US Politics

berbatrick said:
Recessions are the fundamental breaks in history where you get to re-order society. Capital is disorganised and people are angry and willing to go in various directions.
FDR seized his chance and his legacy lasted half a century. Obama flubbed his and his legislative legacy was over in 2 years.
It is critical for me that Bernie is in control during the next one -- because the other example is that Hitler seized his (similar) moment too.
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Interesting observation.
 
berbatrick said:
Recessions are the fundamental breaks in history where you get to re-order society. Capital is disorganised and people are angry and willing to go in various directions.
FDR seized his chance and his legacy lasted half a century. Obama flubbed his and his legislative legacy was over in 2 years.
It is critical for me that Bernie is in control during the next one -- because the other example is that Hitler seized his (similar) moment too.
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The Hitler scenario is overplayed. I've used comparisons to Trump in his use of emotion and scapegoating.
But for a repeat of his success you need everyone to be at 'zero'. No Hope.

The more realistic scenario is a civil war situation.
We are a diverse people.
 
Red Dreams said:
The Hitler scenario is overplayed. I've used comparisons to Trump in his use of emotion and scapegoating.
But for a repeat of his success you need everyone to be at 'zero'. No Hope.

The more realistic scenario is a civil war situation.
We are a diverse people.
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You think Americans could weather another deep recession and not reach that lack of hope?
 
DiseaseOfTheAge said:
You think Americans could weather another deep recession and not reach that lack of hope?
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If the Dems are stupid enough to nominate another corporate stooge, I see a revolution within the Democratic party.
2018 was the first sign of anger against the establishment.

I still think Biden will not win the nomination, which can only mean Bernie or Warren.

So I still hold out some hope.
 
Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out

Newly unearthed documents reveal how an environmental-minded socialite became an ardent nativist whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda.



But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.

She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.

An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.
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Her twin passions, protecting natural habitats and helping women prevent unplanned pregnancies, merged over time into a single goal of preserving the environment by discouraging offspring altogether. “The unwanted child is not the problem,” she would later write, “but, rather, the wanted one that society, for diverse cultural reasons, demands.”
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By the end of the year, after more than two decades working with Planned Parenthood, she had resigned from the group. Two years later, her top aide delivered a stern message to Mr. Zeidenstein, the new president of the Population Council: Family planning and famine relief were a waste of money. Instead, “the U.S. should seal its border” with Mexico. According to a memo by Mr. Zeidenstein, Mrs. May’s views were becoming so radicalized that “one got the impression” she favored compulsory sterilization to limit birthrates in developing countries.
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The Environmental Fund pushed mainstream concerns about overpopulation to the fringe and stoked opposition to immigration. Virginia Abernethy, a self-described “ethnic separatist” who became involved in the group, now called Population-Environment Balance, said in an interview that Mrs. May was “the first person who comes to mind” of those who pushed the population-control movement to oppose immigration.

“She funded a great deal of the original research,” said Ms. Abernethy, a retired Vanderbilt University professor who spoke last year at a white nationalist conference headlined by the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Through her work with the fund, the heiress struck up a close friendship with Garrett Hardin, a microbiologist and ecologist who argued that the modern welfare state encouraged overpopulation and ecological depletion. When Mrs. May sent him news clippings about riots in Los Angeles, Mr. Hardin responded that the media was finally seeing that “maybe the blacks are less than saintly” and lamented “the predominant Latinity of apprehended criminals” where he lived in California.

“The hope of the future,” he said, “lies in the intelligent practice of discrimination.”
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A young cousin asked whether her causes weren’t discriminatory, racist or, as Mrs. May recalled in a letter, “the one that really puts my teeth on edge … ‘elitist.’”

She produced a five-page typed response, rife with comments about Filipinos “pouring” into Hawaii and “Orientals and Indians” sneaking across “long stretches of unmanned border” with Canada.

She compared medical science’s success in reducing infant mortality rates to veterinarians prolonging the lives “of useless cattle.” Birthrates had dropped in a few areas, she noted, and millions died of starvation every year, but population growth rates continued to climb. “Even wars no longer make much dent; during 11 years of conflict, both North and South Vietnam showed a net increase in population,” she wrote.

Legal and illegal immigration led to overpopulation, she said, “the root cause of unemployment, inflation, urban sprawl, highway (and skyway) congestion, shortages of all sorts (not the least of which is energy), vanishing farmland, environmental deterioration and civil unrest.”

Mrs. May’s Laurel Foundation gave $5,000 to the Institute for Western Values to distribute a translation of the French dystopian novel “The Camp of the Saints” in the United States. The book, about an invasion of poor immigrants overwhelming Europe, is an essential text in white-nationalist circles and has often been cited by the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
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But environmental groups were “doomed to failure,” she wrote in her nonprofit application to the I.R.S., until they recognized “that the degradation of our natural world results ultimately from the press of human numbers.” In addition to stricter immigration, she supported “the study of human intelligence as it relates to schools and the workplace” and “research in the area of human differences,”
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Colcom has funded not only FAIR and other large organizations Mrs. May helped create, but also lesser-known ones like the American Immigration Control Foundation, which has likened immigration to a “military conquest” with the effect of “substantially replacing the native population”; the International Services Assistance Fund, whose focus is promoting chemical sterilization of women around the world; and VDare, a website that regularly publishes white nationalists
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The main groups cultivated new allies in Congress, none stronger than Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, whose office served as an unofficial Capitol Hill headquarters for the restrictionist movement. Mr. Sessions, who later became attorney general in the Trump administration, hired as a spokesman Stephen Miller, who would give a keynote address at a Center for Immigration Studies event years later, in 2015, before joining the Trump campaign.
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Mrs. May, who had pancreatic cancer, died at her home in 2005, at age 76. Her death was ruled a suicide by asphyxiation.

She left land on the island of Maui to the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii. Her Gulfstream jet was sold for $26.7 million. She was remembered in the local press for her devotion to the environment and family planning, her support of Pittsburgh’s aviary and her quixotic bequest to a donkey sanctuary in Devon, England.
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In 2005, $215 million from her family trust poured into the foundation’s coffers, along with another $30 million from her personal estate. As her affairs were wound up, another $176 million transferred from her estate in 2006.

In all, since Mrs. May’s death, the anti-immigration groups have received $180 million. The market value of Colcom’s assets is $500 million, more than she bequeathed it in the first place.
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Short rant about eco-fascism in the aftermath of Charlottesville

Also the posted excerpt here on immigration is some history I didn't know much about: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/229082/undocumented-by-aviva-chomsky/9780807001677/
 
2cents said:
Oh for those heady days, when every day brought a new “Boom!”, “this is big”, or “Trump is finished.”
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Generic #Resistance member number 1038 tells me that his sauces say that THIS TIME (big if true) Drumpf is finished

#ItsMuellerTime, Impeachment is coming, Thank You FBI, #Resist,

Donate $100 to impeach Trump to my patreon
#RandomHashtagtoOwnTrump
 



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Great news! He was the youngest of the brothers too!

Burn in hell you facist cnut.
 
Have CNN and the New York Times done their gushing eulogies of Koch yet?
 
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