Tag Archives: Globalization

Indian Rani: Retiring Prez Patil Traveled By Jumbo Jet With Butlers

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With even the middle-class struggling with soaring food and gas prices, farmers committing suicide (over 200,000 plus over 15 years, 17,000 in one year), electric shortages, no infrastructure, the country on austerity, the political class still rides the gravy train.

This video describes how retiring President Pratibha Patil (July 2007 – July 2012) still travels abroad in a Jumbo jet, with an entourage of 100 people including multiple cooks and butlers, and attendants.

Meanwhile,  UK PM David Cameron at least travels business class. Patil spent almost a million dollars a day when she traveled (22 trips), while the government was telling  Indians that if they earned more than 28 rupees/day (about 50 cents approx), they were not poor.

Patil is not the only one at fault, of course. And her trips were not taken on her own initiative.

But this kind of thing is rampant in the senior officialdom and their media parasites.

War On India: US Warns Travelers Not To Visit India

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US issues travel advisory against visiting India:

“The United States has issued a fresh travel advisory on overseas travel to its citizens, including India which “continues to experience terrorist and insurgent activities”.

“India continues to experience terrorist and insurgent activities which may affect US citizens directly or

indirectly,” the State Department said in its new worldwide travel alert for its citizens.

“Anti-Western terrorist groups, some on the US government’s list of designated Foreign Terrorist
Organizations (FTOs), poses a potential danger to US citizens in the region,” it said.

“Terrorists and their sympathisers have demonstrated their willingness and ability to attack targets where US

citizens or Westerners are known to congregate or visit.

“Their actions may include, but are not limited to, vehicle-born explosive attacks, improvised explosive device attacks, assassinations, carjackings, rocket attacks, assaults, or kidnappings,” the State Department said. “

Comment:

OK. That’s an official hit against the tourism industry. The advisory is basically letting the world know  the country’s got HIV, please quarantine it.

Is this for real, or is it one more show of force? We’ll soon see.

Meanwhile, it’s been six years since I’ve seen my family (FOO).  And as many since I’ve even talked to some of them.

They live and work in some of the most dangerous places in India, traveling on the most dangerous roads in the world (150,000 deaths a year), in a country with the highest number of terror attacks…and that’s besides the difficulty of just ordinary living in a place with mind-boggling bureaucracy, extreme corruption, non-existent government services (we’re not talking social-security and other kinds of pampering that you find in the west) and a thousand social ills… Nowadays there’s also soaring gas and food prices that make daily living for even the professional class an unending struggle.

Each of these problems can be traced back to some misbegotten government program shoved down the country’s collective throat against the warnings of India’s true national heroes, by some brainless puppets fed by Western foundation (Rockefeller etc.) and grant money.

So by the time the leftists and the corporatists and the NGOs and the rights brigade and the rest of the monotheist one-worlders have meddled (doing good, right?), bribed (moral, right?), blackmailed (heroic, right?), and extorted (fun business, right?) everyone, with the blessings of whatever bunkum leftist or rightist theory is currently being touted  by academic pimps and attention whores, all that’s left for the masses of  ordinary people will be the  intellectual transfat and spiritual aspartame that’s already poisoned the population back home in the West.

Vox Day: Free Trade Violates The Property Rights Of The Nation

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Christian libertarian Vox Day turns propertarian arguments against free-traders:

“In the comments, PG constructed an interesting and effective logical argument against free trade, which I have organized thusly:

1. Free traders insist upon the existence of property rights and the sovereign exercise of those rights as axiomatic. From this foundation, they argue that all actions concerning with whom one will trade, regardless of their location or nation, are protected by those property rights and cannot be morally infringed.

2. If a group of people happen to share the rights to a property in an ownership group, they must decide together on how those rights are exercised. No single individual can sell the property or permit its use by others without the agreement of the other rights holders. The ownership group collectively has the right to decide who and what are permitted to enter their property. It is not an infringement of any one owner’s property right if the greater part of the ownership group does not wish to sell the property or to permit entry to certain parties or items.

[Lila: Libertarians and classical liberals would argue that property rights cannot be exercised by an abstract collective entity like “the nation” and can only be exercised unjustly by any government that claims to represent the nation.]

3. A nation is a group of people who share a common property that is delineated by the national borders. This group of people must therefore decide in some consensus manner how the rights to that property are exercised. They can therefore decide who and what are permitted to enter the national property in precisely the same manner that a house-owning group decide who and what are permitted to enter their house. It is not an infringement of any one individual’s property right if the greater part of the nation does not wish to sell the land possessed by the nation or permit entry to certain parties or items.

4. To deny a nation the property right to enact tariffs or refuse permission for goods, capital, or labor to cross its borders, is tantamount to either denying a) property rights or b) the nation’s existence.

[Lila: Rather than enact laws against the property rights of companies wanting to trade under the present “managed trade” regime, it might be more conducive to freedom to undo the subsidies that currently exist, whether in the form of fixed prices, welfare, preferential tax treatment,  or any other grant by the government.  Doing so, would probably make it far less beneficial for some companies to trade, discourage some movements of labor, and generally have the same effect as a sanction or tariff, without needing to invoke group property rights.]

5. However, denying the existence of nations is not only empirically false, it creates a logical contradiction for the free trader because it requires denying the individual property-owner the right to form collective property-ownership groups from which nations are made. The free trade position depends upon the idea that individuals possess property rights, but groups of more than one individual cannot.

6. Therefore, free trade doctrine requires the denial of the very property rights upon which it is founded. As PG correctly concludes, “their whole argument is an outright logical contradiction”.

As evidence in support of PG’s logical construction, I offer the following statements concerning the existence of nations from two champions of the dogma, Mr. Gary North and our own Unger.

North: “Defenders of tariffs present themselves as defenders of the nation, when in fact the nation, from the point of view of economics, is not a collective entity. The nation, from an economic standpoint, is simply a convenient name that we give to people inside invisible judicial lines known as national borders.”

Unger: “I do not consider myself an ‘American’, except as a verbal convenience, or have any care at all for ‘America’.”

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that the mere existence of a nation does not mean that all of its members are voluntary members of it and it cannot be denied that the legitimate property rights of the nation can be abused or ignored just as they are in the case of individual property rights. But PG’s logic suffices to demonstrate that the property rights argument upon which many free traders heavily rely is far from the conclusive one that they believe it to be.”

[Lila: A version of this argument was made by David Boaz in reviewing the movie, Avatar]

Indian Opposition Says No To Wal-Mart

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Bloomberg reports on Indian opposition to corporate giants forcing open the lucrative retail market:

“Opposition parties and government allies rounded on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bid to open India’s retail sector to foreign companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), stalling parliament for a fifth day with their protests.

In a rare concerted attack on the ruling Congress party, Singh’s two largest parliamentary partners joined the opposition in criticizing the policy approved by the Cabinet last week, forcing both houses of parliament to adjourn. Overseas retailers stand to be barred from opening stores in at least 19 of India’s 45 largest cities with state assemblies set to veto their entry. “

I’m glad to hear this.   Even though it’s too little too late. The spineless Manmohan Singh has already opened up local mutual funds to foreign investment, with all the economic and other dangers of cross-border financial flows and hot money.

Of course, the globalist mouthpieces, (Time: Jyothi Thottam, “Why India Should Stop Fearing Walmart”), are anxious for it to happen.

The big media outlets like to put a local face on the policy (“India’s Wobbly Walmart Embrace’), but astute readers aren’t fooled.

One writes:

Let’s say our law says that Walmart will source 30% from small players. What about the rest, the 70%? Is it going to source 100% of it from India or is allowed to import the rest, i.e. 70%? According to the WTO you cannot stop them from importing.  The example the writer gave was from Bharti-Walmart which is a wholesale cash and carry store (like SAM’s) not Walmart – it is the consumer side which will kill the Kirana business and the Indian manufacturers. She talks about the food supply and global chains without even knowing what it means. …..

They are in the business of making money and lots of it for their US shareholders. They are not in the business of reducing cost for Indian consumers. If it happens that they buy in bulk in China and flood the Indian market with imports, so be it.  Today India is a net Export-Import deficit country with $85 Billion per year. This is the contribution of Dr. Singh…from a few billion a year trade deficit that we had before to having to borrow $85 Billion a year to pay our imports minus exports. So what do you think will happen when Walmart imports $100 Billion dollars worth of goods into India every year?

Now you have to somehow find current $85 Billion net deficit + $100 Billion = $185 Billion dollars PER YEAR.  In the case of the USA, it was simple. The USA borrowed $3 Trillion to pay the deficit. It has the luxury of printing dollars. So if China demands money, they can print it. They just recently printed $600 Billion. India can not do this and India will ultimately be screwed.  In the 17th Century, India was a net exporter. Then the Britishers came and India became a net importer and in turn a poor country. That will happen after a few years if our appetite for imports continues to grow and our exports dont keep up with the rise in imports as happened in the last many years. Today, we borrow soft money and hard money from the IMF, bonds, FDI in other sectors etc. to pay the difference of $85 Billion of dollars that we have to pay to import more than what we export. How long do you think this is sustainable? How long do you think we can continue to borrow either via the FDI route or via IMF loans to pay for our imports. India is one of the few countries where you can allow all these things, including changing our nuclear policy, allowing FDI, etc. without discussing this in Parliament first.

Remember also that Walmart started putting in RFID tags into their clothes from last year, August 1, 2010, making it possible at some point that you could be tracked anywhere you went, because of your clothes. This is incipiently fascistic.

India FDI Watch has a detailed report on what really happens when foreign lobbyists get big retail giants into the market, monopsony:

“Industrial licensing had brought monopolies to India but monopsony is a new phenomenon for India which has recently come to the forefront in the manufacturing goods sector due to the increased specialization in the global process of production. This has led to the concept of a single supplier to a large producer who obtains the goods at a ransom. The larger the amount of any commodity a large retailer can purchase, the greater the concession on price, delivery, it can extract. This is a demonstration of monopsonistic procurement and the awesome monopsonistic purchasing power which comes with it. This is unique to the modern world of digital instant communication (branding, streamlined logistics distribution can drive down prices still further) and hugely affects the agricultural commodities market also, as shown. The more of a commodity large retailers purchase in bulk, the lower the prices growers of agricultural commodities obtain!”

More in this report on how the globalists at WTO would like to destroy the decentralized production of food:

“The Bank has identified laws such as the Essential Commodities Act (1955) the Agricultural Produce and marketing Act (APMC 1972) and the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential Commodities Act (1980) which have defended the rights of farmers to a just price and the rights of the poor to a fair price for food, as having “prevented the free mobility of agricultural produce and thus segmented the Indian domestic market into many smaller markets.

The government has also imposed restrictions on foreign investment in the retail of agricultural commodities, and on both foreign and domestic private investment in wholesale. These restrictions have collectively discouraged and/or prevented the private sector from undertaking large-scale investment in agricultural storage, marketing, or processing activities – an example of horizontal fragmentation preventing desirable vertical integration. The result is that today there is no large, organized, efficient pan-Indian supply chain in the agricultural sector, including in horticulture. What the Bank defines as “fragmentation” is in fact self-organized local systems of production and trade which are not controlled by a centralized store or by centralized, monopolistic corporations. And the repeated attack on India’s “geography” shows how anti-nature World Bank’s basic economic thinking is. Not only the World Bank like to wish away India’s diversity and geography, it would like to destroy India’s food sovereignty.

Thus, the Bank takes apples grown in Himachal and says it would be cheaper to import them for Chennai. This was exactly the argument the trade liberalisers had used to justify wheat imports. However, the imported wheat turned out to be twice as costly as domestic wheat. Navdanya has filed a case in the Supreme Court against wheat imports.”

Note:

I’ve shopped at Walmart, and they have great prices, true. But in the US I don’t have that much of a choice of smaller shops.  In India, however, there are plenty of choices….and it should stay that way.  Anyway, I don’t think I should be shopping at Walmart, even if the prices are low.  It’s a question of choosing smart self-interest over self-defeating self-interest. I like cheap prices, but I also want to live in a country of small shops and farms, not one of huge commercial farms and supermarkets.

It’s time to buy from local retailers, wherever possible.

The American-made Retail E-guide features over 2500 American-made products from over a dozen popular retail stores like Dillard’s, Home Depot, TJ Maxx, and Costco.

How Americans Can Buy American
Post Office Box 780839, Orlando, Florida 32878-0839
Tel: 1-888-US OWNED (1-888-876-9633)
Emergency Backup: 407-234-4626
Email the Author: Roger Simmermaker
Web: http://www.howtobuyamerican.com

On this issue, I agree with OccupyWallStreet.

If we can’t lower taxes to bring companies back, we can boycott multinationals with predatory practices. Giant corporations of this kind have nothing to do with the free market.

From TowardFreedom:

“The shiny happy people featured in Wal-Mart advertisements, as well as the company’s continued PR claims of corporate responsibility (“We at Wal-Mart take an active interest in conserving the environment!”), simply doesn’t match the frustrating reality of their corporate behavior. Even the largely toothless Environmental Protection Agency, for example, a federal regulatory outfit that sometimes seems to exist simply to provide permits for giant corporate polluters, has managed to prosecute Wal-Mart for Clean Air Act violations in nine states, due to the company’s stubborn insistence on storing lawn fertilizer and other toxic chemicals in parking lots located near local watershed areas.

Greenwald even takes us to Wal-Mart’s global factories in where Wal-Mart workers put in 14 hour days 7 days a week and brush their teeth with fireplace ashes because their salaries don’t allow them to buy tooth paste. Implicitly in this global tour is the fact that, while wrapping itself in the American flag and a shallow sham version of patriotism, Wal-Mart cares very little for the health and well being of its workers, the environment, or the health of the U.S. economy as a whole, beyond the short-term dollar value it can extract to increase its profit margin.

While all of this is deeply sobering, Greenwald wisely chooses to end the film on a powerful high note, spotlighting and interviewing several citizen/activists – normal people just like you and me – who have chosen to organize their communities to oppose Wal-Mart’s predatory behavior and fight for more just and sustainable local economies.”

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

Civil Unrest In Guadalupe, February 2009

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Researching trouble spots that could predict how civil unrest might  unfold in the future, I came across this report from February 2009 ,about insurrection in the French Caribbean. It is described, literally, in black and white terms, as a class war that breaks out along racial lines. The source being The Daily Mail, this might be sensationalistic. But there’s no denying it’s plausible:

“Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island.

Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages.

But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy.

The troubles come at the height of the holiday season, with thousands of mainly British, French and American tourists on the paradise tropical island.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1150062/Britons-flee-French-island-Guadeloupe-rioters-turn-white-families.html#ixzz10g0gHgMy

Bill Clinton Gets 6 Billion In Pledges For Global Philanthropy

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(MORE LINKS TO COME)

Reuters reports that ex-President Bill Clinton has raised a record $6 billion for a global philanthropic effort called Clinton Global Initiatives:

“Former President Bill Clinton secured a record 291 pledges worth more than $6 billion to tackle global woes at his sixth annual philanthropic summit, which wound up on Thursday.

The value of Clinton Global Initiative pledges for economic empowerment, education, environment, energy and health was $3 billion less than 2009, but the organization said that in previous years one or two big commitments represented a disproportionate share of the whole.”

So what’s the Clinton Global Initiative?  Here’s the website

And here’s what its all about (my translation in italics)

“In 2005, President Clinton established CGI to turn ideas into action and to help our world move beyond the current state of globalization to a more integrated global community

[Lila: More centralization leading to world government]

of shared benefits, responsibilities, and values. [Lila: perks, taxes, and bureaucratic regulations]

By gathering world leaders from a variety of backgrounds [Lila: We’ve bullied, bribed, and blackmailed every pol  on the face of the earth to join],

CGI creates a unique opportunity to channel the capacities of individuals and organizations to realize change [Lila: You want to make any money, you’re going to need to do business through us].

To fulfill the action-oriented mission of CGI, all members devise practical solutions to global issues through the development of specific and measurable Commitments to Action.

CGI Annual Meetings have brought together more than 125 current and former heads of state [Lila: OK, we’re missing a few islands], 15 Nobel Peace Prize winners [Lila: Now you know why they’re given Nobel prizes – they can lend their credibility to the CGI], hundreds of leading global CEOs [Lila: Right-wing fat cats], major philanthropists and foundation heads [Left-wing fat cats], directors of the most effective non-governmental organizations [Lila: Professional do-gooders  and trojan horses], and prominent members of the media [Lila: The PR department].

These CGI members have made nearly 1,700 commitments valued at $57 billion, which have already improved more than 220 million lives in 170 countries

[Lila: 220 million reliable constituents and advocates of bigger government].

The CGI community also includes CGI University (CGI U), a forum to engage college students in global citizenship; CGI Asia; MyCommitment.org, an online portal where anybody can make their own Commitment to Action; and, CGI Lead, which engages a select group of young leaders from business, government, and civil society.”

The 60 Million Strong White Underclass

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Joe Bageant writes about the white underclass in America in his latest book, Rainbow Pie: A Memoir of Redneck America (Portobello Press, 2010):

“When World War II began, 44 per cent of Americans were rural, and over half of them farmed for a living. By 1970, only 5 per cent were on farms. Altogether, more than twenty-two million migrated to urban areas during the post-war period. If that migration were to happen in reverse today, it would be the equivalent of the present populations of New York City, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, and Saint Louis moving out into the countryside at a time when the U.S. population was half of its present size.

In the great swim upstream toward what was being heralded as a new American prosperity, most of these twenty-two million never made it to the first fish ladder. Stuck socially, economically, and educationally at or near the bottom of the dam, they raised children and grandchildren who added another forty million to the swarm. These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass. Their children and grandchildren have added to the numbers of this underclass, probably in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 million people now. They outnumber all other poor and working-poor groups — black, Hispanics, immigrants. Even as the white underclass was accumulating, it was being hidden, buried under a narrative proclaiming otherwise. The popular imagination was swamped with images that remain today as the national memory of that era. Nearly all of these images were products of advertising. In the standard depiction, our warriors returned to the land kept free by their valor, exhilarated by victory, and ready to raise families. They purchased little white cottages and Buick Roadmaster sedans, and then drove off into the unlimited horizons of the ‘land of happy motoring’. A government brochure of the time assured everyone that ‘An onrushing new age of opportunity, prosperity, convenience and comfort has arrived for all Americans.’ I quoted this to an old World War II veteran named Ernie over an egg sandwich at the Twilight Zone Grill near my home in town. Ernie answered, ‘I wish somebody had told me; I would have waved at the prosperity as it went by.’

According to this officially sanctioned story of the great post-war migration, these people abandoned farm life in such droves because the money, excitement, and allure of America’s cities and large towns was just too great to resist. Why would anyone stay down on the farm when he or she could be ‘wearing ten-dollar shoes and eating rainbow pie’? One catches a whiff of urban-biased perception here; but then, the official version of all life and culture in America is written by city people. Our dominant history, analysis, and images of America are generated in the urban centers. Social-research institutions, major universities, and the media — such as ABC, HBO, PBS, and the Harvard University sociology department — are not located in Keokuk, Iowa; Fisher, Illinois; Winchester, Virginia; or Lubbock, Texas.

I grew up hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, and am a product of that out-migration; and, as I said, grew up watching it happen around me. I’m here to tell you, dear hearts, that while all those university professors may have their sociological data and industrial statistics verified and well indexed, they’re way off-base; they’ve entirely overshot the on-the-ground experience. In fact, they don’t even deal with it. You won’t be surprised to hear that the media representation of the post-war era — and, let’s face it, more people watch The History Channel than read social history texts — it is as full of crap as an overfed Christmas goose.

My contemporaries of that rural out-migration, now in their late fifties and mid sixties, are still marked by the journey. Their children and grandchildren have inherited the same pathway. The class competition along that road is more brutal than ever. But the sell job goes on that we are a classless society with roughly equal opportunity for all. Given the terrible polarization of wealth and power in this country (the top 1 per cent hold more wealth than the bottom 45 per cent combined, and their take is still rising), we can no longer even claim equal opportunity for a majority. Opportunity for the majority to do what? Pluck chickens and telemarket to the ever-dwindling middle class?”

Read the rest of this excerpt at Alternet.

My Comment:

I’ve enjoyed Bageant’s writing and the insights it offers into rural Americans of the kind the media elites tend to reflexively dismiss. The last of the racial insults still permissible in public is “white trash” or “red-neck.” Sarah Palin’s immense unpopularity with the liberal intelligentsia boils down to her evident origins in this class, although Palin herself is certainly middle-class. Nonetheless, the deeply class and race-based commentary about her has pigeon-holed her as one of “them”.

Yet Palin’s following is middle-class and generally educated, skilled and successful. Why then are they conflated? That’s what puzzles me.

Bageant’s underclass, as he portrays it, truly is functionally illiterate and on the verge of desperation.

If anyone ought to threaten the intellectual elites, it ought to be a gun-toting, tattooed, out-of-work chicken -plucker. But that’s not the group that shows up for the Tea Parties. And it’s not the one the media is busy painting shades of black.

So why the conflation?

My guess is it’s because the establishment most fears a coalition of these two white groups – the underclass and the middle-class. That coalition, cutting across class and prone to nativism, will be the group that has a real chance to topple the establishment.

Which is why the elites are doing their best to split the white middle-class (and upper middle-class) from the working class. That is what the deployment of the class-based rhetoric amounts to, It is a challenge to the middle-class suburbanite – do you want to be one of them (the rednecks) or one of us (the educated elites)?

Posed in those terms, the elites believe the challenge will pry away the accountants and soccer moms from the chicken-pluckers.

Let’s hope they’re in for a surprise.

Daily Bell: Elites Conspire Over Afghan Mineral Wealth

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The Daily Bell on the Afghan mineral discovery:

Here is what the Anglo-American brain-trust may have in mind:

1. It will invite countries into the region to “exploit” minerals, operating through the Afghan government. (And has already invited China.) Each country, once involved, will be expected to provide its own security. Continue reading →

Afghanistan Has Trillion Dollar Deposits Of Iron, Copper, and Lithium

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So now we know the real reason for the Afghan war.. I wonder how long the Pentagon has had this information? BBC reports on June 14, 2010:

“Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested. The statement came after reports in the New York Times of the work of a team of Pentagon officials and US geologists. They discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium. However, questions are being asked about the timing of the release of the latest information. Continue reading →