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Excelsior! and Eureka! 165 Years of California Gold: from Sutter’s Mill to Jennifer Lawrence (January 24, 1848-January 24, 2013)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by | 1 Comment

On January 24, 1848, gold (AU 79 on the Periodic Chart of the Elements) was discovered on the South Branch of the American River at John Augustus Sutter’s Mill in “New Helvetia” (New Switzerland), California.  Sutter’s history kind of set the tone in California for a culture of real estate piracy by “claim jumping” and disregard for any rights except those established by possession of money……

At one time the absolute ruler of what amounted to a private kingdom along the Sacramento River, John Sutter saw his immense wealth and power overrun in the world’s rush to pick California clean of gold.

Sutter was born John Augustus Sutter in Baden, Germany, though his parents had originally come from Switzerland, a lineage of which he was especially proud. In 1834, faced with impossible debt, he decided to try his fortunes in America and, leaving his family in a brother’s care, set sail for New York. There he decided that the West offered him the best opportunity for success, and he moved to Missouri, where for three years he operated as a trader on the Santa Fe Trail.

By 1838, Sutter had determined that Mexican California held the promise of fulfilling his ambitious dreams, and he set off along the Oregon Trail, arriving at Fort Vancouver, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in hopes of finding a ship that would take him to San Francisco Bay. His journey involved detours to the Hawaiian Islands and to a Russian colony at Sitka, Alaska, but Sutter made the most of his wanderings by trading advantageously along the way. When he finally arrived in California in 1839, Sutter met first with the provincial governor in Monterey and secured permission to establish a settlement east of San Francisco (then called Yerba Buena) along the Sacramento River, in an area then occupied only by Indians.

Sutter was granted nearly fifty thousand acres and authorized “to represent in the Establishment of New Helvetia [Sutter's Swiss-inspired name for his colony] all the laws of the country, to function as political authority and dispenser of justice, in order to prevent the robberies commited by adventurers from the United States, to stop the invasion of savage Indians and the hunting and trapping by companies from the Columbia.” In other words, Sutter was to serve the California authorities as a bulwark against the assorted threats pressing in on them from American-controlled territories to the north and east.

Ironically, as headquarters for his domain, Sutter chose a site on what he named the American River, at its junction with the Sacramento River and near the site of present-day Sacramento. Here, with the help of laborers he had brought with him from Hawaii, he built Sutter’s Fort, a massive adobe structure with walls eighteen feet high and three feet thick. Two years later, in 1841, Sutter expanded his settlement when the Russians abandoned Fort Ross, their outpost north of San Francisco, and offered to sell it to him for thirty thousand dollars. Paying with a note he never honored, Sutter practically dismantled the fort and moved its equipment, livestock and buildings to the Sacramento Valley.

Within just a few years, Sutter had achieved the grand-scale success he long dreamed of: acres of grain, a ten-acre orchard, a herd of thirteen thousand cattle, even two acres of Castile roses. His son came to share in his prosperity in 1844, and the rest of his family soon followed. At the same time, during these years Sutter’s Fort became a regular stop for the increasing number of Americans venturing into California, several of whom Sutter employed. Besides providing him with a profitable source of trade, this steady flow of immigrants provided Sutter with a network of relationships that offered some political protection when the United States seized control of California in 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican War.

Barely a week before the war’s end, however, there occurred a chance event that would destroy all John Sutter’s achievements and yet at the same time link his name forever to one of the highpoints of American history. On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, who was building a sawmill for Sutter upstream on the American River near Coloma, looked into the mill’s tailrace to check that it was clear of silt and debris and saw at the water’s bottom nuggets of gold. Marshall took his discovery to Sutter, who consulted an encyclopedia to confirm it and then tried to pledge all his employees to secrecy. But within a few months, word had reached San Francisco and the gold rush was on.

Suddenly all of Sutter’s workmen abandoned him to seek their fortune in the gold fields. Squatters swarmed over his land, destroying crops and butchering his herds. “There is a saying that men will steal everything but a milestone and a millstone,” Sutter later recalled; “They stole my millstones.” By 1852, New Helvetia had been devastated and Sutter was bankrupt. He spent the rest of his life seeking compensation for his losses from the state and federal governments, and died disappointed on a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1880.

On January 24, 2013 at 8:00 p.m.: I took time off from my somewhat manic-depressive studies of Louisiana Civil Law to  go to the Prytania Movie Theatre for a free showing a a movie “Haiti Redux” where I happened to sit next to an Iranian-American student of Real Estate at New York University named Alexander who identified himself as being from Beverly Hills, California.  It seems that one of the Professors from the Real Estate Department at NYU was one of the co-producers of this movie about the efforts of various small academic and artistic groups to help in the reconstruction of Haiti after the January 12, 2013.  They came to New Orleans as a kind of “study of comparative disaster sites” I guess (seven and a half years after Katrina).  

I have previously commented on how Iranians, especially Iranians of the Jewish Faith and sub-ethnicity, have taken over Beverly Hills, so it was a weird triangulation on the world.  The movie itself was slightly interesting but kind of pointless.  Why a bunch of “do gooder” White people from New York need to go down to Haiti to tell them what their “standards” ought to be for everything in life begged (in my opinion) the question of why Haiti is such a basket case of a country in the first place.  

It makes no sense to say that Haiti is the way it is because of White Oppression of Blacks, because Haiti was the SECOND INDEPENDENT NATION IN THE NEW WORLD, after the U.S., to fight for and win its own Independence.  Basically, after the French Revolution had started in the 1790s, the Black Slaves rose up and either slaughtered or exiled the French landowners, and their country has been a living hell ever since.  Coincidence?  Karma?  Genetics?  Some combination of all three?  The movie “Haiti Redux” did not explain.

January 24, 2013, at 10:00 p.m.: Since I was already at the Prytania, and kind of bored and frustrated by the Haiti Redux movie, I decided to stick around for “Silver Linings Playbook”, not having heard or read anything about it in advance except that it had 8 nominations for Academy Awards.  This is only the third movie of Jennifer’s I have seen, but I’m already quite madly in love with her and I am very happy that she has been nominated for “Best Actress” in this piece.  To begin with, the young Katniss Everdeen, I mean Miss Lawrence, outshines the rather more sensationally ballyhooed Kristen Stewart by a factor of roughly 10,000 to 1, both as a genuine actress and a beauty with sex appeal….well, beyond any effect I can describe without using metaphors of NASA technology and intergalactic astronomical explorations.

But the movie Silver Linings Playbook scores a more important victory.  It turns the past year’s penchant for portraying ordinary Middle-Class White people as insane subjects for clinical analysis and institutional confinement into a marvelous romantic comedy.  So of Jennifer’s three movie’s I’ve seen so far: in the HUNGER GAMES, she is a heroine par excellence, a beauty with skills and brains reminiscent of her own real Kentucky frontier heritage and background.  Katniss Everdeen’s mental strength and character in that movie equate with her physical skill and practical experience.  But then in HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET, Jennifer’s character, though still exquisite in every way, was drawn into a tragedy of mental illness and depravity of ordinary middle class White People.  This media theme is part of the Western Power-Elite’s current campaign to destroy all vestiges of the America that was pre-1965, pre-Johnson, pre-Vietnam, pre-Johnson-Nixon, pre-Watergate, pre-Nixon-Ford, pre-degenerate malaise, pre-Carter, pre-fake Neo-Con Restoration, pre-Reagan.

But a stroke of genius—you bring Katniss Everdeen together with “Deer-Hunter” and American Icon Robert DeNiro, and you have a recipe for REGENERATING the American Middle Class Dream.  It all started out, depressingly enough, in a mental institution, no Jennifer’s character wasn’t there but she COULD have been—showing yet another real aspect of modern America that men are treated much more harshly for their transgressions than women.  I thought initially it was going to be yet another—everyone who LOOKS American as Apple Pie is Demented movie.  But the movie totally transcended all that and convincingly showed that “Temporary Insanity” is actually pretty normal and that even people who have taken a sampler of the entire menu of the nastiest psychiatric drug menu imposed by Non-American Non-Whites who have their consciousness completely together.

I have this terribly depressing fear that Obama era politics will lead to an Academy Award going either to “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (which at least is incredibly original) or to “Lincoln” which is anything but original and in fact deserves to be panned on every single historical point contained within it, but I’m casting my vote for Silver Linings Playbook and Jennifer Lawrence as the incomparable Tiffany….  OK, I’ve also confessed in the past that I tend to fall in love with any and every girl I meet named Tiffany, but this is a personal hazard of mine which has no bearing on my evaluation of the movie.  Robert DeNiro is the best I’ve seen him in many years, and this movie has truly redemptive potential at a time when America Desperately needs it.  

Strange to think of the similarities between the California Gold Rush and Hollywood Movies as the parallel and independent but key defining features of California culture…. but there they are, separated only by the difference between Northern and Southern California….

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Offensive Questions (Regarding the Slave Trade) Deserve Honest & Analytical Answers: Osiris or The Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, Part 1, by E.A. Wallis Budge (dedicated to Lionel Walter Rothschild, Trustee of the British Museum), September 4, 1911

Posted on October 8, 2012 by | Leave a comment

  • http://news.yahoo.com/ark-gop-calls-candidates-statements-offensive-212508499.html

    Associated Press/Arkansas Secretary of State, Lori McElroy – In this Feb. 23, 2012 photo provided by the Arkansas Secretary of State’s office shows Jon Hubbard. Arkansas Republicans are speaking out against ”offensive” statements by a GOP state representative who is running for re-election and a former GOP legislator running for a state House seat. The state GOP chairman, the Arkansas Republican House Caucus and U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin issued statements Saturday, Oct. 6, 2012 criticizing books written by Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro and former legislator Charlie Fuqua, who is running for a Batesville-area seat. (AP Photo/Arkansas Secretary of State, Lori McElroy)  less 

An Arkansas Politician dares to say that slavery, the worst sin of American history, might have been a “blessing in disguise” for some of the traded victims?  Chapter V of E.A. Wallis Budge’s 1911 book, Osiris or the Egyptian Religion of Resurrection is entitled “Osiris and Cannibalism”.  Chapter VI, which follows, is entitled “Osiris and Human Sacrifice.” E.A. Wallis was an contemporary of Sir James G. Frazer (author of the Golden Bough), and his use of anecdotal details from informal traveler’s and explorer’s ethnography, history & ethnology is similar.  (Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing: http://www.kessinger.net, also available as a Dover Reprint).

Together these chapters run from page 167-230, a large proportion of which text Budge devote to a comparative study of the most ancient Egyptian texts and iconography with 18th-19th century traveler’s descriptions of cannibalism and human sacrifice in  recent Africa.  The first page of Chapter V ends with the statement, “it has been the custom to eat the bodies of the dead, as well as to kill systematically the old and infirm, and slaves, and prisoners of war, and strangers, and to eat them”.   The balance of both chapters contain multiple anecdotal, historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic accounts of cannibalism of slaves in Africa.   On page 188, Budge Reports:

“The people did not, as a rule, eat their own townsfolk and relatives, but they kept and fattened slaves for the butcher, just as we keep cattle and poultry.  There used to be a constant traffic in slaves for that purpose between the Lulongo River and the Mubangi.  The people on the Lulongo organized raids on the upper reaches of their river, or landed at some branch to raid the inland towns.  They fought the unsuspecting and unprepared people, killed many in the prices, and brought the rest home with them.  They divided up their human booty and kept them in their towns, tied up and starving, until they were fortunate enough to catch or buy some more, and so make a cargo worth taking to the Mubangi.  When times were bad these poor starving wretches might be seen tied up in towns, just kept alive with a minimum of food.  A party would be made up, and would fill two or three canoes with these human cattle; they would paddle down the Lulongo, cross the main river when the wind was not blowing, make up the Mubangi , and barter their freight in some of the towns for ivory.  The purchasers would then fee up their starvelings until fat enough for the market, then butcher them, and sell their meat in small joints.  What was left over, if there was much on the market, would be dried on a rack over the fire, or spitted, and the end of the spit stuck in the ground by a slow fire, until it could be kept for weeks and sold at leisure.”

On Page 189, “The Mubangi women were not admitted to cannibal feasts, but they were greatly valued as the material of the banquets, the Buaka and Banziri men preferring the flesh of women and infants, without, however, despising that of prisoners of war and mal slaves.”

Further quotation is not necessary here.  The reader may decide for him or herself whether Budge, in trying to relate the cultures of recent African to most ancient Egypt, was relying on lies or fantasies of racist western observers.  A minority of anthropologists and ethnologists discredit the entire notion of Cannibalism, as in the book, The Man Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (William Arens, 1979: Oxford University Press).  Marvin Harris, Robert Carneiro, and Tim White, by contrast have documented the extent and antiquity of cannibalism around the world, see especially Harris’ (also 1979) quasi-popular textbook: Cannibals and Kings. 

Let us imagine for a moment that the reports described above are true.  Let us imagine for a moment that some tribes of pre-Colonial sub-Saharan West and Central Africa did in fact maintain slaves as Western Europeans keep cattle or poultry.  IF these allegations of fact are historically true, does that change the history of Western Slavery and the “guilt” of the White Men of Europe and the Americas?  If White (Christian, Islamic, and Jewish) Slave-Traders purchased chained collections of slaves from Black African-Slave Traders, is it any wonder that they loaded these slaves onto ships “like cattle?”  If White (Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) Slave-Traders did not eat their slave cargo but traded them to become laborers in Barbados, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guadalupe, Haiti, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Southern States of the American Union, were they not in fact preserving the genepool of individuals and families who might well have been extinguished by cannibalism?  

The world is a brutal place, and world history proves this fact.  How then can we be certain that the following highly controversial commentary by politicians from Arkansas (one of the more conservative of the Southern States, dominated in park by the “Hill Folk” of the Ozarks) is inaccurate or truly wrong/reprehensible?

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Republicans tried to distance themselves Saturday from a Republican state representative’s assertion that slavery was a “blessing in disguise” and a Republican state House candidate who advocates deporting all Muslims.

The claims were made in books written, respectively, by Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro and House candidate Charlie Fuqua of Batesville. Those books received attention on Internet news sites Friday.

On Saturday, state GOP Chairman Doyle Webb called the books “highly offensive.” And U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, a Republican who represents northeast Arkansas, called the writings “divisive and racially inflammatory.”

Hubbard wrote in his 2009 self-published book, “Letters To The Editor: Confessions Of A Frustrated Conservative,” that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.” He also wrote that African-Americans were better off than they would have been had they not been captured and shipped to the United States.

Fuqua, who served in the Arkansas House from 1996 to 1998, wrote there is “no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States,” in his 2012 book, titled “God’s Law.”

Fuqua said Saturday that he hadn’t realized he’d become a target within his own party, which he said surprised him.

“I think my views are fairly well-accepted by most people,” Fuqua said before hanging up, saying he was busy knocking on voters’ doors. The attorney is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. James McLean in House District 63.

Hubbard, a marketing representative, didn’t return voicemail messages seeking comment Saturday. He is running against Democrat Harold Copenhaver in House District 58.

The November elections could be a crucial turning point in Arkansas politics. Democrats hold narrow majorities in both chambers, but the GOP has been working hard to swing the Legislature its way for the first time since the end of the Civil War, buoyed by picking up three congressional seats in 2010. Their efforts have also been backed by an influx of money from national conservative groups.

Rep. Crawford said Saturday he was “disappointed and disturbed.”

“The statements that have been reported portray attitudes and beliefs that would return our state and country to a harmful and regrettable past,” Crawford said.

U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., kicked off the GOP’s response Saturday by issuing a release, saying the “statements of Hubbard and Fuqua are ridiculous, outrageous and have no place in the civil discourse of either party.”

“Had I known of these statements, I would not have contributed to their campaigns. I am requesting that they give my contributions to charity,” said Griffin, who donated $100 to each candidate.

The Arkansas Republican House Caucus followed, saying the views of Hubbard and Fuqua “are in no way reflective of, or endorsed by, the Republican caucus. The constituencies they are seeking to represent will ultimately judge these statements at the ballot box.”

Then Webb, who has spearheaded the party’s attempt to control the Legislature, said the writings “were highly offensive to many Americans and do not reflect the viewpoints of the Republican Party of Arkansas. While we respect their right to freedom of expression and thought, we strongly disagree with those ideas.”

Webb, though, accused state Democrats of using the issue as a distraction.

Democrats themselves have been largely silent, aside from the state party’s tweet and Facebook post calling attention to the writings. A Democratic Party spokesman didn’t immediately return a call for comment Saturday.

The two candidates share other political and religious views on their campaign websites.

Hubbard, who sponsored a failed bill in 2011 that would have severely restricted immigration, wrote on his website that the issue is still among his priorities, as is doing “whatever I can to defend, protect and preserve our Christian heritage.”

Fuqua blogs on his website. One post is titled, “Christianity in Retreat,” and says “there is a strange alliance between the liberal left and the Muslim religion.”

“Both are antichrist in that they both deny that Jesus is God in the flesh of man, and the savior of mankind. They both also hold that their cause should take over the entire world through violent, bloody, revolution,” the post says.

In a separate passage, Fuqua wrote “we now have a president that has a well documented history with both the Muslim religion and Communism.”

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Of Corporations, Communism, and Capitalism—where the boundaries blur…Should We Nationalize Oil and Banking Companies and distribute the proceeds to the people? Would this constitute Communism or a the first step towards the Restoration of Non-Corporate Individual Enterprise Capitalism?

Posted on August 10, 2012 by | 1 Comment

My dearly departed grandmother Helen always said that the reason the United States of America would prevail over Soviet Russia in the Cold War was that the United States had perfected Communism whereas Russia had failed: the United States perfected Communism by inventing “McDonald’s”, “Walmart” (and/or its smaller predecessors), and Red Russia had nothing remotely comparable….  McDonalds in particular seemed the epitome of Communism to my grandparents who raised me and, as a consequence, to me: everyone equal, no tradition of anything, cheap food to sustain the human body available everywhere, distributed nationally, no local or regional development allowed in the franchise. I think it was this “Worker’s Paradise Worldwide Global Homogenizing” aspect of McDonald’s (and Walmart) that my grandparents, born respectively of French-Louisiana and English-Texas backgrounds in the 1890s, found most repulsive.  McDonald’s IS repulsive and the global uniformity it (and every other trans-national trademark, from Archers-Daniel-Midland, AT&T Avon to Ford to Hilton to Mitsubishi and Nissan and Beyond) imposes is particularly oppressive.

One of the great signs of the collapse of the Soviet Union was, of course, when McDonald’s opened its first Moscow franchise on Red Square—it was as if the American Flag had been planted on Lenin’s & Stalin’s graves…. I think many felt exactly the same way in Mexico when a sacrilegious Yankee Imperialist Walmart opened beside the ancient pre-Aztec ruins of Teotihuacan, just north of Mexico City—a site whose name means “where the gods go.”  ”La Reconquista de México aquí se llevó a cabo.”  In both cases, it seemed to some Americans: ”We Won.”

Or did we?  1848 was the year of the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

In 1848, there was no such thing as a transnational corporation, pure and simple, much less international banks—the various members of the Rothschild Family who acted as predecessor-antecedents to international B  Even within the United States, the largest corporations were the interstate railroads, there were no such as interstate banks.

In the 1850s the railroads were growing, and with them the demand for steel and coal (and eventually…oil).   In 1860, Abraham Lincoln (lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad, one of the largest corporations of the day) was elected President as the First (successful) Communist Revolution was about to take place as one half of the American Population, out of envy and spite, destroyed the other half over the question of slavery, which was resolved peacefully in every other country in the world except the seemingly eternally accursed island of French Haiti.

Thomas DiLorenzo and Donald Kennedy have, over the past 10 or more years, written brilliantly concerning the nascent alliance of communist ideology and corporate-government in the America of the 1860s and forward.   It was ultimately the corporate economy of the North which triumphed over the individual agrarian (Marx and other disparagingly, and inaccurately, called in “Feudal”) socio-economic organization of the South.   The Corporate Union over the Confederacy of Individuals (“Individual” or in Greek “Ho Idios“, giving us the word “idiot”—a person who is “off by himself” or wants to have it “his way”, or in the ancient Greek papyri of Hellenized Egypt “idiotiki ge” the phrase denominating “private property”—the Marxists and Corporate Statists  still use accusations of mental illness and anti-social behavior to describe advocates of individual autonomy or capitalism).

The period of 1860-1920 is often taught in our schools as the heyday of Capitalism—but was it?  No—it was the time when individuals were increasingly subjected to the power or faceless, nameless, organizations called “corporations”—except in the early days the “names” of many of these corporations were in fact individual or family names, or else they were associated with their founders/majority shareholders, who became known as the “Robber Barons”.   Was this process antithetical to communism or was this the true birth of true communism?

The largest “companies” of the past (prior to 1860) had mainly been colonial enterprises from Hudson’s Bay, Louisiana, and Massachusetts Bay, to India.  The British South Africa Company was one of the last of these, founded in the late 19th Century by Cecil Rhodes—but it was the one of the two last significant private imperialist enterprises that was contemporaneous with the development of large national corporations in North America and Europe (the other being King Leopold’s private “plantation” known as “the Belgian Congo.”)

When I think of real solutions to the modern American crisis, I think of how to restore individual private property and individual enterprise, and the enemies I see are the corporate-governmental complexes (what Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the “Military-Industrial” Complex—not quite recognizing how subversive of democracy and communistic this complex really was, and has increasingly become).

I propose that the renaissance of the individual can only come when we recognize the enemy and name the Mega-Corporate-Mega-Governmental synergy by its earliest formal name: Communism.  To destroy communism, then, we must destroy the mega-corporations and the gigantic government together.

Nationalizing the Oil and Banking Industries would be a disaster if these industries were left in the governmental hands which effectively maintain the “private corporate” fiction at the present time, but if the purpose of nationalization were to restore the wealth to the people, and the ways and means we used were the technologies and common law procedures of trust formation and fiduciary duties to achieve nationalization, these nationalizations would ultimately serve to restore both wealth and power to the people.

One year ago I wrote several pieces about the massive fraud of the Social Security Trust Fund—which was never a trust and was never funded by Social Security taxes, which were stolen and embezzled from the American People by the government’s false pretenses and fraud of creating something CALLED the Social Security Trust Fund.   Regular political “panics” are created when politicians announce that the Social Security Trust Fund is about to go bankrupt—but how can a Trust go bankrupt which was never actually funded?   The ONLY “corpus” of the Social Security Trust fund are “non-negotiable securities” which translates into English as “the hermeneutically concealed true source of the government’s inflated fiat currency.”

I propose that we should indeed nationalize the oil companies and the banks, but with the purpose of abolishing both.  The world’s dependence on oil technology and “means of production” should be radically reduced and ultimately eliminated.  No industry is more destructive of world health and the environment than the petroleum products industries.  But the wealth of the oil companies should be carefully collected, accounted for, and then invested and  administered as a true trust, operated by the government as fiduciary with FULL fiduciary liability and supervised by Congress under the debt clause of the 14th Amendment.  Likewise, the banks should be nationalized and abolished.  The real estate now held by the banks should be distributed to the people in fee simple absolute, restoring “allodial” title to all true U.S. Citizens—and yes, there needs to be a finite definition of that category, and immigration probably needs to stop, especially immigration by and through foreign investors buying up U.S. property.

Much to my pleasure and surprise I see that these ideas are not unique or individual “ho idios” to me, although I am resigned to the notion that many of my peers already think I’m crazy.  But nationalizing the banks and the oil companies is obviously, already, a concept with some support….  I am merely adding that we must not maintain them as part of the government, which is what the government is effectively doing right now—especially the banks since 2008.  What we MUST DO NOW is to nationalize the massive wealth represented and administer it as one or more fully responsible trusts to repair the damage done to the people by the lies of the past 80 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, the past 99 years since the creation of the Federal Reserve, and the past 132 years since the election of Lincoln and America’s First Communist Revolution, erected by Republicans as the supporters of Corporate-Government Plutocracy against Individual land ownership and Democracy.

See:  http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=11388172#page:showThread,11388172

 Population to US: Nationalize the Oil CompaniesDo it now!

by: Anonymous replies 126 03/10/2012 @ 12:41PM
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flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

If any candidate proposed that (and won), they’d end up like the guy in Iran in the 1950s. Democratically-elected president, overthrown by the CIA to put in a puppet regime.

by: Anonymous reply 1 03/10/2012 @ 12:47PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

Do it anyway.

by: Anonymous reply 2 03/11/2012 @ 12:11PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

I don’t necessarily want to say nationalize but take away the subsidies and tax the fuck out of them.

And then nationalize higher education and health care and you’ve got a deal.

by: LuciferTheLightBringer(authenticated) reply 3 03/11/2012 @ 12:37PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

Oil Companies own Congress. You would have to first ban all Corporate Political Contributions.

by: Anonymous reply 4 03/11/2012 @ 02:38PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

The top 0.1 percent are way too powerful to let any of this happen.

I think we should nationalize the banks as well, personally.

Disolve the Fed and bring the currency back into the hands of the people instead of keeping it in the hands of private bankers.

But none of this will ever happen, so wishing for it is completely unproductive.

by: Anonymous reply 5 03/11/2012 @ 02:42PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

Last person who tried to end the Fed was JFK. We all saw what happened to him.

by: Anonymous reply 6 03/11/2012 @ 02:45PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

[R3]:

Nationalize higher education?

Think what that would accomplish for wealth distribution (over time) and class mobility.

Make every college serve a geographical area — you live here, you go to that college. That would eliminate the rich buying their way into Harvard at five million a pop, which was the going rate a couple years ago.

Then you could also make all education free starting with forgiving student loans. That would amount to confiscating a significant chunk of the banking system which now finances college education.

Think of how much it would help ordinary people and the economy of main street if we took student loan payments out of bank vaults and put it into the pockets of consumers.

by: Anonymous reply 7 03/11/2012 @ 04:40PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

That’s true…since the oil companies own our CIA, if oil companies were nationalized as they should be…our president would be slaughtered.

by: Anonymous reply 8 03/11/2012 @ 04:56PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

We should tax the hell out of them…instead the working people have to pay all the taxes and the oil companies keep all the profits. Why doesn’t our congress protect us against them?

I think every CEO of every American owned oil company should be put in prison, until things change.

by: Anonymous reply 9 03/11/2012 @ 04:59PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

We have done it here in Norway, and it works out well for us.. we get tons of money in, which some of it we spend now, but most of it we save for future generation, after the oil is gone.. it ultimately goes to the people, not to greedy oil companies, Statoil was made for the Norwegian people first and foremost. Statoil is the reason we have free higher education, free health care, paid maternity leave for a year etc… I doubt we would have had all of that without our oil, and I don’t think we would have had all that without Statoil.

by: Anonymous reply 10 03/11/2012 @ 05:05PM
flag: [ww] [ff] [troll-dar]

The thing about oil companies is that most of them worldwide are nationalized already, so private companies are inherently at a disadvantage.

by: Anonymous reply 11 03/11/2012 @ 05:11PM

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THE ROAD TO HELL, WELL-PAVED WITH INTENTIONS (but are they really GOOD intentions? For example: birth control started to transform Europe and America starting in the 1920s—why did the “foreign aid” explosion that began simultaneously with the retreat of Colonialism in Africa and Asia cause a huge population explosion? Why was Latin America immune from the population explosion until Pope John Paul II “energized” Catholic fanaticism against birth control in 1978-79?

Posted on July 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

One topic NOT covered in this excellent review (from American Renaissance) is that American “foreign aid,” starting in the 1950s, LITERALLY was designed to take the place of (nominally) retreating French & British colonialism.  The imbalance in the world’s population began right after World War II—any idea why?  Well, the developed nations started practicing birth control fairly effectively while exporting MEDICAL supplies, based on supposedly humanitarian concerns, to the former Colonial/Emerging Third World, WITHOUT birth control (until much later).  The result was that “the horror of infant mortality” (which had been a long-standing and traditional, normal, if nowhere beloved, grim-but-real aspect of the way of life in “Civilized” Europe and the Americas THROUGH the 19th century, into the 20th)  began to abate, but the specter of STARVATION DUE TO OVERPOPULATION began to haunt Africa and Asia.  Latin America had a good enough start in the 19th century so that ONLY Haiti and a few other small pocket territories ever seemed quite as bad off as Africa—could there be a common reason why this is true?  Was it all by grossly negligent accident or careful design to destroy European and North American Civilization?  If so, it’s almost succeeded….

As I have previously written on this blog—MEXICO, BRAZIL, and VENEZUELA in particular were on their way to becoming genuine First World Countries in the 1960s-1970s, until Pope John Paul II (often placed in a “triumvirate” [duum virate/adrogynate?] with Ronald W. Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the trio who formed and shaped the modern world)  went first to Mexico and then travelled throughout Latin America urging them to “be fruitful and multiply” in the name of sadistic Catholic orthodoxy.  Such preaching was hardly necessary in Africa and Asia—

Shaking Hands with the Devil

Jon Harrison Sims, American Renaissance, July 13, 2012

CrisisSlide
The perverse consequences of foreign aid.

Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?, Metropolitan Books, 2010; $24.00, 229 pp.

What’s wrong with humanitarian aid? The short answer to the question posed by Dutch reporter Linda Polman in the subtitle of her book is “everything.”

When Smedley D. Butler called his 1935 pamphlet War is a Racket, he knew what he was talking about. He had fought as a Marine Corps officer in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and concluded that he had been nothing but a “high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and the bankers.”

Likewise, Miss Polman knows what she is talking about when she says foreign aid is a racket. She has tramped through countless refugee camps in Africa, interviewing aid workers, refugees, African government officials, and rebel leaders. What she found is one of the biggest con-games of our time.

That there is genuinely terrible suffering, disease, poverty, and violence across much of Africa and Asia she does not question. That western humanitarian and development aid is the answer, or even part of the answer, she does question. She thinks all it does is perpetuate poverty, fund corruption, and foster dependence. To the question “So we should do nothing then?” she answers that that would be better than what we are doing now.

Miss Polman is not the first reporter or chastened aid worker who has come to that conclusion, yet every year the money spent on humanitarian and development aid increases—she says the idea of donor fatigue is a myth—and what she calls “the crisis caravan” rolls on. Why? The short answer is money.

The biggest players in the aid game are the international non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, which get money from governments and private donors. There are tens of thousands of them; no one knows how many. On average, 1,000 of them descend on a humanitarian crisis zone, along with 10 United Nation agencies, and at least twice as many government aid organizations. With their flags and tents, and white Land Cruisers, relief camps are like a traveling circus.

Each year governments spend $120 billion on humanitarian and development aid, but an average of 60 percent never leaves the donor countries. It’s called “phantom aid,” and is spent on salaries, conferences, publicity, transportation, and contracts for Western businesses that make or deliver aid supplies. Miss Polman says the Americans are the worst offenders; an estimated 70 to 80 percent is phantom aid.

The outright stealing begins after supplies and money reach the target country. Corrupt local governments “tax” aid, by demanding payment either in cash, or in relief supplies, which they sell on the black market. In Somalia, aid organizations paid warlords 80 percent of the value of all aid supplies. In Aceh, Indonesia, after the tsunami, they paid 30 percent to the Indonesian Army. Sometimes officials or rebel commanders tax aid organizations according to the number of patients they treat or people they help. These deals are often made with the very thugs who are committing atrocities and mayhem. This is called “shaking hands with the devil.”

Devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, after 2004 tsunami that killed 200,000 people.

Aid workers also must bribe soldiers and officials just to move about in a relief area. There is “no access to war zones without payment, whatever form it may take,” writes Miss Polman, “especially if you’re a humanitarian.”

Aid organizations also provide jobs, and disburse lucrative contracts to local companies, which are usually started up for the sole purpose of getting aid money. The scramble for this business is called “contract fever.” The aid agencies keep poor records of how their money is spent, and when the local economy becomes wholly based on aid—which it usually does—it is called NGOism.

Because the agencies are independent, and compete for money and publicity, they cannot take a common position against corruption. If just one agency refuses to pay off a corrupt general, another 10 will step in and grease his palm.

Miss Polman says that most journalists cannot be trusted. Often their travel expenses are paid by NGOs, and they are wholly dependent on aid workers for food, lodging, transportation, and protection. As a result, their reporting is superficial and biased. Miss Polman calls their work “churnalism;” they just churn out what they are told.

The refugee camps in Goma,Congo, that operated from 1994 to 1996 were subject to the typical whitewash; the media covered them as an epic humanitarian response to a flood of Hutu refugees who fled war in neighboring Rwanda only to be stricken with cholera inside the Congo. In fact, this flood of Hutu included the entire Rwandan Hutu army and militias that had just helped murder more than 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis. They were fleeing from a Tutsi army that had invaded Rwanda from Uganda, and Miss Polman calls them “refugee warriors.” She gives other examples of soldiers and fighters posing as refugees in order to rest up before resuming the killing.

The Hutu refugees continued their campaign of murder right in the camps. The Hutu doctors and nurses who staffed the camp hospitals would murder any newly arrived Tutsi patients, as well as Hutus suspected of disloyalty. They would dispose of the bodies, and bring in Hutus to fill the empty beds. A common Hutu saying was “Crushing a cockroach [a Tutsi] isn’t murder, it’s a hygiene measure.”

One aid worker estimated that the Hutu militias stole 60 percent of the aid that went to Goma, which they sold for cash or traded for arms. One aid worker called Goma “a total ethical disaster.” The truth was never reported in the Western media.

Hutu Refugees

Miss Polman was in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, in 2001. The United Nations Development Program had just declared it the poorest country on earth. That meant the crisis caravan would soon arrive, and everyone was celebrating. As Col. Vandamme of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) explained, “The white man are soon gonna need drivers, security guards, and houses. We’re gonna provide ’em.”  He added that “NGO wifes” (“wives”—aid workers are seen as submissive wives) had already arrived and wanted to count how many children and sick people were in the area. He said aid workers would have to pay him before they did that.

Miss Polman also spoke to the leader of the RUF, General Mike Lamin. His men had been battling the government for ten years in a brutal civil war that left more than 200,000 dead. His troops were long known for scorched-earth tactics, but only recently for “amputation squads,” which hacked off the arms or legs of women and children.

General Lamin confirmed the rumor Miss Polman had heard: The sole purpose of the amputations was to attract media attention and aid. He explained that although the war had gone on for a decade, “you people looked the other way all those years.” He said he had not tried to negotiate a cease fire with the government because “there was nothing to stop for.” As he explained:

Everything was broken and you people weren’t here to fix it. All you cared about was the white man’s war in Yugoslavia and the camps in Goma [Congo]. You just let us go on fighting . . . . [But] when we started cutting hands, hardly a day BBC would not talk about us. Without the amputation factor you people wouldn’t have come.

As she left the interview, a young RUF gunman shouted a question: “White woman! Do you know what warmeans?” “Fighting and killing?” she offered. “Wrong! Waste All Resources! Destroy Everything! Then you people will come and fix it.” Miss Polman calls this the “logic of humanitarian aid.” Since suffering brings aid, and more suffering more aid, why not wreak havoc in order to cash in?

While Miss Polman was in Sierra Leone, she discovered that Americans from religious organizations with names such as Gifts of Limbs and Noah’s Ark were taking children and teenage amputees from the camps, driving them over the border to Guinea, and flying them to the United States for adoption. Here, too, she found the same deceit, corruption, and perverse idealism that characterize all foreign aid.

Amputee from Sierra Leone.

First, the organizations were telling donors that the children were without prostheses, did not have medical care, and were orphans. None of this was true. The children had custom-fitted European prostheses, regular medical care, and at least one parent. Miss Polman found out these groups always left the children’s medical records behind, to make the children seem more pathetic and their actions more heroic.

Why was the American embassy in Freetown approving visas for children who had parents and were getting medical attention. “For political reasons,” explained an embassy official:

Amputee children have been politicized. Recently I had some member of Congress on the phone from Washington demanding I tell him what the fuck was the problem with the visas for a group of amputee children. Pretty remarkable, since those visas hadn’t even been applied for yet. Get the picture?

The Sierra Leonean government was taking bribes to let the children out of the country, and Miss Polman found organizations were either bribing or tricking the parents into giving up their children. She heard one American tell a woman that in America her child’s missing limbs would be magically regenerated. It is clear that despite humanitarian pretentions, these allegedly Christian groups were stealing children for naive whites who wanted to adopt a black baby from Africa.

Miss Polman writes that veteran aid workers harbor few illusions about their business. Over drinks, they admit that development aid is a racket, that aid merely perpetuates  poverty and corruption, and even that the recipients of aid are hardly worth saving. So why do they stay? Miss Polman explains that “the salaries, and per-diems, and danger and discomfort bonuses . . . make working in the established aid sector highly attractive.” Even in the most hellish countries, there is a secure capital with swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, discos, five-star restaurants, and prostitutes. Aid workers live like colonial administrators of old, perhaps even better.

Miss Polman leaves no doubt that the entire business of aid is morally, as well as politically and intellectual corrupt, but that’s what it is: a business.

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