Amerika

Big strong things rarely get taken down, David-vs-Goliath style. They do tend to collapse from within.

First they lose integrity in the form of an idea that holds it all together, and then the middle becomes a vacuum, sucking in the periphery.

It happens so gradually that no one notices. Politeness keeps us from discussing the upsetting but unprovable, and you cannot prove a patterns exists — patterns appear in things, but aren’t things.

The new vision of our Western future, which we call Amerika, is a type of anarcho-totalitarianism. The people have nothing in common; they are ruled by a dogma of freedom and dissenters are ostracized willingly by the population. Commerce provides what culture and socialization used to.

However commerce, government and the average voter are really good at thinking a pay period ahead, or a fiscal quarter ahead, or even on a five-year plan. They’re terrible at historical scope beyond that.

We’re seeing the signs of the decline and starting to realize that our dogma of freedom is hiding a grim truth: this isn’t a growing society, but a dying one.

In December, the Los Angeles Times reported — very briefly — that from 2007 to 2008, life expectancy in the United States declined by 0.1 year. It should have been the lead story of every newspaper in the country with the largest possible headlines (‘LESS LIFE’). Did 9/11 reduce life expectancy this much? Of course not. Did World War II? Not in a visible way — American life expectancy rose during World War II. I can’t think any event in the last 100 years that made such a difference to Americans. The decline is even more newsworthy when you realize:

1. It is the continuation of trends. The yearly increase in life expectancy has been dropping for about the last 40 years.
2. Americans spend far more on health care than any other country. Meaning vast resources have been available to translate new discoveries into practice.
3. Americans spend far more on health research than any other country and should be the first to benefit from new discoveries.

– The Washington Post

One major sign of decline is that the indexes which suggest quality of life as a whole fall. These measure in aggregate things as diverse as infrastructure health, population genetic quality, hygiene, danger (including crime and law enforcement), pollution and suicide.

Although the number appears small so far, this is the beginning of a long steady decline, and that it happened at all given that technology is improving (as is, in theory, health care) suggests that an underlying issue blights the American prospect.

As if supporting that fact, the economy is collapsing inward — we got good at selling ourselves stuff, so we sold ourselves overpriced houses and then sold that debt, all on top of the disastrous dot-com bubble of 1998-2001 in which fantasy properties were overvalued.

Someone paid $588 million for MySpace, and recently sold it again for $45 million. Which was always the more likely figure? Now turn to homes: we’re selling them by location (not in the ghetto) which actually says very little about their value.

The U.S. economy is coming apart at the seams, and there are a whole lot of indications that things are about to get even worse. After a time of relative stability, the pace of job cuts is starting to pick up again, inflation is rising but paychecks are not, the U.S. housing crisis shows no signs of ending, millions of American families are drowning in debt and all of the recent polls show that the faith of the American people in our economy is eroding. – End of the American Dream

Across the board, signs of a massive economic downturn.

You only get a situation this disastrous when, for political reasons, you vastly overinflate the stated value of your economy and its products.

We did that, first with silly websites, then with financial instruments, then with houses. We sold ourselves overpriced crap and because the money was in motion, we assumed it was “valuable” because people seemed to want it.

All it took was a crack in the facade, and the whole wall came tumbling down. Shades of the 1930s.

And to make matters worse, May’s paltry job growth numbers were revised even farther downward, from the initial estimate of 54,000 to 25,000. Sadly, the record continues—the Obama recovery remains the weakest recovery of the post–World War II era. In past recessions, employment fully recovered within two to three years. Today, U.S. job growth is stopped dead in its tracks.

If you want a comparison of what job growth could look like, go back to the 1980s’ Reagan recovery. By the 20-month mark, the unemployment rate had dropped from 10.8 percent to 7.5 percent – a 3.3-point drop. In contrast, under Obama, the unemployment rate has risen a full percentage point to today’s 9.2 percent.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk puts the pace of recovery into perspective, noting that “The economy needs to add between 100,000 and 125,000 jobs per month to keep pace with population growth. Unemployment will rise if employers consistently create fewer jobs than this.” Unfortunately, that’s where we’re at today. And if the economy keeps up this trend, Americans can expect unemployment to remain permanently high. – The Heritage Network

This isn’t Obama’s fault; he has inherited all of the tomfoolery that went on post-Reagan.

America has permanently overvalued herself, and now is attempting a sleight-of-hand: replacing her population with a mixed third world labor pool, and hoping technology makes up the difference.

Reagan actually built up the value of the country itself through strong leadership, a strong military, and spending in areas that produced more technology, like space exploration and the military.

No one since then has had the wit. Bill Clinton correctly realized that if he spun the currency into fast motion, no one would have the brains to realize he is the author of the depression currently savaging us.

As of this writing, no one in the mass media has figured this out yet.

The “other” survey—of households rather than businesses—showed a seasonally adjusted employment decline of 545,000, the largest since September 2009. The Household Survey, which records race, showed that non-Hispanics bore the entire brunt of the June swoon:

• Total employment: down 545,000 (-0.39 percent)
• non-Hispanic employment: down 684,000 (-0.57 percent)
• Hispanic employment: up 139,000 (+0.69 percent)

Since the recession hit in December 2007 non-Hispanics have lost jobs at more than three-times the rate of Hispanics (-5.3 percent versus -1.7 percent.) And since the start of the “recovery” in June 2009 Hispanics have gained 416,000 jobs while non-Hispanics have lost 675,000 positions.

Step back further and the picture is still bleaker. Since January 2001 the number of non-Hispanics holding jobs has declined by 2.6 million, or by -2.1 percent. But over that same period Hispanic employment rose by 4.0 million, or a whopping 25.1 percent. – VDARE

America’s plan for a new economy: import impoverished Mexican indios, pay them next to nothing, cram them into apartments with a dozen other people, and work them hard while ignoring their deleterious effects on our free public services, especially healthcare.

Our current healthcare crisis is in fact the result of hospitals being gutted by constant traffic to their emergency rooms and care centers by people without healthcare coverage. Most of these people are speaking Spanish. That $20 lawn cutting job is now a $20 lawn cutting with a $100 health care cost raise attached.

In the meantime, this exodus of important labor has gutted Mexico, destabilized her politically, and created no small amount of resentment. Who really likes to leave home to go to a foreign land where they pay you pennies and then dispose of you like a used lawnmower?

America has new jobs being created, alright — in the unskilled or low skilled sectors. Fast food, construction, cleaning services and agriculture all need warm bodies. But these industries are selling to average consumers, not building new technologies that can be sold first to luxury consumers, then to middle class, then to the rest and then exported.

In the meantime, we have a huge boom in make-work jobs. On the unskilled level, there’s fast food, hair braiding, nail painting, selling cell phones and other tomfoolery. In the middle, we now have millions of government bureaucrats, the kept workers of the industries employed by them, the desk clerks in do-nothing jobs across the land, and those with “certifications” that are little more than memory tests.

Further, we’ve devalued college degrees — through affirmative action, grade inflation and other forms of dumbing down so everyone can play — to the point where all that an American college degree proves is that you managed to smoke pot for four years without dying.

People graduate college and find themselves behind those who raced out of high school, got certifications (that are nearly worthless), and piled on experience with a big corporation. Silly collegians.

Some days, news presents editors with a challenge to write a striking headline. With today’s story, there is almost too much striking news to choose from:

• Since March, the number of unemployed people has increased by 545,000!
• The share of adults working is at 58.2 percent, lower than any time during the recession!
• If job participation were still at 2009 levels, the unemployment rate would be more than 11%!
• The U.S. labor force just broke another distinct record: the longest average duration of unemployment ever

But for me, there’s only one candidate for worst news of the day. The number of people who dropped out of the labor force was 15-times higher than our net job creation. One-five. – The Atlantic

We have too many people in the labor force.

Baby Boomers liberalized our society so that women work too. Automatically halve whatever you hoped to earn, because now two people must be paid with the same amount of wealth.

That is because we cannot invent new wealth out of thin air, and simply having more people employed does not create wealth. In fact, it creates obligation. Some of that is repaid because these people keep that money in motion by buying stuff. But the consequence is devaluation of the money because it is less likely to represent actual value.

In addition to the Baby Boomers wrecking our society with their social policies, we expanded our entitlement payments from 0% in 1950 to over 50% in the current year. Our federal budget swelled, which created a lot of industries that are nothing more than parasites. They generate no wealth; they take.

Reagan put the economy back on track, and Bush I kept it in line; Clinton hosed everything by encouraging a financial free-for-all that rewarded people selling financial instruments to one another. Bush II was able to hold back the tide, but Obama cannot. We are seeing that not only is our currency worthless, but most of our jobs are, as well.

What is the actual value of a web designer? Maybe a few thousand in “new” US dollars… until that money isn’t there. Then they just buy a software package to do it and produce a less expert result, but not so much less expert that it’s non-functional.

Web designer is one of those roles that is certification based, and involves very little actual skill or knowledge, so we have produced millions of them and they all don’t understand why they are no longer valued.

Again, we are not directing our efforts at income production, only at spreading the wealth around inside our sanctum. We assume that our currency is worth something.

On Friday, America’s final space shuttle shall rocket into orbit for the last time. After returning home, the four shuttles which once conquered the heavens will battle rust as they gather dust adjacent to airports or in little-visited museums.

Euphemistically the reasons for eradicating one of the greatest accomplishments in recorded history are budgetary. Political malaise and shortsightedness exist under the pretense that the funds might be better spent on the ground.

This is a blatantly transparent argument considering that everything from integrated circuits, cell phones, MP3 players, GPS devices, MRIs, LEDs, smoke detectors, cordless tools, joystick controllers, cochlear implants, scratch-resistant eyeglasses, the Internet, flame-retardant clothing, freeze-dried foods, TV satellite dishes, and a host of other utilities both common and technical are direct fruits of the labors spent in creating and maintaining a space fleet. – Taki’s Magazine

Space exploration and the military are not only worthy things in their own right, but also form massive R&D silos that dump money into cutting edge technology. Much of this tech is too risky for business to take it on yet, because business operates on a relatively short-term return on investment cycle. Not so government.

Instead, we are focusing on political objectives, like the late Soviet Union and post-Revolutionary France. We are working toward all these things that sound good to voters — equality, liberty, fraternity, multiculturalism, compassion, inclusiveness, green certifications — that have nothing to do with how productive we are, or inventing new technology, or even keeping our economy and infrastructure healthy.

We are now in the neo-Soviet zone of fulfilling political objectives at the expense of practical ones.

The federal government is seeking applicants who are mentally ill, mentally retarded or both to work as lawyers in the Justice Department. Specifically, a job announcement for “up to 10 experienced attorneys for the position of Trial Attorney in the Voting Section in Washington, D.C.” contains the following language:

The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine. Applicants who meet the qualification requirements and are able to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation are encouraged to identify targeted disabilities in response to the questions in the Avue application system seeking that information.

– Overlawyered

When I’m facing a judge and jury, I know I want my lawyer to be mentally retarded. That way, as I complete my perp walk at the prison gates, I’ll know I did the right thing morally.

The grim truth: socialism has misled people into thinking they can impose an insane political agenda in place of imposing a creative, constructive and forward-thinking agenda of technological, economic and social progress.

By social progress, I mean people who don’t need supervising, not more cheap labor that needs constant police vigilance to reign in their high rate of neglect, criminality and intoxication. (Cheap labor, whatever its ethnic origin, tends to have the same types of problems. These may vary between population, but the fact remains that the more cheap labor you import, the more of these problems you import.)

And who’s to blame? The voters. They love to delude themselves, and then blame their leaders for the greed that led the average voter to approve decades of pointless, illusory, insane and irrational policies.

So when we look at what is happening in Athens, we have the eerie sensation that this might be London a few weeks or months hence.

We have seen our future, and it riots.

In fact, Greece is only a particularly acute or virulent case of the sickness that afflicts much of the Western world. Greece’s overall debt is higher, no doubt, and its deficit larger, than those of other countries, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Like most of the rest of us, the Greeks have been living beyond their means.

When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting “Thieves! Thieves!”, its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults. It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and no doubt many of them are thieves; yet their real crime was not stealing but offering a substantial proportion of the Greek population a standard of living that was economically unjustified, maintained for a time by borrowing, and in the long run unsustainable, in return for votes. The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators. – The Australian

The people as a group will vote for anything they think is “free” and sounds good to them. In particular, those on the bottom (and decadent spoiled children of the wealthier ones) vote for whatever entitlements they can find.

In actual impact, this is no different than adopting a Socialist or Communist government. A society that does such a thing converts itself from a wealth-producing society, to a wealth-redistributing one, and as a result it paralyzes its community, smashes any incentive to improve itself, and as a result stagnates.

The solution the politicians and proles always come up with — like clockwork — is to increase the taxes on the rich. Since the dawn of time, this has not worked. The “rich,” by which they mean people earning enough money to someday escape both wage slavery and the ghetto, figure out they’re about to get screwed and they vacate en masse.

For this reason, our conservatives are rejecting the idea of raising taxes. They want us to not raise the debt ceiling also. The reason is simple: government is wasting the money it takes in, and that’s why we’re in debt.

As in Greece, the problem is not that taxes are not high enough. It’s that the economy has converted to one where a majority of the citizens receive benefits, paralyzing the economy and social structure so that no one is creating wealth.

Eventually, the currency gets devalued and the whole Ponzi scheme collapses.

The GOP is the party of small government and low taxes.

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What school of economic thought — Keynesian, supply-side or monetarist — says raising taxes in a slumping economy is the recipe for a return to prosperity? There is no such school.

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What of the charge that the Republican House is holding America hostage, blackmailing the nation with a suicidal threat to throw us all into national default if it does not get its way?

This smear is the precise opposite of the truth.

The Republican Party has not said it will refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It has an obligation to do so, and will.

The House has simply said it will not accept new taxes on a nation whose fiscal crisis comes from overspending. – Real Clear Politics

Crowdism, or a group of individuals creating a false reality to benefit those individuals at the expense of others, afflicts all dying civilizations.

Ours in the West — Europe, USA, Canada and Australia — is experiencing the same kind of death. It’s a cultural death, where we drop the notion of a mission we share in common.

The result is that everyone exploits the system and invents a fanciful political dogma to “justify” what they are doing as “altruism,” when really it’s selfishness.

As a result of that excuse, people go ahead and lie, cheat and steal — politely, of course — and in time sabotage the foundations of the civilization. It collapses outward toward its center.

This has been happening for some time, but has really picked up since the 1960s, when the children of WWII acted out their parents’ entitlement fantasies in a new political radicalism.

We either reverse this progress now, or become like other fallen civilizations, a vast mass of unruly people governed by tyrants, living in filth and corruption, investing nothing in the future.