office in the Virginia suburbs. His existence became known only when he was identified as lead litigator publicly revealing a tax shelter used by William Simon, Republican candidate for governor of California. How many more liberals pursue their agendas inside John Ashcroft's Justice Department is anybody's guess.
Lane, Pat Buchanon blames Robert Rubin for the mess that JPM is in re bad loans to, among other places, Brazil. Buchanon says that O'Neil has no choice but to bail out Brazil (and the rest of Latin America) in order to keep our big US banks afloat. Clearly, this is not political, because we all follow the stock of C, JPM, MER, etc. all the time, right?
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townhall.com
Pat Buchanan (back to story)
August 14, 2002
Bailing out Brazil -- or Robert Rubin?
What has happened to Paul O'Neill? Our tough-love treasury secretary seems to have undergone a road-to-Damascus conversion to the Clintonite policy of bailing out bankrupt Third World regimes.
Last month, O'Neill scoffed at the idea of bailing out Latin America. The money, he said, would probably wind up in Swiss banks. But last week, Uruguay got $1.5 billion to stop a run on its banks. Then came a $30 billion dollar IMF bailout of Brazil. Now, the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank are offering Brazil another $7 billion.
This $37 billion comes on top of $15 billion the IMF sent Brazil last year and a $41 billion Brazilian bailout in 1998.
Why is Uncle Sam bailing out these deadbeats, yet again, when Americans have gotten zero help from the government while a two-year bear market has gutted their 401(k)s and stock portfolios?
Read Friday's New York Times and you will find the answer.
Sam isn't bailing out Brazilian peasants, he bailing out big banks. Last week, Brazil was in a panic, on the verge of default, and reporter Edmund Andrews explains why this was so "frightening."
"Brazil's ... external debt of $264 billion is more than double that of Argentina's, and American banks like Citigroup, FleetBoston and J. P. Morgan Chase have much greater exposure to Brazilian loans than to Argentine ones."
How great is the exposure?
"American banks have about $25.6 billion in outstanding loans to Brazilian borrowers. Citigroup, the biggest lender to Brazil, has $9.7 billion in Brazilian loans." That's right. Forty percent of the U.S. bank exposure in Brazil is the fault of America's biggest and dumbest bank. And who is the resident financial wizard at Citigroup?
"Robert H. Rubin, who was treasury secretary under President Clinton and engineered international rescue packages for Mexico, Russia and many Asian countries, is now a Citigroup director.
Andrews pointedly adds, "A representative for Citigroup could not say whether bank executives had lobbied in favor of a rescue package for Brazil." But the day the Brazilian bailout was announced, Citigroup's stock shot up 6 percent.
The career of Robert Rubin is instructive. As lead pony at Goldman Sachs, he led that investment bank into plunging billions into Mexican bonds. As head of the White House Economic Security Council, he failed to see the Mexican default barreling up the tracks. But as treasury secretary, he was able to shovel billions of U.S. dollars down Mexico way, thus saving the Goldman Sachs investments.
Last fall, we learned Rubin phoned Treasury to suggest to a friend that he might call Moody's to urge them not to downgrade the credit rating of Enron. Citigroup had loaned Enron $750 million. Yet, the committee investigating Enron, chaired by Joe Lieberman, has yet to call Rubin to explain what exactly he was up to and what other calls he made on Enron's behalf. Having friends in high places can save a lot of grief.
In fairness, Rubin is probably not responsible for sinking that $9.7 billion into Brazil. For this is not the first time Citigroup has had to have Uncle Sam post bail for its binges in Latin America. Citigroup has a recidivism rate to rival Darryl Strawberry's.
Yet, some of us saw O'Neill's pirouette coming. Two months ago, I wrote, "A prediction: President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill will emulate Bill Clinton and Bob Rubin and get into the bailout business, big-time as Dick Cheney would say, because no wants to be the one left standing there when the music stops."
Why the abandonment of principle by the president and O'Neill? Because neither wants to be in the wheelhouse when the ship hits the reef.
With Brazil's external debt at $264 billion, this $37 billion only kicks the can up the road. Brazil is bust, and putting bankrupts deeper in debt only pushes off the day of reckoning and write-offs. O'Neill is throwing tens of billions of good U.S. tax dollars down a rathole to chase the lost loans of Citigroup and J. P. Morgan.
Moreover, the Brazilians have had enough of IMF austerity. In the latest poll for the October presidential election, leftists "Lula" da Silva and Ciro Gomes had 60 percent of the vote between them, while our man, the IMF's man, the incumbent party's man, was pulling 11 percent.
The only question left is who is going to eat the losses from the idiot Latin loans of America's Big Banks. Because there are guys like Robert Rubins around, with friends in high places, it always comes down to the taxpayer.
That's the way the world works in 2002, even though it stinks.
Lane, here is today's column by George Will, in which he trumpets the coming forced-democratization of the middle east (at the end of an American sword). But, don't worry, since war in the middle east will affect the stock market, this isn't political either. Oh, and credibility-wise, he cites J. Robert Oppenheimer, Eric Rouleau, a French diplomat, writing in Foreign Affairs, and Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
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townhall.com
George Will (back to story)
August 15, 2002
Regime change in Iraq
WASHINGTON--Fifty-six years ago American officials worried about unconventional uses of weapons of mass destruction. In a 1946 congressional hearing, J. Robert Oppenheimer acknowledged that a few people could smuggle components of an atomic bomb into New York City. Asked how such components could be detected in a crate or suitcase, he answered: ``With a screwdriver.'' President Bush would rather rely on regime change than screwdrivers to protect America. So he is unsheathing a doctrine--``anticipatory self-defense'' via pre-emptive war--that might become a dangerous sword in other hands. But as a reminder of the alternatives, say ``screwdriver.''
Saddam Hussein's regime, founded on fear leavened by cupidity, will soon learn the value of those as substitutes for popular consent in infusing people with a willingness to die. During preparation for Desert Storm, an Israeli official, after being briefed by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf on the war plans, said: Too many hospital beds, too few prisoner-of-war pens. He was right: Iraq's army was overrated.
Because of economic sanctions, among other things, Iraq's military is less formidable today. America's military is much more formidable than it was 11 years ago because it incorporates new technologies as avidly as Gen. Pershing did in 1917 when (as William R. Hawkins notes in Parameters, the quarterly journal of the U.S. Army War College) high tech meant radios, trucks and biplanes.
Still, Americans should not assume use of large-scale military power against Iraq will be as easy as three recent uses were. Desert Storm was a 100-hour land war following a 38-day air campaign. U.S. objectives were achieved in Serbia from an altitude of 15,000 feet. Afghanistan may seem to have confirmed Gen. Billy Mitchell's 1925 book ``Winged Defense'': ``It is probable that future wars again will be conducted by a special class, the air force, as it was by the armored knights in the Middle Ages.''
Whether easy or difficult, regime change in Iraq will not be the first such post-Sept. 11 exercise. Afghanistan was. And Saudi Arabia's regime may be changed by reverberations from action against Iraq, particularly if that action is seen to be the prelude to democratization.
The House of Saud almost certainly is a dead regime walking. Saudi Arabia's male unemployment rate is 30 percent. Its population growth--birth control is disapproved--is among the most rapid in the world (3 percent per year). Eric Rouleau, a French diplomat, writing in Foreign Affairs (``Trouble in the Kingdom''), says that since the overthrow of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia is the Islamic world's most rigorous theocracy: ``Universities require male professors teaching women's classes to give their lectures through a closed-circuit one-way television system ... 30 to 40 percent of the course hours in schools are devoted to studying scripture.'' Furthermore, the marriage rate is sharply dropping:
``Unable to afford the traditional dowry, many young Saudi men are now doomed to a prolonged celibacy. At the same time, growing numbers of young women are refusing to marry men chosen for them by their families, men whom their would-be brides are not allowed to meet before their wedding night. As a result, an estimated two-thirds of Saudi women now between 16 and 30 years of age cannot, or will not, marry.''
Sooner or later, and probably sooner, all this will meet its match in modernity. America's reluctant semi-allies in Europe should support American actions that hasten that day. Demography is, if not destiny, at least a shaper of nations' fates, and Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies notes demographic trends that give Europe a huge stake in the transformation of the Middle East.
Barring a surge of immigration into Europe, which the political climate there precludes, by 2050 the median age in Europe will be approaching 60. But in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, the median age will be about 21--which, Fukuyama notes, is what has been normal through most of history. ``So you're going to have this little island of well-to-do elderly people surrounded by vast numbers of people who are a good deal younger and poorer, all wanting to move to the island.''
If Iraq's next government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, the entire region may be changed. ``Brazil,'' according to a familiar jest, ``is the country of the future--and always will be.'' Many people too pessimistically believe that the Arab world is next on the list of regions to experience democratization--and always will be.
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