The passage from war to peace is more critical for an established order than the passage from peace to war.

~ Eric Hoffer (1951)

As I imagine everyone reading this will agree, the American empire our politicians have foisted on the world must be ended, and the sooner the better. The loss of life, the squandering of wealth and the inroads to our liberty engendered by their foolish quest to bring the world to heel all argue for it. Yet, nothing should be started without first thinking it through, and it must be realized that ending our empire brings with it a unique set of dangers. Specifically, we need to be wary about bringing onto our shores a large, standing army.

It's a blunder of monumental proportions that we find ourselves in this position at all. Our Founders (and all recorded history) warned us against so absurd a notion that America should have, or even needs, a large standing army. Naturally there will be, and always have been, those who argue that a large standing army is necessary for the defense of our country. In the Federalist Papers #25 Alexander Hamilton, always on the lookout for any excuse to augment power, railed against "the impropriety of a constitutional interdiction of (standing armies)" and extolled the wisdom of leaving such a profound decision to "the discretion and prudence of the legislature".

His excuse was not Al-Qaida or a "Red Menace" but England, France, and Spain, acting alone or in concert against us. The thousands of miles of ocean God blessed us with as a shield against the world's turmoil was thrown aside as he declared "the improvements in the arts of navigation have…rendered distant nations, in a great measure, neighbors". This, to say the least, was Mr. Hamilton flailing about for he had earlier written in the Federalist Papers #8 "Europe is at a great distance from us. Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security." That last was true in his day, and is true in ours.

From the Egyptian Army's thuggish behavior in Tahrir Square, to the bloodbath visited upon the workers protesting in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Army to the unarmed students shot dead at Kent State University by the US Army, the danger to a people's liberty wherever politicians have at their disposal a large standing army is too obvious to ignore. To "bring the boys back home", to close our foreign bases, end all the wars and allow the uncountable multitudes of uniformed servicemen and mercenaries to re-enter our borders as an armed compact body is an extremely dangerous proposition and one to be avoided at all hazards.

Our military must be demobilized overseas, it must not be allowed to re-enter US territory as an armed body. Honed by years of waging (and losing) colonial guerilla wars, having extensive experience in the minute regulation of and heavy handed operations against civilians, the US military would be primed for any outrage, and for those who believe that it would not turn its weapons against US citizens I suggest a library visit to dissuade you of such delusion. How can we believe they would uphold their sworn oath to defend liberty when for decades now they have blithely, and with not so much as a blush of shame, launched war after war without any declaration from Congress allowing them to do so?

We are far past the point of having a small army of citizen soldiers who feel a connection with their fellow Americans, we long ago turned to an all-volunteer military, one which now has formed its own caste, separate from civilian society. We disregarded the warning of Montesquieu that "it would be extremely dangerous to make the profession of arms a particular state, distinct from that of civil functions" (Montesquieu, I,V,19) as "the army will ever despise a Senate, and respect their own officers; they will naturally slight the orders sent them by a body of men whom they look upon as cowards; and therefore unworthy to command them." (Hyneman, I, 37) And in those words we find, at last, a danger shared by both the workers and the political class of America.

For while the grandees in DC and the state capitals have absolutely nothing to fear from the American people themselves, they do have something greatly to fear from a large standing army recently returned from an overseas empire (now consigned to the dustbin of history), facing unemployment, angry at being "stabbed in the back" and fuming over the useless deaths of so many of their friends. Of course the "People" will be no help in defending a Congress besieged by an angry American army.

It was noted by Alexander Hamilton of those long impressed with the "glory" of their nation's military, "it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold, or effectual resistance, to usurpations, supported by the military power". The commander who turns an American army against Congress will find the road to DC wide open and undefended, in advancing to slay the beast of DC the military would finally experience the "cakewalk" it could never find overseas.

The Russian poetess Zinaida Gippius wrote in 1917 "nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for (the Provisional Government) either". We lie in the same bed, currently. The American people, inculcated to a blind worship of those "who serve" and long habituated to constant encroachments to our liberty (all excused by the necessity of "security" and military exigencies), this combined with the extreme unpopularity of the denizens of Congress makes me ask; who among us would be willing to risk it all in defense of the likes of Pelosi, Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Boehner?

Certainly not me. As for the answer "why" I leave you with a line from Freeman's Journal (a Philadelphia newspaper) dated December 12, 1787. The writer noted "when people are once slaves, it is a matter of little concern to them who are their masters." So come to think of it, a "temporary" military junta led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the current mess led by Obama & Pals…why should I care?

Whether one faction or the other is sitting on the Federal throne or swinging from a noose, it's all the same to me.

Sources Cited

Hyneman, Charles S. and Lutz, Donald S. American Political Writing During the Founding Era: Volume One. (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, IN, 1983)

Montesquiei, Baron de. The Spirit of Laws. (Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2002)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. All opinions expressed are his alone. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book is Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning).

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Things start with ideas. ~ Mike Piazza (2011)

What does it say about a man when he comes across as a scoundrel in a book, even when beloved by the author? That question came to mind repeatedly while I was reading Paul Fusfeld's The Economic Thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the New Deal. Well-written and engaging, Fusfeld's in-depth study of FDR's intellectual growth is, to my mind, one of the most important studies of the man and, by extension, the New Deal and the birth of modern America.

A scion of landed aristocrats from New York's Hudson Valley, young Franklin was raised up in a cocoon of luxury. Much of the family fortune had come through running opium into China (p. 9), a not ironic fact since FDR himself would become the slayer of (alcohol) Prohibition. Sent at an early age to the exclusive prep school at Groton where he "took an active interest in the debating society" (p. 21) FDR's intellectual growth, and all that was to come from it, began at Harvard, where "his teachers…were not men who believed in a laissez faire society." (p. 33)

On the origins of his political maturation, FDR always considered his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as "his political preceptors." (p. 38) He took to heart his cousin's belief that "every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use" (p. 42), and Wilson's 1913 political tract The New Freedom became a blueprint for much of FDR's political philosophy. (p. 54)

Molded into an unabashedly collectivist and materialist "progressive," and with his head filled with "economics" of the Harvard variety, by the time he ran for president in 1932 FDR was so poorly educated that he believed "economic laws are not made by nature, they are made by human beings." (p. 229) Having contracted a raging infection of hubris along with his college degree, his proposed solution for every perceived social ill was "planning" on a national scale.

Any concern for the individual rights such "planning" would trample was non-existent in his mind, as "the struggle for liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the individual" was his goal, and "by liberty we mean happiness and prosperity" (p. 49), not freedom. Fusfeld takes note that "FDR did not suggest any limits on the power of the state or any reserved areas of personal liberty." (p. 51) The New Deal would prove as much.

From such a reactionary outlook, it's not surprising to find FDR sneering "it's all very well to talk of the sanctity of private property" (p. 97), as respecting such limits would get in the way of his Big Plans; government in his view was "an agency…to promote and guide all the people into better ways of living." (p. 99) Humility and allowing others' freedom to choose were not FDR's strong points nor, as the author freely admits, was economics. The FDR administration would prove itself to be a fatal mix of ignorance, hubris and a sordid addiction to power.

In sympathy with his close advisor Rexford Tugwell's urge to "make America over," FDR's fanaticism over the "back to the land" movement, which he described as "the great fundamental of making country life in every way as desirable as city life" (p.124), pops up repeatedly throughout the book. An ardent believer in the reordering and blending of rural and city life through a "more even" distribution of the population, he believed "the undirected mushroom growth of our cities and towns must be contained." (p. 133) This deeply held conviction would lead directly to the building of Arthurdale and the creation of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads, one of the New Deal's most influential projects.

Well written though the book undoubtedly is, the author's efforts to absolve every transgression of FDR's are too obvious, and, due to the FDR's character, too often put in an appearance. For one example (concerning FDR's use of the Panic of 1920 to attack "speculative middlemen" as the cause of price inflation) the most Fusfeld can muster in response is to call it "a clear example of his political disingenuousness. His letters at the time…indicate he was well aware of the basic causes of inflation." (p. 75)

In another example of FDR's "disingenuousness" the book shows that for his 1932 campaign platform he called for a sound currency (gold), balanced budgets, and the elimination of "special advantages, special favors, special privileges wherever possible." (p. 246) Desperate to judge FDR on his words, the author states "nothing shows better how far Roosevelt was from the socialists than this statement" (p. 246), completely ignoring the fact that FDR immediately broke everyone of those promises upon taking the presidency. Words are cheap.

And, in FDR's case, often misleading, as just a few pages later the author lets slip that "(FDR's) utterances are not good guides to his thinking" (p. 254), which is a polite way of saying the man was a habitual liar. It gets to the point you almost feel sorry for Fusfeld and his inability to control his hero worship, never more so than when he claims "FDR did not advocate a system of comprehensive central planning for the entire economy" (p. 254) after he had just spent an entire book proving the contrary.

FDR used the crisis of the Great Depression to full advantage. No president, before or since, has had such a cult of personality built about him. He was the most pure, unadulterated politician we have ever seen, with a preternatural ability to sniff out political opportunity like a dog after a meat bone. His wish, "I favor economic planning not for this period alone, but for our needs for a long time to come" (p. 204) is embodied in everything we are, and 78 years after he founded our nation, and 67 years after he breathed his last, we grasp onto his New Deal as tightly as ever.

While still a student at Harvard FDR confided his disagreement with a political maneuver of his cousin Teddy, "I think that the President made a serious mistake…to make the Executive power stronger than Congress. (It is) bound to be a bad thing, especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office." (p. 266, note 3) It was to be the sad culmination of his life's work that FDR himself would become that very man.

FDR is the father of our nation, and by this time America can scarce imagine any other world than the one he created for us. It is high time we took him down from the pedestal he sits on and examine more closely the man he truly was. Buried deep in the footnotes of Fusfeld's book is an appraisal of FDR by a contemporary who described him as, "An opportunist who did every act from the standpoint of how it would benefit him politically; he had no standard of right or wrong in the ordinary sense." (p.2 59, note 3)

Fusfeld's book is an excellent place to begin bringing FDR back down to earth — even if the author never meant it to be.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. All opinions expressed are his alone. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book is Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning).

The Best of C.J. Maloney

Truth is the foundation on which the power of the press stands and falls, and our only demand of the press, also the foreign press, is that they report the truth about Germany.

~ Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Chief, 1934

Democracy is under assault! To the bulwarks! Quick, load the catapult with our freedom of speech and shoot it over at the enemy; it's our only hope! So says Harvard professor Cass Sunstein in his On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. More an 88-page gab session than a structured book, On Rumors makes me wonder if this is how Professor Sunstein sounds at the chalkboard…placid, scattershot and above all, repetitive. The villain of his piece is the Internet — a fertile breeding ground for "false" rumors — and his knight in shining armor the government censor.

The book starts off with, ends, and endlessly repeats a trumpet blast sure to grab the modern American ear — democracy is in peril. (Sunstein, 3, 10, 65, 85, etc.) The culprit? Free speech – a protective shield for the "false" rumors so hated by the author, all running amok and unfettered via the Internet highway, a regulatory void with no political infringements whatsoever. The Internet is, to the author, a dagger pointed at the very heart of democracy.

Sunstein puts forth two goals of his effort. First, to study how and why rumors spread, where he attempts to use social cascades and group polarization to paint the obvious with an intellectual varnish, a collegiate effort to erect something as earthy as "telegraph, telephone, tell a friend" into a three-month long lecture that costs $17,000 to hear at Harvard.

His second goal is the book's main course – and the part of most interest to those in power itching for any excuse to regulate the Internet — where he grants some helpful suggestions as to "what we can do to protect ourselves against the harmful effects of false rumors." (Sunstein, 4-5) His answer? Not censorship (heavens, no!) but the imposition of a "chilling effect" on such rumors; just the "false" ones, mind you.

Sunstein insists this is necessary as "False rumors…can threaten careers, policies, public officials, and sometimes even democracy itself." (Sunstein, 3) Of course, no warning would be complete for post-9-11 America without pointing out how the Internet is "crucial in the process of radicalization." (Sunstein, 41) He plays to the reader's self-interest, as "rumors can harm the economy" (Sunstein, 3) and "fuel speculative bubbles, greatly inflating prices" (Sunstein, 8) as well as his self-conceit, since "all of us are potential victims of rumors, including false and vicious ones." (Sunstein, 3)

A large concern of the author is the protection of the political elite, since with the spread of "false" rumors "people might lose faith…in their government itself." (Sunstein, 10) Though he warns that "many rumors spread conspiracy theories" (Sunstein, 7) I'd advise him to read a copy of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by his fellow Harvard professor Bernard Bailyn, who helpfully points out that our Founders were rabid "conspiracy theorists" and, even more to the point, urge Sunstein to look at history and the innumerable times when "conspiracy" theories proved themselves to be absolutely true.

For all his learned sounding discourse, Sunstein freely admits he has no idea what exactly a rumor is, as "there is no settled definition of rumors, and I will not attempt to offer one here." (Sunstein, 5) He has the mind of your standard American activist, her "progressives," always on the look out for a social ill to cure via the application of political power. All he needs, in this case, is to assault the freedom of speech so he may stop something he can't quite define but knows for certain is there.

The Censorship That Dares Not Speak Its Name

These points should not be taken as a plea for any kind of censorship…

~ Cass Sunstein, On Rumors, 2009

Most grating on the reader's ear (and insulting to his intelligence) is Sunstein's habit of softening every statement in an attempt to appear thoughtful and levelheaded about what he is proposing. This leads him to write in the same manner as an insecure teenage girl speaks, every sentence reads as if it should end with a question mark, as when "(the problem) seems to be increasing" (Sunstein, 10) and "rumors are nearly as old as human history." (Sunstein, 3) Eventually his constant use of softeners make him appear not reasonable, but weak-kneed. This book lacks the courage of the author's convictions.

Even his outright call for censorship arrives on stage with a timid limp — Sunstein is loath to come out and say what he means. He claims that "while old style censorship is out of the question" (Sunstein, 12) and "a chilling effect can be exceedingly harmful…let's be careful about undue emphasis on the underlying risk…we should be able to agree that on occasion, the chilling effect is a very good thing." (Sunstein, 72) As always with Sunstein, it comes back to the Internet. "It is not obvious that the current regulatory system for free speech — the current setting of chill — is the one that we would or should choose for the Internet Era." (Sunstein, 78)

From back to the land crazes to imperialist designs on foreign lands to the atomic bomb, much bloodshed, misery, and inhumanity have flowed from America's university system. Still I submit there is neither reason nor right to censure our universities and their free flow of ideas because much greatness, too, has come out of them. To obtain the good, we must put up with the bad. And, I suggest to Professor Sunstein, the Internet deserves the same consideration.

In this book's most pertinent passage (for its author) Sunstein writes "Over the course of our lives, it is nearly inevitable that all of us will make or have made statements…that will seem to some members of the public a kind of smoking gun — proof of poor judgment." (Sunstein, 64) On Rumors is indeed that, 88 pages of irrefutable proof of Sunstein's exceptionally shoddy logic, intellectual arrogance and child-like trust in power.

For but one example of that last, while he points out (correctly) that "we lack direct or personal knowledge about the facts that underlie most of our judgments" (Sunstein, 5) he exempts whatever political gatekeepers he'd empower to enforce his "chilling" of "false" rumors from this shortcoming. Sunstein assumes that those in power will not only know what is true or false, but will use their power to "chill" what they claim to be false in a completely honest, benevolent manner. He has a trust in power, a trust in the political class, which neither human nature nor recorded history allows to any rational man.

It is best we remember J.S. Mill's take on freedom of speech when he warned "the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible." (Mill, 16)

And neither is Cass Sunstein; and On Rumors, a poorly written, blatant assault on our freedom of speech, proves my point.

Sources Cited

Mill, J.S. On Liberty. (Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1978)

Sunstein, Cass R. On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York, 2009)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. All opinions expressed are his alone. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in March 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

The pleasures are enjoyed by the few, while the pain is shared among the many. It is hard to think of a less desirable outcome.

Mark Gilbert, Complicit (2010)

I had decided that day to teach my six-year-old son to play checkers and so picked up a set at Wal-Mart for a mere $4.99. Life seemed good, we happily set up the game, and all was going well until he declared his red pieces able to "throw bombs" at my black. A rout ensued. It was only afterward, while cleaning up the widespread carnage, that I noticed the "Made In China" emblazoned on the box. It was then I had my epiphany.

China, I finally realized, has officially replaced Japan as the "economic threat" to America's well being. Japan, come to think of it, is so Duran Duran at this point. Their heyday was years ago, their best economic export since 1990 has been Ichiro, and his baseball career is nearing its end. The Red Dragon of China has taken center stage in America's Pantheon of Bogeymen. Congress appears suitably frightened. Should I be?

On the face of it yes, I should. According to the Census Bureau, the US trade deficit with China has exceeded $200 billion every year since 2005, hitting $252 billion in 2010. US manufacturers claim millions of American jobs have been lost to the explosive growth in China's exporting industries. Yet, while China appears to be an exporting powerhouse, like all politically subsidized entities her manufacturing/exporting sector is punching above her true strength. How far above, I am sad to report, is impossible to measure, but that its strength is, in part, a pure fiction is impossible to deny.

This can't last. We are importing from China far more than we are exporting to her, a clearly unsustainable trend, as if we don't export to her how can we pay for what we have imported? Avid mercantilists never seem to wonder — if you only export and discourage imports, how will you get paid for all the goods you are shipping to foreign climes? The Chinese, I suggest, should take a moment and think about what they are doing.

The US Congress is certainly thinking about it, in that muddleheaded, over-emotional manner that defines their every action. My local senator Chuck Schumer has started up his own little PR machine with constant brays of protest towards China's "undervalued" currency. These signal Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to pop up like a groundhog from a hole and declare six more weeks of observed Chinese currency manipulation, which strikes me as ironic since the Chinese monetary authorities, sitting on a mountain of US dollar denominated debt, are at the same moment deeply worried about America's currency manipulation.

Granted, "undervalued" versus pretty much everyone's currency the Chinese yuan most assuredly is, and that nation's pile of $2.75 trillion (or thereabouts) worth of foreign currency reserves proves the point. The best minds of China's political elite believe that engaging in currency manipulation will increase their exports; and they are correct. But if they believe that such a policy has no long-term cost they are fooling themselves.

The cost to America's manufacturers is obvious, and a recent Bloomberg piece tells us "The Obama administration and U.S. lawmakers say China's currency policy gives the nation's exporters an unfair competitive advantage." An advantage, yes, but "unfair" to whom, exactly? Who does this Chinese policy of export subsidies benefit? The Chinese export sector and the American consumer. Who does it hurt? The Chinese workers forced to pay for these export subsides and US domestic manufacturers, as this flood of cheap Chinese imports has decimated their customer base.

As for the American domestic producers who are now busy lobbying Congress for Chinese imports to be slapped with higher tariffs — a move which would doubtless benefit their bottom lines — I am reminded of Adam Smith's take on such creatures in The Wealth of Nations "They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects on their own gains. They complain only of those of other people." (Smith, I, 9, 24) I can't help but ask — where do you feel you have a right to the American consumer? Who said we belong to you?

Such calls for "retaliation" against "China" are unjust and irrational. To be forced to pay a higher price for something that you could buy cheaper elsewhere is no way to run a railroad, no country ever got wealthy by paying more where less would have done just as nicely. Where the Chinese political elite is lambasting the Chinese worker to benefit their exporters, the response of the US Congress is to lambaste the American consumer to benefit their domestic industries.

Yet why should I, an American consumer, look a gift horse (dragon?) in the mouth? A mercantilist policy is, at its terminus, a subsidy for the consumers of a foreign country. It's the political grandees of Country A forcing their workers to give away sales rebates to the consumers of Country B in order to benefit the exporters of Country A. Does China believe it can get rich doing this?

It has been proved beyond dispute by economic science that trade, in and of itself, is beneficial to both parties. Unfortunately like so much in life, something as innocent and necessary as trade is turned into a battlefield as soon as the factor of power is thrust into it. Trade between US and Chinese businessmen would present absolutely no problem — and be of great benefit to both our nations' peace and prosperity — if the big, college-educated brains, uber-patriots, and arrogant central planners in both Beijing and D.C had minded their own business, left their mitts off the currencies, and instituted a simple, flat tariff on all imports for revenue purposes.

Despite all I have said that may seem to welcome this subsidy of my consumerism by Beijing, I am declaring a boycott. This decision is not taken due to any sense of misguided patriotism or xenophobia, but purely to stay true to the sadly unheeded clarion call of the great Karl Marx, "Workers of the World, Unite!" All these Chinese imports are "cheap" partly due to the political exploitation of the Chinese working masses, all this to benefit a few Chinese exporters. It's unseemly, and I'll have nothing to do with it. So on my honor, I will forevermore buy only American made checker games.

Assuming, of course, we still manufacture any.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in March 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

Show me your friends, show me yourself. ~ Folk Saying

Despite my own outlook being made more sunny by the recent doings in Afghanistan, I grant that even the most ardent American patriot may read the following and despair of our most prominent imperial venture: "A scandal at Kabul Bank, Afghanistan's embattled lender, has engulfed prominent reformers in the government of Hamid Karzai." In the circus that is Afghanistan's government — a staunch ally ever since we created it post-invasion — everything that isn't nailed down is stolen and even the reformers need reforming.

So here our foolish conquest has borne yet another utterly predictable scandal, at Kabul Bank no less, the nation's "largest and most sophisticated" and, needless to say, the one most closely linked to many of the Karzai government's leading lights. Why are we shocked at the behavior of our native allies? Whenever you conquer a country and look for collaborators from amongst the occupied, whom do you think will answer your call, the decent, upstanding patriots among them? Always you will get the dregs of that society, dishonorable traitors all too willing to sacrifice their country for a villa in southern France. And so, like a car left overnight on a Detroit street, Kabul Bank has been stripped bare.

It is important to note that while the rule of law may strike them as odd and utterly foreign (and it seems no amount of money can turn Afghanistan's army and police into staunch anti-Taliban fighters) Karzai & Pals took to American-style banking like a fish to water. They even have a genuine central bank, though it's on training wheels as their currency, a beautifully decorated piece of paper called the afghani, trades alongside the US dollar (both are officially recognized legal tender) to which they strive to maintain a 50:1 peg. So they are hooked firmly into America's monetary system. This had consequences.

This massive ($900 million down the blow hole, at least) fraud at Kabul Bank is only the tip of the iceberg, merely an effect of what lay beneath. We not only exported a huge, heavily equipped army into their midst, but flooded Afghanistan with US dollars as well, sparking a genuine, full throttle housing boom in its capital city. In the better areas of Kabul (no laughing, everything's relative) mansions are sprouting like mushrooms and homes can easily go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Houses with million dollar price tags are far from unknown, as spectacularly corrupt politicians are far from unknown, and there's plenty of "liquidity" sloshing around to bribe them with.

According to the Afghani Central Bank, the "financial sector has grown significantly over the past six years. Assets have grown from US$60 million in 2002 to US$ 4.26 billion in August 2010. During the 2004–2010 period bank deposits grew from US$60 million to US$3.58 billion." Where'd all that money come from? Foreign aid, of course, mostly American. A recent piece in the New Yorker refers to the capital as "this dollar flooded city". And the rise of American-style banking has not been limited to Karzai's domain (Kabul's city limits) — throughout Afghanistan's more urban areas ATM kiosks and bank branches have proliferated under the occupation.

Besides the real-estate boom in Kabul, all these US dollars present opportunities for graft, fraud, and theft of a scale that the pre-invasion natives could have only dreamed. Kabul Bank was, to be blunt, an enormous fraud; as soon as the dollars were deposited they were "loaned" to the politically connected, the cash withdrawn and stuffed into suitcases, then scurried away to foreign locations unknown. This was all taking place with the full knowledge of Western and Afghani regulators, but they were too focused on "the problem of terrorist financing" to care.

Naturally, large politically connected banks do not collapse in the "modern" American banking system so already officials "describe the bank as u2018too big to fail'". They insist there's no need for any Afghani who had deposits at the bank to worry, either, as a government-administered program was created for just this sort of eventuality. At least I think it was created; if you seek out any information on the grandly named "Afghan Deposit Insurance Corporation" (ADIC) on the central bank website the link will lead you to a blank page which, I fear, exactly replicates what's in the vault of the ADIC. No need to worry, though — from the pockets of the American taxpayer, bless his heart, will flow the solution to all this stolen money.

It's depressing to think from what source (mostly, your paycheck) a war-ravaged, agricultural country — with a well-honed tradition of breeding a spectacularly corrupt elite — gets all this cash to throw around. Despite sporting an annual GDP guessed to be only $12 billion, Kabul Bank alone has a loan book (for what it's worth) of almost $1 billion. Keep in mind that Kabul Bank is far from an only child. Amazing for a war-torn capital of an impoverished nation, since 2003 Kabul has seen the birth of over a dozen new banks (Afghanistan International, Kabul Bank, Azizi Bank, Pashtany Bank, along others). All these are in addition to the country's traditional, unregulated "moneychangers" market where the decent people bank.

In Afghanistan your money is far safer lying at the feet of an alleyway moneychanger than in the vault of any official bank. It is a world so far outside of our conception we may as well have invaded the moon. If anyone would like to gain a deeper understanding of our Afghanistan misadventure, I'd recommend a read of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, which uses the fictitious country of Ishmaelia as the apple of the colonialists' eyes.

From the "president" of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai's laughable pretensions of "ruling" anywhere outside of Kabul city, we read Waugh's description of Ishmaelia's "rulers" — "There never has been any Government in Ishmaelia outside (the capital) Jacksonburg" — (p.142) to the utter refusal of American and Afghani officials to tackle the problem before Kabul Bank's collapse — "You can't get a word out of the Government. They won't admit there is a crisis," (p.122) — Waugh tells us everything we need to know about the absurdity, wasted bravery, death, denial, and hubris of any colonialist venture.

Yet, with Kabul Bank's collapse the more perceptive observer can, at last, feel hope for our Afghanistan adventure. With our native allies' all too apparent embrace of our own banking system we are certainly more alike than ever before, and at this point in the farce I'd declare this a victory (Mission Accomplished! We're All Keynesians Now!) and bring the entire spectacle to a merciful end. Evelyn Waugh explained exactly what we, and the Russians before us, got ourselves into by invading the poor Afghanis:

"That profitless piece of territory; that the only thing less desirable than seeing a neighbor established there, was the trouble of taking it themselves". (p.106)

It's high time we left and let the Chinese give Afghanistan a try; assuming they're foolish enough to want to. At least they actually have the funds to bail out Kabul Bank.

Source Cited

Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. (Little, Brown, and Co., New York, 1966)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in March 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

Keep knockin' and you can't come in, Keep knockin' and you can't come in, I guess you better let me be. ~ Perry Bradford

Riding the commuter trains of my area is a study in how people react to being mildly uncomfortable for any length of time. Being designed to seat people of a body type far slimmer than what my line usually encounters makes riding to work with a seatmate's bulging oversized body squeezing you into the wall, arm rest or the bulging girth seated on your other side almost a given. Lucky for me, I learned how to properly fold and read The New York Times even when hemmed into a packed subway car so handling the task while immobilized between two people who could stand to lose a few stone each is not beyond my ability.

So that's how I was able to read Justices Look Again At How Police May Search Homes on a recent ride home. Apparently, the brave warriors who fight our War on Drugs have found getting search warrants too much of a hassle, and lawyers for the Obama administration and the state of Kentucky are before the Supreme Court arguing they must be able to forcibly enter any home should they simply "smell something funny" and "hear strange noises" from the other side of a door. I'd gasp in horror at their brazenness, but I can barely breathe due to the 300 pounds of American on each side of me. Every time the mountain to my left turns a page of the magazine she's reading I feel a rib crack.

I'm getting squeezed, too, from the other side, and I keep a wary eye on the man. He's balancing a slice of pizza, a can of diet cola and the sports page on top of his stomach. I worry about his ability to juggle it all, but at least I have my iPod on so I don't need to hear him slurp and chew for the next hour, though I can still hear a young girl, ten rows up, talk into her cell phone. So I turn up the volume and thank God for His blessings, like having the ability to drown out the world about you. It's the little things that count. I go back to reading.

The reporter tells me that some police officers down in Kentucky were wandering the hallways of an apartment building (searching for a suspect who had sold drugs to one of their informants) and broke down an apartment door from which they claim to have smelled marijuana and heard noises that "made them fear evidence was being destroyed." So without any warrant at all they kicked in a door and arrested a completely different man than the one they were searching for as the poor sap they grabbed, by chance, had marijuana and cocaine in his apartment. No surprise, the Kentucky Supreme Court suppressed the evidence. Even less of a surprise, federal and Kentucky political authorities went apoplectic with that decision.

They argue that we're in a war, a War on Drugs, and necessity and speed make search warrants too cumbersome for that war to be won. Police on the scene must, they say, have discretion to enter our homes as determined by them, on the spot. This ruse has been tried (and denied) before, back in 1948, when the Supreme Court found "the smell of drugs could provide probable cause for a warrant…but it did not entitle the police to enter without one." The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution is blunt on the matter — no home may be entered but with a warrant, specifically pointing to what is to be searched and seized. We also have ample historical evidence and sad knowledge of humanity's flawed state; both argue irrefutably for the use of search warrants to restrain abuse of power.

The power to conduct warrant-less searches that the Obama administration and the state of Kentucky are demanding is simply too dangerous to ever be granted, whatever the excuse. Couple such a power with your average American police department's drug enforcement unit, most of whom enjoy pimping out as if they're off fighting in Afghanistan rather than placid, domesticated America, and you'll never get it back.

So what is to be done should the Supreme Court allow the Constitution to live and breathe and grow until search warrants are declared passé? Quincy's Report concerning "writs of assistance" in Massachusetts just before our Revolution declared, "written constitutions, established by the people themselves, and beyond the control of their representatives, necessarily obliged the judicial department, in case of a conflict between a constitutional provision and a legislative act, to obey the Constitution as the fundamental law and disregard the statute." (Kurland & Lerner, 228) There we have our marching orders, regardless of what the Supreme Court decides.

If you are a police officer, it is your sworn duty to refuse to enter any home without a legally issued warrant describing the place and person to be searched, even if you smell ganja and hear people singing along to Bob Marley from behind the closed door. If you are jury on a case with evidence obtained by an officer following his nose rather than the law, you must acquit or refuse to indict. And if you are a judge sitting high on your bench, you must throw out any guilty verdict derived from evidence seized without a warrant. If there ever is to be a practice crying out for nullification, warrant-less searches are it.

No War on Anything, let along drugs, is worth given up the security of our homes for. Either absolutely everyone has a right — even the stoners amongst us — or absolutely no one does. If heavily armed police snooping outside our doors (how long until they introduce the sniffing dogs?) breaking in as their nose and ears tell them is proper, if that's the road to "victory" in this War on Drugs, I vote we reconsider the whole thing.

Being a natural pessimist, I'm certain America will soon enough have police who substitute their nose for search warrants and the democratic mob, pacified by declarations we're now that much closer to winning the War on Drugs, will sink back into the couch. That's sad and it bothers me, but I may as well rail against the wind — or push back against the mounds of fat encasing me on each side.

Which I now need to do, this is my stop.

Source Cited

Kurland, Philip B. & Lerner, Ralph. The Founders' Constitution, Vol #5. (Liberty Fund, Inc. Indianapolis, IN, 1987)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in March 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

For more than a thousand years the art of alchemy captivated
many noble spirits and was believed in by millions.

~ from Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

England's King Henry VIII (1491–1547) died 463
years ago this month but still deserves our attention, for even
antiquity can ring familiar to a modern ear — none more so than
King Henry. He ascended the throne in 1509 at the tender age of
17 and was, compared to his contemporaries, a rather enlightened
tyrant for though he ordered the deaths of many people innocent
of no crime but angering him, he "never took a life with his
own hand," (Bowle, 15) so that's something in his favor. Yet,
in many important respects he was exactly alike his fellow rulers
(both then and now) as shown by his insatiable desire for tax revenue
and his numerous interventions into the economic activity of his
subjects.

The latter severely compromised his ability to
sate the former, so much so that at one point King Henry, despite
a formidable mind, was reduced to fruitless searches to employ an
alchemist to bring into his court. (One of the more prominent alchemists
he tried to recruit was the famous Cornelius Agrippa, who was reputed
to be able to "turn iron into gold by his mere word.")
(Mackay, 127) Alchemy, now mostly forgotten, was the "science"
of turning base metal into gold.

The King's search for an alchemist may strike us as laughable but
he was, as we all are, a victim of his times, and his exhibited
a widespread belief in alchemists or at least a widespread desire
to believe the alchemists' promises, which gives much the same result.
He was, like any good king-in-waiting, surrounded from birth by
a litany of tutors; one of whom was Giles d'Ewes, the French grammarian
and alchemist. (Bowle, 30)

King Henry was "gigantic in build and gargantuan in appetite,"
(Bowle, 19) with a special hunger for northern France, and the costs
of his endless wars "led to taxation which rendered the government
unpopular" (Bowle, 116) but not the King himself, mind
you, as he was a too shrewd political mover for that. Cardinal Wosley,
his right hand man (who was believed by the unemployed to take beggars,
lock them in barns, then "brenne em up')" (Bowle, 78)
was tasked the job of being the public face for Henry's rapacious
tax policies. To Wosley's credit he played the part well, and whenever
the targeted merchants balked at the King's repeated "requests"
for revenue, Wosley would parry that "it were better that some
should suffer indigence than that the King should lack." (Bowle,
126)

As early as 1523 taxes were an onerous part of
English life, and "the tentacles of fiscal power already gripped
the land." (Bowle, 117n) Throughout his reign, endless
complaints about taxes, rising prices and high unemployment were
heard continuously. (Bowle, 176, 209) It is often said that King
Henry split England's church from Rome due to his desire to rid
himself of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Yet, it was more
likely the bankruptcy of the British crown and Henry's desperation
for revenue that led him to attack the Roman church and confiscate
a large part of its wealth.

As part and parcel to the King's endless fiscal problems, he began
early in his reign to inflate the currency — a difficult process
when your money is gold coin, for despite the alchemists' claim
(and many a ruler's wish) gold is impossible to counterfeit. Henry
continuously resorted to the time honored tactic of "clipping
the coin," by making the coins stamped with his seal a little
less gold and a little more base metal, and "after 1525, serious
inflation had begun: it was to continue through the rest of (his)
reign." (Bowle, 184) By 1544 he was, as was his habit, teetering
on the edge of bankruptcy, and interest charged to the crown for
loans rose from 12% in June to 16% by September of that year. By
that latter date, Henry was reduced to hawking to any taker lead
that he'd ordered plundered from English monasteries. (Bowle, 269)

Toward the last years of his reign bankers in Antwerp (at the time
the Wall Street of the Western world) refused settlement of debts
in English coin, given the minimal quantity of gold in them. Even
worse, there was "less money in the Treasury than had been
thought." (Bowle, 281) The only saving grace for the English
economy was a notoriously inefficient royal bureaucracy, which was
never able to "interfere as much as they wished" in the
economy's productive sector. (Bowle, 269) Though the poor suffered
cruelly under King Henry's meddling with the currency and the economy,
England lived on and would soon rise to a greater glory than even
he could have imagined.

Despite his formidable education and great historic
reputation, the disastrous interventions into the economy, the lifelong
dishonesty with the currency in his care and, most of all, his laughable
attempts to bring a sorcerer into his court to conjure gold, mark
the great King Henry VIII as a fool. Yet there is no reason, be
warned, for anyone to feel superior to the King; one only needs
to pick up a newspaper to see that though alchemy may be a dead
science, it has merely taken up new forms.

This has always been and always will be, for its
immortality is powered by economic man's most dangerous, fondest
wish, the one that will drive us to endless imbecilities and repeated
destruction — the ardent desire to believe that you can get something
for nothing. His adherence to that belief made King Henry VIII a
man of his times — and ours.

Sources Cited

Bowle, John. Henry
VIII. (Little, Brown, & Co. Boston, MA, 1964)

Mackay, Charles. Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. (Barnes &
Noble Books, New York, 2004)

January
14, 2011

CJ Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City. He blogs
for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and
the DailyKos.
His first book Back
to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic
Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in
March 2011.

The
Best of C.J. Maloney

Is it possible
The People should ever be their own enemies?

~ Fischer Ames
(1805)

Remember
the "Ground Zero
Mosque" controversy? It took place last summer in New York
City when some people — with no sense of how a democracy works —
had the foolish notion to build on property they owned an Islamic
cultural center to worship God as they pleased. In both Constitutional
law and simple humanity they were well within their rights but their
proposed location was, unfortunately, just two blocks from where
the Twin Towers once stood. Crushed under a wave of populist indignation,
the Islamic center has yet to be built.

Admittedly
I hadn't thought about it in some time, and would gather that most
New Yorkers hadn't thought about the "Ground Zero Mosque,"
either, since the tabloids stopped telling us to think about it.
The angry mobs that once gathered outside the proposed location
have taken their pitchforks and torches and run off toward other
distractions. (Call
of Duty: Black Ops was released, for one.) Now emotions
lay at low tide, all is calm. So it's time to take stock of what
it cost us.

The fact that
a most basic human right — to worship in peace as you please — came
under blatant assault in America, in our greatest, most liberal
city no less, is tragic but predictable. This is what you get from
nine (and counting) years of living under endless war, breathing
the harsh, poisonous air of an increasingly militarized society,
and the effects were shown in the tepid defense my great state's
political grandees' offered in response to this populist rejection
of religious freedom.

The political
leaders of New York were, with but rare exception, either outright
scoundrels or mealy-mouthed cowards. Steve Israel, my local House
representative, took a few moments to defend our Constitution in
a fuzzy, kind of, sort of way that characterizes those without any
spine. "While they have a constitutional right to build the
mosque," he began (and history would be kinder to him had he
stopped there), "it would be better if they had demonstrated
more sensitivity to the families of 9/11 victims."

So there we
have it. Our Constitution, Israel laments, is too insensitive. Freedom
isn't free, the saying goes, and here Israel is unwilling to pay
even the price of hurt feelings. Mr. Israel's feeble gesture sums
up all that New York's timid Congressional representatives could
muster in defense of religious freedom; highlights how bereft our
leaders are of any courage to stand up to a howling mob.

The farce
deepened as the one politician who came
out the hero of this sad tale was none other than the Golden
Tongue himself, Barack Obama, a man not exactly known for political
courage. “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance
with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion. I was
not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the
decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically
on the right people have that dates back to our founding."
For once I applauded the man and realized I was wrong about one
thing — he has read the Constitution.

The entire
sad episode of the "Ground Zero Mosque" gave warning that
democracy is no bulwark for liberty; it never has been and cannot
be. I look at America today and see the wisdom in Bertrand de Jouvenel's
assertion that democracy is "the time of tyranny's incubation."
(de Jouvenel, 1978, 15) Americans have forgotten to remember that
Hitler — who was elected — is not only a symbol of the vile
Holocaust but of sweet democracy, too.

Like many
of our ancestors these newly arrived Muslim immigrants pinned their
hopes on America's reputation as a nation of law and not of men
but found, in this case, that reputation to be far short to its
reality. Today, America's reality starts for the Muslim immigrant
as soon as they disembark onto freedom's golden shores.

Where once
our forefathers, upon entry into New York harbor, came up from steerage
to gather on the ship's deck and watch the Statue of Liberty slide
by, today's immigrants come through an airport. What do they think
when they first spot a line of freedom-loving Americans, standing
meek with shoes in hand and pants around the ankles as surly TSA
agents bark orders and jam their hands into our crotch? Do any of
them take a moment to think about the lawlessness they had fled
and wonder, "Why did I bother?"

Don't be alarmed,
new Muslim-Americans, all you see and hear about you is from what
democracy is made! As H.L. Mencken noted long ago, a citizen of
a democracy will be met everywhere by "an assumption of his
disingenuousness and dishonour." (Mencken, 2009, 156) So take
off your sandals, lift your robe, and wait for Uncle Sam's frisk.

I don't claim
this anti-Muslim populism to be anything unusual. History tells
us that all human societies need a dog to kick. Without exception
every race and nationality has been through the ringer at one time
or another and, also without exception, every race and nationality
has behaved like a beast when given the opportunity to pummel some
minority in their midst. Every dog has its day, and every society
has its dog. Current dog in America are Muslims within our borders.
Native born or no, these poor people now find themselves cursed
to be Muslim in a land that doesn't want them.

James Madison
once looked about him at 1774 Virginia and its wave of religious
persecutions and exclaimed that he had "nothing to brag of
as to the State and Liberty of my country…that diabolical Hell conceived
principle of persecution rages among some." Now, over two hundred
years on, some Texas Congressman named John Cornyn declared of President
Obama's defense of religious freedom "the president himself
seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America." No
truer words can be said of 2010 America. Democracy has spoken; The
People have made themselves heard. Freedom of religion is conditional
upon the mob's approval, the Constitution be damned.

As things currently
stand any Muslim who comes to America in search of freedom is to
be pitied — they are like a drowning sailor climbing into a sinking
lifeboat.

Sources
Cited

Mencken, H.L.
Notes
on Democracy (Dissident Books, New York, 2009)

De Jouvenel,
Bertrand. On
Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Liberty Fund,
Indianapolis, IN, 1975)

December
24, 2010

CJ Maloney
[send him mail] lives
and works in New York City. He blogs
for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and
the DailyKos.
His first book Back
to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic
Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in
February 2011.

The
Best of C.J. Maloney

The root
of famine lies not in the gods or in the stars but in the actions
of man.

~
Murray Rothbard (1985)

This being
the holiday season it is good for the soul to spend a moment and
give thanks to God for His blessings so thereafter, soul at ease
and heart full of holiday cheer, you may rush back to Wal-Mart and
resume punching out your fellow shoppers during infantile orgies
of spending. I fear with America's high unemployment and a political
elite seemingly bent on destroying the currency we might be psychologically
inclined, as libertarians, to look on the dark side of things this
Christmas. Allow me to point out a little ray of sunshine.

By examining
our nation's history we see that America is indeed exceptional and
blessed by God in one very important way — we have never experienced
famine. It might not sound like much, but you don't know what you've
got until the refrigerator is bare. Episodes of famine are rife
throughout recorded time; the past gives us innumerable episodes
when millions of desperate, starving people were reduced to wander
like the animals of the forest, every moment of their last wretched
days spent in agonizing and often futile searches for food.

Famine is an
unrivaled horror; of all the ways to die none comes close to matching
the physical and psychological torment of starving to death. It
is the most painful way to end your life, a slow, drawn out execution
that will reduce even the most proud of men to root eagerly through
horse manure and swallow any undigested oats within it. Better for
any nation an atomic bomb attack than famine, if history is any
guide. Hardly any peoples on earth can boast of never knowing famine.
During their time under the Tsars famine swept Russia so frequently
that permanently staffed government bureaus were always on hand
to deal with them.

The
physical effects of starving are pitiful and utterly disgusting.
The primary change, of course, is a dramatic loss of weight as the
body, in order to keep the heart pumping and central nervous system
nervous, extracts the needed energy from pre-existing muscle and
fat. Once this is depleted the body slows down to save energy, the
starving become lethargic and incapable of any prolonged physical
exertion. Entire families will lay down together and pass away one
by one, famine will reduce whole villages and towns into graveyards.
Under the assault of hunger great cities of millions will
grow quiet as coffins.

In
St. Petersburg during the worst of its 900-day World War 2 siege,
people considered themselves lucky to be eating the lubricant used
for tanks and one person noted "people are all bloated, frightful-looking,
black, dirty, and emaciated. Young people have become so ghastly
looking…it's simply awful to look at them." (Lincoln, 2000,
282) Starving people are not only hard on the eyes, they are worse
on the nose. With a weakened immune system the body is exposed to
a number of diseases that cause various skin eruptions, diarrhea,
and sores. The stench of the starving revolts the senses.

Yet
even more than the physical devastation, it is in its psychological
effects where starvation extracts the heaviest toll. People withdraw
from the world about them, even from family, and think of nothing
but food. The urge to survive, the endless craving from hunger will
turn men into predators against each other. During the time of Stalin's
terror famine upon Ukraine (when at least six million perished)
it was dangerous for children to walk around alone — they were prone
to be snatched, strangled, and cooked. In the town of Poltava an
entire operation for the processing of children's meat was discovered
by the Soviet secret police (Conquest, 1986, 288). But the consumption
of a child didn't necessarily need to be done by strangers. When
Mao's famine was raging throughout China from 1958 to 1961 a couple
in Anhui province, driven mad by hunger, murdered
then ate their eight-year-old son. (Chang & Halliday,
2005, 438)

There are important
lessons to be learned from the history of famines and the radically
progressive Murray Rothbard once hit the nail on its head when he
quipped, "Why does nature seem to frown only on socialist countries?
If the problem is drought, why do the rains only elude countries
that are socialist or heavily statist? (Rothbard, 2006, 84)

Above all it
is a country's agricultural sector where the political class must
be strictly forbidden to venture. Such meddling carries a unique,
very deadly risk to the safety of the working masses as should the
political authorities get hold of the means of production and distribution
of food society will lay at their feet, helpless for its very life.
Instances of wholesale death by starvation – whether bought
on by political bungling or deliberately engineered "terror-famines"
– stuffs our libraries history sections and grants to us a
clear warning.

Our last century
experienced famine of a scope and virulence unmatched in human history,
this despite a revolution in agricultural productivity that should
preclude any famine at all. Look at those countries stricken by
famine during our last (and current) century and they all share
a common characteristic — in each the political class had control
over that most commanding height of any economy: its food supply.

From the 38
million or so starved on the whim of Chairman Mao to the 6 million
done in by Stalin to the current misery and starvation in North
Korea, each and everyone lends truth to the great Leon Trotsky's
warning regarding political power over resources, "The old
principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with
a new one: who does not obey shall not eat." Food has
too often been used as a weapon by the political class.

In America
the agricultural sector has, despite constant political inroads,
been for the most part free of the degree of government control
found in countries prone to famine. That is our saving grace and
our safety. But should this ever change and we find ourselves in
the sad state of a North Korea you can still be thankful to God
for His mercy upon us, His favored children, and count your holiday
blessings.

For even should
a deadly famine descend upon America and condemn you and your family
to lay weak and still as corpses, feverish for food, your children's
pathetic, skeletal appearance and stench will not trouble your mind
in the least.

You will look
right past them and think of nothing but food.

Sources
Cited

• Chang, Jung
  & Halliday, Jon. Mao:
  The Unknown Story. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005)
• Conquest,
  Robert. The
  Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
  (Oxford University Press, New York, 1986)
• Lincoln,
  W. Bruce. Sunlight
  At Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia.
  (Basic Books, New York, 2000)
• Rothbard,
  Murray. Making
  Economic Sense. (Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL,
  2006)

December
7, 2010

CJ Maloney
[send him mail] lives
and works in New York City. He blogs
for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and
the DailyKos.
His first book Back
to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic
Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in
February 2011.

The
Best of C.J. Maloney

~ H.L. Mencken Notes On Democracy (1926)

I spent this just passed, most Historic of Elections as any right-minded citizen stranded in a democracy should — at my favorite dive bar, as apolitical a place you can hope for to take refuge from America’s favorite pagan ritual. While it’s a toss up whether or not my bar has been upgraded, maintained, or cleaned since her doors first opened, at no time have I ever seen the television move off a sports channel nor heard any patron discuss anything other than their team’s chance at a championship. I did not want to be bothered by chirpy voiced get-out-the-vote phone calls or handed two-sided pamphlets telling me either how my incumbent has been spending my paycheck or how his opponent plans to spend it. All I wanted was to read my New York Times, drink in peace, and be let alone by the tumult of American democracy.

I love the New York Times, Pravda of the Hudson, even though she’s getting a bit long in the tooth and is often a bit demented. I grabbed a beer, sat in my usual booth, and began flipping quickly past all the breathless election coverage, those required hymns to History In The Making when it caught my eye; a reminder that Democracy is not just our main export item but also our national obsession.

After Delays, Citizens Vote For A President In Ivory Coast grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let me pass because, lo and behold, we were sharing the same election week as Ivory Coast! Seems they had lost their right to vote and now they had it back, and the triumph didn’t even require an invading American army. I had to read it, so despite my best efforts democracy walked into the bar with me.

First off it is necessary to let everyone know — as despite a global empire the world is a blank canvas to most Americans — that Ivory Coast is a small, impoverished West African nation of 21 million people, often wracked by internal fighting. Yet, while they know nothing of the rule of law they are certainly up on how an election works as they divide effortlessly, as Americans do, into factions. In Ivory Coast, as in any democratic nation, factions spout like mushrooms on manure.

Also like Americans, Ivorians harbor a particular hatred and fear of immigrants, and those poor souls who flocked to Ivory Coast during its boom years and remain behind, stranded and numerous enough to be one-quarter of the population, are frequent targets for politically engineered pogroms. Any barbaric people need a dog to kick, and it is the immigrants who are the chosen sacrificial victims at the altar of Ivorian democracy, used by demagogue politicians as blood payment to the voting mob to aid their climb to the top of the country’s political dung heap.

One of the worst of that lot is the current president (and incumbent), an out and out thug named Laurent Gbagbo. "A leftist university professor turned populist strongman" (insert Obama joke here) he is backed by a man named Charles Ble Goude, who spends his time organizing pro-government riots and attacks on immigrants and rival factions using the vicious street militias under his control. According to the Times such riots and attacks are used to swing elections in favor of those who execute them and they have "given Mr. Gbagbo a popular boost."

The violence is not confined just to non-Ivorians but doled out liberally amongst the natives as well. Just the act of running for office can put a target on your (and your supporters’) head and both of Mr. Gbagbo’s opponents, themselves long time grandees in Ivorian politics, are to be (according to Mr. Gbagbo’s campaign) "ground into powder, like corn." In Ivory Coast this is no idle threat and, as if to press the point, at a recent pro-Gbagbo campaign rally (held to pounding drums, with sing alongs and freely flowing liquor) Mr. Ble Goude worked up the voters when he entered "holding aloft an ear of corn." When Mr. Gbagbo himself entered the stadium "the people, many visibly intoxicated, went wild." One supporter explained his rapture, "he is a man of the people, and he doesn’t have a house in France."

I don’t have a house in France, either, but I don’t feel any need for one. I have the bar back Scary Mike bringing me fresh beers as needed, I’ve claimed run of the jukebox by playing Minus the Bear’s latest album three times running, and haven’t heard a peep about the day’s election since I walked in. What else could life offer that I’d want? Certainly not the presidency of Ivory Coast: nor of America, for that matter.

The bar is full now. It’s just past five and the suits arrive to press up against the hardhats that had arrived about three, and the hardhats are now pressed up against the bums who have been here all day. I’ve been here all day. The bar attracts a cross section of work-a-day New Yorkers, the kind who care far more about the Mets and Yankees than about whatever madcap scheme the political elite has dreamed up this election cycle.

They are apathetic but not unintelligent (at least when compared to much of America’s ruling elite), just not very inquisitive. The average man’s mental horizons are extremely limited, not only in America but also throughout the globe and throughout recorded time. In his political knowledge, opinions, and behavior the average American is for the most part an ignorant savage, so when he sticks his nose into the democratic process he displays much in common with his contemporaries around the globe.

Those drinking beer in my bar are not of that type, they are of a mind completely incomprehensible to the legions of do-gooders that infect America’s body politic because they wish to be left alone, and like the Ivorians they simply "long for a return to the boom years." And judging by the fact that they, like me, aren’t running off to make the polls before closing, they do not believe that the way home lies through a voting booth.

Unfortunately some Ivorians, voting for the first time in a decade, seem to have pinned their hopes that it does. "We’ve been waiting for this for too long, too long" said a sullen Ivorian voter to a reporter, and he thinks that after all the votes are tallied then "we’ll really know we’ve done something."

"Yes, you’ve done something," I think closing the paper, "wasted your day waiting in line to vote" and that, more than anything, is the crux that all Ivory Coast and American voters share, this irrational veneration of democracy and its absurd premise that the common man knows best and should be, has divine right to be, the final arbiter in political matters. We may as well ask an auto-mechanic to perform open-heart surgery.

What then, you may ask, is my preferred system of governance? I leave that question to better men than I, a mere beer drinker, so I’ll fob it off on Cato’s Letters No. 23 to answer, and it declares, "We do not dispute about the qualifications of a master; we will have no master."

I’ll drink to that.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Jonah Goldberg’s thoughts on how WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be dealt with, October 29, 2010 (Chicago Tribune)

I glanced beyond my history books the other day and see America continues to surf a surging wave of insanity. This is no surprise and it’s bound to continue; the longer any people are at war the more the crazy that’s usually deep within comes rising to the surface, bloated, fish-eaten, yet lively. And now floats up a Mr. Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online and one of our country’s more prominent political commentators, his rational sense abandoned and a large part of what makes him human rotted away. He’s gone mad, if he were a dog he’d be foaming at the mouth.

To prove my point the Chicago Tribune printed an article by Mr. Goldberg with the blunt title "Why Is Assange Still Alive?" wherein the author calls for the murder of the founder of WikiLeaks and scourge of the Pentagon, Mr. Julian Assange. Murder, as in to rub out. To be blunt he writes, "I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?"

I’d like to ask a simple question: Does Mr. Goldberg hug his mother with the hands that typed those words?

Of course he does, and I’d bet good money that should one meet Mr. Goldberg he’d seem a reasonable, polite man who chews with his mouth closed. Yet, seemingly reasonable, polite men have caused most of the world’s misery and bloodshed. I’d bet good money, too, that many of the guards in our last wretched century’s myriad concentration camps seemed reasonable when they weren’t manning the watchtowers. In order to work up to a murder any rational person must make himself believe the irrational; they’d otherwise never be able to live with themselves. Mr. Goldberg doubtless believes what he believes, and with such vigor he’s willing to call for murder to defend it.

Anyone may say what they will about Mr. Goldberg’s call to rub out a man who is, he admits, "a hipster Australian Web guru" but you cannot say his views and outlook are out of step with widespread contemporary opinion in America or its historical behavior during times of conflict. So Mr. Goldberg can happily and openly gab about his thuggish idea — there’s plenty of others who share the same mad look in their eyes; so many in fact they’ve made him a best-selling author and a darling of a major political party. Sad to say, Mr. Goldberg is no fringe player in 2010 America.

To be frank he also has our entire country’s history as precedent to fall back on. From the sacking and burning of Canadian border towns during the War of 1812, Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea through the Civil War South, the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities in the Second World War, and the retaliatory leveling of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the America way of war has always been defined by a ruthless disregard of any restraint, and the longer you stay at war the more barbaric the actions that will be countenanced in the name of its successful prosecution. So here we’ve arrived at Mr. Goldberg’s call for blatant, outright murder.

Mr. Goldberg laments in his column that "assassinating a hipster Australian Web guru as opposed to a Muslim terrorist is the kind of controversy no official dares invite" but here he is holding it up for everyone to give it a good think over. He himself is, to be frank, rather taken with the whole idea but then in the very last paragraph of his essay he displays a sudden lack of courage in his convictions and completely reverses course. He’s so afraid of being accused of holding the idea he takes the overwhelming bulk of his essay to argue for that he lets the air out of his own tires by ending with a "That’s fine. And it’s the law. I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange." Really?

As for "the law" that Mr. Goldberg somehow believes is protecting Mr. Assange, there is no such law. The President of the United States has granted himself authority to assassinate American citizens at his pleasure. (Congress and everyone else seem perfectly fine with it.) Assassinations and kidnappings are part of post-Nine Eleven America’s New Normal; it is no secret that US government agents grab foreign nationals from every spot on this globe and spirit them to secret Black Sites for God knows what.

So what makes Mr. Goldberg believe an American president who has declared he can have any American citizen "garroted in his hotel room" (so to speak) merely on his word hesitate to do the same to a foreign one? The War of Terror Mr. Goldberg champions displays a singular lack of any respect for law or care for any restraint upon the use of political power. This, too, is no secret. For all his coyness, Mr. Goldberg must be aware his call for the murder of Julian Assange will have a number of heads nodding approval in the halls of imperial D.C.

Jonah Goldberg is a far more dangerous and influential creature than the Barack Obama he despises with such fanaticism because unlike Mr. Obama he is a fountain of ideas, a weaver of schemes and plans and crusades that he makes float off a computer screen to set the mob to vile deeds. He is the man who yells not "fire!" in a crowded theatre but "Kill him!" in the last moment before the blood really starts to flow. Iraq was laid waste to an extent because of Jonah Goldberg’s pen, and now he calls for the murder of an Australian Web guru. While I make no claim to sainthood believe you me: come Judgment Day I’m gonna be one happy boy for not standing in Mr. Goldberg’s shoes.

For all his popularity and accomplishments Mr. Goldberg has excused himself from polite society — he belongs in the Looney corner with the skinheads, Klansman, Black Nationalists, idiots in Che t-shirts, and all the others who are foaming at the mouth, mad and dangerous. His call for murder is simply beyond the pale, and all the more hypocritical for the deaths that have flowed from the tip of his pen. This latest call for blood is not his first nor will it be his last: they’ll soon enough be other enemies equally deserving in Mr. Goldberg’s eyes to be "garroted in his hotel room."

So forgive me for saying but if I had to choose between Assange and Goldberg whom I would rather see "garroted in his hotel room" may God in His mercy bless and protect Mr. Assange, a man who’s done nothing more than shed light into the dark corner of America’s madness.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Muhammad Ali (1967)

Duke University is a top-notch school and the students at such prestigious universities — the breeding ground for our next generation of leaders — do their damnedest to stay the hell out of America’s endless foreign adventures — exactly as did our current generation of leaders. Who can blame them? Apparently, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates (who spent Vietnam stateside). With the military stretched a bit thin globally, Mr. Gates went begging and used a recent speech at Duke to try and drum up some warm bodies to fight the endless War of Terror.

It was a telling speech (and a warning to us) about the kind of man Mr. Gates is. A long-time big wheel in the CIA, he opened with The Traditional Joke To Start Things Off and quipped, "(When he was) President of Texas A&M, I had to fire a longtime football coach. I told the media at the time I had overthrown the governments of medium-sized countries with less controversy." Funny guy, I’m sure the people responsible for our country’s diplomatic efforts are thrilled that Obama picks as Defense Secretary a man who doesn’t seem to consider that every military intelligence officer of a "medium sized" country is going to perk up at that one. In his poor choice of words Mr. Gates displays an imperial arrogance that borders on reckless stupidity.

To be fair, considering we are getting our ass kicked in both Iraq and Afghanistan maybe the world’s medium sized countries find his tasteless joke funny, but it still does not disprove my point. We have enough problems, why would Mr. Gates wish pile on? Our political elite piss and moan about people "giving material support" to terrorists and here the Defense Secretary goes and helps Al-Qaeda recruit by providing them with talking points.

Despite his post, he also displays a shaky feel for what exactly the military’s mission is, as when he talked about our troops and "the wider society they have sworn to protect." He is (to put it kindly) a bit off mark, as our troops swear no such thing. They swear one thing only — to "support and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic." That’s it. They don’t even swear to defend the territory of these United States, as the land we live on is unimportant; it is (was?) our adherence to the rule of law that makes us unique.

Mr. Gates seems unaware of this, which is why he can state that our Air Force "has been at war since 1991, when it began enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq" with his sense of honor unmoved (he swore the same oath to our Constitution) and, just as sad, America’s lousy education system is why not one Duke student in the audience was moved to ask, "When did Congress declare war?"

The point in his speech that should have made every draft age Duke student perk up and take notice was when Mr. Gates described a military draft as "the ethos of service, reinforced by the strong arm of compulsion" and how he pointed to the endless rotations in and out of the meat grinder required of our all-volunteer military and asked, "how long can these brave and broad young shoulders carry the burden that we…as a society — continue to place on them?" Yes Mr. Gates, how long?

The all-volunteer military we now possess is one of modern America’s greatest accomplishments, it is the ultimate expression of democracy — the people may vote, by joining or not joining the military, on every war our political class pushes us into. This is an extremely effective check on our political elite’s ability to wage wars, and one made all the more necessary in an America where Congress has completely abdicated its sworn oath to declare war as required by Article I, Section 8. And it is by this system how we know that today the overwhelming majority of Americans — 99% by Mr. Gates calculations — don’t give a damn about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the endless War of Terror.

I am not calling for a return to some imagined libertarian past; America has always had a draft in times of major wars — until now. During our Revolution, Civil War, World War One, Two, and then with the advent the Cold War "America retained a large, permanent military by continuing to rely on the draft even in peacetime." With the fiasco of Vietnam and the social unrest the draft caused, American politicians were frightened enough to end it, and that is one of the very few steps towards freedom this country has taken during the course of its slow devolution.

Towards the end of his speech Secretary Gates pointed to the 54 Duke students who had been killed in fighting across the globe since the end of the Second World War, all on foreign lands, all without any declaration of war by Congress. If the students at Duke are half as smart as their S.A.T. scores claim, they’ll make sure that number remains unchanged. There are more important matters to concern themselves with than who gets to claim control of Kandahar.

Mr. Gates chided the Duke students to "think about what you can do to earn your freedom," promising that they can do so by joining the military. It would be far better for the Duke students to think instead about how the can defend their freedom, which is not something handed out as an award by the likes of Mr. Gates and the rest of his clique, but something that is theirs by birthright.

The military draft has a long, sordid stranglehold on our nation’s history, and for all Mr. Gates platitudes to the all-volunteer force it would take but another terrorist attack on American soil to change his mind, if it isn’t changed already. To defend their right to choose whether or not this government is worth fighting for, to choose whether or not the politicians’ endless foreign campaigns are worth submitting their very lives to, to keep a democratic military to defend our democracy, that is where the Duke students can fight the good fight.

They hopefully realize that a people’s freedom always lies on the home front, and they can do far more for liberty by ignoring Mr. Gates’ lurid sales pitch and staying home. The fight for our freedom must be fought here, not the Middle East.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book Back to the Land (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

My brain did not begin the day thinking about war, the base activity which Lew Rockwell once termed "the murder end of the state." (Rockwell, Jr, Llewellyn H. Speaking of Liberty. Auburn, AL, Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2003, p.139) It was thinking about the beach, a far more pleasant activity. This being modern America, though, it wasn’t long, not even five minutes after our arrival, when my wife exclaimed an "Oh…my…God." That’s when I noticed she’d bought along The New York Times and the war crawled onto the beach with us.

She handed the paper to me in disgust, as if it were covered in filth. Shielding my eyes from the sun to read the article I see we’ve been arming and training Somalia’s army, at least the one we favor, and they in turn are using that money to arm children (some as young as nine) to fight our War of Terror. As I read further into it I am, needless to say, dripping in proud patriotism. What fresh hell is this? We’re back in Somalia?

I have vague memories of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, a nice tale of our last disastrous fool’s errand into Somalia. Granted, we left once but an empire never truly leaves anywhere forever. Now, not wanting to put our own soldiers at risk this go round we are instead using locals as armed proxies to do our bidding. In this case, that means fighting whomever we’ve designated as the enemy for this month and, to make the American flag unfurl even more proudly in the sun, we’re arming and training child soldiers to do it.

All these little boy soldiers are funded and armed by a tentacle of the Pentagon called AFRICON, which was created in 2008 to make certain that no matter where in Africa mayhem may erupt an American weapons dealer will be there to cash in. Some of the latest entries onto the list of our "allies in the War of Terror" include Nigeria, Ethiopia, Liberia, Uganda, and now Somalia’s "Transitional Government." To the informed, that reads as if the local police department has been funding and arming the local pimps, drug dealers, Mafia dons, and cutthroats, but our War of Terror requires these types of compromises, so I am told.

The more historical minded could sit back and wonder what all the (little bit of an) uproar was about, and would point to the ubiquitous drummer boys used by both sides during America’s Civil War. The American use of children in battle is nothing new; it merely faded as we climbed up the ladder of civilization. Over the past decades we’ve come tumbling back down that ladder and here we are, 2010, knowingly arming children to fight on the empire’s behalf. What we are seeing is what one always sees in a militarized society — the slow devolution away from civilized behavior and towards what the soldier-scholars call "total war," sparing no woman or child. It is the American Way.

Of course, all the guilty parties are just shocked to the very core of their shrunken, shriveled souls that American taxpayers have been (and are) arming children. "Now, now," the U.S. State Department says to the Somalia faction that we back, "Don’t you go using children as soldiers, you hear?" The head master of our Somalia proxy, a Fagin-like thug named Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, has ordered his army chief to conduct a "full review" to get to the bottom of things. The United Nations estimates that up to 25% of our allied army in Somalia consists of child soldiers, so it shouldn’t be too tough a task for him to find one of our little armed urchins.

While our political masters are upset, no doubt, over the embarrassment this caused them (for a few moments, until the story quickly faded) don’t think for a moment that this has made them cut off the flow of money, weapons, and ammo to these child soldiers. Our army of little African boys is "a critical piece" of our War of Terror in the Horn of Africa, say the experts. Plus, consider the cost savings, as doubtless Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has. Not too long ago he whined that an all-volunteer force was getting awful expensive, and according to The New York Times our little boy soldiers are getting paid, if at all, only $1.50 per day, and that’s quite a bargain by any measure.

So as not to appear too one-sided, it must be admitted that AFRICON has provided (and is providing) these children with certain job skills that they can fall back on until the end of their days. For instance little Ahmed, all of 15-years-old, was sent to Uganda at the age of 12 and taught by American trainers "how to kill with a knife." His fellow soldier Awil, now 12-years-old, says he "loves the gun."

And to be fair, while the political grandees around the globe have laws (specifically the Convention on the Rights of the Child) that prohibit the use of children in combat, neither the United States or Somalia ever signed it, so it’s a bit of a stretch to expect us to adhere to something we are not signatories on.

Enough. I stop reading the paper and watch my son running the length of the shoreline with the ocean waves his backdrop, and I think of all the children, barely older than he, that part of my every workday is spent to supply with weapons. I gag on a surge of patriotism.

There are many predictions on this site for the coming demise of the American empire, and with God’s mercy that blessed day can’t come soon enough.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ The gangster u2018Tic Tac’ from Miller’s Crossing

It is not often that I disagree with what passes my eye when reading libertarian websites. At this point I’ve guzzled the Kool-Aid and bask happily in the progressive sunshine, relaxed and red-eyed. So when I recently came across a libertarian-slanted review of Elaine Scarry’s Rule of Law, Misrule of Men that seconded that book’s condemnation of W and Obama’s policy of targeting enemy leaders for assassination, I was surprised to find myself muttering to the walls as I processed it. I usually only do that when reading Paul Krugman.

I’m not one to take on anybody over the subject of international law — I’m no expert — but I reserve the right to say that something disturbs the moral sense, and to follow the laws of "civilized" war that prohibits the assassination of the enemy’s political leadership is unjust and irrational. On this count I’m with W, Obama, and all the other bloodthirsty lunatics who have ruled America for the past half-century. While I disagree with their insatiable urge to meddle, bomb, and assassinate on a global scale, I am arguing my belief that their position on assassination is just, rational, and should be the primary tool of any nation at war.

While the legally trained mind may point to the "Rules Of War" as reason to not mark your enemy’s political class for assassination, recall that it is only natural that every country’s political class — who write the laws of international behavior among themselves — have taken the prohibition against attacking civilians (long a part of civilized man’s concept of the proper course in war) and pulled that protective blanket off the working masses and instead wrapped it about themselves. It is here that we see the world’s political classes have developed a class conscience; on this matter it is not the workers of the world who have united, but the politicians.

It is the politician who rules, who is the wellspring behind war, always and everywhere. Bernard De Jouvenel once pointed out "the business of the ruling class is war. But then, war is the business of no other class" (De Jouvenel, 158) and he was spot on. Who else but the politician orders armies raised, atomic bombs dropped, and builds forward operating bases with guard towers at hundred yard intervals? Why this ridiculous prohibition on targeting them, while all the while they’re ordering air armadas to firebomb entire cities of men, women, and children into ashes and dust? Why can’t they feel war’s consequences, too? Yet today, international law cleaves humanity into two classes — granting wartime protection to those who do not deserve it while removing it from the innocents who do.

Granted, "history never lacks instances to show us of vast masses of men submitting to a yoke which is hateful to them, and lending unanimous and willing aid to keep in being a power which they detest." (De Jouvenel, 87) Sadly, you can slaughter uncountable multitudes of Joe Six Pack and the bloodied survivors will simply re-link arms, sing a patriotic Ode to their master, then human wave attack your machine gun nests again and again. People are funny like that. The road to victory, if taken exclusively through fighting them, will be extra bloody and far longer. Civilians are, to be blunt, a waste of ammunition (white phosphorus shells don’t come cheap), so shooting them should be avoided at all hazards.

On the other hand the political class are not only legitimate targets but also the primary one to go after, too, as they have the most to lose (an entire country under their thumb), don’t wish to risk it, and (most importantly) determine when their side will submit. The 1986 US bombing of Libyan dictator Gaddafi’s family compound proved far more effective and humane than carpet-bombing Tripoli would have been, methinks. The former made Gaddafi and his surviving family members into what they are today, another "ally" in the War of Terror; the latter would have steeled his resolve and made him a hero in his subjects’ eye. To adopt such a policy as used against Gaddafi would make war far more humane and leave Joe Six Pack out of it to the maximum extent possible. Yet, current international law has this absurd prohibition forbidding attack against an entire segment of your enemy’s population, and its most important segment, no less — its head.

Think how the frequency of war might decrease if every politician knew that should his country become involved in one he’d flinch every time he started his car each morning. Every politician the world over most certainly has taken that into consideration, and here we find what likely is the primary reason for this Kafkaesque ban. The 1976 Congressional Church Committee (tasked with investigating rumors of wide-spread use of assassination by America’s politicians — which it found plenty of) stated in its conclusions "assassination should be rejected as a tool of American foreign policy" as it may "incite retaliatory attempts on the lives of U.S. officials." (Note the same worry does not exist in our Congressmen for the troops in the field who, if captured by insurgents, might very well find themselves water-boarded in retaliation for their political leaders’ policy of torture.)

That same 1976 Congressional investigation revealed widespread "peacetime efforts by U.S. intelligence agency officials to cause the deaths of foreign heads of states…considered detrimental to the interests of the United States" and now, with the timeless, inexorable nature inherent in man’s addiction to power, that policy has been extended to include American citizens. This targeting of civilians is a throwback to barbarism and replicates a sordid policy widely practiced during America’s Civil War. It was given clearest example by the Union Army’s 1864 March to the Sea.

The Union commander General W.T. Sherman had remarked that he would make the Southern people — civilians — feel the heavy hand of war, that he would "make Georgia howl," and he made good on his promise. Yet, what did his brutal March advance, other than the military? The deaths of countless innocents and the destruction of good feeling that workers North, South, and everywhere should harbor for each other.

And to prove that God has a sense of humor, in the year prior to this blatant campaign against unarmed civilians the very same US Army had adopted The Leiber Code that proclaimed, "Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism."

It would have been more just (and more to the purpose) had Sherman’s Army ignored the Leiber Code, left all the Southern civilians alone, and concentrated its efforts on the South’s political elite. For Sherman’s Army to have captured or shot dead every Southern politician they could lay their hands on, confiscated or burned all their stately homes — all of their property in fact — the war would likely have ended far sooner. Instead, Sherman deployed his artillery about Atlanta and ordered them to fire at will so "every house in the town should be battered by our artillery." (Sherman, 576)

Ludwig Von Mises once praised the dawn when "belligerents began to respect certain limits which in a struggle against men should not be transcended" as an advance of civilization. (Mises, 169) Indeed it was, but today we have taken a decided step backward in this respect, and the limits of what now is permissible in war are clearly upside down and need to be put right side up. In the event of war the most rational, moral, and effective means to bring it to a quick and successful end is to target for assassination, smart bomb, or drone attack every member of the enemy nation’s political class, to make them feel the harsh hand of war, and to leave the working masses out of it unless absolutely necessary.

So keeping a steady eye on the enemy country’s politicians, from the mayor of their smallest hamlet to the very pinnacle of their political pyramid, it does good for a civilized nation at war to blow the bugle, let loose the dogs, and declare it hunting season — on the fox, not the squirrel.

Sources Cited

• Sherman, William T. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman. (Library of America, NY, NY, 1990)
• De Jouvenel, Bertrand. On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth. (Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, IN, 1993)
• Mises, Ludwig Von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. (Fox & Wilkes, San Francisco, CA, 1996)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website and the DailyKos. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Black Panther Party (March 23, 1968)

One of the benefits of writing for this website is the mail you receive. After enough time you get a rather good feel for the type of person, on average, that frequents this place. The kind invitations I received after my last submission to grab my AK, run to the mountains, and join the fun when it all falls apart was telling. If the rebellious spirit of our Founders still lives at all, it seems to be concentrated between two groups — libertarians and punks. But, while the spirit may reside, would it be a good idea to act on it?

The right to rebellion is sacrosanct in America, the completely humane, just, and natural right of any man to break bonds with another is embodied not only in our very Founding but in our divorce laws, too. No American would consent to law making marriage an indivisible, eternal commitment; we refuse any compulsion to remain wedded to the girl of our nightmares, let alone the likes of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Anyone who questions the right of divorce and (if made necessary by the political elite) violent action to secure it is, like the pro-slavery proponents of the Old South, seriously deficient in humanity.

Any discussion regarding the dissolution of political bonds belongs to, and only to, the working masses. Naturally, the opinion of any politician regarding this question may be completely discounted. First off, it is none of their business; servants do not determine the length of their employment. Second, addiction to power is in their very nature; it is the be all and end all of their existence. To expect an Obama or a W (or any of their species) to allow the working masses their right to peaceful separation is like expecting a hungry lion to spit out the wounded zebra it has clutched in its jaws.

It takes a statesman, a philosopher king, so to speak, to understand the benefits and justice of liberty, to understand that everywhere and always the struggle for it is the struggle of the workers against the political elite. A true statesman must be a traitor to his class, to be part of what the great Karl Marx promised, "a small section of the ruling class (which) cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class."

Today, almost without exception, America’s ruling caste is bereft of such men.

The Write Way Towards Freedom

…Any change remains possible because citizens are free to communicate with and persuade one another and express their political opinions without being threatened by the Government with criminal sanctions.

~ Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com (March 22, 2010)

The best example of such a statesman is Thomas Jefferson, without doubt the most radical and progressive of the Founders, a man who, unlike even so many of his contemporaries, not only supported the idea of rebellion but also positively encouraged it. This was, and is, in stark contrast to power-mad figures like Alexander Hamilton and Che Guevara, men who are called "revolutionaries" but were nothing of the sort, who as soon struck off the chains of one tyrant went immediately to pot and looked about in a panic for a new set to clamp round their neck.

Jefferson, in contrast, was a true revolutionary, it was a subject he lived and studied his entire life. He believed that while war may be required to get out from under oppressive regimes, it is first of all necessary to have the proper, rational animating idea behind it, to make more likely the rebellion will be a positive step towards liberty rather than what so many revolutions sadly turn out to be; foolish, reactionary steps back into greater political control. Thomas Jefferson’s ideas culminated in the bloodless "Revolution of 1800," when he took the presidency and firmly established, for a few years at least, an Executive Branch with a decidedly progressive, radical attitude towards power. This was accomplished not by war, but by the spread of ideas, something done best by, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, "the vast dissemination of books." Political leaders burn and ban books for a reason.

Always it is a nation’s intellectuals, those who actually read and write the books, who spread the ideas vital to the advance and preservation of liberty. It is telling that while the ideological views put forth in best-sellers such as Edward Kennedy’s True Compass, Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, and Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope are not what progressive revolutions are made of, they are today as "mainstream" and apple pie as can be. Consequentially, a revolution today would be a decided step back as it would lack the ideological roadmap to go anywhere but deeper into the badlands.

If this union is to return to its progressive roots it will be not by the sword but by the writings of those dedicated to a philosophy of liberation, by the wide dissemination of radical thought into the op-ed pages and editorials of our newspapers, into the comments section to Internet news sites, into the mouths of the interviewed "man on the street," into the intellectuals’ monthly journals and thence most importantly, into the minds of men. It is here where even the most humble advocate of liberty can make a difference, it is the necessary first step that, should we fail to take it, will bring any hard-earned advances to naught.

Pick up your pen and write until your fingers go numb, submit an avalanche, cross you fingers, and hope for the best. That is the one and only way to pull out of this tailspin. Patience and endless repetition, above all, are needed. Keep in mind the words of Rexford Tugwell (one of the more reactionary and conservative of FDR’s "Brain Trust") that "a nation does not take a new direction overnight." (Tugwell, 105) Remember that for decades FDR and his fellows wandered in the intellectual wilderness, yet steadily chipped away at the edifice of law, using small, but friendly, publications such as The Review of Reviews and The New Republic as their base of operations.

At this point in time, the average American citizen neither understands nor desires liberty. Today, even in the unlikely event of victory on the battlefield for the forces of liberty, it would all quickly amount to nothing. Freedom is impossible to force onto a people, and we would soon find, as even did God with the rebellious angels He cast out of heaven, that he "who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe." (Milton, 32)

So leave your AK hanging over the fireplace, it is not time for that.

Divorce Court

We hold these truths to be self-evident…that whenever any form of government becomes destructive…it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

~ Declaration of Independence (1776)

As an alternative to open rebellion, some raise the age-old question of secession, seeing the federal behemoth broken up by a peaceful, democratic process. Should anyone think those people in D.C. will simply let the workers go free, as if Pharaoh will give Moses and the Israelites (after a hardy clap on the back and a best of luck) leave to walk away into the desert, a quick trip to any library’s history section should quickly end their delusion.

While Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. effectively practiced passive resistance this, too, is no means to bring about peaceful change as the political mind is, above all, exceedingly prone to violence. It was once written of Europe’s rulers "these were fierce and lawless…war was the business and delight of their existence" (Mackay, 293) and pick up today’s papers and see, is the American politician any different?

Judging by their past and current behavior, from the War of Terror to that on drugs, or obesity, or smutty television shows, America’s ruling class look for any excuse to call out an army, be it of soldiers, police, or bureaucrats. Goading a political beast as highly militarized as the US federal government, even by use of a vote to secede or a simple, peaceful course of civic disobedience is to guarantee bloodshed. While Lincoln most certainly did not put to rest the question of the right to secede, he most certainly did put to rest any question of how America’s political elite will react to any sign of it. Forget "In God We Trust," it’d be better that every US dollar bear a more accurate slogan for our current regime. "If I Can’t Have You, Nobody Will."

So vote to secede or not, engage in peaceful resistance or not, if you want out of America you are going to have to fight your way out, and as of this moment we are not ideologically prepared for that struggle. Years after the glory of 1776, John Adams reminisced to Thomas Jefferson about what, more than anything, allowed such a progressive victory to be gained. He dismissed the actual fighting as of no import to the revolution, "it was only an effect and consequence of it," meaning the true revolution takes place in the minds of men before you can have any hope of success, before any rifle is loaded. "The Revolution," Mr. Adams went on to say, "was in the minds of the people, and this was effected…before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington." (Bailyn, 1)

Before America can be liberated, she must first desire it.

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A Change Is Gonna Come

If (a revolution) happens, I expect it will more closely resemble the French Revolution than the one in 1776.”

~ Wendy McElroy (2010)

Today, give me liberty or give me death no longer rings true, the typical American is content to put up with any outrage because he’s so ideologically stripped as to no longer have any idea he should be outraged. Harboring a completely materialistic view of politics that equates material comfort with freedom, he’ll bear any assault on liberty with timid submission so long as the hi-def cable stays on. The intellectuals fare no better in this regard, as they are the very ones who spread the ideas that made hi-def cable more important to us than trial by jury.

In the event of rebellion, the American people would lack any leadership with the ability, or even the urge, to guide them back to liberty. Even if the occasional outrage morphs into a tea party, the vast majority of Americans, lead by the intellectuals, take most assaults with quiet approval, and for now I thank God for it. To go to war is something even the most ignorant savage does with relish; but to start a revolution requires the ability for calm, rational thought and a manly courage to risk it all that does not currently exist in this country. Where once our forefathers shot at government troops marching through the Massachusetts countryside towards Lexington and Concord, today we are a frightened little flock that goes to pieces at the thought of Goldman Sachs suffering a well-deserved bankruptcy. 2010 America does not possess what successful revolutions are made of.

So, thank you all who sent me a kind invitation to share a mess kit and a fight, but when you Thomas Jefferson wannabes grab your AK-47s, pull on your surplus camouflage uniforms, and go rushing off into the mountains please count me out and don’t wait up. I’ll be watching the slaughter from afar, Barcelona perhaps, Amsterdam more likely, and doubtless I’ll wish good luck and God speed to you all.

As of right now this country is simply not prepared for secession, civic disobedience, or rebellion; and under the current regime they all would be considered the same in the eyes of the ruling elite. Any move in that direction would be setting you up for a hopeless task; to free a people that neither wish for liberty or could handle it if won.

Read the op-ed pages and editorials of any newspaper, glance at the comments section to any Internet news site, and listen to the interviewed "man on the street," read our intellectuals’ monthly journals and agree; modern America is too uncivilized and savage for freedom.

If you wish for a change back to liberty, forget your rifle — grab your pen.

Selected Readings

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1967)

Milton, John. Paradise Lost (Barnes & Noble Classics, New York, 2004)

Tugwell, Rexford. The Battle for Democracy (Greenwood Press, New York, 1969)

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Mikhail Kalashnikov

Recently Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who designed the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947) assault rifle, celebrated his 90th birthday. Though already feted in his Russian homeland as an officially approved hero at three previous events, President Dmitry Medvedev christened him yet again to honor the occasion, this time as a "Hero of the Russian Federation." That was on November 10, 2009 and America for the most part completely ignored the festivities, as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released the same day.

While the US industrial-military complex may get to play with an annual budget which exceeds the rest of the globe combined, they have yet to create a weapon even near the genius of the AK-47. It is so reliable that you can literally drop it in the mud, step on it, pick it up, and fire at will. (Try that with an M-16.) Drop it into a river, fish it off the bottom, and she’ll fire just fine. US and British special forces fighting in the inhospitable badlands of Central Asia are big fans. Combine this amazing reliability with its incredibly cheap production costs and you have the Honda of assault rifles; more of the AK-47 variants have been produced than every other assault rifle combined.

Noting studies that found most rifle combat takes place within close proximity, the rifle has a maximum range of about 300 meters, or 3 1/3 football fields, yet when it comes to being able to hit anything 100 yards is more like it. Since the overwhelming majority of humans are poor shots, semiautomatic or automatic variants are available for your consideration. Six hundred rounds a minute can be placed onto target, but you’d need to be a ridiculously fast loader to reach that number as the curved magazine holds only 30 rounds. 100 to 400 rounds a minute is more realistic, and still plenty. Some versions come with a wooden stock, some with a metal stock which may be folded down for storage; the latter variant is used by mechanized and airborne troops.

Firing a 7.62mm round that can either shred you (if it tumbles when it strikes your body) or leave a nice clean hole (if it passes right through) that can be patched up in a jiffy, the selective fire, gas-operated rifle is so cheap to mass produce and maintain that over 50 armies the world over use it as their chief infantry weapon. Since this leaves a lot of these things laying about, with plenty of ammunition to boot, it’s the preferred weapon of choice for terrorists, Mafia, drug dealers, assorted dictators, and other unsavory types. This fact gives it a rather negative reputation in American eyes; any Hollywood production with a villain almost invariably arms him with an AK-47, never with the M-16, our military’s preferred rifle.

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Nonetheless, it is a supremely lethal weapon, giving any slob armed with one the combat ability to take on a professional, and after you throw in its ability to function reliably in any type of climate the Earth can offer it’s easy to understand Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Jackie Brown when he intones, "The AK-47. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every mother****** in the room, accept no substitutes." Not too many people do.

And that includes not just Iraqi and Afghani rebels but American civilians, too, the last served by AK-47—spewing factories from sea to shining sea. And here is where you should give the communists their just due, as it was communism that put the working masses on an equal footing to the political class in the event things devolve into a bar brawl.

Who says that God has no sense of humor, if a rather dark one, when He gives for us the ironic fact that of all the forms of political organization that humans herd themselves into there has been none more reactionary, bloodthirsty, or political than Stalinism, and that’s the one which gave us the cheap to produce, lethal, and amazingly low maintenance AK-47. Besides corpses and vodka, the AK-47 was the only thing communist Russia was ever able to mass-produce.

A guerilla army in today’s world needs little more than an ample supply of AK-47s, something to believe in, and the support of those around them to be unconquerable. That’s all. And Mikhail Kalashnikov, God bless him, has put that ability in the hands of people from one end of the earth to the other.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No. 29 that should the federal government ever turn despotic it "can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms." If every American family had an AK-47 hanging on the wall over the 46" wide-screen plasma, that’d force enough to give any army pause.

So next May Day, assuming you remember it at all, take a moment to honor the memory of the millions slaughtered over the lethally stupid idea of communism, but give a nod to God’s great mercy, to His mysterious way that willed that very same idea to birth the AK-47. It gave to the working masses the ability to defend themselves from the more virulent strain of politicians; it is the sword of the common man. Of all the firearms yet dreamed up by mankind, it is the automatic for the people.

CJ Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Malayan Proverb

Throughout history Americans have been very good at many things; we have without a doubt established ourselves as one for the history books. In one area, though, we lag — badly. While we had the great industrial base, immense wealth, and utter stupidity necessary to create a world-straddling empire, we were never very good at it.

Even step one to being an empire — conquer to take — is beyond us. Instead of forcing tribute from the conquered, in the late 20th and early 21st century America conquered to give tribute. Once you became a protectorate, your country’s ruling class could be assured of living fat and happy on the American taxpayer, with a bevy of vicious CIA thugs available to murder whomever displeased thrown in as a bonus.

The world is expensive enough just to conquer, let alone subsidize. Pax Americana was never a sustainable system, we run the Jim Morrison of empires, and not a thought is ever wasted for any consequences past the immediate.

Now apparently we are broke, so much so that Obama is making the rounds of our creditors, bowing humbly and holding out his official presidential begging bowl. This is how the American empire wheezes to an end; Caesar issues forth on distasteful fund-raising expeditions, arriving in a 71-car-long caravan of such unseemly profligate waste that would make a Turkish sultan blush.

We didn’t elect a statesman; we’ve elected a bond salesman. Obama, tasked by his handlers to keep the pig troughs full, is walking a loose tightrope in high wind. From one side blows union demands for taxpayer loot, all the promises Obama made in sleazy backroom deals are due for payment. From the other side blow the beloved voters, who demand that all the vague promises made into a microphone be made solid, and without any overt taxation to pay for it.

And lastly from the last side (and in these days most important) are the people who we hope will continue to pay for it all, the foreigners who demand that the paper dollars they are paid back in are of the same value as the paper dollars they lent out in the first place. So sit back, enjoy, and watch Obama’s much-touted youthful visage wilt under the power he craved, a power which now presents him with an impossible task. He can’t please everyone.

Already the factions are forming, union boss Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, demands (unionists always demand) that the government (which is how he refers to the taxpayer) must spend up to $3 trillion to "create jobs," mainly in AFL-CIO ranks. "Where’s there’s obstruction," he darkly warns, "we’ll expose it and push through it."

Unfortunately for Mr. Trumka and the unions of noble bricklayers, plumbers, steamfitters, and so on, there is an obstruction, namely China. Once they no longer trust the ability of the American taxpayer to honestly pay back all this money they’re lending they will simply stay away from US government bond auctions.

Some argue that they would never do such a thing, that we owe them so much they wouldn’t dare stop lending us money, else how would we repay them? People who argue that angle harbor a fervent hope that the Chinese don’t come to their senses before we do, basically.

While the pessimist in me has little doubt this will all end badly, it was fun to watch Obama mouthing banalities about human rights and what not — as American diplomatic protocol demands — while all the while Chinese big wigs nodded their heads politely. Many news commentators have been pointing out that Obama’s leverage on this matter is limited by the fact that China is now America’s biggest creditor.

That is true, and we can also throw in the fact that America circa 2009, with her public displays of torture, extraordinary rendition, and pre-emptive attacks on other nations, has about as much moral leverage on the subject of human rights as a street whore does on the subject of chastity. But he farced his way through nicely.

Obama even took some time to give advice on how to keep not just America’s economy humming, but China’s as well. It involves lots of planning, and he knows just the guys to do it, as he is sure the Chinese leaders do, too. But there’s a problem with the currency, he intoned to his hosts, specifically yours.

He put on his free market cap and explained, patiently and clearly using that tone which so enraptures Americans and Germans, that the Chinese need to stop artificially lowering their currency versus America’s. This is funny because the Chinese, sitting on a pile of one trillion or so US dollars, are worried about the exact same thing regarding America’s currency.

The Chinese politely took all this browbeating, maybe wondering why Obama wants them to allow their currency to appreciate versus the dollar. After all, keeping their currency artificially cheap is the very monetary policy that creates the flood of US dollars into their banks, which in turn allows them to continue to buy the flood of trillions in US Treasury debt, a flood which Obama desperately wishes for them to buy.

And they think the Oriental mind is inscrutable?, they must wonder.

If they picked up a newspaper as Obama was spirited away in his 71-car caravan (how many would a President Al Gore demand?), they would read Obama’s personal pit bull, name of Rahm Emanuel, predict "that even as the administration grapples with deficit reduction, Obama would succeed in winning Congressional passage of key elements of what the president has called his ‘new foundation’ for the country."

The foundation he refers to will cost $3 trillion minimum, if the AFL-CIO has its way. And that’s not even starting on socialized medicine.

From reaching the highest of highs, our empire can’t even go out with a bang, like Japan in an atomic flash, or suffer wonderfully inspiring disasters on our funeral march, like Britain at Islawanda or Dunkirk. Instead, we gussy up our guy in regal splendor and turn him into a better-dressed version of the bums who beg for change on my subway.

Having thoroughly bankrupted the working class, America’s politicians have taken the show on the road, hoping to convince non-American fools to continue to dump money down their insatiable maws.

They are like the She-Wolf in Dante’s Inferno, "a starved horror ravening and wasted beyond all belief, a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving." They are such that my son, whose main concern is watching Transformers 45,238 times a week, is, at the tender age of five, already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

In late 1925, while the German state and her many municipalities had gone on an incredibly irresponsible borrowing spree, representatives of the German Reichsbank wired a cable to all the New York banks — they pleaded that while loans to German businesses were necessary and to be encouraged to please stop lending money to the German politicians. Dr. Schacht, the head of the German Reichsbank, personally appeared in front of the New York banking community at the same time, urging that there should be no more state and municipal loans to Germany.

So taking a page from such a fine example, I ask all my foreign friends, particularly all of China, to have pity on my five-year-old son. Next time Obama pays a visit, feed him, be polite, and send him on his way empty-handed.

I beg you: please stop lending our government money.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Ecclesiastes 1:17

In one of the more bonehead moves that an increasingly bonehead-looking Obama administration has danced to, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dispatched to America’s rumored ally Pakistan, even though tasked by Obama to “counter rising anti-American sentiment and chip away at mistrust of US aims in the region," decided instead to spend some time letting a roomful of Pakistani newspaper editors know that "it(‘s) hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they (Al-Qaeda, of course) are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to."

Then to make her point a bit more pointy for the current rulers, she went and called on Nawaz Sharif, a current Leader of the Opposition who wants to be Pakistan’s top dog. Between all that and the endless US Predator drone strikes, it’s a complete mystery as to why the Pakistani people aren’t waving American flags, building statues to Bushama, and naming their sons after Hillary. Personally, methinks some people are ingrates; they don’t deserve to be America’s burden.

Repeated blunders of this kind were inevitable, as Hillary’s appointment was granted not due to her temperament, and certainly not due to her intelligence and forethought, but as a purely political appointment, a sordid consolation prize for agreeing to play nice and help make Obama’s ascension into the White House a love-fest.

Yet, she does harbor the one qualification that makes her the perfect chief diplomat for the world’s greatest empire — she’s a bully, a saber-rattling loudmouth stuffed to bursting with donations from America’s weapon makers, so have no doubt war could break out at any moment she’s wandering about. And now she’s delivered, publicly, an imperial tongue lashing to a supposed ally. One with nuclear weapons.

But that’s almost always the endgame for history’s bullies, they eventually pick a fight with the wrong guy, and Hillary’s mouth and lack of brain power has put Obama in a diplomatic bind and our two nations that much closer to war.

Actually, considering all the drone attacks we conduct within their borders, we are at war, but also kind of allies in that confused, Vietnam-like way America has become so fond of.

Meanwhile, the man who was ordered to appoint her to that post is puzzling over yet another far-flung corner of the empire — a mountainous sand spit called Afghanistan, specifically. After eight years, a few score plans, billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives thrown into that bottomless pit (all to no avail) it’s plain enough for even a Harvard grad to see; we need a gooderer plan.

So after huddling with everyone worth huddling with for the past many months, discussing what and how and when (with helpful visual aids on PowerPoint to move things along) an underling has been dispatched to a helpful reporter, to whisper that the decider has almost decided.

It’s rumored to be a draw of a plan, as he’s splitting the baby in half and taking two different plans from two different men, one of them clueless as only an expert can be and the other a complete amateur on the subject at hand. Obama will reportedly meld the plan of his Afghan commander, General McCrystal, who says give me more soldiers and I will do thy bidding and Vice President Joseph Biden, who says alright but keep our troops in the population centers, as maybe if we do then the Afghan rebels will be content with the countryside.

So we’re going to stuff Afghan cities with soldiers, and only send them out into the great barrens if needed to rescue the small bands of commandos that we’ll send forth from our bases, just to keep things humming.

The fact that these two puffs are the best Obama can turn to for advice is a stark reminder of how dry America’s well has run. McCrystal is a counterinsurgency expert who is surprised when guerilla forces won’t stand in one place and slug it out with regular troops, and Joseph Biden’s only military experience was getting repeated draft deferments during his chance to fight the good fight in Vietnam. Their two plans, mixed together then combined by Obama with a healthy dollop of indecision, is not a confidence builder.

Meanwhile, back on the home front in our war of terror, my son fell down in the school playground and hit his head. I know this because I received An Alert from the School Health Office, with a helpful "head injury sheet" attached.

Most head injuries do not cause serious problems. However, problems related to a head injury may not always occur right away, so sayeth the school health office. Oh, and keep an eye out for these symptoms, one of which was "change in usual behavior or confusion." That describes every four-year old boy on the planet.

All this official looking paperwork, doubtless designed with the noble intention of soothing my worry, instead made me wonder what was wrong with a simple phone call. He fell. He’s fine. The 2009 version of America has developed taking things too far into an art form.

Maybe one day in a far distant future, after the entire ruckus has died down and the bleeding’s stopped, a noted historian will try to explain all of this. It will take a lifetime of intellectual toil spent but then, stuffed to his gills with information, he will stand before all the other upright, air-breathing fish, each one of them waiting breathlessly for the great explanation to finally be revealed, the answer to one of time’s more puzzling mysteries — what in God’s name got into America at the dawn of the second millennium?

And doubtless, after his decades of scholarly effort, with a shrug of his shoulders he’ll admit that he, like everyone else, is stumped.

Maybe they had a head injury, he might say.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ George W. Bush (September 20, 2001)

I don’t remember exactly which bar we were all gathered in when everybody started to sing. I don’t recall who started it. I just remember suddenly bursting into song along with everyone else — from the barkeep to the bartender to every other patron without exception. If only I were born a gay man — it would’ve been like dying and going to heaven.

Then again maybe not, as we were in an Irish bar along Second Avenue, I think somewhere in the 20s maybe, but I know the sun was still shining and that it was the American national anthem we were all singing. It was not too long after 9-11 had taken down the Towers, and since that day which now, to the New Yorker, separates Before and After, drinking when the sun was still shining was par for the course among my Smart Set.

We were all drinkers and smokers to begin with, but after the attack our lives took on a bit of the crazed. Just a short walk south from us thousands of people were still entombed under a mountain of rubble; the attack’s death toll was large enough so that everybody knew someone. To us, the death toll was no abstract number; all the victims were friends, co-workers, and family.

Everybody had a story to tell about that day, and everybody told it, repeatedly. We gathered daily and told them to one another, then gathered elsewhere and told them again. It was an orgy of neediness, every bar doubling as a psychiatrist couch and mating ground.

I had just cleaned out my office. Our building was directly across the street from the South Tower, which lay in a heap with its Twin right under our windows. The damage we sustained was bad enough to abandon ship. We arrived to the task after sundown, and walked though destruction like we’d only seen in history books.

Our path there was a street bulldozed clear of the endless debris, crushed cars and fire trucks. The fire department alone lost 343 men that day. Nobody talked.

A bit later, I looked down from my office window as the 24-7 cleanup crew went at it with a fervor pitch — they stopped working only in the rare moments when something resembling human was come across in the ocean of rubble. While I watched, they never stopped working. The sound of the excavators and jackhammers from below were clearly heard through the blown out window a few offices down, countless sparking acetylene torches accentuated the gloom.

Always a fan of military history, I’ve seen pictures of bombed out cities taken from the air and as I looked down my mind kept repeating, "Yes, that’s what it looks like." And the whole bar was singing our national anthem.

I was singing the national anthem along with them, as were everyone in my circle, everyone in my line of sight, everyone wearing their hearts on their sleeve and signing loud and unashamed. It was the most patriotic I ever felt in my life, it was uncut, completely pure emotion.

One last quick shot then off we went, first stopping outside for a smoke. It was still early fall, when New York weather will behave and allow you to be comfortable for a change. My wife and I held hands.

In between drags everybody’s eyes, without any comment, furtively glanced south at the empty skyline where the Towers ought to be. The sight was still new enough to be irresistible.

As we walked to the subway I lagged behind and looked up to a sight I never thought I’d in my life experience. Above the city was a sky clear blue and devoid of any jet plane, helicopter, or blimp, utterly empty. It had a sense of the Twilight Zone about it. I kept looking up, searching, and about halfway to the subway entrance I spotted them. A pair of fighter jets circled high overhead, ready to block a blow already struck.

That moment in that bar marked the high tide of my patriotism.

Eight Years
On

Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us.

~ George W. Bush (September 20, 2001)

This was before the Patriot Act, a War on Terror, spying on Americans, torture, TSA clerks randomly picking out the To Be Strip Searched, unprovoked war, and (particularly revolting to a New Yorker) the political deification of 9-11 slowly sapped me of belief then enthusiasm.

And once a year I watch how our day has become a political commodity, pushed by every huckster with a microphone. The memory of that day, of the victims, became mass produced and cheapened.

Non-stop mentions of 9-11 quickly became a required sound bite in every political speech. Now reluctant to watch any televised political campaign, if I risked it anyway I’d sit artificially fortified, ready to wince, waiting for the pre-requisite "9-11" to come chanting off their lips. And most embarrassing to a New Yorker, it was one of our guys, Rudy Giuliani, who was hands down the worst offender.

It was so bad he became a parody, the "9-11 Guy," Joe Biden’s quip that "there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9-11" was dead on. Yet, I will give Rudy Giuliani complete hosannas for his public leadership in the weeks after 9-11 — we couldn’t have asked for more.

When someone needed to step up and be The Man, he represented us well. When the New York Mets played the first ball game in our city after the Towers came down Rudy (a noted, brazen Yankees fan) was in attendance. Instead of his customary boos and curses when introduced, the usually hostile Mets crowd gave him a standing ovation. I was giving him a standing ovation. He deserved it.

But outside of his admittedly brilliant public persona during the weeks after the attack, he had always been a bumbling, self-righteous mediocrity. And now he was like the fat kid who inexplicably wins the 100-yard dash then won’t shut up about it: his presidential campaign’s theme song should have been Springsteen’s Glory Days.

It’s been an odd thing to watch this and the other changes that began after the attack. Having read Orwell’s 1984, it was disconcerting and insulting how the TV shows and advertising ads went to such lengths to remove any visual reminder of the Towers, because apparently seeing the Towers post-9-11 would reduce a New Yorker to tears. Even the Law and Order series, the quintessential New York program, hastily deleted the Towers from the opening credits and threw them down the memory hole.

9-11 did change everything; I see it in the small daily humiliations that a security state constantly uses to monitor compliance. I’m old enough to notice a difference in my city and, eight years of constant warfare later, it’s not for the better.

I now live in a New York that, among other things, sees you walk disarmed by a small knot of machine gun toting police, all standing at the subway entrance. You hope that they won’t pick you for a random search because you don’t want to miss the train, but knowing that if picked you’ll submit has its doleful effect — even if you hurry past them unhorsed, now humiliated, you’ve lost.

When my ancestors first came here from across the ocean, they would have shot a man, uniformed or not, who tried such a thing as rooting through their person and things on a whim. Later, having been disarmed by the Sullivan Act, my grandfather would still have punched him across the face. My father would have engaged him in a rigorous, ineffective debate, while I just turn, walk out, and use another subway entrance.

It’s been a long, slow rot, and most New Yorkers submit eagerly to the searches, and all of us born after 9-11 will know of no other world, my son will know of no other world. They won’t feel any anger, shame, or humiliation, won’t feel any strangeness about it at all as they stand politely still while armed strangers go through their persons and property, on a whim.

And they’ll think it normal and necessary that uniformed strangers may, as is their pleasure, go through their bank records, listen in on their phone calls, declare them an "enemy combatant," strip search them at will, or demand to see their papers. That’s the new America; this is the world of almost to normal.

So now each anniversary of 9-11, I honor the dead without flags, faith, or fury; I’m done with all that. Instead, I quietly pray that our memories of the lost don’t turn from heartbroken wishes that they were still here with us into bittersweet thanks that they were spared the sadness of seeing just how things were going to turn out.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He is currently writing a book on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. He will be speaking at Columbia University on October 10th for the New York/Ivy League Alliance Conference, details here.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Eliot Spitzer (2006)

Once upon a time but not too long ago my state of New York was saved from Eliot Spitzer, a particularly nasty breed of politician, all because of a beautiful hooker from New Jersey.

Praise her name, Ashley Alexandra Dupre! Also known as Ashley Rae Maika DiPietro and Ashley Youmans and Kristen and Victoria she’s the type of girl that you date for a fun-filled drug-fueled summer, engage in a screaming, bottle throwing break up with come October, to forever after remember her fondly until your last breath.

As for Eliot Spitzer, he was New York governor but luckily not for very long, as he was a foul-mouthed bully and power mad. Swaggering down our state’s Main Street, he was dubbed "the Enforcer" by an adoring, slavish media. Eliot rose to prominence first by using his political power as state attorney general to threaten and shake down his fellow New Yorkers.

The "terror of Wall Street" and many other streets he may have been, but luckily for most he was easily bribed to go away. But he had not played nice with the New York State legislator, and threatened to maybe even make them stop being so openly for sale, and that body has a long, august history of chewing up any challengers to their looting. Soon enough, unseemly couplings with a prostitute brought down Eliot, and an outraged People sent him packing.

The whole sordid mess started at Harvard (naturally). One of Eliot’s professors recalls “what set him apart” from his fellow students was “he was interested in a career in politics” which tells us quite a bit about Eliot right off the bat. And Harvard was where he met someone who wasn’t a very good judge of character, a law professor named Susan Estrich, who actually advised this monster to go into politics and to use the state attorney’s office as a stepping-stone.

Example of the type of man Eliot Spitzer was as both attorney general and then governor is given by the time he called a news reporter (who dared to disagree with him in print) and threatened, “You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done.”

He also enjoyed pulling off publicity stunts like threatening to arrest his targets in front of their wives and children and he had quite a temper, too, they say. Imagine this man if he’d gotten to the White House? He’d have made Dick Cheney look like John Adams.

Ms. Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal best sums up his style. "The Spitzer method was to target public companies and officials, leak allegations and out-of-context emails to a compliant press, watch the stock price fall, threaten corporate indictment (a death sentence) and then move in for a quick settlement kill. There was rarely a trial involved."

Using the immense, arbitrary power granted to a New York district attorney, Eliot moved from one Mafia-like shakedown to the next, piling millions of dollars into the state coffers and collecting millions more in "donations" from the very same firms and people he was persecuting. Naturally, this made him a rising star in the political world (he was, after all, reeling in the dough).

Fortunately for the people of our state, and maybe even the world at large, Eliot combined his foolish threats against his fellow politicians with a habit of frequenting hookers and, due to the pervasive surveillance society we live in, his bank records (like everyone’s bank records) were an open book to be trolled by whatever bureaucrat wished to paddle around in them. And when, just by the purest of coincidences, some bureaucrat happened to be paddling around in Eliot’s, what was stumbled upon?

Illicit payments to a brothel called "The Emperor’s Club" to engage the services of a prostitute! Yes! And not only that, he had knowingly broken the Mann Act, which makes it a federal offense to transport a hooker across state lines. And even worse for Eliot, his wife would now learn that he had last used the brothel on Valentine’s Day.

We know all this for certain because (sing along now) of the pervasive surveillance society we live in — his phone calls were tapped. Caught red-handed as red-handed can get, as soon as Eliot was finished in that hotel room so was his political career.

Despite clear evidence which investigators had on Eliot, despite the phone calls and banking records and Eliot himself even admitting that he was in fact guilty of violating the Mann Act (among other laws) U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia claimed there was “insufficient evidence” to convict. What exactly would he have needed to convict Eliot was left unsaid, maybe a sex tape of him and his rented partners? Would that be enough?

More likely, the fact that he was a politician, a state governor no less, weighed heavily in his favor, as he certainly knew about a lot of skeletons in a lot of other closets. So in the end it was decided that as long as he went quietly, he wouldn’t have to exit the stage through any jail cell.

Yet no adult believes that a sitting state governor was bought down for something so routine as frequenting brothels. The truth is, even before his personal, fateful, dirty little St. Valentine’s Day tryst Eliot had already made his fatal blunder.

Eliot, like all the dim-bulb Ivy League bankers pouring their firms’ capital into sub-prime mortgages, came to believe his own line of bullshit, and by his hubris New York was saved. Believing the ever-fickle voters were solidly behind him he was now going to Clean Up Albany the way he had Cleaned Up Wall Street. “Listen, I’m a f—ing steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else,” he threatened and bragged to his fellow politicians.

The stature of his office having gone to his head Eliot forgot that at base, he was nothing more than a college educated shakedown artist, one whose personal life was as seedy as his political one, and this left him extremely vulnerable to political attack. Had he confined himself to merely making life miserable for ordinary citizens rather than going after his fellow politicians, he would still to this day be sitting on his throne in Albany.

Eliot’s biggest failure as a politician came from the fact that when he attained the governorship, he still wanted to play "crusader," he completely forgot that it was no longer powerless, cowering businessmen he was bullying around, but other politicians, all equally powerful and also, like him, completely lacking in scruples or any respect for the law.

They quickly made chum out of him, Eliot resigned his office within barely a year.

Laws Are For The Little People

I believe in an evolving Constitution. A flexible Constitution leaves room for us to consider not merely how the world once was, but how it ought to be.

~ Eliot Spitzer

Eliot Spitzer’s sordid tale is but one more example that in modern America it’s not the "rich" hiding behind their million dollar lawyers who can safely ignore our court system’s voracious appetite for victims, it is the political class who can, overwhelmingly, safely ignore the law. Glenn Greenwald speaks to this repeatedly on his blog, using the refusal to prosecute any politician who ordered his underlings to torture as an example. But examples of this trend extend far beyond just torture — the problem is more a wholesale refusal by the political class to obey any law at all.

In his blasé disregard of the law, Eliot Spitzer is a perfect example of this trend, but he’s far from alone. From former district attorney Michael Nifong — a junkie so addicted to power that he was willing to jail three men he knew to be innocent in order to feed his habit (he served no jail time) to former state comptroller Alan Hevesi, caught stealing over $80,000 from the public till (he served no jail time) to Eliot Spitzer getting caught red-handed violating the Mann Act and suffering no punishment other than ridicule, in America the disregard for the law runs deep.

America’s political system is a shambles, home to legions of lesser specimens that all bring to mind Adam Smith’s description of the type of man Spitzer is:

Arrogance is perfectly familiar to them. They entertain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own judgment. When such (reformers) condescend to contemplate the constitution of the country which is committed to their government, they seldom see anything so wrong in it as the obstructions which it may sometimes oppose to the execution of their own will.

Eliot Spitzer is merely a particularly nasty specimen of the kind. If he were still New York governor, how many innocent men would at this moment be torn from their families, sleeping in a prison on his orders?

In a New York Times profile in March of 2008, Ashley Alexandra Dupre pleaded that she doesn’t want to be "thought of as a monster," and she shouldn’t be. It’s important to keep in mind the hero of our story is not whatever bureaucrat was paddling the U.S.S. Stasi through Eliot’s banking statements and listening in on his phone calls.

Rather it was Ashley herself, as she’s the one who actually took it for the team, who did the dirty work that needed to be done to protect our freedoms. The only thing that spared New York from a full term of Spitzer was this perfect combination of hubris and a hooker.

And now the newspapers report Eliot’s craving for power is in full bloom again, that he’s threatening another run for office, and I fear we cannot count on lightening striking twice.

I thank God for Ashley Alexandra Dupre — a genuine American hero — and urge that we all honor her hard work and sacrifice in two ways. First, by letting her throw out the first pitch to open the 2010 New York Mets baseball season, and most importantly by never letting a man such as Eliot Spitzer anywhere near a position of power again.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He is currently writing a book on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website. He will be speaking at the September Manhattan LP meeting, details here.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ Gary North (2006)

Democracy, especially the virulent, vampire-like variety practiced in modern America, may very well be condemned to collapse, but that’s no reason to give up on it. Despite history telling us that all democracies inevitably devour themselves, history also tells us that every system of governance mankind can dream up have all come to an end, as for example the much lamented American Republic, snuffed out after barely a century or so.

Yet, even when things look hopeless and all recorded history tells us our democracy is doomed, that’s no excuse to give up the ghost. Even in the darkest of times people still give it their best because hope springs eternal, and as a great American once asked in another time of trouble, "was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor"?Hell no it wasn’t, and there is still time to save our democracy, but to do so we must remove the millstones that hang about our systemu2018s neck — we must restrict the franchise. Caroline Baum recently noted, "when half the population is on the receiving end of government programs and has no skin in the cost, they will encourage their elected representatives to vote u2018yes’ on every new benefit that comes down the pike." That, right there, is the root of America’s overriding problem: our future-crushing, insurmountable fiscal deficits.

Now off the cuff, the thought of removing the right to vote from millions of Americans will strike many — especially those to be removed from the voting rolls — as anathema to our idea of liberty. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that to pull a lever is the Mother Wellspring of all that is good and plenty; the voting booth an ever munificent red, white, and blue Fountain of Freedom.

The superstitious belief that to vote means to be free is so firmly imbedded in our DNA that on this point the brain of the modern American is impervious to any and all assault, you may as well debate a rock. So admittedly my idea to restrict the franchise is as likely to happen as Alan Greenspan coming out to publicly lobby for Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill, but what the hell, why not give it a try?

After all, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

The Great Big No

Ambition, love of power, civil emolument, and greed of gain have been the great moving forces in politics under all forms of government.

~ William Graham Sumner (1877)

Democracy as practiced in America today is nothing more than a mob heist where the victims are voted on using a elaborate ceremony characteristic of all superstitious, barbaric undertakings, every ballot lovingly counted to decide who will be this yearu2018s sacrificial victim — which sap will take a shovel to the back of his head. If your neighbor has a wide-screen HD TV that is the envy of everyone, including you, next election you can herd all the envious to the nearest community center, denounce him, then vote his TV right into your living room.

The only solution to keeping the political class from voting the working class into poverty under a democratic system of governance is to restrict the franchise. In order to protect ourselves we must remove from the voter rolls every politician and every person of voting age who receive any part of their income, at all, from the public treasury directly or — if they are employed by or are the owners of any firm that has any government entity as a customer — indirectly.

Restricting the franchise is in actual fact a long-standing, accepted American tradition. Convicted felons, the mentally incompetent, and children do not have any right to vote and we, and they, are better off for it. Just because someone is not allowed to vote does not deprive him or her of the protection of law. They are still citizens, just of the non-voting variety.

In addition, the condition of the disenfranchised is purely voluntary — they may, by resigning their office, quitting their taxpayer funded job, or refusing their taxpayer funded lifestyle automatically be allowed to vote again, but for safety’s sake officeholders, upon resigning, will be allowed to vote again starting only on the fifth anniversary of their re-joining the private work force, five years being, in the opinion of our best rehab counselors, sufficient time to wean a human off power.

Allowing those who live off taxpayer funds to vote is inherently dangerous; they have what we in the financial world call "an inherit conflict of interest." Everyone wants a raise; the bureaucrat and those who otherwise receive taxpayer money endlessly yearn for more loot, and the politician for a far more addictive, lofty coin: power.

This makes politicians particularly dangerous creatures; they are all imbued with an insatiable greed, a boundless urge to grab more of what they crave above all. And there, at the level of each individual politician, lies the nub of any society’s problems, and restricting them from the franchise will help do something even more important than protect our paychecks — it will protect our liberty.

Remember Dad telling you that you’ll do it his way because "I pay the bills around here"? The same clear, just method of logic must be applied to elections. Purging the franchise of those who live off of taxation will restore adult supervision over our nation’s household. As children on an allowance do not get to tell the parents how to run things, so will Washington DC — and each state capital — see the house party come to a quick end, as if Mom and Dad came back from vacation a bit early.

You don’t let children run the show, as any reading of Lord of the Flies will attest, and, if I may steal a phrase from a great man, there’s been a lack of adult supervision over all levels of American government for decades. Come next election, America would do well to send all these children out into the backyard to play while the adults gather round the kitchen table and decide on things.

And mind they play quietly, as children should be seen and not heard, so we’ll need to take a page from the McCain-Feingold Act and decree that all public or private communications by anyone who receives any taxpayer money (excepting any candidate) will be strictly forbidden for three months both before and after any election. Such a policy is beneficial on a number of levels, as for example it’ll leave more airtime for American Idol re-runs, so clearly this is a win-win situation for all Americans.

Plus, restricting the franchise will truly make bureaucrats and politicians public servants, because just like a servant you do not get to tell the Lord of the Manor how to arrange the garden, or not to smoke, or not to drink on Sundays, or that they are too fat — to wit, dust the china cabinet, clean out the stables, and otherwise keep your mouth shut and your thoughts to yourself.

We could even make every public building have two entrances, one for the workers, the taxpayers, up in front and one for the politicians, in the rear alley next to the dumpster, just to remind them where they stand in their fellow Americans’ esteem.

Adults Only

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children she didn’t know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread,
She whipped them all well and put them to bed.

~ Nursery Rhyme

Taking a page from Alexander Hamilton’s reason behind making all the states’ debts into one federal debt (which bound together the men of capital to the politicians in Washington) we too need something to bind all the workers, each and every one, by a common denominator and it can be this: all will pay the same percentage amount of their paychecks in taxes, no exceptions, no deductions.

Conversely, each and every politician, bureaucrat, and recipient of taxpayer funds will pay no taxes at all on their paychecks. This may seem like it is favorable to the political class, but to the contrary it is a detriment to them — it is something that will set them apart in the eyes of the voters — and those that need to be watched must be highly visible at all times.

Some more perceptive reader may protest that this is a bit more civilized than what the public safety requires, being how dangerous the political class are, and they’d be right. It would be far safer for the public to insist that every officeholder should bear a highly visible mark in some way, the better to know which ass to put your boot into.

America already has the beginnings of such a system in place; here the politician is easy to spot, racing by in their heavily armored SUVs, windows tinted black, while the extra perky police hold back the traffic.

Naturally, this plan if instituted would raise a hue and cry among the vampire set, those who live off the sweat of others’ labor. You’d think people with their mouth clamped firmly on the nurse tit of the public treasury should be too busy suckling to sound off about how things should be run, but never forget that Americans are a "can-do" kind of people, so they somehow manage to speak even while nursing non-stop.

This can only mean one thing: they are always talking out their ass, so when the teachers union spokesman, with tear stained eyes, solemnly intones that the new budget is up 7% year over year "for the children," you know that he is full of s__t and best ignored.

A friend recently sent me a quote credited to a Sir Alex Tytler that reads in part, "A democracy…can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure." This quote appears to be a fraud; it is likely that no such man ever said any such thing. Nonetheless, there is infinite truth in those words.

Nature has its own checks and balances, and this can be seen in God’s creations, as every parasite is by necessity far smaller than the host it feeds off of. With half of Americans now living off the other half, we have reached a tipping point. The barnacle is as large as the ship.

Our democracy is a turbulent ride, a fun house carnival with no limits on any ride’s speed; popular passions have long ago removed every safety harness. The insistence that every sentiment being with a pulse has a God-given right to vote, that The People have an unquestionable right to rule in any manner they see fit, as long as 51% keep their fists in the air, is as illogical and reactionary as the belief that one man, a king or a dictator, has an unquestionable right to command.

All systems need a check, a means to keep things in balance, and American democracy, unfettered by any parental restraint, has grown up to be a pack of spoiled little s__ts, undisciplined, endlessly demanding, obnoxious, violent, and, above all, in desperate need of a good beating.

If we do not introduce any checks and balances to account for them, the little bastards will soon enough suck us dry.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He is currently writing a book on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

~ The Arthurdale Song

The West Virginia town of Arthurdale sits on a plateau 1,800 or so feet above sea level, nestled comfortably high and isolated among the Appalachian Plateau of Preston County. Like almost every small American town it is virtually unknown to all but the few who either live or have lived within her borders. There is nothing unusual in that — except in this case there is.

For a time from the initial birth of the town in 1934, Arthurdale was the epicenter of the New Deal, the Roosevelt Administration’s showpiece for what could be done for the common man. It was the first and most lavishly appointed of all the Subsistence Homesteads, a rather small New Deal program with the big goal of redistributing "excess" population from one area to another, the hoped for end result would be a "new American," living a communal life that would be a vast improvement on our country’s traditional individualism.

Arthurdale had the personal attention and fervent support of none other than Eleanor Roosevelt, who devoted the rest of her life — and a large part of her fortune — to the town’s residents. Having such a high-profile celebrity booster would prove to be a two-edged sword.

Subjected to intensely negative media coverage and a popular curiosity that rivaled anything today’s top celebrities endure from the paparazzi, for a few years the town’s name was on the lips of millions and mentioned repeatedly in the pages of newspapers and magazines from coast to coast.

Sightseers, their license plates bearing the mark of every state in the Union, flocked up the winding mountain roads to have a look for themselves in such numbers one of the town’s initial residents later complained, "got so a man couldn’t set down…without some stranger peeking in at the window or walking in to ask some fool questions."

But fame is fleeting, and today the town lay mostly forgotten, even the I-68 thruway which runs about 10 miles to her north does not see fit to mention Arthurdale on any road sign, but there I was driving up the mountain roads to see her for myself, going to peek in at the window to ask my own fool questions.

Night At The Museum

I’m going where there’s no depression,
To the lovely land that’s free from care
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble,
My home’s in Heaven, I’m going there

~ No Depression (1936)

As part and parcel to researching a book I’m writing on the town, I had arrived to attend a most illiberal of events — the annual New Deal Festival, held each year at Arthurdale. Despite the name, it is not so much a celebration of the era of FDR than it is a celebration of his likeable wife, Eleanor. As the town’s most prominent, enthusiastic booster she will always be Arthurdale’s First Lady, and compared to the litany of rogues, mountebanks, and tyrants that litter mankind’s history, she’s not a bad choice at all.

Why a small, obscure town has such fond memories of her and a litany of scatter-brained government interventions is easy to understand if you are aware of the town’s history, for if it wasn’t for the New Deal — and Eleanor Roosevelt in particular — Arthurdale wouldn’t even exist.

I had imagined that Arthurdale would be like every other historic site I’d ever visited. There would be a museum, a few history buffs like myself, and some old buildings to take pictures of, each one preserved to a greater or lesser extent. The first night of the festival was a combination Arthurdale High School reunion and celebration of the town’s 75th anniversary. I had bought tickets for the event with the hope of meeting one or two actual people who lived in the town and who could shed a little light on her history.

Admittedly I had assumed beforehand that my chances of finding any such people would be virtually nil, but that would make a fine introduction to the book, something along the lines of "so obscured by the passage of time that not even the people who live there now have any idea of what transpired." I couldn’t have been more wrong.

To this very day, the town is heavily populated with the direct descendants of the original homesteaders, their children and grandchildren, all of them very attached to the town — and each other — and all impressively knowledgeable about what transpired there. As outsiders among a group of people long acquainted with each other, my wife, son, and I stuck out like sore thumbs, and we were asked by the evening’s master of ceremonies — in a very kind, non-threatening manner — exactly who we were and why we were there.

Taking the microphone, I told them the who and the why (writing a book) and was shocked by the outpouring of genuine kindness and offers to provide any information I felt I needed. Invitations to move down there, look through family pictures and listen to their stories, and even a completely unexpected offer that opened the town museum’s archives piled up so quickly it was a task to keep up with all the names and information.

They all had one thing in common; the openhearted decency characteristic of the country dweller, a decency that always takes the city dweller by surprise. Their sense of community is notable, as it is something that cannot be legislated but earned only by that rare combination of loyalty to each other and the passage of time. Say what you will about the federal selection process that initially populated Arthurdale, the people who make up the town, both then and now, made for a good marriage.

The people strike a New Yorker as very religious (admittedly not a hard thing to do); I have never attended a town gathering that included a prayer to open and close the ceremonies. I’d hazard a guess that the number of churches in Preston County rivals the number of churches in my home city.

Right outside the window of the elementary school cafeteria where the reunion was being held, I could see the town church, a beautiful stone structure that the town residents built with their own hands — just as they had built every original structure within Arthurdale’s borders.

During the opening invocation, the prayer included a line that "we thank the Lord for our heritage" and their heritage, due to the town’s unique birth, is intimately and happily entwined with that of the New Deal. If my forebears had been plucked from the poverty stricken hellhole of a moribund coal-mining camp, as theirs were, and placed into a picture-postcard-worthy town set amongst gently rolling fertile hills, I’d likely feel the same way.

I had never been to an actual "living museum" in my life; Arthurdale fits the bill. Imagine going to research an old story — say ancient Rome — only to arrive and find a few Caesars still alive, and arrayed around them are their descendants, many still laying their heads in the very same homes their ancestors did. I was taken completely by surprise.

Who needs drugs when life throws this at you?

A Most Successful Failure

Friends of the subsistence homestead are very skeptical if this new pattern of life can develop without a great deal of social control.

~ M.L. Wilson, Director, Subsistence Homestead Division (1933)

Any group of individuals with shared life experiences have a collective memory, and the people who live in Arthurdale are still, to this day, deeply sensitive to anything critical written about their home town and its history. During my time there a number of people asked politely and openly that I please not call Arthurdale a failure, that all I had to do was look around and see that the town was thriving. 75 years on, with the nation’s focus long gone from Arthurdale, they still stand fearful of any negative press. They needn’t be fearful at all.

Two of the people most involved with the town’s early years, Eleanor Roosevelt and Elsie Clapp (who ran the Arthurdale school system) were, like me, New Yorkers, and they were, like me, outsiders. Sometimes it takes an outsider to look into your window and tell you what they see, to give an impartial observation and, to be blunt, no person who can perform basic math can look at the colossal waste of taxpayer money that happened at Arthurdale from 1934 to 1947 and come to any other conclusion then that, as a subsistence homestead, Arthurdale was a cataclysmic failure.

Yet, it is not accurate to say that Arthurdale itself, as a going concern, is a failure because the town still exists. In 1987 one of the original homesteaders — a woman named Elma Martin — was asked her opinion about the town’s "success." She replied, "part of it was and part of it wasn’t," and that is the best, most accurate summation of the town’s history; she was a failure until she wasn’t.

It cannot be stressed enough that the failure of Arthurdale as a New Deal subsistence homestead had nothing at all to do with the people who were chosen to live there — they were allowed no authority to decide how things were to be run, what businesses they where to open, or even what curriculum the school would teach. In Stephen Haid’s outstanding dissertation on Arthurdale he noted "the perimeters for community decision-making existed only within the narrowest of limits." (Haid, 197)

Diane Ghirardo wrote of the homestead projects, "in their day-to-day operation American cooperatives revealed a pronounced drive to implement drastic social changes through the cooperatives by means of paternalistic and ultimately authoritarian control." (Ghirardo, 138)

In a 1987 interview, Mrs. Anna Houghton (another original homesteader) talked about the control over their lives by outsiders, stating "to say u2018go ahead and run it your own way’ and yet to have somebody else say u2018well, this is the way it has to be done if you’re gonna get any more money from me’ is the problem of any administration," and there we have the perfect description of the political control applied to Arthurdale from 1934 to 1947. Even Bushrod Grimes (the town’s first federal project manager) complained about the "use of army tactics with the homesteaders." (APP 2178/1)

On the other hand, the success of Arthurdale as a community has everything to do with the people who stayed on after the politicians packed up and left in 1947. It only began running under its own steam when the homesteaders themselves, the Luziers, McLaughlins, Bucklews and all the others, where able to act of their own free will, guided by their own wants and opinions instead of outsiders’ wants and opinions. Only then did the town became the success it is today.

It was the Allsopps and the Zinns and all the homesteaders in between, all derided as dirt poor, ignorant coal miners, who succeeded where all the big-brained intellectual titans of their time, combined with all the millions of dollars that the powerful could muster, utterly failed. They made a successful go of it and 62 years after they bought control of their own destiny, drive into Preston County and try finding, in the opinion of my wife, a prettier town to look at.

It is they, the people of Arthurdale, who reminded us yet again what people can do when they are left to their own devices. As generous with her money and time as Eleanor Roosevelt undoubtedly was, her money (and the taxpayer funds she added to her own) came with too high a price, and in the end what was truly needed for success was for she and her friends to simply stand aside and let the people of Arthurdale run the show.

It is a story that shouldn’t die.
~ Glenna Williams, original homesteader

Come Sunday morning, after a weekend walking among living, breathing history, I pointed the car east along I-68 and headed back to New York City, noting again the disrespect shown to Arthurdale by the billboards and signs listing attractions deemed worthwhile, a category for which she is inexplicably considered unfit. The town has slipped into that quiet, placid anonymity that the American small town excels at. Most towns deserve no mention, Arthurdale, in contrast, deserves to have her name shouted from the hilltops. Her story has much to teach us.

So now, three quarters of a century later, another outsider arrived among them, also in the midst of a depression, also from far off New York City, and if they haven’t grown tired of opinionated New Yorkers, I have to state mine that come next July’s New Deal festival the people of Arthurdale should, as is their pleasure, honor Eleanor Roosevelt but that they should also, first and foremost, honor themselves.

The success of Arthurdale is their story, and no one else’s.

SOURCES

• West Virginia University Oral History Collection: C420/R569, interview with Elma Martin, mark 39:30
• Stephen Haid, Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933—1947 (PhD. Diss., West Virginia University, 1975)
• Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton, 1989)
• West Virginia University Oral History Collection: C420/R571, interview with Anna Houghton, mark 39:45
• APP: Letter from Bushrod Grimes to ML Wilson, April 4, 1937: The Arthurdale Project Papers (A&M 2178/Folder 1) West Virginia University.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He is currently writing a book on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal. He blogs for Liberty & Power on the History News Network website.

The Best of C.J. Maloney

In the public school system where I was molded, teachers loved to perform the Big Morality Play, one that every American high school student, at least in my area and time, was eventually put through. During lectures on the Holocaust the teacher would inevitably, with suitably furrowed brow, throw out the question. Would you have been a guard in the Nazi camps and stand with loaded rifle over a helpless gaggle of starving prisoners, all innocent of any crime, all marked for murder, faithfully cashing in your government paycheck every two weeks?

The answer seems to be that no one truly knows until you’re in a situation where God asks you to rise above the rabble, which is not an easy thing to do even for the best of men.

The teachers could have asked the same question in a different manner to make it more pertinent, at least to my case. What would you do, how would you react, to a friend who came home on leave from the military and told you he was a camp guard, and while away from home he stood with loaded rifle over a helpless gaggle of starving prisoners, all innocent of any crime, all marked for murder, faithfully cashing in his government paycheck every two weeks?

My friend left for Iraq not as some poor sap soldier about to get far more than he’d bargained for, but as a happy volunteer, one employed by another federal agency. Not the military itself, but another tentacle of DC, "civilian" yet militarized nonetheless. And Iraq was where he went to hunt for People of Interest, to then be turned over to torturers, I mean enhanced persuaders, I mean patriots…I sometimes wonder what circle of hell it all must have been like.

He’s been back home with us for some time now. The fact that for a time he was in Iraq is never mentioned to outsiders. Even when he’s not around our group, we don’t speak about what he did. Among us, in the unlikely, rare moments when the subject of torture is bought up (only in the abstract, naturally) you will get a deeply felt argument from some one for not only the necessity but also the morality of using torture during Dangerous Times, spoken with a passion turned screechy by lack of deep-seated conviction.

The whole matter was always quickly dropped, over time to fade out among us completely, like a bad memory you refuse to think about until it seems, at times, to have disappeared. It would be cruelty to push the subject anyway, disrespectful to his mother who is like one to me as well. So bottom line, eventually, you simply don’t talk about it at all.

Silence seems to be the answer to this Morality Play, at least to everyone in my circle. That’s how we handle it. You ignore it. My friend never talks about it — at all — and we never ask. To this day I cannot understand why on earth he told anyone what he was tasked to do over there before he left. Maybe everyone needs a moral sounding board, not to stop them from doing what they’re about to do, we do what we do regardless, but merely to see if they can rustle up a few confederates.

Now, despite my life-long, usually successful determination to ignore the stench of America’s rotting corpse, this morality play has come into my life, courtesy of the War of Terror and one sadly mind-screwed, misguided friend who dragged this stinking abomination of a question back home with him.

Knowing myself, I have a firm conviction that I’ve answered it all wrong. But if I, too, am dragged down for fellowship, for Unity in times of trouble, then at least this bill comes due sometime in the future so, like all Americans, I’ll pay for it tomorrow.

Yet my feelings for him are not all black and white, there’s a lifetime of shared memories. My friend is a good family man, treats his children like the definition of gentleman and loving father, served honorably in the military, and is an officer of a federal agency. He is a patriotic pillar of any American community he should ever choose to live in.

And if we ever spoke about what he did over there, which we never will, this is what I’d say.

Barbarians In The Gates

An honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner, Light of August

Thomas Jefferson must be weeping in heaven, America having decayed into a people exhibiting such disregard for their politicians’ actions. Consequently, America today is Alice in Wonderland gone rabid mad, Congress a mindless spinning roulette wheel of endless edicts, the president joins in the fun signing statements, and we are buried under laws in a lawless land where anything can happen at any time, everything’s in play — even torture.

We throw the Holocaust in the German’s face, yet make barroom jokes about how Our Boys are torturing Their Boys. And my friend willingly — with the hearty cheers of kith, kin, and countrymen — went off to join in the fun. And he’s got plenty of fellows who joined him, all employed by our politicians, all faithfully cashing in their government paychecks every two weeks.

There is no National Interest that justifies the torture of helpless prisoners. There is, however, a National Interest that justifies never allowing those in power, for whatever reason, to perform torture. Not only do they put our troops in the field under heightened danger because, if captured, they will be far more likely to be tortured, but all Americans are now at risk of the same treatment.

To think that what we allow our politicians to perform on foreigners will never be eventually used on us, too, displays both a childish level of irrational trust in the species Politician and a loathsome, callous disregard for our fellow man.

Neither our former president George W. Bush nor our former Vice President Dick Cheney denied that America’s political class ordered certain men in their employ to torture prisoners. And the American people, me included, are the model of apathy, which Thomas Jefferson defined as liberty’s Grim Reaper.

Whether future generations of our children will suffer from or rectify this moral laxity regarding torture remains to be seen, but we’ve foolishly put our children and those to come in a very dangerous situation. They will be born into an America that believes the politicians should be allowed to torture those they feel are something they shouldn’t be, and need a little enhanced persuasion to see the light.

The stupidity of torture as a means of extracting any type of useful information has long been noted. Stalin’s chief executioner Lavrenti Beria once joked that you could give him a man for one night of torture, and next morning he’d produce a signed confession from the man swearing he’s the Queen of England. A lifelong professional torturer, he would’ve known.

If we are not careful, one day we will know, too.

F Minus

The glittering prizes and endless compromises,
Shatter the illusion of integrity.
~ Rush: Spirit of the Radio

I remember sitting on the hood of my car, smoking and watching until I saw his plane rise above the bay, doubtless leaving behind, slowly descending, an un-seen greasy film. My friend’s body went to Iraq; his soul sank to a barbaric level, positively Dark Ages. On the latter journey we all go with him; we have no choice. Each and every American is part of this morality play; we’ve all been asked the same question.

I’m certain there were men back in the Dark Ages that had friends who ran the racks or lopped off heads for the king; had a friend much like mine. I’m sure some felt the same way I do; and who did the same thing I do. You meet him on the street, always with the unspoken agreement not to talk about what he did. You laugh, give him a hug, but like a nun’s hand brushing you back from your high school beau at the dance, that unspoken agreement is there once it’s there and will never leave, always now it keeps you apart.

You no longer truly connect; it hangs like a cold front full of unspoken questions you don’t want to hear the answer to anyhow, it fills up every moment of silence with awkwardness. To meet now is like glimpsing a dead relative through their gravestone. With time I’ve slowly grown used to it; I’ve come to think of him as a friendly ghost, a shadow of what he used to be — like part of him is faded. I feel dimmer myself.

It was the fall of 2005 when my friend left for Iraq to do unspeakable things. My wife, who had refused to come along to say goodbye, hugged me when I returned home from the airport. Later that night she lay on me and whispered a hope that my friend would come home alive. I never answered her — I had already stopped talking about it — but silently, in my head, I whispered a hope that he would come back with his soul.

After the first notice on America’s nightly news in 2004, torture quickly became a non-issue, floated down our memory hole until the most recent flare up — some more bodies have floated to the surface. God, in His infinite mercy, is giving us a second chance. So far in this Morality Play, the response to the question What Would You Do has been apathy, silence, and backslapping hugs for the guilty.

So far that has been my answer, and if you are an American, it’s been yours, too.

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City. He will be giving a talk for the Manhattan Libertarian Party and New York City Campaign for Liberty June 8th. For information, please click here.

C.J. Maloney Archives

~ 40 Below Summer

There are certain places on this Earth — like modern day, war-torn Baghdad — where a giant blast at 9:01 in the morning would earn itself little more than a moment’s pause. Not so in April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City, smack dab in America’s Midwest. The sudden explosion that took down a federal office building, killing 168 men, women, and children and injuring hundreds more, was most certainly out of the ordinary. It’s always the unusual that grabs our attention and heightens our emotion, so while in Baghdad such a blast is called a day at the market, in America’s heartland it’s called by its proper name — a tragedy.

The authorities quickly apprehended the mastermind behind the attack — Timothy McVeigh, a decorated American war hero and Army veteran. Unlike so much of what happens around us, the inexplicable tragedies that leave us asking why without any real hope for an answer, here the why was no mystery to anyone who knew Timothy McVeigh.

The idea for Oklahoma City was birthed in the massacre at Waco, Texas that happened exactly two years prior to the day of April 19, 1995. The matching date of the two attacks was no coincidence.

Building the Perfect Beast

No one close to him thought he was anything but perfectly normal.

~ from American Terrorist

Like most of history’s more vile figures Timothy McVeigh, for the most part, appeared to be just an ordinary average guy. There was nothing in his early days that gave warning he was contemplating or even capable of doing what he did. How often have we seen this, the crowd looking on perplexed as body bag after body bag is bought up from the basement of their long-time neighbor, the one who was always so good with the children during the annual block parties?

Gregarious when he wanted to be, hard-working, meticulous, and blessed with a high IQ, when all was said and done McVeigh’s body count total ranks him up there with many better known killers, but lacking the charisma of a Che or a Charles Manson there will be no college students displaying his face on their dorm walls or t-shirts. Quickly fading, we should grab onto whatever lessons McVeigh can teach us before time crushes his memory.

Complain all you wish about Missouri’s "Modern Militia Movement" report (designed to spot a real or potential terrorist), McVeigh certainly hit on red all across the list. Supports third-party candidates? McVeigh voted for Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne in 1996, casting his absentee ballot from the SuperMax federal prison. Conspiracy theories? He had them in abundance.

Subversive literature? More than anything, it was McVeigh’s reading of The Turner Diaries — the story of a gun rights enthusiast who uses a self-made truck bomb to take down the FBI’s Washington headquarters — that set the stage for what was to come. McVeigh was deeply impressed by the book and copied it as the blueprint for Oklahoma City.

Shortly after he first read the book McVeigh volunteered for the US Army. He would remember his first two years of service as the happiest time of his life. He had found a home, and dedicated himself with a fanaticism that earned him a tryout for the elite Green Berets, but the First Gulf War intervened. Instead of Fort Bragg, McVeigh was sent with his unit to far off Mesopotamia.

Assigned to the first wave of the American led ground assault, he found himself feeling sympathetic towards the Iraqis and wondering what the Army was doing so far from home. Back stateside after the conflict, he washed out of Green Berets training and was honorably discharged from the military in late 1991.

McVeigh had been given firsthand observations of a far-flung empire and he was revolted by what he saw. Turning his back on what he had hoped to be a new family and now once again a civilian, by many accounts he was increasingly embittered and prone to curse-filled tirades about the federal government.

For the rest of his days he would lead a life unstructured, living in a fringe world of gun shows and endless drifting across America, liberally handing out white supremacist literature to mark his passing. Having little to do with his family, he came home to New York but infrequently.

The fuse in his mind was lit by the events in Waco, Texas during a 51-day stand off in March and April 1993 between a Protestant religious sect and hundreds of heavily armed federal agents, the latter tricked out with both air power and armored vehicles. The resultant military assault to end it all, when Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the slaughter that killed 76 people, including 20 children and 2 pregnant women was, in the mind of Timothy McVeigh, a declaration of war on the American people by their own government.

From his father to his few friends to the people who worked with him, all agree, and McVeigh always made it bluntly clear, that the tragedy in Oklahoma City was a direct response to what had happened at Waco two years prior. While Rudy Giuliani would doubtless consider such a theory "extraordinary," thinking that maybe McVeigh launched the attack because he "hates our freedom," the FBI, the jury, and everyone else had no doubt that "blowback" would be the perfect description for what happened.

In the end, his dreams of eventual glory in the eyes of his fellow Americans, who according to McVeigh will one day view him as a patriot, will likely remain a still-born project. For all his willingness to take action, McVeigh suffered from the characteristic flaw of the modern American mind — the frantic urge to act without giving a moment’s thought to what you are about to do.

Road to Ruin

I’ve seen it many times, nice people doing really terrible things.

~ Dr. John Smith, court psychiatrist to McVeigh

Despite his superior IQ, McVeigh, like many highly intelligent people, had a big dose of stupid in him. His plan and how he pulled it off proves the accusation. The sad, ironic tragedy of Timothy McVeigh was this; when all was said and done, he became everything he supposedly despised.

Timothy McVeigh’s low opinion of government employees was arguably given credence by their behavior towards him and his family during the aftermath of the bombing. From FBI agents breaking into and inundating his father’s home with listening devices — even after his father had offered the keys — to the thuggish interrogation techniques used against his sister, to the FBI picking up defense witnesses at the local airport for an intimidating ride to the courthouse, to the sleep deprivation and inhumane treatment practiced on McVeigh himself, the federal government gave every indication that it is the lawless, out of control threat McVeigh claimed it to be.

As the trail came to a close, government prosecutor Larry Mackey asked the jurors "Who are the patriots, and who is the traitor"? In this case, no one was the former and everyone was the latter. In a country with any respect for the rule of law, Janet Reno (who bears ultimate responsibility for Waco) would have shared a cellblock in the SuperMax with Timothy McVeigh, waiting her turn with justice. Yet, the fact that she went unpunished gave McVeigh no reason to bring down a building on top of 168 people who had nothing at all to do with Waco.

Despite McVeigh’s expressed admiration for our Founding Fathers, Larry Mackey was dead on when he stated, "our forefathers didn’t fight women and children…they didn’t plant bombs and run away," (Michel, 2001, p. 320) and when he reminded the jury that, "he committed murder. This is a murder case" (Michel, 2001, p. 341) he was exactly correct. The Founding Fathers would not have condoned the collective punishment that McVeigh inflicted.

For all the hypocrisy of the same organization that pulled off the massacre at Waco beating its breast over the massacre at Oklahoma City, the government’s case against McVeigh was airtight. Timothy McVeigh was guilty as sin, and was nothing more than a mass murderer. From using threats against Terry Nicolas’s family to extract his help in mixing the bomb components to his deliberate, blasé attitude towards the massive "collateral damage" he caused, McVeigh proved himself no more worthy of respect than the government he felt such a hatred towards.

Coupled with his claim that, "I did it for the larger good," McVeigh’s last words to the court after his sentencing were a pathetic cop-out for a man who otherwise gladly took credit for every step of his murderous rampage. He quoted Justice Brandeis, "for good or ill, (the government) teaches the whole people by its example." Such words are nothing but an excuse, like a child telling his mother that he broke a window only because Johnny broke one first. McVeigh tried to argue that all is fair in love and war, as if murdering 168 completely innocent strangers somehow conformed to the rules of a just war.

It’s sad to say but there is much truth in Stalin’s famous opinion "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Like all collective activities, dying in mass removes much of the individuality that each victim deserves. Because of this, except for close friends and family, nobody could likely name a single one of McVeigh’s victims who died that April 19th. From Lucio Aleman Jr. to John Youngblood and all the other 166 murdered in between, everyone from that building is forever known to most by the term "168."

Yet, if there are two who stand out in this tragedy for the fact they are not counted as victims at all, it was McVeigh’s parents, William and Mickey. Bud Welch, a man who lost a 23-year-old daughter at Oklahoma City, felt William McVeigh to be an "even bigger victim of the bombing than himself." (Michel, 2001, p. 388) True to character, Timothy McVeigh considered his parents’ anguish regrettable but necessary "collateral damage."

For the rest of their days, every relative or friend of those 168 will desperately miss their loved one and can soothe their grief in the comfort of others. In contrast, Timothy McVeigh’s parents must go through life without a son and with a past that lies upon their life like a dark cloak, they are condemned to plod along forever fearful that someone will find out they birthed an abomination. Theirs is a secret wound that will never heal, and they bear the scars without even the sympathy of their fellow man.

So on this date, which calls us to remember each of the 168 lives destroyed, we should also extend our sympathy to include William and Mickey McVeigh who, through no fault of their own, have been devastated by the Oklahoma City bombing in a way that most cannot even begin to comprehend.

Recommended Reading

• Others Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy, by Stephen Jones and Peter Israel, Public Affairs, 1998, (New York, NY)
• Secrets Worth Dying For: Timothy James McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing, by David Hammer and Jeffrey Paul, 1st Books Library, 2004.
• American Terrorist, by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, Regan Books, 2001, (New York, NY)

C.J. Maloney [send him mail] lives and works in New York City.

C.J. Maloney Archives

And as we
slowly separate from our worldly desires
we think the unthinkable.

~
40 Below Summer

There
are certain places on this Earth — like modern day, war-torn Baghdad
— where a giant blast at 9:01 in the morning would earn itself little
more than a moment's pause. Not so in April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City,
smack dab in America's Midwest. The sudden explosion that took down
a federal office building, killing 168 men, women, and children
and injuring hundreds more, was most certainly out of the ordinary.
It's always the unusual that grabs our attention and heightens our
emotion, so while in Baghdad such a blast is called a day at the
market, in America's heartland it's called by its proper name —
a tragedy.

The
authorities quickly apprehended the mastermind behind the attack
— Timothy McVeigh, a decorated American war hero and Army veteran.
Unlike so much of what happens around us, the inexplicable tragedies
that leave us asking why without any real hope for an answer, here
the why was no mystery to anyone who knew Timothy McVeigh.

The
idea for Oklahoma City was birthed in the massacre at Waco, Texas
that happened exactly two years prior to the day of April 19, 1995.
The matching date of the two attacks was no coincidence.

Building
the Perfect Beast

No one close
to him thought he was anything but perfectly normal.

~
from American
Terrorist

Like
most of history's more vile figures Timothy McVeigh, for the most
part, appeared to be just an ordinary average guy. There was nothing
in his early days that gave warning he was contemplating or even
capable of doing what he did. How often have we seen this, the crowd
looking on perplexed as body bag after body bag is bought up from
the basement of their long time neighbor, the one who was always
so good with the children during the annual block parties?

Gregarious
when he wanted to be, hard-working, meticulous, and blessed with
a high IQ, when all was said and done McVeigh's body count total
ranks him up there with many better known killers, but lacking the
charisma of a Che or a Charles Manson there will be no college students
displaying his face on their dorm walls or t-shirts. Quickly fading,
we should grab onto whatever lessons McVeigh can teach us before
time crushes his memory.

Complain
all you wish about Missouri's "Modern Militia Movement"
report (designed to spot a real or potential terrorist), McVeigh
certainly hit on red all across the list. Supports third party candidates?
McVeigh voted for Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne in 1996,
casting his absentee ballot from the SuperMax federal prison. Conspiracy
theories? He had them in abundance.

Subversive
literature? More than anything, it was McVeigh's reading of The
Turner Diaries — the story of a gun rights enthusiast who uses
a self made truck bomb to take down the FBI's Washington headquarters
— that set the stage for what was to come. McVeigh was deeply impressed
by the book and copied it as the blueprint for Oklahoma City.

Shortly
after he first read the book McVeigh volunteered for the US Army.
He would remember his first two years of service as the happiest
time of his life. He had found a home, and dedicated himself with
a fanaticism that earned him a try out for the elite Green Berets,
but the First Gulf War intervened. Instead of Fort Bragg, McVeigh
was sent with his unit to far off Mesopotamia.

Assigned
to the first wave of the American led ground assault, he found himself
feeling sympathetic towards the Iraqis and wondering what the Army
was doing so far from home. Back state side after the conflict,
he washed out of Green Berets training and was honorably discharged
from the military in late 1991.

McVeigh
had been given first hand observations of a far-flung empire and
he was revolted by what he saw. Turning his back on what he had
hoped to be a new family and now once again a civilian, by many
accounts he was increasingly embittered and prone to curse filled
tirades about the federal government.

For
the rest of his days he would lead a life unstructured, living in
a fringe world of gun shows and endless drifting across America,
liberally handing out white supremacist literature to mark his passing.
Having little to do with his family, he came home to New York but
infrequently.

The
fuse in his mind was lit by the events in Waco, Texas during a 51-day
stand off in March and April 1993 between a Protestant religious
sect and hundreds of heavily armed federal agents, the latter tricked
out with both air power and armored vehicles. The resultant military
assault to end it all, when Attorney General Janet Reno ordered
the slaughter that killed 76 people, including 20 children and 2
pregnant women was, in the mind of Timothy McVeigh, a declaration
of war on the American people by their own government.

From
his father to his few friends to the people who worked with him,
all agree, and McVeigh always made it bluntly clear, that the tragedy
in Oklahoma City was a direct response to what had happened at Waco
two years prior. While Rudy Giuliani would doubtless consider such
a theory "extraordinary," thinking that maybe McVeigh
launched the attack because he "hates our freedom," the
FBI, the jury, and everyone else had no doubt that "blowback"
would be the perfect description for what happened.

In
the end, his dreams of eventual glory in the eyes of his fellow
Americans, who according to McVeigh will one day view him as a patriot,
will likely remain a still-born project. For all his willingness
to take action, McVeigh suffered from the characteristic flaw of
the modern American mind — the frantic urge to act without giving
a moment's thought to what you are about to do.

Road to
Ruin

I've seen
it many times, nice people doing really terrible things.

~
Dr. John Smith, court psychiatrist to McVeigh

Despite
his superior IQ, McVeigh, like many highly intelligent people, had
a big dose of stupid in him. His plan and how he pulled it off proves
the accusation. The sad, ironic tragedy of Timothy McVeigh was this;
when all was said and done, he became everything he supposedly despised.

Timothy
McVeigh's low opinion of government employees was arguably given
credence by their behavior towards him and his family during the
aftermath of the bombing. From FBI agents breaking into and inundating
his father's home with listening devices — even after his father
had offered the keys — to the thuggish interrogation techniques
used against his sister, to the FBI picking up defense witnesses
at the local airport for an intimidating ride to the courthouse,
to the sleep deprivation and inhumane treatment practiced on McVeigh
himself, the federal government gave every indication that it is
the lawless, out of control threat McVeigh claimed it to be.

As
the trail came to a close, government prosecutor Larry Mackey asked
the jurors "Who are the patriots, and who is the traitor"?
In this case, no one was the former and everyone was the latter.
In a country with any respect for the rule of law, Janet Reno (who
bears ultimate responsibility for Waco) would have shared a cellblock
in the SuperMax with Timothy McVeigh, waiting her turn with justice.
Yet, the fact that she went unpunished gave McVeigh no reason to
bring down a building on top of 168 people who had nothing at all
to do with Waco.

Despite McVeigh's expressed admiration for our Founding Fathers,
Larry Mackey was dead on when he stated, "our forefathers didn't
fight women and children…they didn't plant bombs and run away,"
(Michel, 2001, p. 320) and when he reminded the jury that, "he
committed murder. This is a murder case" (Michel, 2001, p.
341) he was exactly correct. The Founding Fathers would not have
condoned the collective punishment that McVeigh inflicted.

For
all the hypocrisy of the same organization that pulled off the massacre
at Waco beating its breast over the massacre at Oklahoma City, the
government's case against McVeigh was airtight. Timothy McVeigh
was guilty as sin, and was nothing more than a mass murderer. From
using threats against Terry Nicolas's family to extract his help
in mixing the bomb components to his deliberate, blasé attitude
towards the massive "collateral damage" he caused, McVeigh
proved himself no more worthy of respect than the government he
felt such a hatred towards.

Coupled
with his claim that, "I did it for the larger good," McVeigh's
last words to the court after his sentencing were a pathetic cop
out for a man who otherwise gladly took credit for every step of
his murderous rampage. He quoted Justice Brandeis, "for good
or ill, (the government) teaches the whole people by its example."
Such words are nothing but an excuse, like a child telling his mother
that he broke a window only because Johnny broke one first. McVeigh
tried to argue that all is fair in love and war, as if murdering
168 completely innocent strangers somehow conformed to the rules
of a just war.

It's
sad to say but there is much truth in Stalin's famous opinion "one
death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Like
all collective activities, dying in mass removes much of the individuality
that each victim deserves. Because of this, except for close friends
and family, nobody could likely name a single one of McVeigh's victims
who died that April 19th. From Lucio Aleman Jr. to John
Youngblood and all the other 166 murdered in between, everyone from
that building is forever known to most by the term "168."

Yet,
if there are two who stand out in this tragedy for the fact they
are not counted as victims at all, it was McVeigh's parents, William
and Mickey. Bud Welch, a man who lost a 23 year-old daughter at
Oklahoma City, felt William McVeigh to be an "even bigger victim
of the bombing than himself." (Michel, 2001, p.388) True to
character, Timothy McVeigh considered his parent's anguish regrettable
but necessary "collateral damage."

For
the rest of their days, every relative or friend of those 168 will
desperately miss their loved one and can soothe their grief in the
comfort of others. In contrast, Timothy McVeigh's parents must go
through life without a son and with a past that lies upon their
life like a dark cloak, they are condemned to plod along forever
fearful that someone will find out they birthed an abomination.
Theirs' is a secret wound that will never heal, and they bear the
scars without even the sympathy of their fellow man.

So
on this date, which calls us to remember each of the 168 lives destroyed,
we should also extend our sympathy to include William and Mickey
McVeigh who, through no fault of their own, have been devastated
by the Oklahoma City bombing in a way that most cannot even begin
to comprehend.

Recommended
Reading

• Others
  Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy,
  by Stephen Jones and Peter Israel, Public Affairs, 1998, (New
  York, NY)
• Secrets
  Worth Dying For: Timothy James McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,
  by David Hammer and Jeffrey Paul, 1st Books Library,
  2004.
• American
  Terrorist, by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, Regan Books,
  2001, (New York, NY)

April
17, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.

C.J.
Maloney Archives

I
only watched because of my wife. She insisted that the vice presidential
debate last October between Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden had potential
to be entertaining. Sarah Palin, the woman from nowhere, so green
and minor league that she couldn't even handle a puff of an interview
with the likes of Katie Couric, was going up against Joseph Biden,
a long-tenured grandee of the Senate, a veteran political huckster
with a smooth polished to smoother by decades of selling his soul.
This could be a televised massacre.

So
let's now give Mrs. Palin her due. Despite the nervous twitches,
the desperate mental struggles to remember her lines scrolling across
her face, and the chirpy cheerleader delivery, she held her own.
I went from wondering if a vice presidential candidate had ever
been debated to tears, live, to giving her a mental high five for
gritting it through.

Not
having seen many televised campaign events during my lifetime, I
was a bit taken aback, though, as the view kept panning behind
the candidates, specifically behind Mrs. Palin. Is that normal?
I've seen Hillary on camera countless times over the years and I
don't have a clue what her ass looks like; on the contrary Mrs.
Palin's was on prominent display.

My
wife was right; they put on an entertaining show. No experience
is ever completely wasted, and I took away two things from my foray
into genuine American agitprop, one of which was this — Sarah Palin
has a really nice ass.

Despite
such advantage though, Mrs. Palin did not set history as America's
first female vice president; she had to settle for the silver as
America's first female vice presidential candidate to have a porn
movie made specifically with her in mind, the wonderfully titled
Nailin' Paylin. Congratulations, Sarah.

I don't know
how the Republicans are going to top this for the next go-round,
but Politico.com ran a story this last February 30th
claiming Karl Rove has been out trawling our great nation's finer
strip clubs. From so recently having no interest at all in American
politics, I'm already looking forward to 2016.

Best Friends
Forever

You guys
are my best friends, through thick and thin,
Best friends are we!!!!
~ Cartman, on South Park

There
was one other thing, as I said, that grabbed my attention. It was
the only time during the entire debate when either Biden and Palin
seemed legitimately perky, it made a rouge of color came to Biden's
waxy dead cheeks and Palin get to shaking her pom-poms all frantic:
when the subject over who was a better, more ardent defender of
Israel was breached.

Living in the
Age of AIPAC, both candidates showed an extreme concern that their
deeply felt, unequivocal support of Israel be plain for all to see,
and their groveling brought to my mind the Federalist Papers
No. 75, the one where Alexander Hamilton warns of the "ambitious
man (who) might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign
power, the price of his treachery to his constituents." Their
attitude towards Israel is par for the course in American politics;
everyone from Obama to McCain to Hillary crawls through the doggie
doors of AIPAC, barking loyalty.

Yet,
democracy being what it is, such behavior is only possible because
the American people have always had a heavy-breathed ache for Israel
since the moment of her creation. As Walter
Russell Mead pointed out in Foreign Affairs magazine last
summer, America's crush for Israel has been our most deeply
held, popular foreign policy stance since 1947, the year she was
created on a slice of Middle Eastern land given her by the kind
generosity of the United Nations.

To
help argue for the United States government to recognize the existence
of Israel Clark Clifford (the White House chief counsel) quoted
President Truman a religious passage from the Book of Deuteronomy
— and how could Harry disagree with God? Birthed from religious
text, American foreign policy in the Middle East has imported to
our shores the virulent madness created from two thousand years
of endless fighting, all to see who gets to claim lordship over
a pile of holy rocks.

Our
exposure to the Holy Land has been sixty years too long; we've gone
mentally toxic from breathing its religious fanaticisms, and now
massacres and midnight raids and torture chambers occupy our time.
America has gone insane, at least temporarily.

So to all the
people around the world, many my lunatic fellow countrymen may have
crushed, shredded, or stacked into pyramids, I ask that you forgive
us, for we know not what we do. I have lived forty years and see
we are intellectually spent, utterly mindless, our rational thought
dulled by the endless war any empire requires, particularly one
that concentrates on the Holy Land.

We are punch-drunk
and staggered from all the fighting and now most of our blows, like
the Patriot Act, land on ourselves. With each crisis we tighten
down on our own chains, yet of all the sad results so far, the lost
lives, liberties, and skyscrapers, America will one day be best
remembered for her singular, all-time greatest foreign policy blunder
— she let Israel get The Bomb.

The Samson
Option

Thus he
killed many more as he died than while he lived.
~ Judges 16:30

You
could say that dismal men are on the ascendant in Israel, with the
militant Likud Party oozing into power alongside the racist Israel
Our Home Party. But bad men combined with nukes, in and of themselves,
present no mortal threat to the whole international community. Stalin
had the bomb, Mao too; we lived.

Years
ago Seymour Hersh published an article, "The Samson Option,"
detailing Israel's plan to turn all the Middle East into a radioactive
dustbowl if her existence was ever threatened. Yet, this doesn't
really mean anything. I'm sure every nuclear power has its "Doomsday
Plan," getting to write one is part of the fun that comes from
buying an ICBM.

Nobody
knows for sure what any politician with their finger on the button
will decide when it comes to it, but what's for certain is that
at some point in the future, like it or not, with a nuclear armed
Israel the whole world is going to find out.

Israel
has two distinct long-term disadvantages to her survival that all
other nuclear powers thankfully lack — horrid demographics and a
torrid, passionate subsidized relationship with a sugar daddy, in
this case America. This puts the entire international community
under mortal threat.

Annually
lavished with billions in direct and indirect US taxpayer subsidies
and explicitly protected by America's immense military, Israel,
like all subsidized entities, is not running on a self-sustainable
basis. While the IDF is a world class military, Israel punches far
above her weight not due to any inherit strength, but at the pleasure
and willingness of the American taxpayer to keep her on the gravy
train. That's a shaky foundation to build nuclear platforms upon,
because the day will inevitably come when America, through either
lack of ability or inclination, no longer glares protectively over
Israel's shoulder or stuffs her purse full of diamonds.

There
is safety in numbers, especially in the endless bar brawl that we
call the Holy Land, and the numbers are dead set against Israel.
She exists as a small dab of Jewish dropped into an ocean of Muslim
and, to make things even more hopeless, with a birthrate that can't
match her neighbors. Population experts predict that at present
rates Jews will be a minority within Israel itself this half century.

In
the end, it is demographics, the weight of bodies, which decide
who rules, and the IDF will inevitably run out of what is every
army's most valuable resource — fighting men. And knowing that US
soldiers will not be filling the gap, the Muslim world will see
the chance they've been waiting for since 1947.

When
Muslim armies are driving hard towards a Tel Aviv bursting with
terrified refugees mingled among the retreated, shattered remnants
of a defeated IDF, the Jewish Israelis will do what a people consumed
by fear have always done — they will turn for leadership to the
demagogues among them, the raving madmen with the greatest dose
of ruthless charisma, and the ones who promise redemption, in this
life or the next, will end up on top.

And
they will make men such as Netanyahu (the top boss of Likud) and
Avigdor Lieberman (ditto for Israel our Home) look like Gandhi in
comparison.

When
those Muslim armies arrive with a hateful vengeance to announce
Israel's end game, what will those madmen do with all those nuclear
weapons lying about? Come to think, what would men such as Netanyahu
and Lieberman do? How much of a deterrent is the threat of nuclear
martyrdom to a Muslim army? For all the shouting about how the bomb
must be kept out of Iran, we'd be better off to concentrate on getting
it out of Israel.

Lord
Keynes was correct about the long run — death comes to us
all without exception; even your child that you kiss to sleep is
on a timer. Sometimes you go gently in your bed and sometimes you
go fast, hard, and with lots of other people, all together screaming
in big bloody bunches. All you can do is hope for the former and
pray.

And
I pray that when the inevitable arrives, when Israel's timer hits
zero, that I, along with everyone I love, am already safely and
comfortably coffined.

And
I wish the same for you, reader.

April
6, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.

I recently
received e-mails from a couple of college students; they wondered
where the previously smooth path to Wall Street riches was taking
them and asked my advice if they should maybe take a detour into
a career with more potential and less risk, like professional bull
riding. Even worse for the young men, they had the bad luck to stumble
across Hayek and Mises at the tender age of college; they have lost
the intellectual blind spots necessary to drink from Wall Street's
cup without grimacing — for them, the party's over before it had
even begun.

Unfortunately,
there is really no way for me to answer their question about staying
on the path to Wall Street, to follow a Yellow Brick Road that no
longer gleams with gold. I don't know their circumstances; only
they do. But, with me being a modern day American, having no clue
what I'm talking about will not turn me away from running my mouth,
so stuffed to the gills with the hollow omniscience a top post-graduate
degree grants to the owner I'll give my advice anyway.

The
Search for Knowledge

I have never
let my schooling interfere with my education.
~ Mark Twain

Many years
ago, during the dark times before the GI Bill and Sallie Mae, the
overwhelming majority of Americans never earned a college degree.
To become a "college man" meant having parents wealthy
enough to ship you off to Princeton, Harvard, or some such place,
where the progeny would earn themselves a lifetime of steady, well-remunerated
employment through four years of intensive networking, drinking,
rowing, debutante balls, and intercollegiate football matches accompanied
by rousing fight songs. The finished product of this process was
marked not with wisdom but its pale substitute – wit.

Included
among "all the rights, privileges, and immunities thereunto
appertaining" in the top school degree was an arrogance or,
at best, a condescending sympathy towards all those not familiar
with the interior of the University Club, all those poor cabdrivers,
waiter staff, and subway riders who never even heard about that
favorite famous professor of our memory, let alone took lessons
at his feet.

The ideas
birthed by our elite colleges in the late 1800s morphed America
into a socialist democracy, this sea change has had a boomerang
effect on our university system — it now operates under the premise
that college equals education and everybody has a right to it. Politicians
at all levels have borrowed against tomorrow to boost college attendance,
and before all the seed corn ran out the university system gorged
to its content — more Americans now hold college degrees than at
any time in history. Yet, the industry's outsized growth did not
improve the product, but diluted what little it had to offer to
begin with.

At the
top rung of the system (in reputation, at least) are the Ivy League
colleges, which have long been diploma mills producing legions of
dumbasses, schemers, and charlatans by the bushel, every graduated
brain stuffed with the irrational ravings of select madmen and emptied
of any shred of humility. Chock full of an insatiable urge to "plan"
and the ignorant arrogance to see it through, they are released
upon humanity like a viral plague to assume their rightful positions
of leadership, forever after to blunder the world into one disaster
or another.

From
Princeton graduate Woodrow Wilson, who gave us World War One, the
War on Drugs, and the income tax, to Yale and Harvard product George
W. Bush, who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, and turned
America into a pervasive surveillance society, the mark of the Ivy
League graduate has been nothing but bloodshed and fields filled
with skull and bones, corruption of the idea of education, and a
vast wasting of wealth and liberty.

The
best we can do for our nation's future greatness and posterity is
to take Harvard, Princeton, every one of the Ivies in fact, and
turn them all to more useful pursuits, such as teaching auto repair
or plumbing. As for the poor saps who have already graduated and
are running brain damaged about the globe, proudly waving their
Ivy League degrees and causing untold mayhem, they are likely too
far gone to be much use to anyone, though they might, after years
of de-programming, make decent fry cooks.

Home
Schooling

Education
is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
~ Will Durant

If
it's one thing I got from my foray into America's college system,
one thing that my outsized bloated paycheck granted me, it is my
extensive home library, my pride and joy. Lehman's former CEO Dick
Fuld got a mansion in Florida from the boom, and goody for him —
I wish him well and envy him not a dot. What I got for my part in
the whole stock-jobbing frenzy was my refuge, and you might honestly
say that everything I have ever learned I learned on my own, under
my own direction.

A person
will only become as educated as they make themselves. There are
multitudes of Americans with post-graduate degrees who have never
cracked open a book under anything but outside direction, that have
lived a life that has shown no urge towards that pursuit of knowledge
which is always, when all is said and done, a process that is and
must be self-directed.

To say
that self-education leaves holes in your overall views of things,
that it can lead to a stunted mind that will only dive into what
it is sure to agree with can be correct, but there is an easy way
around that. Every book, at least every decent book, is full of
footnotes and a bibliography that can lead the reader more deeply
into the subject at hand, to look at the thing from a variety of
angles.

The
financial advantages to self-education can't be emphasized enough,
either. When Matt Damon's character in Good
Will Hunting mocked the arrogant Harvard student, asking
him why he spends tens of thousands of dollars to be told to read
things he could read by choice in the library for free, he was on
to something.

Yet,
if you insist on becoming a college man anyway, citing the salary
discrepancies between the have degrees and the have not degrees,
my advice to the young men who wrote to me, those holed up in college
libraries clutching Mises and Rothbard to their furrowed brow, is
to take stock of where you are and what college is really about.
Think about what position you are in. 

A recent blog
post by Lew Rockwell sums up that position perfectly — "as
I walked on a university campus this morning…the girl-boy ratio
was overwhelmingly girl." Haven’t you watched Animal House?
What in God’s name are you doing in the library? Who the hell goes
to college to learn anything? Understood properly, America's
college system is not a haven of learning; it is a four-year party
with the background noise provided by tenured hacks giving their
interpretations of foolish utopian schemes culled from other long-dead
hacks.

In college
happy hour is every hour, so remember to ignore your professors
and let your dog off the leash; it's hunting season. You are there
to network, drink, smoke, and build up the fond, blurry memories
that will allow you in later years to watch a porn movie and reminisce
about when you used to get up to such wondrous madness. Stop
wasting valuable college time reading Mises and Hayek — they'll
be plenty of time for that later — and cease frittering away a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity.

Book
Burning

It is possible
to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
~ Alec Bourne

Yet,
while the Ivy Leagues — and all American universities, for that
matter — are like a dark blot on the sun of knowledge, even if everyone
avoided college this would by no means protect society from disaster.

It must be
admitted that a self-educated man can be as much a Hindenburg as
the college man; he too can be encumbered with a favorite crackbrained
theory. Abraham Lincoln, a self-educated one-man wrecking crew of
historic proportion, is the perfect case in point. So I can take
my library and my footnotes and bibliographies and my self-education
and go stuff it.

Therefore,
it would seem that what's best for America, what's best for our
youth in general, is to stay away from books and learning completely.
Like the quip that sex is too good for the common people, the authoritarian
fear that books and ideas are too dangerous for the rabble holds
a lot of credence, as well.

A little
bit of learning is a dangerous thing, and a lot of it is clearly
beyond the bounds of most. We need less college graduates and more
people like Guy Montag from Fahrenheit
451, burning every book within reach. And when almost everyone's
brain is empty and dull, when calls by our educated elite to invade,
forbid, or regulate will bring forth no response from the dull herd,
when the only utopian crusade the American people can get worked
up for or understand is one where we sit back on the couch, smoke,
and play Madden NFL until the heart's content and the lungs
blacken — when that day comes we can all exhale, because only then
will we will be happy, high, and safe from the mad ravings of the
Ivy League graduate.

March
17, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.

~
Missing Persons

On
this just past March 3rd, in a column she wrote in response
to John Kerry's crocodile tears over spilt TARP money, Bloomberg's
Caroline Baum did what she always does — she made me laugh. Unlike
far too many of her fellow professionals, though, she wants
me to laugh at her columns, which mostly cover our not so good American
political economy. A combination of uncommon sense and an inability
to know when to pull her punches makes certain of her pieces stand
out like a raised middle finger, held high enough so that her target
notices.

The
above-mentioned March 3rd column, John Kerry Is Last
Guy You Want Helping Banks, made Mr. Kerry notice — and he actually
responded with a column of his own on March 6th. Truth
be told, in a Congress notorious for not bothering to read any of
the laws they flippantly impose, I was initially relieved to think
I'd found an actual Congressmen capable of the act, but my relief
proved short-lived.

Now having
read his shambles of a rebuttal I doubt he even read her column,
as he didn't answer a single one of Ms. Baum's charges. In a sane
world, he would have been better off not writing the thing in the
first place; all he did was produce an effort that would net him
a D– if turned in to your average high school economics teacher
and give proof that he is not the swiftest boat on the sea.

There
is an old saying "rather be thought a fool than to open your
mouth and prove it" and, provoked by Ms. Baum, our grandee
of the Senate just had to go and prove it.

Typing
in Oblivion

Father
McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear.

~
The Beatles

Ms. Baum
accused Mr. Kerry of three things, the main being that John Kerry
— a run-of-the-mill socialist rife with the compulsion to "plan"
innate to the species — has absolutely no experience outside of
government employment and is ignorant regarding how to run a business,
let alone an entire economy, and therefore should not be passing
any legislation at all regarding the matter.

While
some might argue that his membership on the Senate Finance Committee
would answer the charge, it's well known that august body is designed
to teach its members much about feathering their nests and nothing
of economics or marketing – even Mr. Kerry wisely saves himself
from ridicule and never pretends otherwise, not even mentioning
the posting. Actually, he never mentions any of Caroline Baum's
accusations at all.

Second,
she accuses him of not understanding the function of marketing to
the survival of a business. Private companies need to constantly
hustle for new clients, and to keep new ones. "Social outings
foster business relationships," she notes. Yet, when John Kerry
insists that "normal marketing" wouldn't be effected one
iota, what he means by that is anyone's guess, including Mr. Kerry's,
as he never bothers to explain what "normal" is.

Lastly, pointing
out his sputtering indignation over a TARP-stuffed finance company's
un-normal (to him) hiring of Earth, Wind, and Fire for a client
event, Ms. Baum notes "I don't recall much outrage when the
R&B band entertained the nation's governors at the White House
a few days later. And President Obama's guests didn't exactly dine
on mac 'n cheese."

John
Kerry called the finance company's hiring of the band "an idiotic
abuse of taxpayer money while our country is on the brink";
how does he feel about Obama hiring the same band for his
taxpayer-funded shindig? Naturally, Mr. Kerry doesn't touch that
one with a ten-foot pole.

As
a taxpayer forced to invest in these insolvent companies, she invokes
her right to speak up and points out "Kerry has spent his entire
life working for the government" and she'd rather have the
CEOs calling the shots as to the marketing budget, and that while
a failed firm should have new management, "John Kerry is not
what taxpayers had in mind."

I
agree with Ms. Baum that he has neither the experience nor the training
to develop any rational thoughts regarding economics, and in case
you think me cruel: at the end of his rebuttal's fifth paragraph,
John Kerry insists that all that taxpayer money his bankers friends
are giving out to Earth, Wind, and Fire or otherwise wasting "should
be focused on easing the credit crisis by increasing lending."

Now having
established his plan for the banks to issue more debt, that being
the Road Back To Recovery, five paragraphs later he forgets all
about increasing lending because "household debt-to-income
levels are at historic highs," and that's a D– plan if
I ever saw one.

Yet
sadly, in a nation where men such as John Kerry are taken seriously
and the opinion of people who are patently clueless garner respect,
where President Obama can assert without laughter that his actions
have been "entirely consistent with free-market principles,"
and where rebuttals don't even have to rebut, Caroline Baum and
all those who argue for free markets can type madly until Judgment
Day comes and it won't make this Titanic change course.

John Kerry's
ideas and actions are as American mainstream and apple pie as it
gets; he holds to views as popular as they are foolish, we live
under a collective illusion so deep-baked into our intellectual
DNA as to be impervious to any logic, unconquerable by anything
less than the harsh experience of economic catastrophe.

So
while she may be correct and her accusations remain standing tall,
Mr. Kerry wins the day, he better understands that we live in a
world where you don't need to refute your opponent but can simply
ignore them into oblivion, you can just stand back and watch them
go under in a wave of popular madness, secure that democracy will
advance what rational argument cannot.

Mr. Kerry's
refusal to answer the charges combined with a "plan" that
can't stay on track for more than five paragraphs doesn't matter;
he easily bests Caroline Baum here. The race does not always go
to the swift, and the sanity of Caroline Baum is but a drop of rain
falling into the vast madness of America's ocean.

March
9, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.

~
Joe Maddon, manager Tampa Bay Rays (2008)

To realize
how much fun it was to come of age in the roaring mania of the Great
Moderation, one had to be young, possessed of the right credentials,
and employed by a top-tier investment bank. To stroll into any restaurant
and know that the bill was completely doable, well within reach,
so much so that you never even bothered to glance at the price list,
was a little understood, happy fact of my life. At our favorite
haunt, outsized tips turned the staff into fast family; the stove
in our apartment heated little beside water for over a decade.

At this moment
in time, with the mania's wave having crested on the shore, I am
shocked to find myself face down and hung over on an Austrian beach,
a place where I should never have come ashore, much less feel at
home. Despite a Top-10 MBA education and being groomed for speed,
I am back with the proverbial high school art wing crowd, never
to be invited to the cool parties.

The Austrians
are going through a back-slappin' confab, the "I Told You So"
tour, and they deserve to — but the arenas are mostly empty. In
2009 America being a libertarian or, if you prefer the term, a classic
liberal, is like being a vegetarian who wandered into a nation of
cannibals; none too many roam these parts and our future looks like
stew.

The
Love Train

Life's the
allusion, love is the dream,
Everybody's happy nowadays.

~
Buzzcocks

My
first (though minor) compliant about the big downer that's at the
heart of our Great Unmoderationing (2007– ), for me at least,
is that finding yourself on the Austrian fringe, while it may find
you on the winning team, vindicated, doesn't win you the girl but
quite the opposite. I woke up from a long high party not carried
atop shoulders off the football field to my waiting cheerleader
prize, but hanging out with the debate society champions, showing
off our first prize trophies to each other.

Seeing
off my thirties before studying the life that was around makes me
late to the game, but some say that everyone is born either a socialist
or a libertarian so maybe I was fated to, in my mind, eventually
think things through to my own end, which happens to be on the fringe.
I've always drifted to what was left of the dial and believing in
a gold standard certainly puts you firmly in the realm of social
standing reserved for those "considered as foolish or as a
dangerous extremist" (in the words of Dr. Pascal Salin). There
go my boyhood dreams of working at the Fed.

When
you've read the Austrian tomes, its Moby Dicks and Divine
Comedies and your brain decides to agree with it all, you come
to feel a mental tug of war about what you hear around you, about
all that modern America trumpets, everything starts to sound like
lunacy. I read things that seem to strike nobody but me as absurd,
and while I can soothe myself with Thoreau's all men lead lives
of quiet desperation, that it's not absurd to everyone else
because I'm just such an insightful, smart guy, maybe it's not quiet
desperation on everyone's part, maybe it's all lunacy on mine.

I
once spent part of a Ron Paul event drinking and smoking with some
bearded kid who was dressed as a giant purple dinosaur. We leaned
against the bar, he was trying to sell me on the merits of "riding
out the coming storm" in Quito, Ecuador and the female bartender
delivered every shot with an accompanying warning about One World
Government. I couldn't help to feel a bit like a lunatic.

But
the biggest complaint about meeting the Austrians mentally is that
it spoils the high, it made what little pockets remained of the
paper party appear to me far more frantic, everyone merely putting
on airs, as if doing was believing. People in my world are still
vacationing overseas; I worry about not being able to find gold
coins. There's a disconnect here and I regret it, despite my thousand
dollar suit I no longer fit in.

There
are still legions who fervently believe the powerful do have all
the answers, that somewhere in that latest plan, based on the latest
guesses and assumptions, they've gotten all the variables correct
and things will soon smooth out, we'll see an upturn by late summer
if not sooner, but I no longer believe and am not happy about losing
that mind set, ignorance was bliss. Plus, I want to surf Costa Rica.

Lew
Rockwell, bless his heart, is trying to perk up the troops, telling
me I should feel "fortunate" to live in such times; that
living through economic calamity has its bright side if you know
your economics. Having knowledge of that sort, he says, "even
in the face of calamity, there is no mystery, and hence fear is
reduced."

It's no mystery that if I suffer a complete parachute malfunction
after I jumped from an airplane that I'm going to die. That would
do nothing to reduce my fear, quite the opposite, and everyday at
work I'm watching Bernanke and Geithner and Barney Frank on CNBC,
frantically yanking on every ripcord within reach — all to no avail.

Don't
Worry, Be Happy

We
are fortunate to be living in these times, for we are seeing the
unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian
tradition.

~
Lew Rockwell (2009)

Dr.
Pascal Salin recently stated he was "lucky not to have known
the Mises Institute at the dawn of my professional life" and
I also feel the same way about being late to the game, though for
different reasons. He would not have been tenured in a French University
with such views, and I wouldn't have spent the past twenty years
thoroughly enjoying the party.

A
little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, and also depressing. Knowledge
does not necessarily always bring happiness, and in this case it
certainly doesn't. The benefits are that it gave me wisdom to re-position,
to cut off the alcohol, and I did what I had to before the crash.
But with the knowledge and foresight of what was to come I gave
up on the happy ignorance I wore for the Austrian sackcloth.

A
large part of me wants to become normal again and nod along to the
soothing tones of the latest Fed minutes, secure that all will be
well because we've got the best people — Ivy League to their eyeballs
— spot on the job, and I can go about my day with a lighter step
and lose myself in the crowd, happily debating what plan of all
the suggested plans Obama should choose for us.

Instead,
having wandered into the fringe where the Austrians and purple dinosaurs
roam, I am weighted down like Marley's ghost, my heavy chains forged
from ponderous copies of Human
Action and Money,
Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, their thousands of pages
of weight all boiled down to my sad bank statements. They say I've
used up all my tomorrows. What's left for me?

I
don't hold it against any of them, the Rockwells, Norths, and Hayeks
who have ruined all the fun for me. Adam Smith once wrote of how
to judge a person by "to the intention or affection of the
heart, to the beneficence or hurtfulness of the design, all praise
or blame, all approbation or disapprobation, of any kind, which
can justly be bestowed upon any action, must ultimately belong."
So we're cool. None of them meant to take my punchbowl away, they
just pointed out the turd floating in it.

Unlike
so many others, though, I'm even cool with the politicians despite
their being the source of our sorrow. The political class will always
make things as difficult as they can — and they have — but it's
in their nature to do so. I feel them no more at fault over their
sleazy, violent behavior than I would that of a lion that chased
down and devoured the easy prey of a human toddler — they are merely
doing what's in their nature. Every form of life on God's playground
has its predator, something to cull the herd, why should humans
be exempted? God in His wisdom choose it to be so and who am I to
judge?

Besides,
in His infinite wisdom He makes up for it with sunsets and flowers
and Van Gogh and beaches and Paris Hilton, all created to show His
love. I am happy with the world as it is and should be. The road
back to my inner peace, which made me feel fortunate to be living
in these times despite it all, was not through any knowledge found
in Mises or Hayek, but by my study of a classic of self-actualization,
Be Your Own Me, by Spinal Tap lead singer and philosopher
David St. Hubbins. I absorbed its main message on the true path
to inner peace and fortunate feelings. That message is, in the words
of the great man himself, "take your sadness and shove it up
your ass" — and there you will find your bliss.

Yet,
I will always fondly recall my lost lamented ignorance, which lived
in the days before "the unfolding of events long explained
and predicted by the Austrian school." I recall Bill Clinton
and Monica brightening our day with laughter, with Hillary thrown
in for a foil, trendy dinners with trendy friends and blurry cab
rides and trips to the Pacific Ocean, retching and heaving alongside
the coast highway because of a bit too much.

And
I recall everyone from Fool's Paradise blissfully unaware, dancing
on seaside rooftops to Jon Porter's spinning. The sun would come
up off Fire Island and we would always cheer as she peeked above
the waves, and I too believed the promise of an endless summer.

March
7, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.

~
W.E.B. DuBois

Despite
never having been much for political participation of any sort,
there I was this past presidential Election Day, accompanied by
my wife, throwing my vote down a Third Party's hopeless maw. In
my mind, voting is to politics as pro-wrestling is to sports: an
amusing farce, enlivened with empty boasts and the occasional skull-cracking
chair.

My
wife, God bless her soul, tossed her vote onto Barack Obama's mighty
pile. Then off we went, invited to an election night party filled
almost to the brim with unity, all rooting for Mr. Obama, all but
me. "Watch your mouth, please" said my wife on the drive
over. No need for the warning — other people have other opinions,
and who am I to hold that against them? A world of unity would be
a boring one besides, a Star Wars without Darth Vader.

It's
not that I happily choose to forego the pleasures of losing myself
in the crowd, but I can't pretend to believe anything that slips
gently off a political tongue, even one so smooth as Mr. Obama's,
and having read his books and listened to his speeches (which Ms.
Kyle Anne Shiver beautifully summed up as "eloquent but non-specific"),
I expect nothing but repeated disasters from his hand, each following
the other, pulled from a socialist goody-bag. I am resigned to it
in advance.

Yet,
seated comfortably at the Election Night party hosted by my town's
Obama for President headquarters, I found myself cheering my libertarian
lungs when he took Pennsylvania from McCain, I hugged my wife as
New York, New Jersey, and Ohio went Obama blue.

Part
of it was the people I was with that night. I sat surrounded by
many men and women who had first hand experience of the violence
and degradation of racism, who had met Jim Crow personally. As Obama's
electoral count rose steadily, their hopeful nervousness faded and
was replaced by jubilant, stunned happiness. The bitter memories
of water cannon and snapping police dogs turned to bittersweet wishes
for now dead loved ones, to wish they were there to witness such
a thing. It was a sight to see, and a nice one at that.

Back
home after the party, my wife and I, as parents do, checked on our
sleeping son before we went to bed. He lay below us, his fluffy
fro outlined on the white of his pillow, and the blood of multiple
races mixed in his blood. Taking my hand, "He can be president
one day now, too" she whispered to me. I'd rather he gets a
real job, something honorable, but I kept my mouth shut. No need
to ruin a moment, plus there was another part of it.

You
take what you can get out of life, and Obama offered something that
McCain just couldn't hope to match. It's not the promised vague
"change"; Obama's policies are much the same as McCain's,
which are much the same as W's. What he gives us is a chance to
finally step away from America's most sordid legacy, our irrational
soul-crushing obsession with race.

That's
a pretty impressive piece of flotsam for a survivor of our shipwrecked
republic to cling to, and I'm happy for it as I float away with
the tide.

February
21, 2009

C.J. Maloney
[send him mail] lives and
works in New York City.