Economics of Racism 101
Machiavellian Greed-speak: Rodrigio Borgia Would Have Been Proud
by Jacqueline S. Homan
I would really love to believe that most people in the US are not virulent racists to the point of clamoring for genocide, by poverty if all other crimes against humanity fail. But the following diatribe posted in response to a USA Today article tells me differently, unfortunately:
Tribes look to $3B share of stimulus funds
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-05-12-indianstimulus_N.htm
Bad Acid (5 friends, send message) wrote: 5/13/2009 11:43:08 AM
No WE didn't kill anybody. And none of THEM got murdered. This &^%$ is like giving black people a check today because a black person was a slave 150 years ago. Life goes on. Stop giving hand outs and force people to integrate into society and make their own way.
In terms of what happened to native americans back in the day, that is life. That is what has happened since the beginning of time, across the globe. The world expands and the population expands. Indians were probabaly just as scared as the Eurpeans, and just as racist. The only difference is that Europeans had the numbers and were an advanced society. Bye bye indians.
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I'm supposed to feel guilty for slavery and running off Indians when my ancestors came over in the early 1900's. Give me a break. Of all the Irish and Chinese that came over penniless and were persecuted, how come they don't still have problems like many African American and Native American leaders claim their people have? Don't tell me it's racism keeping them down, because it's not. Everyone had the opportunity to start with nothing, build a community, and have everyone come out on top, and I'm thankful many African American, Native American communities did just that. For the rest of the slackers, no more bailouts, no more of our money. We got ours, they can buck up and get theirs.
I don’t know whether to give this socially imbecilic miscreant an A+ for his/her mastery of the economics of racism and classism, or nominate them for the Machiavellian of the Year Award.
Sadly, the “IGMFY” (I’ve Got Mine F**k You) cultural value of Roman imperialism which evolved into fascism later on has permeated and contaminated almost everyone on all levels. Yet it is this attribute of “superior” Western civilization that was anything BUT civilized. It is part of the cultural assimilation that actually penetrated Indian society — to the detriment of Indian culture and life.
Here’s how Indians were treated compared to every other racial minority in America:
Kill off 90-95% of an entire race of people just because they were different in order to legitimize the theft of what was theirs by right. Invade, conquer and kill (instead of peacefully and fairly trade with and learn from) the Indians, and justify it by claiming that those unique people with red skin somehow deserved it for being “savages.” [Luckily the Wamopanoag people weren’t savage enough to let the Puritans — America's first welfare cases — starve to death their first winter here].
Then use the strong arm of the law to physically exclude the Indians by forcing them into concentration camps (reservations) at gunpoint located in the most inhospitable places (except those lands where gold is later rumored to have been “discovered”). Force them into the state religion of Christianity, steal their children and sending them to Christian boarding schools far away from home in order to kill their heritage and culture, and force them into a dominant European culture ruled by greed… yet discriminate against them for jobs and deny them legal rights while telling them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps even though they have no boots.
Lets see…what other “gifts” were bestowed upon the First People and what other “favors” has white America done for them?
How about Holocaust denial for starters. Nobody was murdered eh? Well, lets see. What happened to all of the Iroquois peoples, the members of the Six Nations? Do you think they just amicably exchanged warm good-bye’s with the European newcomers (who stole everything) and then boarded spacecrafts and flew to their new home on Sedna in the outer regions of the Kuiper Belt?
The Indians were used and manipulated into doing European colonists’ dirty work of warfare, sustaining far more casualties than the whites. But none of "them" were killed, right?
Ever hear of the Cherokee and their Trail Of Tears? The Trail of Tears is analogous to the forced death marches of Jews when the Allies were en route to liberate the “camps” and the Nazis went on the lam, but first sought to destroy the evidence of their crimes against humanity in attempts to evade justice.
In fact, here’s a clue Sherlock: the term “Final Solution” which means mass murder to every Jew, was not first uttered by Hitler and it was not first directed at Jews. It was said by General William Tecumseh Sherman and George A. Custer regarding Indian policy. It was said with respect to the Indians and their place in the Manifest Destiny that embodied western expansion. This expansion resulted in the elimination of the Indians such as the peaceful Cheyenne who were butchered in their village at Sand Creek before Custer got his long-overdue ass-whuppin’ by Lakota chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Sand Creek was for the Arapaho and Cheyenne and Wounded Knee for the Sioux is what Babi Yar was for Ukrainian Jews after Hitler’s rise to power.
Out of 103 Cheyenne killed at the Sand Creek massacre, 93 were unarmed women with small children and the elderly. The younger men were out hunting for buffalo to feed the people when the attack occurred.
The very act of forcing (using starvation policy such as the deliberate extinction of the buffalo) Indians onto reservations was no different than the Third Reich forcing Europe’s Jews into the sealed ghettos of Lodz, Minsk, Lublin, Krackow, and Warsaw.
Don’t tell me no one murdered Indians with the intent to wipe out every last one. Holocaust denier David Irving might by that tripe, but most people with an IQ above a houseplant know the truth. If you really buy that no one had the intent to do to the Indians what Hitler did to six million Jews, you could put that ditty to music and then we can all dance down the yellow brick road.
What else has western civilization given our Indian hosts who did not make European immigrants unwelcome until the settlers began stealing their food and killing them for it, and enslaving their women and children?
Europeans brought them disease, cruelty, vice, taught them avarice, and taught them how to make excuses for bad behavior — by setting the example, beginning with making excuses for genocide and then denying the American Holocaust just like the Nazis denied the Jewish Holocaust.
Those who came to the US after the Indians were starved into near extinction continue to benefit from unearned privilege that was paid for with the blood of this country’s First People who are still treated to this day as wards of the state. They were not even officially recognized as US citizens until 1924.
Their reservation land is controlled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is held in trust. There is no reciprocity between tribal law enforcement and non-native law enforcement. Since the land is held in trust, it cannot be used by the tribes to raise venture capital which would make industry and employment possible.
Ron His Horse is Thunder, great-grandson of Chief Sitting Bull. He is the president of the Sitting Bull tribal college and holds a juris doctorate degree. He is the Lakota tribal chairman on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation which stretches across the North and South Dakotas. He's happily married and is the father of two beautiful children (sorry, ladies...I know he's handsome and I am sure that his wife thinks so, too).
The Iroquois nations (from whom Jefferson and those other "founders" got the basic idea of representative government ) led by Chief Joseph Brant were Balkanized during Britain’s war against the French.Yet ironically it is the Indian who is called uncivilized and "savage as the wolf", a stereotype that persists to this day. Wolves mate for life, unlike most selfish white guys who unfairly get all the good jobs but won't marry and support all the poor and uninsured white women who have to fight tooth and nail to get a dime of child support.
The Iroquois model of directly accountable government and people free from the yoke of feudalism shaped the US Constitution. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were not the brainchilds of directly accountable government — chiefs of the Algonquin and Iroquois nations were.
Accountable government by consensus was the most effective government, and it was what the Indians had. Keeping rules simple minimized bureacracratic waste and social strife. In fact, Indian communities did not have wasteful government and social ills until they were forced to conform to white ways. They were also the first "green" communities: They didn't have problems with contaminated drinking water, sewage disposal problems, toxic Superfund clean-up sites, or overpopulation due to lack of contraception.
They were very efficient people. First People had been doing things that way for 25,000 years before the Europeans came to America. They must have been doing something right.
They're treated as if they’re incapable of self-determination while our “benevolent superior” government allows mining interests to continue contaminating the drinking water supplying the Indian reservations in South Dakota in order to "finish the job."
As to the idea of begrudging "welfare handouts" to reservation Indians who are poor and jobless, those meager crumbs of subsistence are treaty fulfillment obligations — not handouts.
What little bit of "welfare" they get, they're entitled to every cent of it. In fact, they get nowhere near what they were promised by the government in exchange for their lands, years of organized murder and brutality committed by the Bluecoats, and loss of their lands, their languages, and their culture. Sadly, they don't recieve enough to be able to live. Life expectancy due to the poverty on Pine Ridge is 47 years for women and 44 years for men. But oh well, that’s life, right?
Failed Impoundments, Poisoned Drinking Water, and Poverty is the Price of Don Blankenship's Wealth
“Anywhere you go, low cost electricity, the creation of energy, of jobs, of an economy, ultimately leads to an improvement in the environment. There is no place in the world that has a good environment where people live on two dollars a day with no electricity.” – Don Blankenship, Massey Energy CEO and President, in defense of mountaintop removal.
Apparently Don Blankenship didn’t get the memo: millions of poor Americans have to live like that right here in our own backyard. Over 16 million American households are without gas or electricity (or both) because their services were shut off after they’ve been priced out by skyrocketing utility companies’ rates. In northwestern Pennsylvania where I live, low-income electric utility customers are forced to pay an average of $175/mo for their electricity alone. Residential utility rates jumped by 41% in 2005 after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast. But the average person's income did not increase proportionately to withstand these unaffordable rates. Pennsylvania’s governor Ed Rendell signed Act 201 into law in November of 2004 allowing utility companies to shut off poor people for inability to pay, even in the dead of winter. Having your gas or electric shut off in the winter is a death sentence in Pennsylvania. And there isn’t “all this help out there” for the needy that people think there is.
So who is benefiting from this “cheap electricity”? It sure as hell isn’t America’s poor who’ve been priced out and had their utilities shut off.
Every American would certainly benefit from free/low-cost electricity, such as that derived from hydrogen proton membrane exchange fuel cell technology, solar and wind.
Don Blankenship also confuses the definition of free market capitalism with feudalism. Feudalism exists when a small handful of wealthy elites band together to keep other industries out of a region, which keeps out more good jobs for people – thus artificially creating an inflated and permanent underclass. This tactic has worked for greedy corporate interests to maintain a docile few middle class people. It whips them into complacency with an unjust status quo and a blind obedience to the agenda of the sociopathic elite. Rich men like Blankenship are nothing but social parasites that obtained their wealth and power by creating poverty and despair by design – on top of the ecological destruction left in their wake.
In a true free market, Americans would not be artificially held in debt peonage to utility monopolies and oil, natural gas, and coal cartels. In a true free market, Bruce DePalma’s “N-Machine” - device that produces free electricity - would have reached the mass market. Freedom from unaffordable utility rates would have lifted most of America’s poor out of poverty and fostered healthy and ecologically responsible economic growth in communities across the nation. But Bruce DePalma died under very suspicious circumstances within days before his N-Machine was ready for mass production with patents pending.
Don Blankenship holds himself up as a nice guy who gives out two toys and a turkey to select poor families in Mingo County, WV and Pike County, KY at Christmas. He calls this highly publicized $200,000 annual charity a “Christmas Extravaganza.” Blankenship was quoted as to having said he “wished there wasn’t a need for it, but there is.”
If Blankenship truly wished there wasn’t a pressing need to alleviate poverty in the southern coalfields of Appalachia’s poorest counties, he would not have helped to create that poverty to begin with by using his economic muscle to keep other businesses and industry out (thus keeping out jobs) and he would not have rendered hundreds of acres of properties uninhabitable and unusable that cannot be fully restored for a cost that runs into the tens of millions of dollars. His charity is nothing more than a high profile publicity stunt to make him look like he’s such a nice guy.
But this same “nice guy” thought nothing of verbally and physically abusing his former personal maid, Deborah K. May, whom he paid a paltry $16,000 a year (with no health and dental benefits). May was forced to quit her job due to the abuse she suffered at his hands after which Blankenship then tried to have her unemployment benefits denied on the grounds that she “voluntarily quit.” Maybe Blankenship really thinks he is being a nice guy. But “nice” compared to whom? The Burmese military? Idi Amin? Pol Pot? Foday Sankoh, the Taliban?
Massey Energy, under the direction and leadership of this “nice guy”, has poisoned the well water in communities throughout Logan, Boone, Mingo, and McDowell counties in West Virginia due to coal waste seepage into the groundwater. The majority of the citizens there cannot afford the luxury of bottled water; they’re hard pressed to put their next meal on the table. In areas such as Prenter, the well water is so contaminated that skin contact is inadvisable. But the people cannot afford to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking, let alone bathing and washing clothes. Blankenship bought off the West Virginia legal system to lawyer Massey’s way out of having to recompense West Virginians that have suffered because their soil and water supply was contaminated, rendering their property worthless and their health irreparably damaged. He thinks couple of toys and a turkey on Christmas is sufficient for giving back to the communities that his company has destroyed for the sake of wealth-grabbing and bleeding West Virginians dry. What a good Samaritan! (NOT!).
No one has a Constitutional or God-given right to get filthy rich at the expense of permanently destroying the natural resources of an entire region along with the lives of those who dwell there by ruining the drinking water and the soil so that food can’t be grown.
The toxic cocktail of heavy metals and chemicals in the coal slurry has been directly linked to abnormally high rates of birth defects, physical deformities, and developmental disabilities in children, diseases, cancer, and premature disability and death rates in Mingo County – the poorest county in the entire United States. Coincidently, Mingo County has a poverty rate close to 30% and has borne the brunt of the most mountaintop removal activity.
Mountaintop removal has not created good jobs – it has eliminated many good jobs and created an environmental disaster that makes the Exxon-Valdez fiasco look like small potatoes. Once mountains are blown up, they don’t grow back. The entire ecosystem of the eastern and southern United States is at peril if the “Mountain State” is turned into one big desolate and contaminated “Moonscape State”. America's "homegrown" poor from Detroit to Appalachia are living like those in 3rd World nations because of not having clean safe water or other life-sustaining utilities – forget the cheap electricity.
Jacqueline S. Homan,
Author: "Nothing You Can Possess" , "Classism For Dimwits" , and "Eyes of a Monster"
"Nothing You Can Possess"
by Jacqueline S. Homan
The following is an excerpt from "Nothing You Can Possess" and is copyrighted material. The author does not grant permission for reproduction or reprinting, in whole or in part:
"The world's richest and most powerful 130 families only need a global total of 500,000 peons to be kept alive to serve them as slaves in their New World Order utopia. There are plans openly discussed about UN troops being deployed here on American soil in the event of a state of emergency. The government medical intelligentsia has openly called for culling the US population by deliberate withholding of lifesaving medical care from those it deems "unworthy"; the old and the disabled. What do you think their plan is for the majority of 300 million Americans? The corporatocracy and the government they control, which in turn controls you, doesn't care about you. If you think you'll be spared, you're an idiot who ought to be arrested for possession of brains with intent to use."
(Jacqueline S. Homan, "Nothing You Can Possess", pp. 407) copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
STOP No-Bid Contracts and End Corporate Welfare Now!
If you really care about our troops in Iraq, then ask your Congresscritters why the health of our troops is being sacrificed for Haliburton/KBR profits - on YOUR tax dollars!!!!
Hooters a Sacrament; Nursing Moms a Sacrilege
<---If a pair of these are good enough to be seen in advertizements to sell crap like this-->
Then breasts are good enough to be seen in public doing this:
In an age of being inundated with all things sexual, constantly bombarded with images of practically naked girls in thong bikinis leaving nothing to the imagination at almost every beach, swimming pool, and water park; it is breastfeeding mothers who are criminalized and discriminated against.
Nursing moms and their babies are being unlawfully ejected from public places where women and children normally have every right to be.
The shrills who harass and abuse nursing moms in public claim that these moms are being "indecent" and shouldn't be seen. However, a nursing mom that looks like Angelina Jolie is not "indecent" according to these hypocrites.
They have threatened, bullied, shamed, humiliated, and coerced breastfeeding mothers (and their infants) into filthy toilet stalls, back allies, and cars - regardless of sweltering heat or bitter cold. Women discreetly nursing have been ejected off of airlines and evicted from restaurants by these sanctimonious asshats.
The irony is that these same "morally upright" people dictating control over mothers and babies concerning public breastfeeding are usually the same ones who are "pro-life" neocons. They have successfully gotten laws passed making obtaining contraceptives more difficult for women who seek to prevent unplanned pregnancies. Pharmacists can legally refuse to fill a prescription for Plan B for rape victims, as well as the Pill - based on religious and moral conviction.
But they're not really pro-life. They're pro-forced birth and they're anti-woman. Their position subordinates the human rights and civil liberties of women to fetuses. Under no other circumstance is any person forced by law to be a walking life support system for another human; for another human to live off of their bodily organs for 9 months. A parent cannot be legally forced to donate bone marrow or kidneys to already-born children - even in a life or death situation. A woman's uterus is no different. It is a part of her body.
But when a poor woman wants to donate her uterus to a fertilized egg, give birth, become a mother and provide the best means of nourishment for her baby after it's born; they not only want to deny her the right to publicly breastfeed, they also want to forcibly sterilize her if she's poor and unmarried so she doesn't have anymore babies.
Apparently, poor women don't deserve the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the form of support for their right to choose. That's a social class privilege reserved for the wealthy.
These nimrods want to restrict how, where, and when all mothers can feed their babies by denying the civil liberties of all nursing mothers. They're not satisfied with controlling women's wombs, they want to control women's breasts, too. They want to force all pregnant women to give birth, even if the woman conceived from rape.
When personal autonomy and control of women's bodies, in whole or in part, is taken away from women, that's slavery: it's taking ownership of the bodies and free choices of other people. All of this is couched in the name of morality, decency, and "class."
But none of these mother-bashers utter a Puritanical peep when images of women's breasts and scantily clad teenaged bodies are pimped out by "Big Media" and their corporate sponsors to sell everything from aspartame-laden beverages to sports cars, and from genetically engineered "diet" food to blockbuster movies to Viagra to high tech toys. "Big Media" profits handsomely off of steamy sex scenes in movies and in "reality TV" shows.
Women are only worthy and deserving of jobs, of love, and of social acceptance if we're "eye candy" for the benefit of male gaze and profit; but too much of an "eye sore" to be seen if we're pregnant, if we're overweight, if we're average-looking, if we're old, or if we're nursing mothers.
Any woman who fails, for whatever reason, to conform to society's fraudulent standard of beauty of being a 20-something size zero Barbie doll doesn't even deserve to be allowed to participate fully in society according to these anti-woman, anti-baby, and anti-freedom elitists - only thin, young, non-pregnant and "pretty" women deserve to be seen in public and in the workplace. 
The message behind this double standard is crystal clear: In our class-stratified society, wealthy powerful corporate interests perpetuate hate against women, hate for families, and hate for all realistic facets of womanhood that fall outside the realm of the fraudulent standard of beauty. Affluent men view women as status possessions whose only purpose and real value is if we can be shown off as "trophies."
Elitist men with mommy issues have a retinue of Barbie Doll trophy wives agreeing with them, thus helping to perpetuate the status quo. The Barbies' mentality is not far removed from that of the "house Negro" in the antebellum South - the "Massa" has been good to them. The rest of us are just "uppity no-account bitches", written off as "trailer trash" who need to be kept "in our place." Where's Gloria Steinhem when we need her?
Another Fine Mess (see below)....
The picture you are looking at is that of PA Hwy 61 North leading into Centralia. Subsidence from the heat of a raging 46 year old subterranean mine fire forced the closure and rerouting of this state highway in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Please check out the interesting story about how the government let 3,700 acres of fossil fuel go up in smoke - literally. Read the facts about the disaster in Centralia, PA here. This one more way in which the government has failed to protect the public interests. If we cannot trust the government with this disaster, why should we trust that our best interests will be served by Real ID?
How can we trust Congress to act in good faith when history shows they've abused their plenary power in dealing with the original Americans? The judiciary also has a history that is murky.
Does the case Buck v. Bell ring a bell?
If the cases against human rights activists such as Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier are highly circumspect, do you really think YOUR rights won't be next on the chopping block?
When's the last time government leaders admitted that they were wrong and rectified their errors in any meaningful and adequate way? Toxic Superfund sites, contaminated ground and drinking water, destroyed natural resources caused by subterranean mine fires that all occurred because powerful corporate interests come before people's basic human rights is NOT progress and NOT "civilized."
What is FEMA's real purpose?
This picture to the right was taken by an anonymous unembedded photojournalist near FEMA headquarters at Mount Weather, Georgia. What you see are some of FEMA's 500,000 vinyl coffins that were obtained from a burial vault company, Plyguard Vaults, which is located in Alabama....and paid for on our tax dollars, just like so many previous FEMA "black budgets" have been funded. Each of these vinyl makeshift coffins can contain 4 average sized adult corpses...for a total of 2 million corpses, which is about the same number of disgruntled Americans who strongly disagree with our government. But our government wouldn't target select groups of citizens such as patriot groups (which have all been deemed "home-grown terrorists"), would they?
The horrors of Nazi occupied Europe could never happen here, right? We could only hope. Yet, leaks of information to the contrary have been getting out to the public. There is disturbing news of secret meetings of the House of Representatives in Congress, of the planned fates of citizens who are on "Red" and Blue" lists; of a planned Holocaust on American soil leaked by a former CIA agent and a military intelligence person. We have all heard of the agency charged with disaster management, but do you know what FEMA is really for?
"That's NOT my tinfoil hat - it's my bullshit detection unit." ~ Jacqueline S. Homan
My name is Jacqueline Sarah Homan and I approve this message.
