Monthly Archives: October 2012

Hurricane Readiness: Goldman > Government

open quoteIt’s clear now that while the Mayor of NYC holds press conferences on the size of cups that should be allowed for sugary drinks, no one has been checking on the capabilities of NYC hospitals to survive a power outage during an emergency.

NYU Hospital had to be evacuated because of generator failures, after ConEd power went out, and Bellevue Hospital was within an hour of being evacuated, before a human chain snaked to the hospitals 13th floor to deliver 5 gallon containers of fuel the hospital did not have on hand for an emergency. The hospital also ran out of oxygen containers.

Thus, while Mayor Bloomberg will do all kinds of posing on television today, the fact of the matter is government did not provide basic checks to determine if hospitals could provide services in a power outage related emergency. Hurricane Sandy has revealed the true state of affairs, government as protector is a myth. It’s pretty much all show – all talk and no generator checks.

If you really want to protect yourself during a crisis make sure you have your own stockpile of food, clothing, weapons and an electric generator. Government officials and elitists will pooh, pooh the necessity of doing this as wild west, right wing thinking, but watch what the elitists do not what they say.

Here’s what Goldman Sachs did before the storm hit.

They certainly weren’t depending on the government to protect them. And reports indicated that, through out the night, lights remained on in the Goldman Sachs building, while the rest of Wall Street was dark. Which means GS had their own functional power generator(s), better than those at NYU Hospital or Bellevue.close quote (Read more)

Joe Klein’s sociopathic defense of drone killings of children

open quoteOn MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday’s night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama’s ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.

. . . .

(1) Klein’s justification – we have to kill their children in order to protect our children – is the exact mentality of every person deemed in US discourse to be a “terrorist”. Almost every single person arrested and prosecuted over the last decade on terrorism charges, when asked why they were willing to kill innocent Americans including children, offered some version of Joe Klein’s mindset.

. . . .

Leaving aside the sociopathic, morally grotesque defense of killing 4-year-olds with a “joystick from California”, Klein’s claims are completely false on pragmatic grounds. Slaughtering Muslim children does not protect American children from terrorism. The opposite is true. That is precisely what causes the anti-American hatred that fuels and sustains terrorism aimed at Americans in the first place, as even a study commissioned by the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon recognized almost a decade ago.

. . . .

This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media’s most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it’s left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC – the progressive network – who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama’s ongoing killings.close quote (Read more)

S. African Woolworths boycotted over racist hiring

open quoteYou could call it WAR – Whites Against Racism. Since 1994, South Africa has become the country in the world, apart from Zimbabwe, where anti-white racism has been pushed to its absurdist extremes. Woolworths, like many big corporations, have taken to advertising jobs with the proudly stated proviso: “Whites need not apply.” Of course it is not put as bluntly as that, and couched in the Orwellian weirdness of ANC newspeak like “employment equity”, abbreviated as EE, or the more sinister “transformation”, but the meaning is the same.close quote (Read more)

Administration plans 100,000 new highway deaths

open quoteIt’s wonderful what the government can accomplish with a little gentle arm-twisting, especially after it’s set an example by seizing control of General Motors and turning over part ownership to the unions, as their reward for driving the car-maker to the brink of bankruptcy in the first place.

On Aug. 28, for instance, the Obama administration announced a final “agreement” with auto makers which by 2025 will increase the cost of an average new car by $3,000 to $4,800.

Even better, the flimsier, lighter-weight cars that manufacturers just “agreed” to build (at a time when their biggest profits come from pickups) will result in thousands of additional highway deaths per year, and tens of thousands more serious injuries.close quote (Read more)

The Restoration and the Navigation Acts 1660-1663

open quoteish imports and exports from England were limited to English ships alone. As part of the Restoration compromise, Charles II continued to gratify the London merchants and passed a series of Navigation Acts in 1660–63. Part of the commissioners’ instructions, indeed, was to see to the enforcement of these acts.

The new Navigation Acts drastically restricted and monopolized American colonial trade, to the detriment of the colonies.

The Navigation Act of 1660–61

1. restricted all colonial trade to “English” ships (English and American), that is, ships built, owned, and manned by Englishmen;
2. excluded all foreign merchants from American trade; and
3. required that certain enumerated colonial articles be exported only to England and English colonies.

We have already seen the havoc caused in the Southern colonies by tobacco being made one of the enumerated goods. Among the others were sugar, cotton wool, and various dyes. The second important Navigation Act was the Staple Act of 1663, which provided that all goods exported from Europe to America must first land in England. Only a few colonial imports were exempt from this prohibition: salt, servants, various provisions from Scotland, and wine from Madeira and the Azores.

The Staple Act meant that English ships and merchants would monopolize exports to America, while English manufacturers selling to America would be privileged by extra taxes being levied at English ports on foreign exports to the colonies. The enumerated-articles provision ensured that these staples would be exported only by English merchants and in English ships.close quote (Read more)