Big Whiskey Sam's "THE LIFE OF BARRY!"

Normally, when I sit down to write one of these columns, I’m seeking perhaps to vent my frustration over the various insanities which dominate our societal, economic and political landscapes. Or, sometimes, I’m writing to share with my dear readers my unique and insightful observations on and solutions to said insanities (or, “to state the plainly obvious,” if you want to be a dick about it).

But not today. Today I am neither frustrated nor philosophical. Today, I am simply curious, and genuinely fascinated. Certain recent events have left me astounded and intrigued. Specifically, certain events involving our current president (at least indirectly), and the more, shall we say, ardent, of his swooning supporters.

By now, you’ve probably seen the video from Burlington NJ. For those of you who don’t get out much, here it is in a nutshell: a public school teacher leads a group of first-graders in reciting a poem/chant heralding the social edicts of “Barrack Hussein Obama,” followed by a song set to the melody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic in which they simply extol the overall greatness thereof. Needless to say, when this hit the airwaves, and especially when Glenn Beck got a hold of it, shit began hitting fans all across the fruited plains.

Conservatives and Republicans were apoplectic. This was hardly unexpected. Favorite right wing buzzwords like “indoctrination” and “brainwashing” have been given new life. The shock and outrage pronounced on talk radio and the internet were, to say the least, predictable; as was the fact that for the most part, they were pretty much real.

Equally predictable were the liberals populating TV and the blogosphere who, with all the snide condescension they could muster and righteous indignation they could feign, set out immediately to brand anyone who found fault with this kind of activity in a public school as a racist/wingnut/whatever. They then of course went into full spin mode, portraying this as harmless patriotism on the part of those adorable students, and basically backpedalled on everything they had said about patriotism and proper respect for the presidency during the eight years George W. Bush was in office.

None of this do I find particularly remarkable. What I find remarkable is the video itself, and more to the point, the strange mindset currently so prevalent in so many circles, of which this video is merely one example, and hardly the first.

It’s the pure, genuine Cult Of Personality that exists around President Obama.

I’m well aware that nothing new exists under the sun. Cults Of Personality have come and gone for as long as men have walked the Earth. But this is the first time I’ve ever gotten to observe one, a real one, as it happens. I say “a real one” because the term is often misused. Especially in our media and celebrity driven popular culture, “cults of personality” are attributed to virtually every dipshit who manages to find his fifteen minutes of fame. But a true CoP is much more difficult to come by, and even more so to achieve. Michael Jackson or Madonna may have millions of diehard fans (though I’m really not sure why), but the object of a true CoP has Followers. True Believers. Zealots. Minions.

In short: Worshippers.

What we are seeing from the Obama crowd (not all, but a surprising many) is nothing short of a religious movement. The term “cult” really is appropriate. We’ve all seen the video footage of idiots who think Obama will make the world right and life easy for them (also pay their mortgage, their gas tab, etc.). The acceptance speech in a sold out arena at the Democrat National Convention, set in front of marble pillars (perhaps imitations) designed to invoke images of the grand halls of Olympus. The people screaming, crying, even fainting at his campaign rallies. And of course, the throngs mindlessly chanting “YES WE CAN!”, without ever really bothering to ask “can what?”

Jesus would have been lucky to have these kind of crowds.

Over and over again, we hear people ascribing to Obama the power to “change” things, or to “bring change.” Nearly always, the focus is on him bringing change, personally, not on how he will aid or facilitate his followers efforts to bring about change, or just what that change might be. His followers seem to think he is somehow exempt from the basic pitfalls of human nature; such as temptation, powerlust, greed and arrogance (his detractors incessantly note, rightly, how he possesses that last one in abundance). Indeed, many of them seem to think he is in fact more than human: anyone remember Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, being interviewed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, claiming that "...in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

And of course, there is the virulent attack on anyone who dissents or even questions. As with any group of True Believers, heresy must never be permitted. Fortunately, the vast majority of our population is both far too lazy and far too comfortable to begin engaging in physical violence and bloodletting over this type of thing. This holds just as true for the Obamatons as it does for everyone else. Instead, the attacks consist mainly of verbal efforts to defame, intimidate, shout down, or otherwise stifle the speech of the dissenter. Name calling and character smears are most prevalent. Being as most Obamatons are Democrats, the patented “YOU’RE A RACIST!!” method of argument came into play quickly. And even though it appears to now have much less effectiveness right now as it may have had in years past, they show no signs of giving up on it any time soon. Snide remarks about dissenters’ intelligence, education, background, etc., are also going at full throttle. On most left leaning websites, you’ll find a lot more of these (peppered with various vulgarities, often as not) than debate tactics such as “I disagree because...” or “Here’s where you are wrong....”

Of course, like I said, none of this is new. Cults of Personality are a fact of life. One which has become more prevalent over the last hundred years, due mainly to advancements in communications technology. The end results of these cults have varied. On the one hand, you have CoPs like those surrounding Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., the effects of which on the population at large were at worst benign if not mildly positive. Then again, the last century also saw these same CoPs surrounding the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong, the effects of which were disastrous.

And that’s where the video comes in.

One rule that all religious movements, as well as socio-political ones, have in common is this: get ‘em while they’re young. The Bible, the Koran, the Communist Manifesto, you name it: they all make mention of the importance of instilling their values in children as early as possible. Most often, this is done in two arenas: in the home, and in school. And when the values being taught in those two places clash, all Hell breaks loose.

There is a valid reason so many people are outraged over the contents of this video. Think about it: a government run school, in which teachers (or at least a teacher) are leading extremely young and impressionable students in overt songs of worship to the leader of said government. And make no mistake, these were songs of worship, especially the spoken word one. Replace “Barrack Hussein Obama” with “Jesus” and maybe dump the one or two lines about the economy, and you’ve got a classic example of a children’s hymn in any Protestant Sunday School.

This was a remarkably effective textbook tactic of all of the tyrants I listed above. The Hitler Youth, Mao’s Red Guard, and so on. In order for any totalitarian regime to work, the state must convince its subjects that their first loyalty, before family, friends, community or God, is to the state. To the government. To Dear Leader. Naturally, the best and easiest way to do this is to get it into their heads as young as possible. The state must insert itself in between children and their parents.

And there are a great many citizens of these united states who believe that the federal government, regardless of who happens to be in it, if given a chance, will seek to do just that. They are by no means wrong.

Also, never forget that in the mind of the True Believer, the ends always justify any means. Ethics are irrelevant. Hell, even results are often irrelevant. All that matters is that they do what the Leader wants, or what they think he wants, them to do. This is why you see people in cults of all kinds destroy families, ruin lives, and even commit egregious violence, and have zero remorse. In their minds, they did right. There is a word for people who reach this point. The word is “evil.” There is a reason people, and especially parents, react strongly at the very possibility that such a person might be in contact with their children.

Now, do I think Barrack Obama is sitting in the Oval Office, rubbing his hands and snickering to himself, giddy with thoughts of his plans for total domination and supreme power over all? I doubt it. But then again, did Mao? Did Hitler? All the monsters I listed came to power in circumstances not all that different from those surrounding Obama: nations in financial crisis, ruled by corrupt and/or incompetent and brutal governments. The Batista regime and the Russian Tsars weren’t a whole lot less monstrous then Castro and Lenin were after them. All were hailed as saviors of their countries. I’m sure none of them went into office with ideas of becoming iron-fisted dictators, acquiring unlimited power and brutally crushing all who oppose. Didn’t stop all of that from happening, though.

So the point that really peaks my curiosity is:

Just what does President Obama think of all this? Is he sitting back on Air Force One, watching this video and others like it and stroking his ego the whole time? Maybe. I hope not.

Or perhaps he’s living The Life of Brian right now. Fans of England’s comedic supertroup Monty Python will recall their biblical satire of that name, in which the title character is mistaken for the new messiah by a mob of fools, who pursue him tirelessly and mistake everything he says or does for a miracle or message from God. If Barry is feeling a bit like that right now, i couldn’t blame him.

So when the president finally calls me, and says “Big Whiskey, what do I do? These people are mad! What do I say to them?” I will advise him to go on TV, which he was probably would have done within the next twenty minutes anyway, and say something to the effect of:

“My beloved supporters, I am deeply appreciative of all of the songs, poems and works of art so many of you have made in tribute to me. But enough is enough. Really, y’all need to get a life. I really wasn’t born in a manger. Stick to teaching the tykes to read and write. You need improvement in those areas anyway. And for the love of God (the real One, not me), if you feel you must write a poem for me, try not to set it to a meter that sounds reminiscent of goose-stepping Nazis!”

I’m sure that call will be coming any day now.




Here’s the now famous video:









Hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must all lend a hand
To make this Country strong again
Hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama
He said we must be fair today
Equal work means equal pay
Hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama
He said we all must take a stand
To make sure everyone gets a chance
Hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama
He said red, yellow, black, or white,
All are equal in his sight
Hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama
Yes, hmm, hmm, hmm
Barack Hussein Obama

Another one, from back during the campaign. Note the swooning teacher lady. Definitely a True Believer.









My personal favorite. I’ll let this one speak for itself.









And just a little proof that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Racist Robots!

It is safe to say that I will not go to see the new Transformers movie in theaters. By and large, I don’t go to see any movies in theaters. I think the last one was something like four years ago in Florida. Generally, I just wait for a movie I want to see to come out on DVD, and either rent it or borrow it from some fool who actually spent the twenty-plus dollars to buy it. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, being of a genre I can’t stand, and by a director who’s batting .000 in my book, would normally be the type that couldn’t even prompt me to put a dollar in the Redbox. But now, just maybe, I might have to. Because apparently, the film is racist.

Today, while perusing the web to kill some time, I come across this headline, from AP Entertainment writer Sandy Cohen, via the Souther Oregon Mail Tribune:

Jive-talking twin Transformers raise race issues

Oh my Lord. Call the funny-farm Reba, the world’s finally gone off the deep end. Before I even get into this ridiculous article, just think about the headline: this is proof that we as a society are way too hung up on both racial grievances (real or imaginary), and superfluous pop-culture, so much so that we can’t resist entangling the two. It also proves that editors at the AP and/or the SOMT have the writing skills of a slow second grader (note the lack of proper capitalization in the headline), and don’t seem to realize that the last person to use the term “jive-talking” was the little old lady who translated Kareem Abdul Jabar in Airplane.

Apparently, two of the Autobots (if you don’t know what those are, aks somebody) in the film are being whined about because they represent stereotypes which are offensive to black people. From the article:

Harmless comic characters or racist robots? The buzz over the summer blockbuster "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" only grew Wednesday as some said two jive-talking Chevy characters were racial caricatures. Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They're forced to acknowledge that they can't read. One has a gold tooth..

OK, so far, I’m getting a mild chuckle. The potential for good comedy here is obviously pretty high, as the bickering-buddies shtick is one of the most time tested and proven tools in the history of comedy. Abbott and Costello, The Bickersons, Beavis and Butthead, Pegg and Frost, Riggs and Murtaugh, Amos and Andy (yes, that was deliberate), the list goes on. These types of characters are almost always stereotypical in some way, and are necessarily highly eccentric. They will, almost by default, be to some extent caricatures of whatever segment of society from which their characters derive.

That would be my defense of Skids and Mudflap. Except I’m not defending them. They don’t need defending.

As we read further down the article, we find predictable examples of the kind of tripe that makes thinking people roll their eyes and/or laugh out loud.

"They're like the fools," said 18-year-old Nicholas Govede, also of New York City. "The comic relief in a degrading way."

More still from another NYC moviegoer, who called the characters “outrageous:”

"It's one thing when robot cars are racial stereotypes," he said, "but the movie also had a bucktoothed black guy who is briefly in one scene who's also a stereotype."

And of course there are the obligatory intellectuals, offering opinions which are conspicuously devoid of intelligence. From an assistant professor of cinema and media studies (wow, if there’s a bigger bullshit course out there, I haven’t heard of it) at UCLA:

"There's a persistent dehumanization of African-Americans throughout Hollywood that displaces issues of race onto non-human entities,... It's not about skin color or robot color. It's about how their actions and language are coded racially."

And this, from a professor of popular culture (nevermind, I found one) at USC:

"There's a history of people getting laughs at the expense of African-Americans and African-American culture,"

To all of which, I reply:

So what?

The truth is, there’s plenty about blacks and black culture that’s worth laughing at. The fashions; the bravado; the attitudes; the hair weaves; the slang which borders on being its own language; all are inherently parody-ready. The examples are too numerous to count, and so are the comedians and filmmakers, black and white alike, who have both names and fortunes for themselves making fun of it. Anyone who’s ever sat through a 1970s ‘blacksploitaion film’ or a 1990s ‘growing up in da ‘hood film’ can readily appreciate the comedic genius of Keenan Ivory Wayans’s uberspoofs I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka and Don’t be a Menace to South Central while Drinking yo’ Juice in da ‘Hood. On a somewhat deeper level, Tim Story and Mark Brown did a masterful job of dragging out some of the less openly discussed points of black culture (street crime, low IQed hustlers, widespread ignorance and poor education, even the civil rights movement), and making them both thought provoking and hugely laughable in 2002s Barbershop. These films also received some flack in the press for being racially insensitive, though it was widely ignored, since they were made by black people.

And that, methinks, is the crux of the matter. Somewhere along the line, the notion became accepted in mainstream (i.e., northeastern white) culture that white people laughing at black people, or any caricature thereof, for any reason, is somehow an act of unspeakable cruelty, on par with eating live puppies, and must never be allowed. It really is the great taboo of our age (criticizing, analyzing or frank discussion of them in any form are also big no-no’s, but that’s for another day). As you might have already guessed, I call bullshit. If people are going to be laughable, laugh at them. If there’s humor to be found, enjoy it.

”But Whiskey!”, perhaps you respond in the gasping manner which has become a cliched fixture of these columns, ”Making fun of other peoples’ cultures is wrong! How would you feel if blacks were making fun of and laughing at your culture?

Huh? You mean they’re not?

Caricatures of all segments of white people and culture are as numerous as the stars in the big ass Texas sky. Black comedians mimic whites incessantly, with varying degrees of accuracy and funniness (D.L. Hughley and Paul Mooney in particular have had me rolling on the floor more than once). And no one makes fun of white people like, well, white people. Ever heard of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour? The Office? The Onion? Want me to keep going? Truthfully, I don’t think any racial group takes to self-deprecating humor as much as white people do. For that matter, I seriously doubt more than a handful of black people are really that offended by simple caricatures like these two robots either. Am I wrong? Any black folks out there want to correct me on this (not you Rance, I already know better)?

As an aside, I mention the Onion specifically because one of their entertainment editors is quoted in the AP article, complaining that Skip and Mudflap were racial caricatures and also had no real other part in the movie. I find this particularly amusing, since the Onion is some of the most irreverent comedy on the web, and relies heavily on caricatures and stereotypes for much of its shtick.

Of course, if one were to want some real evidence of racism in the new Transformers movie, they could check out this quote from lead actress Megan Fox, in an interview with Total Film UK magazine:

”“I’d barter with him [TF villain Megatron, if the two had a sit-down]and say instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the porch monkeys, chickenheads and gangbangers infesting our cities?”

Oh no, wait, she didn’t say that. What she really said was exactly the same, except it was ”white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America.” The interviewer’s response? ”Good answer.” Personally, I don’t pay much mind to the ramblings of Hollywood airheads, even really hot ones like Fox. I do however find it interesting that such unbridled contempt for the south and the midwest is no big deal in the entertainment biz, but a couple of CGI robots with homeboy accents is somehow newsworthy. It almost sounds like a mental disease. One which might easily be cured, I might add, by a regular dosage of The World According to Whiskey, but somehow I doubt Ms. Fox or any of her contemporaries will have the good sense to read it.

Oh well. Chump don’t wants da help, chump don’t gets da help. I’ll catch you on da flipside.

Original AP article, via Southern Oregon Mail Tribune
Megan Fox interview in Total Film UK magazine

The Onion caricaturing:

Denny’s Customers
Obama supporters
Black Football Stars

For not one but two ass kicking reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, by the greatest Facebook/MySpace film critic of all time, click here, and here.

The Wolves, the Lamb, and the Dinner Menu

Wow. I am dumfounded. I just went back and reread my last three columns (my Economy trilogy), and am seriously finding it hard to fathom just how much our politico-economic situation has deteriorated in just the meager four months since I wrote them. The examples of economic illiteracy I cited in them have already been outdone so many times over that they seem like they were written ages and ages ago. The housing bubble? Fannie & Freddie? The CRA? AIG? Stimulus? Bailouts? Who even remembers that shit?

All of those things had seemed unthinkable just a year before I wrote those columns. The shit that has gone down since then seemed unthinkable while I was writing them.

Since then, we’ve seen the most brazen power-grabs by the federal government in, well, at least since Roosevelt’s New Deal, possibly before, and certainly in the memory of anyone reading this blog. Arguably the most egregious, definitely the most obvious, example of this would have to be the takeover of Chrysler and General Motors.

They called it a bailout. I call that bullshit. What we ultimately saw happen was an utter subversion of bankruptcy law and contract law, with legitimate lawful creditors being given the shaft (aka, ‘having their money stolen’) in favor of the government and Democrat cronies, most notably the United Auto Workers.

I do not know all the ins and outs of bankruptcy law or of the bond market, but I do know enough to fill up a couple of paragraphs and bore you to death. Since I believe my trilogy probably already accomplished that particular goal, I’ll keep it brief:

A bond is a financial security, as is a share of stock. The difference is this: when you purchase a bond, you are in effect lending the issuer your money on defined terms, but without any ownership stake in the company or government entity issuing the bond. When you purchase stock, you are purchasing a share of actual ownership in the company. The payout for a well performing stock is generally better, and potentially far better, than that of a bond. But the stockholder, as part owner of the company, is implicitly assuming part of the risk associated with the company’s performance, and so the stock is also riskier than the bond.

Part of this is because when a company goes into bankruptcy, there is order in which the law prescribes that debtors be dealt with, after administrative and legal costs are met. In the case of the GM and Chrysler takeovers, certain bondholders who were secured creditors (the ones who get first crack) were paid out substantially less on the dollar than the UAW, which was a non-secured creditor, and which also received 18% ownership of GM and 55% ownership of Chrysler (The federal government now owns 60% of GM; I’m not sure how much of Chrysler, which is now also partly owned by Italian auto maker Fiat). I’ve read some conflicting reports as to specific numbers on this (or at least unclear, possibly due to an insufficient understanding of terminology on my part), but it appears that in some cases bondholders were forced to surrender the debt they owned in exchange for stock shares. Of course this is all happening because GM and Chrysler just went in the drink, so those stocks are practically worthless.

Bear in mind, by the way, this is after more than $20,000,000,000 were dumped into these companies, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, for the specific purpose of preventing a bankruptcy. Much of that money has been provably squandered, and still more is unaccounted for.

Predictably enough, proponents of the takeover, and even President Obama himself, have derided those bondholders and creditors who objected to all of this as greedy, as looters, as lacking a will to sacrifice for the greater good, and as eeeeevilll speeeecuuulaaaatoooors. Obama himself derisively uses the term “the money people” and declares “I don’t stand with them.”

But who are these bondholders? They are hedge funds, mutual funds, and investment firms. They are pension plans, retirement plans, and 401(k)s (including mine). It’s all one and the same, folks. Yes, there are people in there who are trying to play the market for a quick buck. The thought of them can be irksome, but there’s nothing really wrong with it. But most of that money is coming from peoples’ paychecks; savings; earnings. Yours and mine. And we are the ones being told to take the hit and like it. If all that’s not enough, we’re being told this by the same people who are taking our tax dollars to fund this madness.

Still more bizarre, the appointment by Obama of Steven Rattner as the head of the auto task force, aka “the car czar.” Despite very specifically say that he and his administration “have no interest in running the auto industry,” the president seems to have appointed someone to possibly do just that. I say possibly, because it’s still not really clear what this guy is supposed to do. Little of his specific job description seems to have been released, and he doesn’t seem to like interviews. But if he’s anything like the dozen or so other “czars” Obama has appointed (such as the “bank czar,” the “climate czar,” the “Great Lakes czar” (I shit you not), and the CEO “pay czar”), he’ll wield an awful lot of influence, and answer to no one but the president. Sound like any other countries we know?

I’ve heard people debate as to who the biggest loser is in this scenario (though I’ve yet to hear anyone name any winners). Obviously the U.S. taxpayer tops the list, but beyond that, I’d have to say:

Ford.

The Ford Motor Company has thus far resisted its original impulse to partake in this whole bailout craze, and as such is still an independent auto manufacturer. I don’t know exactly why they backed away from the fed’s bailout. Maybe they saw what was happening in other sectors that took bailout and TARP money, and decided they didn’t want the government meddling in their affairs in that way. You can bet their higher-ups took serious notice of fed actions to regulate CEO pay.

But now Ford faces the very real prospect of being in direct competition within its industry, against the federal government. This means that their competition will have a virtually unlimited pool of money (again, courtesy of John Q. Taxpayer!), and will be directly linked to the federal agencies both that regulate them, and that enforce those regulations. Remind you of an old parable? Something about two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner?

Sounds like Ford’s about to get a taste of what it’s like to be John Q..

The Economy, Part I: What the Fuck Happened?!

The world is full of idiots. It’s possible you already knew this. If you’ve read any of these columns, you certainly know I already knew this. Nope, nothing new here. Idiots are all around us- definitely all around me- and for the most part their mindlessness, short-sightedness and minimal, two dimensional thinking-on-life-support is to be simply tolerated and ignored, their irrelevant opinions left to pass unobstructed through our ears, much as the wind does through Matt Damon’s.

But every now and again, one stumbles across some gem of pure idiocy so inane, so intellectually vacuous, that a thinking man cannot help but feel the grinding of it on his nerves. The only thing worse is if he hears it over and over again. Of course right now, as you may have noticed, the U.S. economy is having a bit of a hiccup, and when that happens, repetitious idiocy knows no bounds, especially for those of us who watch the news.

And it’s not just normal, standard variety idiocy either. No, it’s that extra special blend you get when you mix one part panic, one part anger, two hundred ninety-eight parts I-don’t-know-what-I’m-talking-about and one large cup of maybe-this-will-make-me-sound-smart.

So today, I mean to shatter it all. Today I will identify the idiocy, debunk it, correct it, and write a column that will probably be really, really long. By the time you finish reading it, you will understand the basics of our economy, why it’s currently as fucked as a billy goat in Georgia, know how to correct it, and possibly fall asleep.

Now the first piece of idiocy I’m thoroughly sick of hearing, is perhaps the most pervasive. I hear it everywhere on talk shows, in newspapers, on TV talking head shows, even from the poor fellow at the bar three weeks ago who sat and cheered haplessly for the Baltimore Ravens, as the Great and Mighty PITTSBURGH STEELERS!!! [cue choir of angels] marched past them for the third time this season, and onward toward their destiny of winning their sixth Superbowl ring and claiming their rightful place as the single greatest team in the history of the game of football, forever and ever, or at least until the Cowboys or the Niners pull off another one. This particular jewel of ignorance goes as follows:

“George W. Bush singlehandedly wrecked this economy.”

Bullshit.

I’m no fan of W.. The man is a fuck-up to the Nth degree, who lacks any concept of governmental restraint, the necessity of borders, the proper role of the military, or the function of the veto pen. But this isn’t his bag, at least not solely. He certainly didn’t help matters any, but no one man, not even a president, makes or breaks the U.S. economy. What impact he does have is seldom good, and is not always felt right away. Such is abundantly evident in the recent bursting of the housing market bubble, which is at the root of this entire economic quagmire.

Here’s how you make a seemingly vibrant housing market fall apart overnight:

First, you have someone go to take out a mortgage loan that he clearly cannot afford to pay back. Next, you have a loan officer for a bank or lending institution, whose income is dependent on the commissions he receives from writing good loans, write one up for the guy who can’t pay it back. Then you have a bank agree to loan the money to the man who can’t pay it back. After that, you’ll need an outside entity to buy that bad debt, the one that won’t be paid back, an take it off the bank’s hands at their own expense. That entity must then bundle numerous mortgages into a single note- bad loans mixed indiscriminately in with the good- a mortgage backed security, which they sell like a bond to an investment firm (those Wall Street guys of whose oh-so-evil ways we are constantly reminded) at a rate of interest slightly lower than what they themselves are getting from the loans. Mr. Wall Street is buying these securities with his investors’ money (foreign investors, often as not), and paying them back a return slightly lower than his own.

So everybody turns a profit, and everybody’s happy. For the moment.

But sooner or later, the guy who couldn’t afford his mortgage loan is going to default. This is inevitable. If he’s the only one who does, it’s no big deal. But if thousands of people default, or go into bankruptcy, or have to renegotiate their loans for a substantially lower amount of money, then the shit hits the fan. Houses get foreclosed, leaving the debt holder with a property which they need to get rid of as quickly as possible, which means selling cheaper, which devalues not only that home, but all the homes around it. When property values in general go down, those securities go right in the toilet, and every single person along that chain gets crunched.

“But Whiskey!” you may be crying out in shock and disgust, “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard! Risking all that money on a guy who can’t afford his mortgage loan... why, it’s financial suicide for everyone involved! How could all of those people possibly do something that asinine?!”

Glad you asked. Actually the recipe for all of this is quite simple: Instant boondoggle, just add Federal Government.

Let’s travel back to a magical time called the seventies. In the seventies, bad clothes were in style, gas lines were long, the Orioles actually played in the World Series, and I was born. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Community Reinvestment Act. In a nutshell, banks were given a CRA rating based on how many mortgage loans they wrote in low income neighborhoods in which said banks did business. The thing is, residents of low income neighborhoods tend to be, well, low income. This means that the majority of them, perhaps a vast majority, will be bad credit risks and/or lack the income necessary to qualify for a mortgage loan. That’s not to say that a bank can’t still provide needed services in those areas. People can still take advantage of checking accounts, interest bearing savings accounts, maybe CODs and shit (I’m really not an expert on banking services). But the majority of applicants for mortgages will not qualify.

The other thing, though, is that residents of low income neighborhoods tend to be, well, black. And naturally, cries of discrimination and racism were everywhere. Hand the keys to Congress and the White House over to a bunch of post-Kennedy era Democrats, and you can rest assured they’re going to do something about it, even if that something is wholly unprofitable and serves the purposes of absolutely no one involved, save for their own ability to say “Hey look, everybody! We did something!”

The CRA contained no direct punitive action, such as fines or criminal charges, for banks who didn’t comply sufficiently. Instead, a bank’s CRA compliance record was looked at by regulatory agencies (namely the Federal Reserve and FDIC) and taken into account when deciding whether to allow banks to go through with things like acquisitions, mergers, and opening new branches.

Fast forward to the nineties, and the Clinton administration. This was the first time the CRA was really given teeth. The administration clamped harder than ever on mergers and acquisitions, and also expanded the Act so that it was also used in deciding whether to allow banks to go into other fields, such as securities and insurance.

Now of course, forcing a bank to make bad loans will do nothing except put that bank out of business, in which case no one gets a loan from them. Enter the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. Haven’t heard of them? Perhaps you’d know them better by their nicknames: Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.

Formed long before all of this, Fannie and Freddie were Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs), which meant that while they were private sector companies, they enjoyed certain perks from the Federal Government that no one else did; mainly, a direct line of credit to the Federal Reserve, and exemptions from certain lending regulations to which everyone else had to comply. There were unofficial perks as well. The big one was that, although it was never actually in their charters, there was always a sort of wink-&-a-nudge understanding that the Government would guarantee their loans in full, and therefore they would never go under. The perfect cash cow.

Their business was securitizing mortgages. They bundled them into securities and sold them to investment firms like AIG, Bear Sterns, and so on. Their stock price was high, and profits were through the roof. They had, and still have, most of the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee, and most notably their chairmen (Rep. Barney Frank, D-MA, and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT), so thoroughly in their pocket that members of regulatory agencies have been brought before the committees and excoriated, slandered, called everything but a child of God, for so much as noticing that Fannie or Freddie’s books didn’t add up. But they didn’t.

To make matters even worse, during this same period, the Clinton administration eased regulations on the GSEs for buying up high risk mortgages, and put pressure on them to do more of just that. This is how the now infamous subprime mortgage market kicked into full gear, aided by the fact that the same sort of governmental idiocy continued unimpeded during the presidency of George W. Bush, and his naive vision of an “ownership society.”

You see, once you get to this point, the question for a bank making a loan isn’t so much “Is this person a good risk?” as “Can we sell this loan off to Fannie or Freddie?” And since the answer was usually “yes,” you saw a precipitous rise in high risk loans, especially Adjustable Rate Mortgages (the ones where they offer a low teaser rate at first, to get idiots to borrow more money, then jack the rate up a few years later). The loan officer? Hey, what the hell, right? If the bank will go for it, then he can write shit loans all day and roll in commissions. And the homebuyer gets to live in a house far nicer than he could ever really afford. For a while.

But then the ARM rates change, the defaults begin, and the foreclosures go up. Mortgage backed securities tank. Financial institutions fall. Bear Sterns has to run to the feds for a bailout, and many others follow (more on that later). The once mighty Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. disintegrates altogether. Fannie & Freddie stock tumbles more than 90% in a year. Both are fully taken over by the feds.

Most important though is this: the mortgage industry is the basis for all the rest of the money lending industry in America. Car loans, small business loans, credit cards. You name it. With the cash flow severely constricted, banks are lending less money. This is a huge problem, because Americans are addicted to debt.

Read that last sentence again. Americans are addicted to debt.

I said earlier that the bursting of the housing bubble is at the root of the economic quagmire, and it’s true. But America’s love affair with debt and deficit spending IS the root. The fact is, we want luxury, and we want it now. If we want it, we buy it, right then and there. If we can’t afford it, we charge it or finance it. We’ve grown accustomed to it, and living beyond our means has become the norm in our society. When this happens, the prices of goods and services will always adjust themselves accordingly, and soon things become too expensive to own without borrowing. Seriously, can anyone reading this now actually afford to walk into an auto dealership and pay cash for a new car? If so, please contact me. I’ll probably hit you up for some money.

But we did it to ourselves, folks. Bill Clinton and George Bush were both, in my estimation, egregious in their actions concerning Fannie, Freddie, and the mortgage industry. They did it solely for the sake of their own legacies (“Hey ev’r’body! Look how many people became homeowners on mah wawtch! See what a great pres’dunt Ah wuz?). But really, they just jumped on board to ride the tsunami we made. Wanna know who’s really to blame for our economic woes? Look in the mirror, folks.

You did it. I did it. It’s all our fault.

The Economy, Part II: You Can't Get There From Here.

Right now, I want to make this abundantly clear: I am not an economist. Call me an economist, and I may very well punch you in the mouth.

I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to economists on the radio and TV. There are a few of I do respect, such as Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto, and Texas congressman Dr. Ron Paul (as a presidential candidate, Paul was an absolute charlatan, but his knowledge of economics and the history of the U.S. economy is first-rate). But all in all, most of them seem to be either political hacks spouting a party line, or dweebs who will simply say whatever to get a steady paying gig on a TV or radio show. Watch the weekend financial shows on Fox News, for instance. Invariably you’ll get a four person panel yelling at each other over what number 2+2 equals, and the only sum left unconsidered will be 4. I am thoroughly convinced that when forming their economic theories, economics and the economy are the furthest things from their minds.

Same goes for politicians. I seriously cannot fathom where they get their ideas about how to run the economy, or even the idea that they are capable of doing so at all. Precious few people on Capitol Hill have any real world, private sector business experience whatsoever. Of those who do, a curious amount seem to forget all of it when the cross inside the Beltway or land at Reagan National. Presidents? In the last twenty years, the only one who’s had any at all was W., and I have yet to find anything he touched that didn’t end in red ink.

As an aside, this is not some mystical effect that DC itself has on people, as some in the blogosphere like to claim. There are heroin dealers in the southeast quadrant who have mad business skills, and the bankrolls to prove it.

But here we are, in the middle of an economic clusterfuck, of which the feds were a principal catalyst, and these same bumbling boobs on the Hill are tripping over each other trying to figure out just how they’re going to charge in like white knights on their steeds and save us all. And as usual, their proposals all center around the absolute worst things they can: expanding the government, creating new bureaucracies, devaluing the dollar and taking on ever more debt. Not to mention aimlessly scattering shitloads of your money and mine all over the place.

The most obviously egregious example of this: bailouts. In the waning days of W., we saw the collapse of the housing market, Fannie and Freddie, the mortgage backed security, and all the Wall Street firms that were wrapped up in them. Now I don’t know what imbecile coined the phrase “too big to fail,” but the son of a bitch should be shot. Congress’s response to this mess, instead of letting companies who had made bad business decisions suffer the consequences and allowing the market to sort itself out (which it will anyway, one way or another), was to appropriate $750,000,000,000, turn it over to then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to be dispensed pretty much at his discretion among the begging banks and companies. The result? Tens of billions of dollars are unaccounted for. Missing. See all of those zeroes, folks? That’s your money and mine, and we don’t even know where it went. The feds don’t know, and the recipients won’t open their books.

But the bigger scam here is that whether we have a full accounting of the money or not, the truth is all that was done here was the subsidization of failure. These companies screwed up, plain and simple. And instead of cutting their losses, you and I were just forced to cut the losses for them. Same thing with the infamous bailouts of the “big three” auto makers. They engaged in abysmal business practices, compounded further by the incessant back breaking meddling of the United Auto Workers. We just got handed the bill, so the execs could keep screwing up and the UAW could continue bilking the industry. This is of course the real reason that bailout happened at all: the UAW is a major cash cow for the Democrats, and if the big three go under, they go under with it. Pelosi and Ried and company simply can’t allow that to happen, no matter what.

Worse yet, much of this is coming as the purchase of majority shares of stock in these companies by the government. For example, the feds are loaning $150,000,000,000 to bail out American International Group (AIG). They will then own roughly 80% of AIG stock. AIG is one of the biggest insurers in the world, and the government will own its controlling interest. This, my friends, is what we call nationalization of industry, and we’ve seen it’s dire results all over the world.

Currently, the hot topic is President Obama’s stimulus plan, which carries with it the single biggest price tag in the history of humankind. To really call it a “stimulus” though, one must seriously stretch one’s definition of the word. What it really is is the throwing of roughly a trillion dollars into random infrastructure projects, thousands of new government jobs, and of course, a who’s who of the Democrat party’s favorite special interest groups. Needless to say, I have a few problems with this.

The first problem is the number itself. A trillion. One trillion. $1,000,000,000,000. The bill hasn’t gotten out of the Senate yet, and the final number could be a bit less (or more), but it will be in that ballpark.

Once you get into numbers this large, it is difficult for the mind to really grasp the enormity of them. So let me give you an illustration: let’s pretend that our current calendar has always been as it is now, and started on January 1st, 0001. If you opened a business on Jan. 1 0001, and made one million dollars every single day, seven days a week, without interruption, you would make your one-trillionth dollar on November 5th, 2738. That’s adjusting for leap years and everything.

The biggest problem with such a huge price tag is this: we don’t have it. There isn’t enough money in all of the U.S. government’s possession to pull this off. Drastic increases in tax rates will be an eventual necessity, but even that can’t be done to raise the money right now, as it would bankrupt most businesses and households. So how can they do it? There are only two ways.

One is to borrow it, which will be done mostly from foreign nations. Obviously, this will drastically increase the national debt. Personally, I find it amusing how the Dems railed and ranted about W.’s love affair with deficit spending (of which he was certainly guilty), but the moment they manage to get full control of both congress and the White House, the very first move they make is to take deficit spending into hyperdrive. This is, bear in mind, on top of all the runaway spending already going on in Washington.

The other way is to simply have the Federal Reserve print it up, and this is where we see the potential for true disaster. The value of the U.S. dollar is already in the tank, and the most surefire way to tank it further is a sudden infusion of an unthinkable amount of new bills. Remember, there is no real basis for the dollar. It is not backed by gold or any other precious metal, or any tangible commodity. It is simple fiat currency, mere paper, the illusion of its value maintained only by force of law.

So if you add a fresh trillion clams into circulation, the result will be massive inflation, quite possibly as bad or worse than what occurred during the Carter administration. Prices on everything will rise to compensate for the newly expanded pool of cash. Peoples’ money will go even less far than it does right now.

If all that’s not enough, there’s still the matter of exactly where this money is being slated to go. President Obama made a point of stressing how it will be used to fund massive infrastructure projects all over the country. Turns out this is actually only a small fraction of the total expenditure, the vast majority being straight up pork barrel giveaways. But even if these projects were the entire bill, they still miss the point. Yes, roads and bridges and electrical grids and shit need maintaining. But they do not in and of themselves generate wealth or income for anyone. These things are a means to an end only, and focusing on them as an end in and of themselves will not yield any form of long term benefit to the economy.

Of course the idea here, equally foolhardy, is that having all sorts of new construction projects of this type will create lots and lots of jobs in the form of hiring people to do them. Not really. The companies and contractors who will do this work are already out there, and most of them are hurting right now. These projects may provide revenue to these companies, but in large part they will have to address their bottom line first and foremost. This will mean doing as much work with as few expenditures as possible, which means they won’t be hiring any more new workers than they absolutely have to. Even then, who are they going to hire? I’ll wager that very few of the people who didn’t want to do these jobs in the boom times are going to jump at them now, especially when part of this same bill includes massive expansions of spending on welfare, food stamps, and Unemployment. So let me get this straight: our goal is to create new jobs while simultaneously expanding our subsidization of shiftlessness? Did I miss something here?

And let’s be serious people, we all know what happens when infrastructure projects become their own end: they never end. Once the work is finished, some reason will have to found to continue it anyway. Too many peoples’ livelihoods will have become dependent upon them to let them end. After this, these projects will become endlessly vacuous money pits. For examples, one need look no further than the Big Dig in Boston, or the infamous PA Turnpike.

At best, we’re talking about a band-aid on a shotgun wound. At worst, it’s the San Sebastian Mines writ Federal.

”But Whiskey!” you perhaps cry out in despair, ”If all of this stimulus, from the President who simply must be the single smartest, greatest champion of goodness and light ever sent down from On High to save us all from our flawed and incompetent selves, is doomed to failure, then what are we going to do? And just what the hell is a Sebastian Bach Mine anyway?

Well, for the answer to that second question, read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

For the first, read my next column, where while equipped with nothing more than standard household items- such as basic math and common sense- I will jerry-rig a foolproof plan for restoring the wealth of our great nation, like an economic MacGyver saving us all just in the nick of time.

Whether anyone will follow the plan however, is still up in the air.

The Economy, Part III: Big Whiskey Solves all our Problems.

President Ronald Wilson Reagan, I think, put it best: “The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.” One need spend but a few minutes watching C-Span to find indelible proof of this.

As I said in my last column, I’m always amazed by the propensity of Congress and of presidents to come to the conclusion that they know better than anyone else how to manage the economy of a union consisting of fifty separate sovereign states each with its own unique interests and demographics, and that only through action on the part of the government will we be able to find happiness or prosperity. This despite the fact (or in some cases because of it) that precious few of them have any real background in or understanding of business or economics.

Right now, our illustrious and much fawned over new president is starting to look like a prime example of just this. For examples of how his policies reflect this, read my last column. He displayed his cluelessness even further last week, in a speech he gave to a retreat of Democrat congressmen in Williamsburg VA.

For the most part, the speech was standard Obama fare: lots of lofty, high sounding words which in and of themselves mean very little, coupled with a list of all the glorious wonders which his “stimulus” bill will accomplish, unaccompanied by anything resembling an explanation as to how. Also thrown into this particular diatribe was a healthy dose of scare tactics, warning about how our economy will go from “crisis” to “catastrophe” if we don’t immediately pass his bill, instead of wasting time paying attention to what’s in it. Of course an Obama speech just wouldn’t be right if he didn’t revive his campaign talking point about “the same failed policies” and so on.

But there was one particular line I found very interesting. When addressing complaints by his critics that this bill was less a stimulus and more a litany of runaway pork spending, he made this remark:

"What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending — that's the whole point! Seriously.”

Whoa. Damn. You heard it, people. The president of the United States of America does not know the difference between economic stimulus and simple spending.

We are in for an interesting four years.

In case any of you are are as bereft of common sense as Dear Leader, allow me to explain. What stimulates an economy is not the mere spending of money, but the generation of wealth. This is done by providing a product or service in exchange for pay. By default, this must come from the private business sector, since the government produces no tangible product or service for its revenue, but rather uses the threat of force to confiscate it from those who do. Anyone who has bills to pay knows that you cannot generate wealth by spending with reckless abandon. This is exactly what the president is proposing we do, and that we do it with money we don’t have.

That this money will be spent primarily on things which do little to even circulate money isn’t even the point (seriously, $50,000,000 for the National Endowment for the Arts? $650,000,000 for digital TV conversion coupons? Exactly how many jobs are these supposed to create? $335,000,000 for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases? Here’s a novel idea: don’t fuck strangers. Problem solved, disease prevented, and not a dime spent). The point is, no amount of government spending will cure what ails this economy.

Fortunately, I know what will. So does everyone else who has any concept of basic math and a lick of common sense, but that’s besides the point. It’s my column, so I’m going to play the sage here.

First things first: people, stop looking for the quick fix. A quick fix is exactly what our new economic illiterate in the White House and his supporters are hoping this stimulus will be. They are laboring under the erroneous assumption that simply spending money is the key to a vibrant economy. The truth is, we’ve had exactly this kind of “stimulus” going on for years. It’s called “easy credit”.

In reality, this market correction we are suffering through right now has been long in the making. It’s painful and highly unpleasant, but it really is what’s needed to make us well. Kinda like diarrhea.

Over the last twenty years or so, we’ve been maintaining the illusion that are economy is stronger than it’s really been and that we have more money than we really do, by borrowing money and financing purchases out the wazoo. This can’t go on forever, folks. We all know this to be true, but we really, really don’t want to believe it, and the chaos resulting from the credit crunch is proof. Sooner or later, the piper must be paid. On the micro level, it means that you are going to have to pay that mortgage, or that car note, or that credit card debt. On the macro level, we will have to make good on all the foreign debt we’ve accumulated. In both cases, the money to do so will eventually run out. When this happens, all hell breaks loose.

So the first thing people need to do to get the economy back on track is to start living within their means and, most importantly, revive the notion of saving money. Some people will tell you that saving money will do nothing for the economy, and might even hurt it. Those people fall into two categories: liars and fools. Building up a healthy stash of saved money is the key to being able to make purchases responsibly, which is ultimately just plain good business, for buyers and sellers alike. Savings are also the key to being able to weather new financial storms as they arise (and there will always be new storms). True, this will not immediately put cash into the hands of businesses, but think about this: which businesses do you think are most likely to survive our current recession, the one’s which have backup savings or those which spend every dime the get as soon as they get it? It’s all about the long term, people. No quick fixes.

Secondly, and this is a big one, we cannot allow our emotions to overcome our judgement. For instance, we’re all hearing sob stories about peoples’ homes going into foreclosure. These can be heartbreaking, but the simple fact is these things happen. Most often, they happen because people made stupid purchases they couldn’t afford. Their eyes were to big for their incomes, or maybe they just failed to think about how their lives may change in the future, such as a sudden job loss, or illness, or having kids (apparently those little drool & shit machines are really expensive). But the tug of heartstrings is not a valid basis for subsidizing bad debt. Nor is anything else. People who got in over their heads need to either find a way to honor their contracts or face the music. Same goes for businesses who make bad decisions: if they have to go under, they have to go under. Throwing taxpayer money at these problems may ease a few symptoms, but it will allow the disease to continue unabated. Then, when the money runs out...

As for the government, I think there is one major thing they need to do to enable the process of our economic recovery: get out of the goddamned way.

Eliminate the capital gains tax. This is a tax paid on any gain from the sale of non-inventory assets, such as stocks, bonds and property. In the investment world, this is huge, and that is the area from where most of the capital used in running every sector of the economy comes. When investors see a bigger return, the invest more . They do this, because they know it will make them money. Whatever portion government takes is wasted. Government does not invest, it merely spends. It does this because it is not dependent on wise investment to make money, relying instead on the threat of force to bilk the taxpayers. Also, on the micro, you-and-me level, this will enable us to keep 15% or more of the sale of a home or other piece of property, which we would otherwise have to fork over to Uncle Sam (the thief; not to be confused with Whiskey Sam, the sage-like and remarkably good looking last best hope for mankind).

Eliminate the income tax. The reason is simple: it is the interaction of individuals in pursuit of their own interests that generates and moves an economy. Confiscation of the fruits of their labor, invariably impedes it.

I get flack from some people on this one, but seriously, it’s the wise, and right, thing to do. This includes Social Security and Medicare, which need to be scrapped altogether. Seriously, look at your W2 from last year. How much could you have done with the thousands of dollars, money you worked for and rightfully earned, that the feds withheld from your pay? How much more easily would you have been able to pay your bills? How much more would you have had left over? How much would you have been able to save, for your future? Your children’s education? Your own education? A rainy day?

If nothing else, ask yourself this: are you better off having those five hundred-thirty-five dim bulbs in DC deciding where and how that money is spent, or would you and your family be better off deciding it for yourself?

And while you’re at it, contemplate this: Texas is one of the most financially sound states in the union right now, and it has no state income tax. California is so far in the hole they can’t see daylight, and it has the highest state income tax rate in the nation.

Eliminate business and corporate taxes, if for no other reason than the fact that businesses do not and can not actually pay taxes. In business, taxes are just another expense, one for which a business must compensate by adjusting their prices accordingly. It is the consumers, you and I, who actually pay these taxes.

“But Whiskey!” you might be wondering aloud, “If we get rid of all these taxes, how will the government have enough money to provide services for us?”

Well, there are duties, tariffs, excise taxes, for starters. You know those things specifically provided for just that purpose in the Constitution; that document that’s supposed to be the blueprint for how the federal government operates. But beyond that, here’s a really wild idea:

How about the federal government stop pissing away our money in the first place!

I’ve heard it said that we’re spending around $1,000,000,000 a day on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If so, we’re looking at close to $400,000,000,000 a year. That’s outrageous, especially when you take into account how much of it is pure waste (God bless the troops, and [insert patriotic sounding platitude here], but the DoD is as vacuous a money pit as any other department of the federal government). What’s even more outrageous? The fact that giveaway spending, specifically Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid/SCHIP and Unemployment/Welfare, are almost four times that (nearly $1,600,000,000,000 in 2007 alone). And that’s not to mention the myriad of other departments, bureaucracies, and good old fashioned pork that made up the $2,800,000,000,000 budget for that year (a year which, BTW, saw only $2.4 trillion in net receipts).

If the American citizen needs to live within his means, so does the government. Get rid of all this bullshit, and return tasks such as infrastructure, care for the elderly/sick/unfortunate/useless to the states, where they belong. Let Pennsylvania figure out how to deal with Pennsylvania’s concerns, Maryland to Maryland’s, Idaho to Idaho’s and so on. Says me, it is high time the states stood up and reclaimed our rights- and the responsibilities that come with them- as the sovereign peoples we are and of right ought to be, from the leviathan we’ve created inside the Beltway.

So all in all, the recipe for fixing the economy is to observe the math (I probably could have summed up this whole long assed column up in that one line, but what fun would that have been?). In truth, the math is like God: it is unmovable, and unbeatable. You can ignore it all you like, but when all is said and done, it will always have its way. The longer you try to put it off, the worse the hit will be when it does.

So that’s the economy. In a nutshell. Three columns worth of nutshell. You can thank me later.

Russia Predicts: "America will Die in 2010!" Big Whiskey Responds: "Huh. No Shit."

So the other day I came across an article which ran last week in The Wall Street Journal, featuring the theories of Russian political analyst Igor Panarin. Panarin, a “U.S. expert” and former KGB agent, has been predicting for the past decade that the United States will dissolve and cease to exist as we know it in the year 2010. From the article:

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar.

Moreover, he predicts that the end result of this will be the splitting of the U.S. into six territories. The west cost, basically from Utah on over, will be the California Republic, and likely be controlled by or under the influence of China. The midwestern states north of Oklahoma will be absorbed by Canada. The northern east coast will constitute Atlantic America, which he says will likely join the European Union. The southern states from New Mexico on east will form the Texas Republic, and be controlled by Mexico. Hawaii will be independent with heavy ties to Japan, and, of course, Alaska will run back into the waiting arms of Mother Russia.

Obviously, the specifics of this split are inherently flawed. In fact, they’re comically flawed. Mr. Panarin does appear to have a somewhat deficient understanding of demographics, and is certainly pig ignorant of the socio-political demographics of America. Utah under Chinese rule? Idaho? Please. Mexico takes over the southeast? Those states can pool more resources, money and manpower than all of Mexico combined. If anything, they might extend their southern border all the way to Guatemala. The northeast join the EU? The EU wouldn’t have them, and even if they would, the EU is in and of itself highly disorganized and its member states can’t seem to agree on anything. Besides, anyone who’s ever met a native Kentuckian or Virginian knows there’s not much chance of them becoming part of European society. As for Canada controlling the northern midwest, the states in question hold a population which exceeds Canada’s by nearly twenty million. Pretty tough to absorb that.

Even all of this notwithstanding, the real fault lines of dissent in America are not tied to geographic regions, as is more common in Europe. Rather, they fall primarily along the lines of race, socio-economic status, and ideology.

But while Panarin’s predictions for the future map of the continent may be based on some very faulty thinking, the idea of serious internal conflict, or even dissolution of the union as we know it, is far from impossible. At least I think as much. And Panarin’s ascribed reasons are pretty much spot on.

Riddle me this: what do you assume would happen if a society were to allow, willingly, unchecked masses of people from another society to move in on their turf? Moreover, let’s assume the newcomers’ society has a vastly different culture than that of the hosts’. One which has different values; has historically performed very poorly in the sciences, arts, and everything else; has never been able to create or maintain an economy beyond that of the third world; brings with it a great degree of criminality; and for a number of reasons both real and imaginary (but mostly imaginary), holds a deep seated resentment and even hostility toward the host society. To sauce things up even more, let’s assume a language barrier keeps most members of the two groups from communicating with each other.

What comes next? Do you suppose the two groups will learn to love each other and all get together and buy the world a Coke and sing Kumbaya and just become one big happy family? Or are you not an abject retard?

Obviously, the host society in this scenario is signing its own death warrant. Equally, and painfully, obvious is that America - and Europe, for that matter - is doing exactly this. Face it folks, our immigration situation is a problem (if any of you are wondering: yes, this is where Whiskey the eeeeevil racist rears his ugly head). We are importing Mexicans, Central/South Americans, and more to the tune of millions every year, and make no mistake about it, we’re not getting the cream of the crop.

”But Whiskey!” perhaps you gasp in self righteous disgust, “We’re a nation of immigrants! If it weren’t for this same kind of immigration from Europe, there wouldn’t even be an America!”

All true. Ask an Indian just how well that one worked out.

They key difference here is that despite the various quirks and misgivings between the Irish, Polish, English, Italians, or whatever, they all came from comparatively similar cultures, had similar values, and ultimately assimilated well into America’s European-based society. The mestizos flowing in from the south are not doing so, or at least not at a sufficient rate. More often than not, their loyalties lie with their country of birth, instead of their new chosen home. The cultures clash. The net result is balkanization, the necessary first step toward conflict.

Panarin next cites economic decline as the next ingredient in America’s suicide cocktail. Not hard to figure that one out. Piss poor countries where the people have little to lose are always more prone to violent civil wars and revolutions, usually of questionable wisdom. The same could hold true of Americans. If we were to find ourselves in a sufficiently shite situation, we may resort to truly radical and/or desperate measures. But the fact that we still have more to lose by doing so is, methinks, the primary reason we haven’t had any real civil wars or secessions during the last century or so (and likely won’t between now and 2010). The American economy has it’s ups and downs, as do all economies. People are freaking out about this little hiccup we’re experiencing right now, but this country has seen much worse, and will again. As of yet, Americans have always found a way to pull themselves back up. This, I believe, is where the distinctly American “Fuck you, I’ll do it myself” attitude truly shines at it brightest. When left to their own devices, people of sufficient will, vision and intellect will find a way to improve their lot in life. Comparatively, America has these types of people in droves. When interacting with each other, in pursuit of their own self interests, the invariable result is economy. Of course, that’s when they’re left to their own devices. Throw in an outside factor which offsets productivity (by devaluing currency, confiscating profits, etc.) and the whole landscape changes. Most commonly, these outside factors are called “government.” Look to places like Zimbabwe for a good example of what happens in this scenario.

But the real crux of the matter is the last item on Panarin’s list. Moral degradation. This is where the water gets muddy, since people have different ideas of exactly what moral degradation and even morality itself actually are, or at least we pretend we do.

But I guess a safe and universal way to put it would be this: Americans like to behave badly. It’s one trait we do share with the rest of the world. We like to drive in ways that endanger everyone around us. We like to hurt people of whom we disapprove. We like to fornicate without paying any mind to the children we beget as a result. We like to buy things we know we can’t afford, with money we don’t have. The list goes on.

In short, we like to pursue immediate gratification with no regard for the consequences. But sooner or later those consequences have to be faced, the piper must be paid. And when the check bounces, bad things follow. A great example would be the housing and credit market crunches we’re seeing right now. A whole litany of people from high risk home buyers to unscrupulous lenders to crooked politicians to Wall street traders saw a get-rich-quick scheme in the field of bad mortgages, and when they didn’t get paid all hell broke loose.

More on that later.

So again, while I highly doubt Igor Panarin’s theory of the inevitable demise of America will come true next year, it’s still food for thought. What can be done about any of the pitfalls he (and I) cited? Beats me.

Personally, I suggest you pop open a cold Sam Adams, and join me in watching the freakshow unfold.

Wall Street Journal story on Igor Panarin

The American Voter, and why he Sucks

Voting. It’s the most basic, fundamental right of each and every American citizen, and no one, no matter what, should ever be denied that right. To do so would be a travesty, under any circumstances. This is what I have been told, over and over again, by teachers, activists, and countless talking heads on the boobtube. In response, I offer to them this immortal quote from General A.C. McAuliffe at the Battle of the Bulge:

”Nuts!”

I for one (and maybe only one), truly believe that what this nation really needs is fewer voters. Our electoral system, and indeed our very democratic republic, are plagued by unqualified fools who genuinely have no business exerting any influence whatsoever on the governmental goings-on in this country. Allowing the shiftless, the criminal, and above all the stupid to vote for anything more than dog catcher is not a sign of how enlightened a society we are. Just the opposite: it shows that we are actually backward enough to let the inmates run the asylum.

I think we seriously need to raise the bar of qualifications for voting rights. In the early days of this country, voting was limited to land-owning white males. I’m not suggesting we take it that far, but simply managing to breathe for eighteen uninterrupted years just doesn’t cut it. And so, I, being one who believes in providing solutions to the problems about which I complain, offer you now my three point list of (what should be) qualifications for voting.

1) Only taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

In the days when only white land-owners could vote, it was done that way because those were the only people thought to have a genuine stake in the outcome of elections. This of course was demonstrably false. Female and non-white land owners were still prohibited from voting, and people who owned no land still have some stake in how the land on which they lived was controlled.

But even though the execution was massively flawed, the basic premise was still accurate: only those who have an actual stake in the political process should have any say in its workings. Transposed to the modern day, this means taxpayers. Their pockets are picked incessantly by their federal, state and local governments. The money taken is redistributed and spent at the whim of any number of politicians and bureaucrats, with precious little say left to those from whom it was confiscated. Not only do we have almost no say in how our tax money is spent, we don’t even have much in how much is taken in the first place. The confiscating party determines the rate at which we are taxed, which means they effectively have total control of our money (btw, ever hear a politician say shit like “we can’t afford a tax cut!”? Notice they never ask whether you or I can afford an increase?)

But all that’s a problem of who we’re voting for. The problem where the voter himself comes in is that far too many of them aren’t actually paying any taxes, and are even on the receiving end of the money being lifted from our paychecks. Think I’m over exaggerating? We heard a whole screaming lot over the last few years about how G.W. Bush’s tax cuts gave the largest breaks to the richest 1% of Americans. Naturally, we envision fat CEOs in three-piece suits laughing at us while they light Cuban cigars with hundred-dollar bills. But here’s what they didn’t mention: that 1%, pays nearly 40% of the nation’s tax burden. What else didn’t they mention? That 1% is anyone making $388,806 and up. Don’t get me wrong, $400 grand is hardly a sum I’d turn down, but it’s far from the filthy rich jet set we’re left to imagine.

As for the rest of the pie, anyone making $65,000 or more is in the top 25%, and anyone making more than $31,988 is in the top 50%, which pays 97% of all income taxes in this country. For those of you who flunked basic math, that means that an entire half of all wage earners are chipping in a measly 3% of all that money flowing into Washington. And let’s not forget those who are paying no taxes at all (welfare recipients come to mind). Yet this bottom half are the largest recipients of federal social and entitlement spending, which, like everything else, comes out of your pocket and mine. That these have the same vote that their taxpaying benefactors do is more than just wrong, it’s dumb. The reasons should be self evident. Alexander Tytler put it best:

”A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

2) Citizens of other countries have no business voting in the United States.

Sounds pretty obvious, right? I mean hell, if I were to say that I, a Pennsylvanian, had any right to vote for the governership of Indiana, folks would look at me like I was nuts. And it would be even more ridiculous of me to claim any rightful say in the presidential elections of Mexico or El Salvador, right? Of course it would. These are all sovereign entities, and the course of their governance should be determined by their citizens alone. The same holds true for the United States.

But still there is a massive push to register illegal aliens to vote here. The usual suspects are to blame: parts of the Agriculture industry, labor unions (who are selling out their fool members by doing this), Democrats, some Republicans, and race-hustler groups such as La Raza. Basically, anyone who thinks they can benefit from an unrestricted flow of third worlders into this country; and the rest of us be damned.

Now I’m not fixing to get into the immigration debate in depth here today. Those of you who know me already know my stance on it, and the rest of you can probably guess. My only point here and now is that these are citizens of Mexico, or Nicaragua, or Ecuador, or wherethehellever, and they should be working to shape and better their own governments to their liking, not interfering with ours. Moreover, I am one who firmly believes that it is the individuals that make the society, not the other way around. A nation is, for better or for worse, what its citizens make of it. If a nation is a third world hellhole, it is that way because its people, whether by design or incompetence, made it that way, or at least allowed it. So why would we want those shaping ours?

3) Stupid people shouldn’t vote.

Now this of course is a tough one, because more than the other two combined, this one has the potential to wipe out huge swaths of the voting public (part of the reason I like it). I think that some sort of standard should be applied to make sure that the people who are shaping our political landscape have at least some basic idea of what it is they are shaping (or what the hell they are doing). I’m not suggesting we give out an IQ test at the polls. It would be pointless. I’ve known people with amazing IQs and analytical abilities who are nonetheless dumber than rocks. But I reckon a simple questionnaire, designed to demonstrate a basic knowledge of U.S. history, government, and constitution would be appropriate.

Questions of minutia will not be necessary. Things like “The Alien & Sedition Acts were signed by which president?” or “What is meant by the term bicameral legislature?” would not be on my exam*. No, just a few simple points designed to weed out the truly clueless. I’d even make it multiple choice. Here are a few ideas:

The top position in the Executive branch is
a)President b)Majority Whip c)Chief Justice d)Head Muthafucka In Charge, biotch!

The legislature is comprised of the Senate and the
a)Circuit Court b)Congress c) The House of Representatives d) Da House of Representin’!

The words “We hold these truths to be self-evident” are found in what part of the U.S. Constitution?
a)The Preamble b)The Bill Of Rights c)Article 1 Section A d)That’s the Declaration of Independence, dumbass!

The last four (4) words of the U.S. National Anthem are
Land of the Free b)Home of the Brave c)O Say, can you See? d)Gentlemen, start your engines!

See? Simple shit.

Seriously though, stupid or uninformed people in voting booths are possibly the single greatest threat to our democratic Republic. And they have the power to cancel your vote.

*PS-
For those of you who don’t know, the answers are ”John Adams”, and “legislature of two houses”, respectively.

Breakdown of tax burden vs. income, via Kiplinger.com

A Day of Firsts, Part 2

My current happiness for my fellow Americans in DC, in the wake of today's reversal of the District's thirty-year-old, unconstitutional gun ban, is dampened somewhat by my disappointment on behalf of my fellow Americans in Louisiana, ala another decision of the Supreme Court, which was rendered yesterday. Apparently believing themselves to be a super-sovereign legislative council, the court ruled that the state of Louisiana has no right to enact or execute its own laws regarding the sentencing of violent criminals if the high court doesn't approve of them.

The specific case in question was that of a New Orleans monster named Patrick Kennedy. In 2002, he brutally raped an eight-year-old girl (his stepdaughter, no less). A 300 pound ogre, Kennedy caused extensive internal injuries to the little girl: emergency surgery had to be performed to keep her from bleeding out.

He's not a murderer (by the grace of God and the skill of good doctors), but in Louisiana, people who rape children under the age of twelve can be sentenced to death. This sentence was handed down unanimously by the jury (not arbitrarily by a judge), and upheld on appeal by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

The appeal then went to the SCOTUS, where by a 5-4 vote the law was deemed unconstitutional, as a violation of the eighth amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).

Now I personally don't think it's excessive or cruel to execute inhuman animals who brutalize innocent defenseless children in this way. Neither did the legislature of Louisiana who passed the law. Neither did the governor who signed it. Neither did the jury who handed down the sentence. Neither, I suspect, do a majority of Louisianans (in the parts of Louisiana I've been to, which are considerable, you'd be hard pressed to find many who do). In all likelyhood, neither do you: put your own daughter, or niece, or neighbor's kid, in the shoes of this poor little girl and then tell me that "cruel" and "unusual" wouldn't be the very nicest words usable to describe the way you would make this worthless mongrel die.

But apparently, all of that means nothing if Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter and Kennedy hold a different opinion. Their basis for this ruling is nothing more than their personal opinion that the convicted rapist's crime just wasn't serious enough. They have no solid basis in the constitution to make this decision, or determine policy, for the sovereign state of Louisiana.

Governor Bobby Jindal agrees. He has vowed to "nullify" the Supreme Court's decision. That's some pretty ballsy talk, but I believe it is exactly the kind of talk we need (followed, of course, by action). The federal government as a whole, and the SCOTUS in particular, have been marching steadily down the road toward totalitarianism for a long time now, and the pace has quickened in recent years. Laws are passed and rulings made with little or no attention to the constitution upon which they are supposed to be based. This has been allowed both by a growing ignorance of the constitution among the public (I suggest you read it for yourself, link posted below) and by a generally weak and defeatist attitude; a simple acceptance of the falsehood that we are powerless subjects of an unassailable government. I for one, submit that this is bullshit. You can quote me on this:

The Supreme Court of the United States must be openly defied on this matter.

Jindal's plan is to push for new legislation which will alter the paradigm of the case and render the ruling moot. I could be wrong, but I can't see how this would ever work. The crime is what it is, and nothing will change that. Any new law will just be struck down again.

But that's only as long as the court's ruling is willfully observed. Ultimately, if Jindal wants to nullify this unlawful ruling, I think there is only one real course: execute Patrick Kennedy. If a date has been set, abide by it. If not, set one, and carry out the sentence in accordance with Louisiana law. Then, Bobby, face the Supreme Court, and extend your middle finger. This would doubtlessly cause repercussions, possibly including the use of force by the feds (not to mention nauseating amounts of televised melodrama). Hell if it comes to that, I might drive down to Baton Rouge and stand in front of the capitol to block them, hopefully in the company of many, many other like-minded fools.

Perhaps one of them would be Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama. In an unexpected fit of sense today, Obama, while being generally critical of the death penalty, opined:

"I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution."

And from his book, The Audacity of Hope (there's that damned buzzword again):

"While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment,"

Republican nominee John McCain also stepped his IQ up just enough to agree with me:

"[The Supreme Court's] ruling is an assault on law enforcement's efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime."

And finally, Bobby Jindal's assertion:

"One thing is clear, the five members of the court who issued the opinion do not share the same standards of decency as the people of Louisiana."

All too true. Decency has never been the concern of despots.

Louisiana Vows to Nullify Child-Rape Ruling, via Washington Times
What Patrick Kennedy actually did to this 8 year-old girl, via Michelle Malkin.com
Obama and McCain agree with Big Whiskey, via MSNBC
The Constitution of the United States of America, via Cornell University

A Day of Firsts, Part 1

It is a day of firsts, to be sure. The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the constitution immediately on the heels of sodomizing it; a state governor has vowed to nullify their decision; and, perhaps strangest of all, Barack Obama and Big Whiskey Sam agree on something.

Mark your calendar, because I doubt that will happen often.

On the upside of things, the SCOTUS ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, aka the DC Gun Ban case, came down today. As anyone who's carried on a conversation with me at all in the past year already knows, I've been following this one with great interest.

In 1976, the DC city council enacted a total (and totally unconstitutional) ban on all handgun ownership in the District, as well as draconian regulations on rifles and shotguns (must be kept unloaded, disassembled, and cannot be transported, even between rooms in the home). The net effect is a total gun ban in DC. The net result has been that decent, law-abiding citizens of the District have been left disarmed, defenseless and at the mercy of the most wretched, foul and subhuman filth among their criminal class. A group which, of course, remains heavily armed.

DC is one of the roughest cities in America, and possibly the world. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to take a tour of the Anacostia neighborhood any night they want. I don't recommend it, but you can. Violent crime is rampant, and the ban has done nothing to stem this. In fact, DC's violent crime rates have more than tripled since the ban took effect, rising even when national trends were showing a decline. The city's murder rate is extraordinary: it was the highest in the nation for fourteen of fifteen consecutive years (I believe of the last seventeen, but I can't remember the last year it was), and is six times the national average.

Obviously, this ban has had no deterring effect on crime in DC, and no effect whatsoever in terms of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. Excuses for this from ban supporters are varied, but invariably lame. "Too many guns are coming in from Virginia, because their gun laws are too lax" (yet while DC had 186 murders in 2006, Alexandria VA, which immediately borders it, had all of 7), "the gun lobby is keeping us from passing strong enough laws" (a total ban in effect for thirty-two years. How much stronger do you want?), etc. etc.. The real reason of course, is that criminals, by definition, don't obey laws. That includes gun control laws. Only the good people of the city are harmed by this ban. The thugs aren't even inconvenienced.

So as you may imagine, I was happy as a pig in slop when I heard a few months back that that the US Circuit Court of Appeals for DC had stated the obvious truth that the ban was an unconstitutional violation of the second amendment, and struck it down. Today, when I heard that the Supreme Court had upheld that ruling, I let out a triumphant "Fuck yeah!" and punched a dent in the roof of my truck (my hand still hurts).

Now understand, this ruling does not immediately overturn all gun control laws everywhere in the country. Indeed, most will remain in tact, though the case will be used by groups such as the National Rifle Association (of which I am a member) as a basis on which to challenge other gun control laws in court. I'm not sure how these suits will pan out, as they will be challenging the laws of the individual sovereign states. DC on the other hand, is a federal territory. This does raise one question in my mind: while the court's decision effectively kills the handgun ban and the restrictions on rifles/shotguns, it leaves DC's requirement of licensing weapons in tact. Since DC is a territory, and the constitution specifically gives legislative power over it to congress (Article I, section VIII), and since there is no provision for gun licensing in the constitution, I fail to see how that part could stand. For that matter, I can't see how a DC city council even exists or is in any way legitimate.

Perhaps my inability to understand that is merely evidence of the very limited nature of my intellect. But if that is the case, at least I can take comfort in the fact that at least one member of the Supreme Court still makes me look like a freakin' genius by comparison. In writing the dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens offered this little gem of pure ignorance, claiming that Justices Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, Alito and majority opinion author Scalia:

"...would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

Yes John, that's exactly what they did (you fucking dolt). Not only the second amendment, but the entire constitution is designed to limit the power of elected officials, most specifically congress, to regulate the lives of the citizenry. The whole document is a litany of restrictions on governmental power, as well as a detailed and narrow listing of the authorities and duties charged to the three branches thereof.

He went on to say that such evidence "is nowhere to be found." Really? What part of "...shall not be infringed" is beyond your ability to comprehend, John? These statements couldn't have been more ridiculous if he had said of the first amendment that no evidence existed that the Framers meant to limit the ability of elected officials who wish to regulate civilian speech.

But John's idiocy put aside, I'm very happy for my fellow Americans in Washington DC, especially those who place the safety of their homes and families above the edicts of a few morons and a crackhead, and have been secretly keeping private arms in their homes for self defense anyway. They need no longer fear reprisal from their elected officials (most of whom are afforded armed police protection). I harbor no delusions that the District will become a nice place to live any time soon, but it's always good to see a wrong of this nature righted, especially after all of this time.

Supreme Court Shoots Down DC Gun Ban, via CBS News