Robert Fisk, back at the same old lemonade stand.

[This is all that can be expected from the likes of Robert Fisk, a “reporter” who has never found an enemy of the United States that he couldn’t support. From the days of the Viet Cong and the Kymer Rouge, to the fall of Saddam, to the growth of Islamism, he’s always right there on the job. Lying in support of these people is just his way.

JimG33]

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -

Robert Fisk Demonizes Mideast’s Persecuted Christians

Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On July 4, 2012 @ 12:41 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage | 

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the U.K.’s widely-read Independent, recently showed why it is that Islamic jihadists and terrorists, including the late Osama bin Laden [1], strongly recommend his propaganda to Western readers.

In a recent article [2], Fisk goes out of his way to demonize the abused Christian minorities of the Middle East for supporting those secularist leaders most likely to preserve their freedoms and dignity.  For instance, after portraying the Middle East’s “old guard” in the worst possible terms, he complains that “Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak loyalist, has the support of the Christian Copts, and Assad has the support of the Syrian Christians. The Christians support the dictators. Not much of a line, is it?”

In Fisk’s way of thinking, Christians of Egypt and Syria are unpatriotic freedom-haters because they support secularists, whereas the Sharia-pushing Islamists are patriotic freedom-lovers for not.

“Not much of a line, is it?”—especially from someone who supposedly lives and travels in the Middle East and is deemed an authority on the region.  Completely missing from his narrative is why Christians are supporting Shafiq and Assad: because the alternatives, the Islamists, have been making their lives a living hell.

Fisk’s biased narrative is, of course, not original to him, but rather originates with his friends—the Islamists.  Soon after the first presidential elections in Egypt, many Islamists bemoaned Shafiq’s good showing, laying the blame directly on Egypt’s Christian Copts, who reportedly came out in large numbers voting for the secular candidates.  Tarek al-Zomor, a prominent figure of the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, [The group that has as its leader The Blind Sheikh, Abdel Rachman.] the terrorist organization that slaughtered some 60 European tourists, including several of Fisk’s countrymen, during the Luxor Massacre, “demanded an apology from the Copts” for voting for Shafiq, threatening that “this was a fatal error.”

Others, like Abu Ismail,[3] the Salafi presidential candidate who was disqualified, expressed “great disappointment” in “our Coptic brethren,” saying that “I do not understand why the Copts so adamantly voted for Ahmed Shafiq,” portraying it as some sort of conspiracy between the Copts, the old regime, and even Israel: “Exactly what relationship and benefit do the Copts have with the old regime”?

The uncritical [?] Fisk follows suit and asks the same questions, portraying the Mideast’s Christians as unpatriotic.

Missing from the Islamists’—and Fisk’s—narrative is the fact that Christians are under attack by Islamists, especially in Egypt and Syria, where Christian women and children and regularly abducted, molested, and forced to convert; where churches and monasteries are regularly attacked; where blasphemy laws imprison or kill and calls for jizya are back [4]—in short, where Christians are persecuted (see entries for Egypt and Syria in my monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians”[5] for an idea).  Moreover, the ultimate goal of Fisk’s supposedly “freedom-loving Islamists—the enforcement of a decidedly anti-freedom Sharia law—will naturally spell disaster for Christians, since this draconian law code emphatically condemns non-Muslim “infidels” to dhimmi status—barely-tolerated, second-class “citizens” of the Islamic state.

Back in the real world, the reaction to Islamist complaints that Copts are not voting for them has been one of amazement.  As one Coptic activist put it: [6] “Did they [complaining Islamists] really expect a Christian to choose a president to represent him from those who cut off the ear of a Christian,[7]  blocked the railways in objection to the appointment of a Christian governor [8] in Qena, burn downseveral churches [9] and who are diligently working to write a Constitution which undermines the rights of Christians?”

Even Egyptian Muslim writer Khaled Montasser, [10] in an article titled “The Muslim Brotherhood Asks Why Christians Fear Them?!” explained that the Brotherhood’s own official documents and fatwas decree several anti-Christian measures, including the destruction of churches and the prevention of burying Christian “infidels” near Muslim graves—hence why Christians are not voting for Islamists.

As for Syria, since the uprising, “opposition forces”—that is, Islamists—have been attacking Christians and churches,[11] including through “kidnappings and gruesome murders.”[12] None of this happened before the uprising and under Assad’s secular rule.  As an earlier report [13]put it, “Should Assad fall, it is feared that Syria could go the way of Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. Saddam, like Assad, restrained the influence of militant Islamists, but after his fall they were free to wreak havoc on the Christian community; hundreds of thousands of Christians were consequently forced to flee the violence.”

Should the “opposition” get their way and topple the Assad regime, the same brutal pattern experienced by Iraq’s Christian minorities [14]—who have been liked to, and killed off like, dogs, to the point of nearing extinction—[15] will come to Syria, where a preacher recently urged Muslims to “tear apart, chop up and feed” Christians who support Assad “to the dogs.”

All of these “subtleties” are completely [and I would say deliberately] missed by the Independent’s Middle East foreign correspondent. Instead, he bemoans how those in Washington who support secular rulers “will want to pump up Christian fears and frighten the West with the awfulness of ‘Muslim fundamentalism.’”

At a time when Christian minorities in the Islamic world are experiencing a form of persecution unprecedented since the pre-colonial era, it is commonplace for Western “reporters” to ignore or whitewash [16] their plight.  Robert Fisk, however, takes it a step further and paints these persecuted Christians as the bad guys, thereby facilitating their ongoing sufferings.  He and the Independent should be ashamed of themselves

1- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/03/al-quaida-cunning-methods-us-news

2- http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-hosni-mubarak-has-fallen-assad-clings-on-yet-the-fate-of-their-nations-is-anyones-guess-7814810.html

3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeqPddy3BM8&feature=relmfu

4- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10872/the-specter-of-jizya-returns-to-egypt

5- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11713/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2012

6- http://www.aina.org/news/20120528191505.htm

7- http://www.aina.org/news/20110325223845.htm

8- http://www.aina.org/news/20110502234500.htm

9- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10492/egypt-destroying-churches

10- http://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/10238

11- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11322/syria-christians-fate

12- http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Syrian-Christians-in-desperate-straits-will-the-churches-survive.html

13- http://www.barnabasaid.org/US/News/Archives/Help-Christians-affected-by-worsening-crisis-in-Syria.htm

14- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/9440/iraq-christians-persecution

15- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10912/iraq-christians-near-extinction

16- http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11539/media-whitewashes-muslim-persecution-christians

Happy New Year from Thomas Sowell

[Thomas Sowell, the intellectual from Harlem that official Harlem decries. As always he states some random thoughts at the end of the year. Hell if I’d written as much as he had I’d be able to throw of these types of random thoughts. Check out his bibliography you smart folk and despair. JimG33]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 

Thomas Sowell

December 27, 2011 12:00 A.M. Random Thoughts for the New Year Barack Obama and the audacity of hype Random thoughts on the passing scene: Talk show host Dennis Miller said, “I don’t dig polo. It’s like miniature golf meets the Kentucky Derby.” Nothing illustrates the superficiality of our times better than the enthusiasm for electric cars, because they are supposed to greatly reduce air pollution. But the electricity that ultimately powers these cars has to be generated somewhere — and nearly half the electricity generated in this country is generated by burning coal. The 2012 Republican primaries may be a rerun of the 2008 primaries, where the various conservative candidates split the conservative vote so many ways that the candidate of the mushy middle got the nomination — and then lost the election. Because morality does not always prevail, by any means, too many of the intelligentsia act as if it has no effect. But, even in Nazi Germany, thousands of Germans hid Jews during the war, at the risk of their own lives, because it was the right thing to do. In recent times, Christmas has brought not only holiday cheer but also attacks on the very word “Christmas,” chasing it from the vocabulary of institutions and even from most “holiday cards.” Like many other social crusades, this one is based on a lie — namely that the Constitution puts a wall of separation between church and state. It also shows how easily intimidated we are by strident zealots. If you don’t like growing older, don’t worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer. What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice. When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential. Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonize those who disagree with them — instead of answering their arguments. The wisest and most knowledgeable human being on the planet is utterly incompetent to make even 10 percent of the consequential decisions that have to be made in a modern nation. Yet all sorts of people want to decide how much money other people can make or keep, and to micro-manage how other people live their lives. The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite. Of all the arguments for giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, the most foolish is the argument that we can’t find and expel all of them. There is not a law on the books that someone has not violated, including laws against murder, and we certainly have not found and prosecuted all the violators — whether murderers or traffic-law violators. But do we then legalize all the illegalities we haven’t been able to detect and prosecute? In the 1920s, Rep. Thomas S. Adams referred to “the ease with which the income tax may be legally avoided” but also said some congressmen “so fervently believe that the rich ought to pay 40 or 50 percent of their incomes” in taxes that they would rather make this a law, even if the government would get more revenue from a lower tax rate that people actually pay. Some also prefer class-warfare politics that brings in votes, if not revenue. Can you imagine a man who had never run any kind of organization, large or small, taking it upon himself to fundamentally change all kinds of organizations in a huge and complex economy? Yet that is what Barack Obama did when he said, “We are going to change the United States of America!” This was not “The Audacity of Hope.” It was the audacity of hype. — Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Another cute hippy chick.

Look I tried, I really tried, to understand this protest. It's not like the ships are full of Napalm headed to Vietnam, or rubber duckies to add to that mad flow in the central pacific. It's just dumb, like a bell, a big noise but a hollow structure. 

Tom and Naomi, dancing in fantasy land.

[From Common Dreams; for the Greater Good; for the "greater good", well maybe. Here we have one of the stalwart warriors of the Old / New Left taking on one of the Warrior Princesses of the New /Newer Left.Let’s listen in, shall we.]

For more info on these folks you can go to Discover the Networks at www.FrontPageMag.com.

JimG33

Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 by The Nation

Why Naomi Wolf's Occupy Conspiracy Theory Can't Explain Occupy LA [Or much else.]

by Tom Hayden

Compared with the brutal [!?!] police crackdowns against the Occupy movement in New York City, Oakland and even the pacific Davis campus of the University of California, the attempted eviction of Occupy Los Angeles has been almost entirely peaceful. The question is why and whether it can last.

Occupy LA was grappling with internal conflicts before the Mayor’s deadline brought the occupiers and their supporters to stand together Sunday night. The police chose wisely not to attempt mass arrests or brutal force. The police are now being accused by some in the business community of going soft. Meanwhile the occupiers have no end game at this point. [Duh] An Occupy media spokesperson, Clark Davis, indicated the group’s problems in a Sunday morning KPFK interview when he accused one faction of being “freeloaders” and warned that the movement could lose its way. [Anyone who has followed this dance through fantasyland knows that this “movement” has never had a way to lose. And how to tell the “freeloaders” from the legitimate #Occupandos, it was always impossible to me. Also if you think what had gone on with the police is brutal you have a lot to learn about crowd control, but Tom always wants the citizen’s representatives to roll over and assume the position, whether they be police or soldiers.]

One reason for the uneasy status quo was the leadership of the liberal Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ordered the eviction but also no beatings, tear gas or police violence. Another was the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, eager to show a new approach after years of controversy. The City Council came out early in support. Organized labor and local clergy joined the Occupiers and insisted the mayor do the right thing. And the Occupiers themselves adhered to a code of non-violence in an effort to keep the focus on Wall Street. 

But to believe the writer Naomi Wolf, who was arrested during one of the New York protests, the Occupy movement inevitably faced a brutal crackdown because of its threat to the status quo. Wolf has written in the UK’s Guardian that the recent crackdowns on Occupy have been a coordinated conspiracy between local officials, police, the FBI and Homeland Security. As evidence, she points to conference calls between officials and police in eighteen cities that preceded the raids. She claims that a “shocking truth” behind the crackdown is the vested interest of Congress in protecting its own insider stock dealings on Wall Street. In one passage, Wolf accuses the White House of blessing the “war on peaceful citizens.” [Shocking, and not just as a doctrine! That The President and Ms. Pelosi, along with so many other Dem office holders should come forward in support of OWS while working behind the curtain to undermine and destroy the Glorious Revolution! Not to mention all the other members of the 1% who showed up in their $1000 jeans riding their Maybachs. So may labels, so much profiling!]

Wolf is not entirely off the mark. But her monolithic conspiracy model needs more investigation and cannot explain the case of Los Angeles. [But it is the source of her wealth and fame and has been for the last decade.]

There is no doubt that the conference calls were conducted, [We’re so important, look how the ruling class shakes in their boots as we raise our tiny fists.] and public records act requests may yet shed light on what was said. The mayor of Los Angeles was not on those calls, and says he didn’t want to be. [But he knows they happened, how?]

While there is no evidence thus far of FBI or White House coordination of the crackdowns, [Tommy’s so hungry for central control that he sees it even when it doesn’t exist.] what is most naïve in the Wolf analysis is her notion that coordinated crackdowns are new with the advent of Occupy Wall Street. Since the 1999 Seattle protests, the involvement of the FBI with local police has followed a repeated pattern. First, an FBI counter-terrorism task force warns local officials, media and the public that thousands of masked “anarchists” will be invading their cities to break the law, fight the police, break windows and destroy property. [As if local officials have to be warned, the Black Block sends out press releases weeks before. Any local politician who doesn’t take their threats seriously need only look at the streets of Seattle littered with broken glass, or the wire stretched between lampposts in Washington D. C. to unhorse police to know what their facing when these folks come to town. But the Left’s fetish for violence goes so deep that there is no way for them to get away from it.] They then advise that all protests be literally fenced into protest cages. To sweeten the coordination, tens of thousands of federal dollars are offered to local police forces for “security” [acquisition of the latest in gas grenades, launchers, surveillance cameras, even paper shredders in one case]. Young people and their convergence centers are targeted for prior detention, with the. assistance of informants and provocateurs. [As if provocateurs were ever necessary, these people can work themselves into a frenzy with no provocation at all. Let’s review the Minneapolis-St. Paul traffic disruptions and bomb plots at the Republican convention of 2008.]

The list of cities where this has occurred is a long one, starting with Seattle: Los Angeles (2000 convention), Washington DC (2000, 2002), Genoa (2001), Quebec City (2001), Oakland (2003), Miami (2003), New York (2004, 2008), Minneapolis-St. Paul (2008), Denver/Boulder (2008), to list only the most dramatic and recent. None of these are remembered in Wolf’s inflated narrative, as if the Occupy movement has been unique in provoking the ruling class to order up repression. [So Tommy, are we supposed to sit around with our fingers up our asses when you crew of wreckers comes to town?]

There was one exception to this recent pattern: Mexico’s handling of the anti-WTO protests held in Cancun in 2003. Instead of following the FBI’s script, Mexico decided to de-escalate the police response, perhaps to protect Cancun’s tourist economy, perhaps to improve their security forces’ tattered reputation. It was quite remarkable to observe. In spite provocations by the so-called Black Bloc, in spite of protestors taking over the streets, in spite of a horrific ritual suicide by a South Korean farmer, the police and army remained largely disengaged or passive. When they arrested one group for sitting in an intersection, they placed them on an air-conditioned bus, which drove them back to the protest site. 

The lesson that was driven home for me in Cancun is that the police, and those who dictate their policy, have enormous discretion over whether a confrontation turns violent. It mostly depends on what image they want to project. [The projection of image is totally irrelevant to the “protesters”? Really Tommy? In a propaganda war, really Tommy?] That is, it depends on politics. [Duh!]

To return to the case Los Angeles, I am not arguing in favor of the Mayor’s eviction order. There was no particular reason for the order to be imposed. [Public health be damned!] Left alone, the Occupiers might have decided on their own time that it was the moment to move on. Even Adbusters, the Vancouver culture-jamming magazine that called for Occupy Wall Street, has editorialized on the need for a new phase. [Since the old phase was going nowhere.]  Or the LA occupiers might have descended into negative feuding and folded their tents. [Since they had no leadership, and didn’t want any.]  There was a serious risk in forcing them out of their encampment. [Bathing and disease, rape and general mayhem, of course, had no effect.]  Nor do I believe the mayor bowed to pressure from downtown property owners to clear the encampment. [Of course not, tax paying business have no effect on local pols. Just wondering, after all this time does Tommy own property, just asking.] His own explanation as an elected official makes more sense: that sooner or later, an incident would occur at the encampment (a death, a rape, a fight) for which he would be held accountable politically. [Read that again; a death, a rape, a fight, seemed to be all too common in #OWS sites across the country.]

But the way the LA eviction has been handled so far is a very important achievement for a city plagued by fifty years of police scandals, brutality, corruption, and court-ordered reforms. Only four years ago the LAPD’s fabled Metro Division went wild and trampled peaceful protestors and media at a huge immigrant rights rally. The LAPD still stops and frisks hundreds of thousands of inner city youth each year, a potential scandal that is so far invisible. [NYPD does that a lot here, and shootings are still a problem in “inner city” neighborhoods; if they were neighborhoods.]

Under the direction of the mayor and Chief Charlie Beck, however, the LAPD officers on Sunday night were as “tactful” as could be, in the phrase one Occupy sympathizer who works at City Hall. 

Once considered an “occupying army” projecting a threat against the least disturbance, for one night the LAPD allowed Occupy LA to co-opt their old brand. 

The Occupy movement also showed an evolution in thinking about street tactics. A decade ago, the phrase “diversity of tactics” allowed a range of actions from strict nonviolence to “fucking shit up”, as certain anarchist factions used to say. [Hey Tommy, ever wonder what it was like to be the owner of a storefront designated to be the shit to be fucked up?]  Experience showed that such “diversity” only allowed the most violent sensational tactics to dominate the media narrative, despite being employed by a tiny handful of activists and provocateurs in some cases. [Must have been the Hello Kitty Faction.]

So far the clearances in LA have been peaceful. On Monday morning the mayor met with a delegation of inter-faith leaders who have been joining the occupiers for several weeks. [Slaves looking for Masters.] The clergy communiqué from the meeting commended Chief Beck for “the restraint shown so far by the LAPD”, and made a “commitment to sustain the Occupy presence and message in LA going forward”, including a promise by the Mayor to use his “bully pulpit” as head of the National Conference of Mayors to push the major themes of the national Occupy movement: “the need to halt the avalanche of home foreclosures, the need to reverse corporate ‘personhood’, the need to fully enforce the Dodd-Frank law, and the need to gain needed federal and state tax revenue to support municipal services in LA and throughout the nation.” [And the need to strip the middle class of all their assets in the service of the Revo.]

The dire scenario painted by Wolf does not tell the story of Los Angeles, where for the moment a crack of hope has been opened for nonviolent conflict resolution and a transition to a new stage.

© 2011 The Nation

Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of 1960's peace, justice and environmental movements. [And a supporter of Communist dictatorship through out the world.] He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. [Since no one will vote for him to hold office in southern California anymore.] His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader. [Just what you want when curled up before the flicker of raging bonfires.] [Just one more question, how does the shutting down of West Coast ports and causing dock workers to miss work feed this "ideology"? This bunch continues to make no sense, unless that's the point, like an old Talking Heads song. Is the Left so bankrupt that all that's left is temper tantrums? Hmm....]

#Occupy Plymouth Rock

The Real Story of Thanksgiving

By Rush Limbaugh

November 23, 2011

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now time for a tradition, an annual tradition, and that is The Real Story of Thanksgiving from my book that I wrote back in the early nineties. I wrote two of them, actually. In one of the books I wrote, The Real Story of Thanksgiving. And reading from it has become something we do every year on the program because it's still not taught. The myth of Thanksgiving is still what is taught, and that myth is basically that a bunch of thieves from Europe arrived quite by accident at Plymouth Rock, and if it weren't for the Indians showing them how to grow corn and slaughter turkeys and how to swallow and stuff, that they would have died of starvation and so forth. The Indians were great -- and then, in a total show of appreciation, we totally wiped out the Indians!

We took their country from 'em. We started racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia; spread syphilis; and, basically, destroyed the environment. That is the multicultural version of Thanksgiving, and it simply isn't true. The real version of Thanksgiving is in my second best-seller, 2.5 million copies in hardback: See, I Told You So. "Chapter 6, Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You: The True Story of Thanksgiving -- The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century ... The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs." In England. So, "A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community.

"After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example.

"And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work. But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found -- according to Bradford's detailed journal -- a cold, barren, desolate wilderness." The New York Jets had just lost to the Patriots. "There were no friends to greet them, he wrote." I just threw that in about the Jets and Patriots. "There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims -- including Bradford's own wife -- died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.

"Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of" the Bible, "both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well." Everything belonged to everybody. "They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

"Nobody owned anything." It was a forerunner of Occupy Wall Street. Seriously. "They just had a share in it," but nobody owned anything. "It was a commune, folks." The original pilgrim settlement was a commune. "It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the '60s and '70s out in California," and Occupy Wall Street, "and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way." There's no question they were organic vegetables. What else could they be? "Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage," as they saw fit, and, "thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism.

"And what happened? It didn't work!" They nearly starved! "It never has worked! What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years -- trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it -- the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future." If it were, there wouldn't be any Occupy Wall Street. There wouldn't be any romance for it.

"The experience that we had in this common course and condition,'" Bradford wrote. "'The experience that we had in this common course and condition tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing -- as if they were wiser than God,' Bradford wrote." This was his way of saying, it didn't work, we thought we were smarter than everybody, everybody was gonna share equally, nobody was gonna have anything more than anything else, it was gonna be hunky-dory, kumbaya. Except it doesn't work. Because of half of them didn't work, maybe more. They depended on the others to do all the work. There was no incentive.

"'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense,'" without being paid for it, "'that was thought injustice.'" They figured it out real quick. Half the community is not working -- living off the other half, that is. Resentment built. Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself? That's what he was saying. So the Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.

"Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? 'This had very good success,' wrote Bradford, 'for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.' ... Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes," it did. "Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians." This is what happened. After everybody had their own plot of land and were allowed to market it and develop it as they saw fit and got to keep what they produced, bounty, plenty resulted.

"And then they set up trading posts, stores. They exchanged goods with and sold the Indians things. Good old-fashioned commerce. They sold stuff. And there were profits because they were screwing the Indians with the price. I'm just throwing that in. No, there were profits, and, "The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London." The Canarsie tribe showed up and they paid double, which is what made the Canarsie tribe screw us in the "Manna-hatin" deal years later. (I just threw that in.) They paid off the merchant sponsors back in London with their profits, they were selling goods and services to the Indians. "[T]he success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans," what was barren was now productive, "and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.'

But this story stops when the Indians taught the newly arrived suffering-in-socialism Pilgrims how to plant corn and fish for cod. That's where the original Thanksgiving story stops, and the story basically doesn't even begin there. The real story of Thanksgiving is William Bradford giving thanks to God," the pilgrims giving thanks to God, "for the guidance and the inspiration to set up a thriving colony," for surviving the trip, for surviving the experience and prospering in it. "The bounty was shared with the Indians." That's the story. "They did sit down" and they did have free-range turkey and organic vegetables. There were no transfats, "but it was not the Indians who saved the day. It was capitalism and Scripture which saved the day," as acknowledged by George Washington in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, which I also have here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to quickly tell you about one passenger on the Mayflower, a guy named Francis Eaton. He was a carpenter. He was not one of the Pilgrims. He was another passenger. He was a carpenter. He died in 1633, 13 years after they landed at Plymouth, and here's what he left in his will: "One cow, one calf, two hogs, 50 bushels of corn, a black suit, a white hat, a black hat, boots, saws, hammers, square augers, a chisel, fishing lead, and some kitchen items" and his season tickets for the Redskins-Cowboys game. No, no, seriously. This is the estate of one of the men who probably built many of the houses for the first settlers. Very modest. But it shows what he saw as wealth back then. By the way, the life expectancy back then was not much.  Not compared to today.  And just remember, they were not eating trans fats, and they didn't live as long as we do today.

END TRANSCRIPT

The same old crew.

PATRICK BRENNAN

National Review Online

NOVEMBER 16, 2011 4:00 A.M. The OWS Legal Team The radical lawyers who sought to bring occupiers back to Zuccotti Park Yesterday, lawyers for the Occupy Wall Street movement successfully filed for a temporary restraining order with a New York court. On paper, at least — the Bloomberg administration did not comply — Justice Lucy Billings’s ruling allowed the protesters to return to Zuccotti Park between yesterday morning’s eviction and yesterday afternoon’s full hearing. She temporarily barred the city and the private owners of the park from preventing the occupation or keeping the occupiers from setting up tents. Justice Billings is perhaps the ideal enabler for the occupiers. Her liberal credentials are sterling: She graduated from the University of California–Berkeley’s law school in 1973, was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1974, and went on to spend 25 years working for the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked, according to her official biography online, “to enforce new rights for minority, disabled, and low-income persons” and “forged new legal remedies by litigating issues not previously addressed in housing, environmental justice . . . public health, child welfare, education, and employment.” And her role may not have been coincidental; the Daily News reports: “Asked why they called her first, protest lawyer Daniel Alterman wouldn’t say, remarking that he’s not a ‘gossip guy.’” Speaking of the protest’s lawyers, most of them are affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild, a group of explicitly progressive lawyers whose mission calls for the “reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property rights.” That philosophy runs throughout much of their work, which has consistently championed the preferences of “marginalized” groups over the rule of law. Here is a guide to Occupy Wall Street’s legal counsel. Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, formerly spouses, are the authors of Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century.  [Their radio show on WBAI on Monday mornings is called Law and Disorder.]   One of their favorite forms of dissent, it seems, has been a significant amount of anti-Israel advocacy, including the charge of Israeli “apartheid.” Ratner has accused Israel of “massive violations of Palestinian rights” and “inhuman [sic] treatment of Palestinians.” He has written that Americans have not widely condemned Israel because of “ambivalence about condemning the actions of a people that have experienced pervasive antisemitism and the holocaust.” Alan Levine, another OWS lawyer, has also publicly expressed anti-Israeli arguments. In light of the confirmed presence of anti-Semitic sentiments at OWS and other occupations, the choice of several prominent critics of Israel as counsel is somewhat disturbing — Jewish people appear to be one minority group that neither the occupiers nor human-rights lawyers have much interest in protecting. Another OWS lawyer, Michael J. Boyle, has an even more worrisome history of advocacy: He has represented no fewer than four men with connections to terrorism, basing his arguments on legal technicalities. Most appallingly, he represented Pakistani terrorist Shahawar Matin Siraj in an appeal of his conviction for plotting to bomb Manhattan’s Herald Square subway station. There was no dispute over Siraj’s guilt; Boyle appealed the decision on the grounds that Siraj had a right to access police records of his own oral statements — an argument that was legally unjustified and rejected. In 2008, he secured the overturning of a conviction of two Yemeni men, cleric Ali Hassan al-Moayad and his assistant, Mohsen Yahya Zayed, for conspiracy to support al-Qaeda and Hamas. Their conviction was overturned because a witness’s description of a Hamas bombing in Tel Aviv was ruled “inflammatory testimony.” He also defended Osama Awadallah, an associate of two 9/11 hijackers, on perjury charges — Awadallah claimed he didn’t know one of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar, despite material evidence that he did. Boyle secured Awadallah’s release, via a dramatic jury reversal, by arguing that Awadallah had unintentionally denied knowing al-Midhar to the FBI. Boyle has also defended a number of members of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. He attempted to win parole for Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, a so-called “political prisoner” who was convicted of murdering two New York City police officers. Daniel Alterman and the late William Kunstler — a radical lawyer who married Margaret Ratner Kunstler after she divorced Michael Ratner — were involved in the defense of several rioters from the 1971 Attica prison riots in New York. Alterman includes his work for the convicts involved in the riot as “among his proudest achievements.” At Attica, there was a brutal riot that involved prisoners’ taking ten guards hostage, and the New York State Police became overly violent in response, but Alterman sees a problem with only one side: In his view, his work was “a story about justice” and “the legitimate complaints of the inmates.” Michael Ratner also attempted and failed to secure a writ of habeas corpus on appeal for Pedro Gutierrez, a Bronx man convicted of “assorted crimes arising from a fatal shooting incident among rival drug dealers,” on the grounds that a piece of evidence had not been available to his defense. The appeal was necessary because a lower court had already refused the writ — the type of evidentiary mistake that had been made was, according to other precedent, “harmless in view of the overwhelming evidence of defendant’s guilt.” Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Ratner was still insistent that Gutierrez had been unfairly treated by the criminal-justice system. More amusingly, in 2009, attorney Yett Kurland worked to ban tour buses from her neighborhood in the West Village, arguing that their “noise pollution” was greatly compromising the residents’ quality of life, and promising an investigation into “all the environmental hazards that these tour buses may pose.” Surely if buses using public streets for their intended purpose must defer to the community’s quality-of-life concerns, protesters have no right to occupy a private park and damage the neighborhood’s environment without being held to the same standards. It is not surprising that Occupy Wall Street has chosen a slate of far-left lawyers to defend it against the demands of the city and the park’s owners. The legal team fancies itself a defender of the oppressed and marginalized; the occupiers now claim that label for the “99 percent.” — Patrick Brennan is a 2011 William F. Buckley fellow

#OWS: The diorama versus the real.

              Signed up for Soc. Sec. Wednesday and since the office was only about three quarters of a mile from Zucotti Park M. and I decided to walk on down and take a look. At this point I’ve only seen the YouTube posts out of Oakland or heard the pro #OWS propaganda on Pacifica, not that that stuff would have a positive effect on me, I’ve been listening to lefty propaganda all my life; I’d sooner fall prey to a fancy camera ad. I know that that’s the diorama, as compelling as the stuffed and posed animals behind glass in the corridors of the Museum of Natural history. For some examples we can go to their greatest supporter The Indypendent, a free newspaper I often find in my local laudromat; I refuse to pay for AdBusters. The first article, titled We Contain Multitudes, introduces a cross section of the #Occupandos with photos and such quotations as these:

Diego Espita, 18 of South Jamaica,

“I used to have a home, girlfriend and job and lost it all.

I’m sick of these wars and people getting laid of.”

Gretchen VanDyck, of NYC,

“I oppose the negative effects of Neo-Liberal Capitalism on everyday life.”

Kanaska Carter, 26, a musician from Newfoundland,

She has relocated to Liberty Park to be part of what she sees as a global transformation. One thing that has surprised Carter is the amount of police brutality.

However she says,

We cannot hate the cops. They’re part of the 99% too. A lot of them are saying,

‘I’d rather be home with my kids right now’

There’s some that try to provoke us,

but if I think if we want to get any where, we have to show them love.”

David Siroonian, 32, of New York City

Is a teacher at the High School of Economics and Finance,

which is located across the street from Liberty Park.

Siroonian visits the park whenever he can,

 including during his free periods from teaching.

              

               We Contain Multitudes, a quote from Whitman’s Song of Myself, is a piece by Francine Prose, president of the PEN American Center and an author of many bestselling works of fiction. She sees people who shouldn’t be in conversation talking to each other, members of every race and class, a biker with tattoos and piercings discussing our problems with a lady in a Hermes scarf. This lightening of a weight, this lessening of a feeling of powerlessness and isolation, something she has never known leaves her drowning in her own tears. Give me a fucking break, the same BS has been used to describe the crowd in every demonstration for the last fifty years. “The crowd contained a wide cross section of the American People, all turned out to show solidarity in the cause of…whatever.” But that’s the diorama, everything surrounded by beauty, under the sky of blue.

              

               The financial district on a workday is a beehive of activity, I can almost hear Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as the background theme to the soundscape of these streets.  As you get below City Hall Park you enter Skyscraper Park-Downtown. Here some of the oldest skyscrapers stand, with Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in the world, at the gateway. So many of these buildings were built when architects were still trained in the use of the classical orders; columns, entablatures, statuary, and bits and pieces of carving adorn these buildings. But as opposed to the uptown Skyscraper Park with its wide streets, even wider avenues and its glass towers, here the streets are tied to the lanes and trails laid down in the days of New Amsterdam. Even the great fires of 1776 and 1835 didn’t have much effect on that original grid. Walking the streets off Broadway gives the impression of being in a forest of stone where the walls are close by and the carvings manipulate the changing light as the sun moves across the sky.

              

               Then you hit Zucotti, since the buildings are so tall the park would be a welcome open space, and it is in normal times, but these are not normal times. When we were there the police were holding the barricades, moving the crowds and maintaining pressure on the #Occupandos, so the park felt like a time bomb. Ringed by double rows of barricades, the #Occupandos are allowed to come and go as individuals, however any surge will be controlled. The filth is palpable, as it is in any gathering of unwashed humans. Most seemed to be just sitting around doing nothing more than holding signs and looking at the tourists, entering the park for a stroll would have been impossible as the tents are all cheek by jowl. M would have tied a rope around my neck if I had tried to pick my way among the tents and engage in conversation, she tries to keep me out of fights. Most flitted back and forth like birds involved in whatever piece of work held their attention at this point, but there were men, cold eyed and burly, to whom I’m sure the cops have long since given nicknames.

              

               During Depression 2.0 we have seen a new/old type of homeless, young, tattooed, and travelling across the nation with their backpacks and their dogs, these are the people in Zucotti. Back in the 60’s the rents were so low in the ghettos of NYC that it was easy to rent a one bedroom apt. for $75 a month. Open up your place to street people and their begging would feed a multitude; they were called Crash Pads. Then the ghettos burned and the rents went up. In the 80’s any open space was squatted by anyone who took the time to build a shack. Ole’ Adolf Giuliani ended that as part of the Broken Windows anti-crime sweeps, and new housing was built in the empty lots. And now they’re back as #Occupy Whatever, a new generation of losers. But no matter how much they may push, the energy is gone. Oh they make their implied threats but their numbers are small and any violence will backfire on them, and they know it.

              

               It’s been a warm and dry fall, it might even be a warm winter, and I’m sure the #Occupandos are praying for it. New York winters can be brutal, our real homeless are already looking for their bed down areas for the next five months, and they say some #Occupandos have developed a chronic cough. By February the Revolution will be looking for another site for the highest credentialed lumpen proletariat ever to rise against the Oligarchy, and this pathetic bunch will be scattered to the winds. I’m sure Our Dear Mayor is counting on it. Meanwhile the beat goes on.
JimG33

Allen B. West on the lasting effects of the Democrat Plantation.

Col. West gets to the point, again. Maybe that’s why he’s ignored at all the usual places. JimG33

 

Economic Freedom for Black Americans

By Allen B. West from the November 2011 issue of The American Spectator

When will black Americans finally be "free at last"?

The word "freedom" for many black Americans is inextricably linked with the word "slavery." While it has been 148 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, and 47 years since the landmark Civil Rights Act, for many, the words of Martin Luther King in his famous speech still ring true: "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." Many black Americans still find themselves spiritually and economically enslaved on the figurative 21st-century plantation.

Why is that still so? After all, for the last 47 years, our leaders have passed bill after bill ostensibly to free black Americans from the manacles of poverty and provide ever-stronger safety nets for those disadvantaged.

But two very formidable forces have conspired over these last 47 years -- almost the span of my entire life--to shackle the economic freedoms and aspirations of the black community: liberal progressive policies, generally supported by Democrats, and the socialist ideology espoused by prominent blacks such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

It is always curious to me that black Americans typically vote Democrat, when it was a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and a Republican from Ohio, Representative James Mitchell Ashley, who brought forth the bill to support an amendment to end slavery throughout the United States.

Nearly 100 years later, when the initial Civil Rights Bill came before the full Senate in 1964, it was a group of 18 Southern Democrats who argued most fervently against its passage.

While the Civil Rights Act passed, finally ending the reprehensible practices of segregation, the liberal progressive policies passed during these last nearly five decades have perhaps done more damage to black Americans' prospects than the racial policies of the past. Unemployment in the black community stands at 16.7 percent, food stamp enrollment is up, and nearly three-quarters of all black children do not live with their biological fathers.

Welfare policies devised by the left to aid single mothers have instead worked perversely to incentivize more young women to have children out of wedlock.

High minimum wages advocated by labor unions-- from whom Democrats receive tremendous financial support -- mean employers are less apt to hire unskilled black youths, or any youths for that matter.

For the left, "spending on education" generally means job protection and preserving benefits for teachers, rather than actually improving education for students in public schools, where black students can build a foundation for economic advancement.

But the effects of these so-called well-intentioned policies, while damaging, are certainly not as toxic as the socialist orientation and noxious rhetoric of "leaders" such as Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Words do indeed have meaning, and the defeatist and demoralizing screeds of these prominent speakers do not inspire, but instead reinforce the victim mentality, and generate class hatred and jealousy -- further cultivated by our own President Barack Obama.

Since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's founding in 1909, socialism has been, unfortunately, deeply ingrained in the black community. In fact, NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois received the 1959 "Lenin Peace Prize" and formally joined the Communist Party USA two years later.

One of the primary tenets of socialist ideology is the creation of a welfare state, which is precisely what has happened in the black community. It is, in effect, a virtual plantation, where black Americans remain enslaved to damaging economic policies and poisonous attitudes of the rhetorical "overseers" who continue to reinforce exploitive, negative mindsets.

The only way for black Americans -- and all Americans for that matter -- to enjoy the full fruits of economic freedom is by once again embracing the spirit of individualism and self-determination laid out in our Constitution and exemplified by true black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. It is only by abandoning the damaging liberal progressive policies and throwing off the shackles of the victim mentality can black Americans finally be "free at last."

About the Author

Allen B. West is a Republican U.S. representative from Florida.