Get your own Free Home PageThe African Growth and Opportunity Act, just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and touted by the White House, is like most of what Congress does in the trade area -- fraud. A better title would be the Multinational Corporations Exploitation of Africa Act.
If passed by the Senate and put into effect, it would hurt Africans and cost Americans more jobs.
The notion that the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa can be solved by increased exports is nonsense. That part of Africa suffers devasting poverty precisely because its natural resources have been exported for decades -- to the benefit of multinational corporations, not to the benefit of the African people.
Normally, when a country possesses great natural resources and fertile land, it becomes prosperous. Many African nations possess both, but where are the African millionaires who made fortunes in diamonds, cobalt, copper, coffee, gold and titanium? They don't exist. The only Africans who prospered were those few the multinationals or colonial powers bribed in order to loot the resources, or the dictators who looted their own people. Other than the dictators, the ``African'' millionaires are in Europe and North America, and they are all Snow Whites.
I don't pretend to know the answers to Africa's problems, but I do know that the answer is not to make it easier for multinational corporations to continue to loot their resources and in addition set up sweatshops and phony fronts in order to evade American trade laws. That's what the doublespeak African Growth and Opportunity Act would do.
No nation has ever or can ever prosper by exporting nothing more than cheap labor and its own natural resources at extremely low prices. No nation can prosper by accepting international loans and foreign aid that is directed toward building palaces and huge facilities it doesn't need, or to finance armaments. No nation can prosper if its resources are owned or controlled by foreigners.
I suspect that what Africa needs rather than free-trade agreements are, first of all, leaders committed to an Africa-for-Africans policy. Next it needs the same kind of infrastructure that we needed in North America before we could prosper -- clean water, sanitary sewers, good farm-to-market roads, a stable currency, education facilities, a developed agricultural base designed to feed Africans and, most of all, ownership of its own resources.
Free enterprise isn't always the answer at all times. If our forefathers had allowed British corporations to buy up all the land and valuable resources in North America, we would have been in the same boat as the Africans. Our country prospered because early Americans were determined to own the nation's resources -- even if they had to take them at gunpoint.
As American citizens, we should have sympathy and compassion for Africa and lend our support to those African leaders trying to help their own people. We also need to realize that what is good for Africa may not necessarily be good for the banks and multinational corporations that tend to control our own government. In some cases, for example, Africans may have to confiscate and nationalize some foreign-owned companies in order to get control of their own destinies.
We should not let ourselves be duped yet again that the only ``good'' African leaders are those whom London, New York and Washington approve of. The record shows those will be the ones who have sold out their own people. The African people are no threat to us nor have they done us any wrong. Americans should be glad to support an Africa-for-Africans policy.
There's not much intelligent that anyone can say about a random event, tragic or otherwise. And not much intelligent is said.
The problem with the news business is that, on most days, there isn't any. That's true if you define news as something important. Obviously, those of us in the news business don't define news as something important. If we did, we would be printing blank pages lots of days and broadcasting test patterns.
So we have a considerably broader definition of news, which includes routine reports of routine events, chit-chat, gossip, miscellaneous records, amusements, random tragedies, accidents, crimes, lawsuits, rewrites of press releases from various and assorted special-interest groups and factions, and weather and sports. That's OK. We aspire to be chatty companions. You just have to remember not to take us as seriously as we sometimes take ourselves. We can be as pompous and self-righteous as any lawyer. I keep writing ``we'' because there's no point in pretending that print journalists are somehow all that different from broadcast journalists. We're all in the same racket and pretty much follow the same patterns and practices. It has grown to the point that we ought to refer to ourselves as the news-entertainment industry.
But what we do least well is put events into perspective, and, thanks to the proliferation of news outlets and the expansion of broadcast time, we're getting worse instead of better on that point. If my dog could chew on his food as long as television can chew on a one-time event in its ever-desperate attempt to fill air time, I would have to buy only four or five cans a year.
Two mean kids shooting some other kids, as occurred recently in Arkansas, is not all that unusual. In any population at any time, a small percentage of people will turn out bad or get their brains wired wrong. Some kids are killers. That's true today. It was true in the past. It will be true in the future.
What's new is to have an army from the news media descend on a random event and talk about it for days. There's not much intelligent that anyone can say about a random event, tragic or otherwise. And not much intelligent is said. Most often random events are meaningless, not indicative of anything; they reveal no trends or underlying problems; and they are not preventable. Like tornadoes, these events just happen. Bad luck.
I don't know of any more intelligent words to write about random death than those Larry McMurtry put into the mouth of Capt. Gus McCrae in his American masterpiece, Lonesome Dove. At the grave of a boy who died of snakebite, Gus says, ``Life is short, shorter for some than for others. Now we best move on to Montana.''
There is nothing we can do about death, and there is no rational explanation for why life is shorter for some than for others. It is. And we just have to move on. But television, once it has video, is darn reluctant to move on.
I recently had begun to speculate that it may well be impossible to have a self-governing republic and television. It may be that it is impossible to have a rational society and television -- the distortion of reality being so great and so pervasive and so persistent that it seems to make everyone a little bit crazy.
We Americans may be writing a new page in human history by being the first great nation to fall because of the invention of a home appliance. It seems demeaning to think of Howard Stern and Jerry Springer as Vandals -- demeaning to the Vandals, that is -- but, by golly, they may be the Vandals of our Rome. Somehow Attila the Hun seems more dignified than Howard the Vulgar or Jerry the Exploiter.
We may yet survive, though. The national electrical grid could go down and stay down long enough for people to regain their sanity. A new virus could develop that would cause advertisers to develop good taste. The newest generation could slay the television dragon by saying the magic word, ``Boring.''
Tax time. Let's get it right this year, people. If you don't like the tax code, blame the people who wrote it (Congress), not the people stuck with enforcing it (the Internal Revenue Service).
Which is worse, someone who creates a scapegoat to escape responsibility for his or her own doings or someone dumb enough to beat up on the scapegoat? Maybe it's six of one and a half-dozen of the other. Anyway, Congress regularly makes the IRS the scapegoat to hide its own dirty work.
As my regular readers know well, I didn't learn much from the math courses I took, but I did learn something from a library book on math I checked out and read. You can't solve a problem until you define it correctly.
The tax code is voluminous because Congress made it voluminous. The tax code is complex because Congress made it complex. And taxes are high because Congress made them high. The IRS is to the tax code what law-enforcement officers are to the statute books. They don't write the laws. They just try to enforce them.
In a world that has a fair amount of uncertainties, there are two things you can count on: You will never have low taxes and big government. The two are mutually exclusive. You will never have a simple tax code with a corrupt Congress. The reason the tax code is both voluminous and complex is because it contains so many political payoffs.
For a working man or woman whose only income is his or her paycheck, the tax code is already simple, if not fair. It gets complex for businesses and for people with multiple sources of income. Keep that in mind when you listen to the politicians state that they want to simplify the tax code.
Also keep in mind that they've had the opportunity and authority to do that since the 16th Amendment, which authorizes an income tax, was ratified in 1913. Instead, they have made it more complex.
The key to taxes is not the tax code but the authorization and appropriations process. Government does not create wealth. A private economy can exist without a government; a government cannot exist without a private economy from which to suck wealth. Government, in economic terms, is parasitic. It has to take before it can spend.
Therefore it is foolish to expect a government that spends $1.7 trillion per year to lower taxes. How is it going to do that? The only way to lower taxes is to reduce government spending. As long as spending stays high and goes higher, you will get smoke and mirrors but no real tax cuts. For as far out into the future as they project, both Republican and Democratic plans call for annual increases in government spending.
Therefore, they may with fanfare lower a rate and quietly eliminate a deduction or they may cut a tax here while increasing a tax there. Everything we earn, save, touch, eat, drink, smoke, wear, live in, drive or use is taxed multiple times. Even our deaths are taxed. Under no circumstances can you expect a genuine tax cut as long as government budgets increase instead of shrink.
The American people are already -- well, to avoid a vulgarity, let me say, committed to an unpleasant future by the politicians they so carelessly elected to office. The twentysomething generation ought to rouse itself and become a ferociously active force in American politics. It is the future of that generation that has been ruined by irresponsible government spending.
Those of us who crossed the geezer line (my colleagues constantly remind me that 60 makes you a geezer) will be out of here before the worst effects of past economic sins fall like plagues and hurricanes on those who are now young but will suffer when they are most vulnerable.
Better, you young ones, to use that energy now to change your own destiny. All futures are constructed in the present.
Reaction to my column stating that Puerto Ricans have earned the right to choose statehood if that's what they want has amused me. Many are worried that it may be difficult to assimilate the Puerto Ricans.
Assimilate them into what? Oh, my beloved conservatives, with your stout hearts and equally stout heads, the America you want to preserve is long gone, and you haven't even missed it.
For 50 years, the U.S. government has preached, practiced and propagandized internationalism. The official doctrine of government schools is multiculturalism, not assimilation, and internationalism, not patriotism. About the only thing graduates of government schools seem to know about America is that the founders of the country owned slaves and shot Indians.
The U.S. government admits 1 million legal immigrants a year while another quarter of a million enter illegally, and you are worried about assimilating people who have been American citizens for most of this century.
The U.S. government has enacted trade laws that sacrifice both American sovereignty and American jobs, handed out hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign governments, deployed troops in 100 foreign countries -- not one of which is a threat to the United States -- and you are worried about assimilating people who have served and died in defense of the United States.
Do you not realize that the standard practice of domestic politics is the same as it was when the Radical Republicans first took office under Abraham Lincoln: to pit race against race, ethnic group against ethnic group, so the ruling elite can hold onto power?
Do you not yet realize that the modern Republican Party is what the Soviet KGB referred to as ``political prophylaxis,'' a phony opposition into which conservatives can be drawn and controlled?
Who passed the North American Free Trade Agreement? Republicans. Who passed the bill authorizing the World Trade Organization? Republicans. Who is blocking campaign-finance reform? Republicans. Who stopped Congress from blocking the Mexican bailout? Republicans. Who have prevented reform of the environmental laws that represent an assault against the last pillar of liberty -- private property rights? Republicans. Who saved the Legal Services Corp., which Ronald Reagan tried to kill? Republicans. Who have refused to stop the atrocity of abortion? Republicans. Who have allowed the man in the White House to waste lives and treasure on United Nations peacekeeping missions? Republicans. Who are allowing the armed forces to be depleted? Republicans. Who allows foreign aid to sail through with virtually no debate? Republicans. Who whitewashed the Waco massacre? Republicans. Who have confirmed the majority of the president's radical appointments to the bench? Republicans. Who twisted public education into an unrecognizeable mess? Republicans. Who have been a combination doormat and step-and-fetch-it for the big corporations? Republicans. Who treated Pat Buchanan, the one pro-American Republican candidate, like a fascist? His fellow Republicans. Who said, ``(expletive) the conservatives. Who else are they going to vote for?'' James Baker, a Republican.
Conservatives said that if we elect a Republican president, our ideas can become law. They elected Republican presidents and got the same policy they got under Democrats. Then they said if we had a Republican majority in Congress, our ideas would get enacted. They got a Republican majority in Congress and got the same policy they got when Democrats were in power.
Heck, I'm a slow learner myself, but I'm not permanently slow. If the America you love is a constitutional republic committed to independence and to the safety and welfare of Americans, your disagreement is not with brown or black people or people with foreign accents. It's with folks who look like you and talk like you and were elected by you.
A wire service writer recently described the M-1 Carbine, a civilian version of which was used in the Arkansas shooting, as ``powerful.''
Such misstatements of fact give shooters a big laugh and further undermine the credibility of journalism. Nevertheless, the ignorance of firearms, which is regularly demonstrated by reporters and editorial writers, is understandable, if not excusable.
With the ending of the draft, most younger Americans today have no military experience. That was often the first exposure urban Americans had to firearms. And, of course, children born and growing up in urban areas rarely have the opportunity, as we country kids did, to use firearms. I received my first rifle at the age of 8.
Nevertheless, journalists have an obligation to get the facts straight, and there are plenty of reference works. God knows they would not call the National Rifle Association. It is the oldest American organization promoting marksmanship and sports shooting, but the anti-gunners have apparently intimidated many journalists into thinking, like Pavlov's dog, that the NRA is the ``gun lobby.''
OK, they can get a catalog from Krause Publications, 700 E. State St., Iola, Wis. 54990-0001. Krause publishes many fine reference works on firearms and cartridges (as well as other subjects), and because Handgun Control, the premier anti-rights, brainwashing organization, is probably unaware of Krause's existence, the reporters won't have to worry that they'll be frowned upon for using that organization's resources.
The M-1 Carbine, far from being powerful or potent, as it was described, is underpowered, barely more than a pistol cartridge. Power, of course, is determined by the bullet, not the gun. Power is measured by muzzle energy. For the M-1 Carbine, commercial load, that is 965 foot-pounds. For comparison, the .44 magnum pistol cartridge (Dirty Harry's favorite) generates more than 1,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
My 30-30 deer rifle can generate more than 1,800 foot-pounds of energy. In other words, the lowest-powered sports rifle generally considered acceptable for deer hunting is twice as powerful as the M-1 Carbine described by the reporter as ``potent and powerful.''
Many civilians have the false impression that any arm associated with the military is ``high-powered.'' In fact, most infantry weapons are medium-powered. Military designers are more interested in durability, rate of fire and portability of ammunition than in high power.
I don't know how many times I've read reports describing the bullet used in the AK-47 and SKS as ``high powered'' or ``high velocity.'' It is neither. The bullet -- the 7.62 x 39mm -- generates only about 1,400 foot pounds of energy, and its velocity (depending on the load) runs between 2,300 and 2,500 feet per second. That is less energy than my 30-30 generates and less velocity if I use a 100-grain bullet, which can travel at 2,600 feet per second.
Journalists also have been duped by politicians into calling semi-automatic rifles assault weapons. They are not. The factual definition of an assault rifle is quite simple: It is a rifle that has a selector switch so that it can be fired either semi-automatically (one shot per pull of the trigger) or automatically. To my knowledge, none of the semi-automatics banned under the false label of assault weapons is an assault weapon.
Besides, sale of any weapon that fires automatically has been regulated since 1934, available only from special dealers to purchasers who obtain a special license and pay a transfer tax to the U.S. Treasury.
People can have any opinion they want on the subject of guns, but journalists have an obligation to get the facts straight. If they are going to write about firearms, they have an obligation to learn something about them.
Would you say that killing 1 million people would qualify as mass murder? What would you say to a person who stood by and watched 575,000 children being killed?
Well, look in a mirror and say it.
Our government, in our name, with our consent, has killed 1 million Iraqis, including 575,000 children. As these beautiful months of spring slip by, 4,500 Iraqi children will die during each one of them. They will die in ill-equipped hospitals, where doctors weep in frustration. They will die in the arms of their parents. They will all die because of us.
None of these is a statistic. They are individual human beings -- grandmothers, grandfathers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. People with names. People with personalities. People who once had hopes and dreams. Each one was a unique creation of God, and each one was destroyed on the pagan altar of politics by a U.S. government that has the obscene hypocrisy to assert that it is a champion of human rights.
All of these people have died and continue to die because of an economic embargo maintained against Iraq for seven years at the insistence of the United States and Great Britain. It is a failed policy if, in fact, its purpose was to remove the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. He is in a stronger position now than he was seven years ago.
But even if it had not failed, by what filthy standard does anyone rationalize the killing of children to remove a political figure disliked by another set of political figures?
No American, after this atrocity, can ever again criticize any German who lived during the Nazi era. We are standing aside while our government, in our name, commits mass murder against innocent people. But we are worse than any German. There is no dictatorship to keep us from speaking out. Americans are imprisoned only by their own fears and guarded by their own ignorance.
Until we force our government to lift the embargo against Iraq, we are accessories before and after the fact of a crime against humanity -- the cold-blooded killing of innocent civilians.
I was pleased to see that thousands of Americans took to the streets to demonstrate against bombing Iraq when it was being considered. If necessary, we should take to the streets to end this embargo.
There is a difference between Cuba and Iraq. The U.S. government does not allow American companies to do business in Cuba. Cuba, however, is free to do business with any other country in the world. The economic hardships in Cuba (mild compared with Iraq's) are the result of Fidel Castro's incompetence in the economic sphere and his theft of the fruit of people's labor. They are not the result of the American economic sanctions that apply only to our own people.
In the case of Iraq, however, armed forces prevent Iraq from trading with any other country. The kind of embargo imposed on Iraq is an act of war.
The casualty figures in Iraq are not coming from Saddam Hussein. They are coming from the United Nations and from independent humanitarian organizations. American Christians who have defied the embargo and taken in medical supplies have been threatened by the U.S. government with ruinous fines and prison sentences. Pretty bad hombres, these mild-mannered Christians, who want to save a child the U.S. government wants to kill.
This embargo against Iraq is wrong -- morally, legally, tactically and strategically. It amounts to murderous stupidity. It is killing innocent people. It amounts to seizure of a sovereign state by an international gang. It has not done what the U.S. government stated it was intended to do. It is ruining America's credibility and alliances. It is a stain on our honor and on our souls.
Multiculturalism, as Dr. Sam Francis has pointed out, is a tactic, not a legitimate field of study. So, too, is political correctness.
If you have the stomach for it and can plow through the theorizing of the old and the new left, you discover that they think the road to seizing political power is to overthrow the culture. That's the tactical purpose of multiculturalism. The tactical purpose of political correctness is to silence the truth in order to protect the lie.
Recently when I wrote a mild-mannered and polite column about my own Anglo-Celtic culture, I got the usual blasts from the multiculturalists. OK, let's not be polite. Let's deal in stone-cold, naked facts.
The progress of the human race is entirely the result of Asian, Mediterranean and European people. Period. When the Europeans landed in North America, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand and sub-Sahara Africa, it was as if they had embarked in a time machine and landed in the New Stone Age. There is not one intellectual advance that can be found in any of those pre-European civilizations that was not already millennia old in Europe, the Mediterranean and Asian civilizations.
In most cases, the Europeans found no archaeological evidence of anything beyond a Stone Age existence; where they did, the ruins or structures reflected a primitive level of culture. When the Europeans confronted the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century, those people, despite their empires, had not discovered the wheel, much less any kind of more advanced technology. That's why they so easily collapsed.
Let me give you a list of inventions or achievements that date before the birth of Christ and the places where they originated: the potter's wheel, 6500 B.C., Asia Minor; woven cloth, 5000 B.C., Mesopotamia; copper-working, 4500 B.C., Yugoslavia; wheeled vehicles and gold mining, 3500 B.C., Sumer, Syria and Mesopotamia; irrigation, 3150 B.C., Egypt; silk production, 2640 B.C., China; ox-drawn plow, 2500 B.C., Egypt; cotton production, 2500 B.C., India; musical notation, 1300 B.C., Syria; geographical and star charts, 570 B.C., Miletus; gun powder, 221 B.C., China; mechanical lifting device, 200 B.C., Greece; stone bridge, 100 B.C., Rome; wheel bearings, 100 B.C., Europe; seed-planting machine, 85 B.C., China; and rotary-winnowing machine, 40 B.C., China.
By the time the Europeans discovered the primitive cultures of the Western Hemisphere, sub-Sahara Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the Europeans, Mediterranean and Asian people already had mastered and invented the following:
Paper-making, rotary fan, wheelbarrow, watermill, iron-chain suspension bridge, windmill, porcelain, moldboard plow, canal locks, rocket, paper mill, magnifying glass, gun/cannon, 360-degree compass, belt-driven spinning wheel, eyeglasses, metal cannon, automatic striking clock, mechanical clock, wire, perspective views, printing press and cast-iron pipe. All that was done before Columbus sailed from Spain. Before the Jamestown settlement in 1607, the following had been invented: pocket watch, spirally grooved rifle barrel, portable shotgun, artificial limbs, the pistol, screwdriver, wrench, enamel, dredger, graphite pencil, screw-cutting machine and ornamental lathe, time bomb, hosiery-knitting machine, flush toilet, compound microscope and wind-powered sawmill.
And all of the above is far from a complete list of the accomplishments of the people of Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe. To my knowledge the list of original inventions and new scientific discoveries of other peoples prior to their contact with Mediterranean-Europeans or Asians is: zero. If I've overlooked one or two items, please let me know.
Multiculturalism is a political tactic but otherwise a load of horse apples.
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