From last night AC360, here’s a rather disturbing report about new media access rules that seem to be making it nearly impossible for the press to cover the worst environmental disaster in American history:
While I agree that there needs to be some reasonable rules that allow clean-up crews to do their job, cutting off press access completely it totally uncalled for and, to the extent that it’s a government action, it comes very close to being a violation of the FirstSunday, July 4, 2010
'US facing Soviet-like disintegration'
A senior Iranian lawmaker, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, has warned the US of imminent collapse, saying its approaches bring to mind soviet policies before disintegration.
"America's conduct toward the world bears great resemblance to that of the Soviet Union before its disintegration," Fars News Agency quoted the head of the Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission as saying on Friday.
"I believe the United States today is going through disintegration just like the former Soviet [Union] and this collapse is easy to see and sense."
On the US military presence in the Middle East, Boroujerdi called Washington a major "international thief" which pursues various goals by invading other nations.
He referred to the rising production of narcotics in Afghanistan years after the US-led invasion of the impoverished country, suggesting Washington's military presence has aggravated the situation.
Boroujerdi further cited Afghan President Hamid Karzai as saying that the United States has gained USD 100 billion through the production of narcotics in Afghanistan.
MRS/HGH
"America's conduct toward the world bears great resemblance to that of the Soviet Union before its disintegration," Fars News Agency quoted the head of the Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission as saying on Friday.
"I believe the United States today is going through disintegration just like the former Soviet [Union] and this collapse is easy to see and sense."
On the US military presence in the Middle East, Boroujerdi called Washington a major "international thief" which pursues various goals by invading other nations.
He referred to the rising production of narcotics in Afghanistan years after the US-led invasion of the impoverished country, suggesting Washington's military presence has aggravated the situation.
Boroujerdi further cited Afghan President Hamid Karzai as saying that the United States has gained USD 100 billion through the production of narcotics in Afghanistan.
MRS/HGH
Jefferson changed 'subjects' to 'citizens' in Declaration of Independence
"Subjects."
That's what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.
But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.
Over the smudge, Jefferson then wrote the word "citizens."
No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.
Scholars of the revolution have long speculated about the "citizens" smear -- wondering whether the erased word was "patriots" or "residents" -- but now the Library of Congress has determined that the change was far more dramatic.
Using a modified version of the kind of spectral imaging technology developed for the military and for monitoring agriculture, research scientists teased apart the mystery and reconstructed the word that Jefferson banished in 1776.
"Seldom can we re-create a moment in history in such a dramatic and living way," Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden said at Friday's announcement of the discovery.
"It's almost like we can see him write 'subjects' and then quickly decide that's not what he wanted to say at all, that he didn't even want a record of it," she said. "Really, it sends chills down the spine."
The library deciphered the hidden "subjects" several months ago, the first major finding attributed to its new high-tech instruments. By studying the document at different wavelengths of light, including infrared and ultraviolet, researchers detected slightly different chemical signatures in the remnant ink of the erased word than in "citizens." Those differences allowed the team to bring the erased word back to life.
But the task was made more difficult by the way Jefferson sought to match the lines and curves of the underlying smudged letters with the new letters he wrote on top of them. It took research scientist Fenella France weeks to pull out each letter until the full word became apparent.
"It's quite amazing how he morphed 'subjects' into 'citizens,' " she said. "We did the reverse morphing back to 'subjects.' "
France said the possibility that the erased word was "subjects" came up during a talk she gave to library donors and visitors about how to study historical documents without harming them. France had determined that a word existed beneath "citizens," and she asked the group for ideas. One woman called out "subjects," and library staff members immediately realized that she was on to something. The intensive work on the document soon began.
The erased word is on the third of the draft's four pages, in the section that addressed grievances against King George III and outlined his incitement of "treasonable insurrections." The sentence is not found in the later Declaration of Independence, but "citizens" is used elsewhere in that document and "subjects" is not.
Scholars previously determined that Jefferson had been writing his early version based on the first draft of Virginia's constitution, where the words "our fellow subjects" appear.
Finding Jefferson's erased word is the library's greatest accomplishment using its new technology, but several other projects are in progress. The imaging device, for instance, found thumb and fingerprints on the Gettysburg Address using infrared light, and library researchers are seeking to determine whether they are President Abraham Lincoln's.
Light outside the visible range has also brought to life details of Pierre L'Enfant's design for Washington and notes on papers of Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Van der Reyden said the research and discoveries illustrate why it's so important to keep and protect original documents. The erased "subjects," she said, could have been detected only from Jefferson's original draft.
UK banking customers targeted by data-stealing Trojan
NEWS
Two UK-based botnets are zeroing in on British bank customers with new variants of the Zeus Trojan, according to a security firm.
The Zeus botnets, which consist of 20,000 to 30,000 compromised computers, are being used to send out regionally-specific infected spam to distribute links to the Trojans, according to Trusteer. Compromised UK websites are also being used in the attack on online banking users, it added.
"It looks like criminal gangs are focused on the UK market and are specialising in UK banks," Trusteer chief executive Mickey Boodaei said on Friday.
Boodaei declined to name the banks, saying only that customers of all of the major institutions had been targeted. Spam runs typically focus on customers from three to nine of the major banks at a time, according to Trusteer.
Zeus, also known as Zbot, steals data by installing a keystroke logger on the victim's machine. People who click on a link in an infected email or compromised website could end up exposing their online banking credentials.
Trusteer said it gained access to the command-and-control servers of the botnets, and this allowed it to pinpoint the location of the zombie computers from their IP addresses. The company then analysed attack commands from the servers to determine the targets of the Zeus variants.
In general, detection rates for the malware have been low, said Boodaei. Between zero and 20 percent of the Trojans is being picked up by antivirus companies, according to Trusteer.
To determine detection rates, the company ran the different Zeus variants through services like VirusTotal, which checks malware samples against different antivirus engines. It also performed forensics at its own labs.
Boodaei said that international antivirus companies may not detect the Trojans due to their localised nature. Antivirus companies normally deploy a network of sensors, including computers designed specifically to capture malware samples, in networks called 'honeynets'. The Trojans may not be hitting these sensors, said Boodaei.
"The malware is too local to see on the radar," he said.
In addition, heuristics designed to stop malware by identifying its behaviour may be circumvented by criminals testing their products in their own labs before unleashing them on the public, said Boodaei.
Trusteer also warned of two other pieces of financial malware, which it calls Silon.var2 and Agent.DBJP, that are tailored to British online banking customers. These use the same distribution methods as the Zeus variants: infected email and compromised websites.
Dangerous Crossroads in World History: Obama’s New Iran Sanctions: An Act of War
When the UN refused to agree to the severe sanctions that the U.S. wanted, Obama responded with typical Bush flair and went solo. The new U.S. sanctions against Iran — signed into law by Obama on July 1st — are an unmistakable act of war.
If fully enforced, Iran’s economy will be potentially destroyed. The New York Times outlines the central parts of the sanctions:
“The law signed by Mr. Obama imposes penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. It also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the United States government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran.” (July 1, 2010).
Iran must import the majority of its oil from foreign corporations and nations, since it does not have the technology needed to refine the fuel that it pumps from its soil. By cutting this refined oil off, the U.S. will be causing massive, irreparable damage to the Iranian economy — equaling an act of war.
In fact, war against Japan in WWII was sparked by very similar circumstances. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spearheaded a series of sanctions against Japan, which included the Export Control Act, giving the President the power to prohibit the export of a variety of materials to Japan, including oil. This gave Roosevelt the legal stance he needed to implement an oil embargo, an obvious act of war. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor simply brought the war out of the economic realm into the military sphere.
Iran is facing the exact same situation. Whereas the Obama Administration calmly portrays economic sanctions as “peaceful” solutions to political problems, they are anything but. The strategy here is to economically attack Iran until it responds militarily, giving the U.S. a fake moral high ground to “defend” itself, since the other side supposedly attacked first.
But the U.S. is provoking militarily too. According to the New York Times: “The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships [war ships] off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four [surrounding] Arab countries, according to administration and military officials.” (January 30, 2010).
The same article mentions that U.S. General Petraeus admitted that, “… the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf [Iran’s border] at all times. Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles.” Iran, as well as the whole world, knows full well that “antimissile systems” are perfectly capable of going on the offensive — their real purpose.
Iran is completely surrounded by countries occupied by the U.S. military, whether it be the mass occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. puppet states that house U.S. military bases in Arab nations (not to mention Zionist Israel, a U.S. cohort in its war aims against Iran). Contrary to the statements of President Obama, Iran is already well contained militarily.
It remains to be seen how closely U.S. allies will follow the new oil sanctions; they will be under tremendous pressure to do so. The European Union has already signaled that it will follow Obama’s lead.
Ultimately, the march to war begun by Bush is picking up momentum under Obama. Congressional Democrats and Republicans gave the President their overwhelming support in passing these sanctions, proving that the two party system agrees to the necessity of more war.
Uniting the U.S. anti-war movement is crucial if current and future wars are to be stopped. A step in this direction will take place at the National Peace Conference, in Albany, New York, July 23-25.
It's non-stop fun in Zero Carbon Britain, 2030
What do the Greens have in store?
A hundred years ago, the socialist utopians had a vision of what they called "a world without want". The Zero Carbon Trust published its vision of Britain in 2030 earlier this month, and it's one where people's "wants" will substantially increase. Particularly anyone wanting, say, a lamb chop with rosemary and garlic, or a Shepherd's Pie.
The Trust wants British livestock be reduced to 20 per cent of current levels, and since shipping in frozen meat is carbon intensive, and verboten, you'll have to do without. Or be a Lord to afford one.
This one example is just one of the random miseries to be inflicted on the population as part of the Trust's proposed "New Energy Policy", a collection of ideas assembled with the scattergun enthusiasm of the Taliban. I know it's the end of the month, and everyone's ignored this document - but I urge you to download it - all 4MB of it.
Let me give you another example of how what was once an idealistic progressive impulse can turned into what we might justifiably call an "austerity jihad". After 1917, Trotsky had grand plans for mass transit - this would no longer be the preserve of an elite. The proletariat would travel far and wide, at low cost, and in great comfort. Not only that, but he envisaged room in Soviet train carriages for a string quartet. And a lectern. Travel would broaden the mind, Trotsky believed, in so many ways.
But back to the Zero Carbon Britain of 2030, we see that all domestic air travel will be banned, and all travel they deem unnecessary will also be impossible. This is not a group that thinks of Maglev Trains, speeding between London and Glasgow at over 300mph are a good idea. Mobility will pretty much return to C17 standards, where you had to hitch a lift from a passing horse.
Here's the odd thing.
Both the utopians then, and the carbon cult now, both think of themselves as bright progressives, essentially doing the world a favour. But one had a vision of the world as a fascinating place waiting to be explored and graced by the human touch, and of humans as curious creatures, and where imprisoning the mind was as much of a crime as imprisoning the body. The other merely sees us as quite nasty carbon-emitting units, where the mind is entirely absent.
The goal of the Zero Carbon Trust, as you would expect, is not an increase in human curiosity or fun, but that we all collectively... er, "emit" nothing. The policies then naturally fall into place - for to emit nothing, we must do nothing.
Let's look at a few examples. To get to a Zero Carbon Britain means reducing electricity consumption ... by half. In turn, this means the end of modern industrial society - production of tangible goods would largely disappear. With nothing to sell, so would sales, marketing and support jobs. With nobody working nobody would have to move about. It all fits together. Hopefully you now see the genius of the plan. The minor issue of how the UK would then create any wealth (to pay for the feed-in tariffs, for example) is completely ignored - in fact, there's no indication of what people would do, other than mend broken windmills.
Another big Trust idea you'll be glad to hear is to "decrease the thermostat/air temperature". Another mandate is decreased living areas. So we're going to have to live in even smaller houses. Which are a lot colder.
The extreme environmentalist's conception of a human, then, is a strictly materialist one: it's indistinguishable from their conception of an amoeba: humans have no autonomy, no free will, no curiosity, and they have an inability to feel pain. For their part, the Bolsheviks had a pretty brutal approach to property and dissent: for them, too, the ends justified the means. But the difference between the old utopians and the new, eco-driven ones, is striking. You couldn't wish for two greater contrasts.
You'll be happy for your daily electricity ration
And powering this exciting vision of Britain in 2030?
Well, over half of the energy will come from Offshore Wind, reckons the Trust. And for backup when the wind doesn't blow? The answer is: "some biogas is used as additional dispatchable [sic] generation to back up the grid." Not surprisingly, no numbers are attached. But Germany, which went big for wind, building around 20,000 bird-slicers, has set about building five new coal-fired stations as backup.
If you're concerned about things environmental, biodiversity or future fuel supplies, it's less than useless. Costs are glossed over, and consequences ignored. Although it's the product of over a dozen universities and think tanks it seems little more than a list drawn up by a student, or some demented trainspotter in his shed, writing down a list of "Things I Hate".
It's been ignored by the press as cranky, which it obviously is. But future historians, sociologists and anthropologists will find a lot of material in the ZCT report.The idea of creating one great Unit of Measurement - of all human activity - and using it as a brutal political proxy, will astound people for decades to come.
The politics of climate change is really a Dead Duck now - the mitigation policies are unsellable to a democratic electorate at any price - and as the realisation sinks in, the movement behind them is fragmenting in lots of interesting ways. These aren't being reported, so let this be a tentative first step.
On the extreme fringe are people who really like whittling sticks by candlelight - the DIY crowd, who in the 1970s spent every waking moment planning for a post-apocalypse. Or making TV dramas about it. These are people who are quite happy bartering goods, while keeping an eye on their investment portfolios and PEPs. This sort of chap was satirised in the sitcom The Good Life: Self-sufficiency in potatoes then, "energy security" now.
Single males are overly represented in this group: they can DIY everything they need, why shouldn't everybody else?
Then there are people who are quite happy to go along for the ride, so long as there's money behind it. This includes large chunks of academia (the ZCT is a good example - over a dozen institutions were involved in producing Zero Carbon Britain 2030), the bureaucracy (eg. recycling officers and sustainability quangos), and individuals with a canny eye for a hand-out. They can fit a solar panel to the roof, grab a subsidy, and hope to ride the gravy train as long as it's feasible. Even George Monbiot has pointed out that feed-in tariffs are a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the middle-classes (the middles classes with solar panels, natch).
So the second group, the free-riders, are people who really aren't deeply ideologically committed, but are perhaps able to persuade themselves that (say) man-made global warming or Peak Oil is really worrying, or that resources are finite, so long as the money keeps flowing.
There's an important difference between the Jihadists and the Free-riders, though - and that's the necessity or quantity of suffering humans necessary. I note that even the Malthusian chief scientific advisor to our Department of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay (author of bloggers' favourite Without Hot Air), doesn't see misery as necessary.
Both groupings will have to face the same, fairly unpalatable realities quite soon, however.
The policies of carbon mitigation are now unsellable - they mean political suicide. In an election year it makes all the difference: Obama wisely won't touch it, the only Republican behind climate change has turned turtle, and it helped cost the Australian PM his job. Politicians will still use it as an excuse for taxes - the Tories dropped anything to do with climate mitigation but still used it as justification for increasing air taxes. But the fact is, the more people realise that mitigation means misery and costs - there's no way of disguising either - the less popular it becomes.
Did anyone really think it would work - one great unit of measurement, one (and only) one measure of how much things in life are worth? Or was it just a pose - a way of saying you're more caring and compassionate and earthy than the chavvie chap next door, with his Plasma TV?
Bootnote
(And just for fun: see if you can tot up the split between "Jihadists" and "Free-riders" in the Comments below; we'll compare tallies in seven days.) [Thanks Andrew, can't wait - the Moderatrix]
A hundred years ago, the socialist utopians had a vision of what they called "a world without want". The Zero Carbon Trust published its vision of Britain in 2030 earlier this month, and it's one where people's "wants" will substantially increase. Particularly anyone wanting, say, a lamb chop with rosemary and garlic, or a Shepherd's Pie.
The Trust wants British livestock be reduced to 20 per cent of current levels, and since shipping in frozen meat is carbon intensive, and verboten, you'll have to do without. Or be a Lord to afford one.
This one example is just one of the random miseries to be inflicted on the population as part of the Trust's proposed "New Energy Policy", a collection of ideas assembled with the scattergun enthusiasm of the Taliban. I know it's the end of the month, and everyone's ignored this document - but I urge you to download it - all 4MB of it.
Let me give you another example of how what was once an idealistic progressive impulse can turned into what we might justifiably call an "austerity jihad". After 1917, Trotsky had grand plans for mass transit - this would no longer be the preserve of an elite. The proletariat would travel far and wide, at low cost, and in great comfort. Not only that, but he envisaged room in Soviet train carriages for a string quartet. And a lectern. Travel would broaden the mind, Trotsky believed, in so many ways.
But back to the Zero Carbon Britain of 2030, we see that all domestic air travel will be banned, and all travel they deem unnecessary will also be impossible. This is not a group that thinks of Maglev Trains, speeding between London and Glasgow at over 300mph are a good idea. Mobility will pretty much return to C17 standards, where you had to hitch a lift from a passing horse.
Here's the odd thing.
Both the utopians then, and the carbon cult now, both think of themselves as bright progressives, essentially doing the world a favour. But one had a vision of the world as a fascinating place waiting to be explored and graced by the human touch, and of humans as curious creatures, and where imprisoning the mind was as much of a crime as imprisoning the body. The other merely sees us as quite nasty carbon-emitting units, where the mind is entirely absent.
The goal of the Zero Carbon Trust, as you would expect, is not an increase in human curiosity or fun, but that we all collectively... er, "emit" nothing. The policies then naturally fall into place - for to emit nothing, we must do nothing.
Let's look at a few examples. To get to a Zero Carbon Britain means reducing electricity consumption ... by half. In turn, this means the end of modern industrial society - production of tangible goods would largely disappear. With nothing to sell, so would sales, marketing and support jobs. With nobody working nobody would have to move about. It all fits together. Hopefully you now see the genius of the plan. The minor issue of how the UK would then create any wealth (to pay for the feed-in tariffs, for example) is completely ignored - in fact, there's no indication of what people would do, other than mend broken windmills.
Another big Trust idea you'll be glad to hear is to "decrease the thermostat/air temperature". Another mandate is decreased living areas. So we're going to have to live in even smaller houses. Which are a lot colder.
The extreme environmentalist's conception of a human, then, is a strictly materialist one: it's indistinguishable from their conception of an amoeba: humans have no autonomy, no free will, no curiosity, and they have an inability to feel pain. For their part, the Bolsheviks had a pretty brutal approach to property and dissent: for them, too, the ends justified the means. But the difference between the old utopians and the new, eco-driven ones, is striking. You couldn't wish for two greater contrasts.
You'll be happy for your daily electricity ration
And powering this exciting vision of Britain in 2030?
Well, over half of the energy will come from Offshore Wind, reckons the Trust. And for backup when the wind doesn't blow? The answer is: "some biogas is used as additional dispatchable [sic] generation to back up the grid." Not surprisingly, no numbers are attached. But Germany, which went big for wind, building around 20,000 bird-slicers, has set about building five new coal-fired stations as backup.
If you're concerned about things environmental, biodiversity or future fuel supplies, it's less than useless. Costs are glossed over, and consequences ignored. Although it's the product of over a dozen universities and think tanks it seems little more than a list drawn up by a student, or some demented trainspotter in his shed, writing down a list of "Things I Hate".
It's been ignored by the press as cranky, which it obviously is. But future historians, sociologists and anthropologists will find a lot of material in the ZCT report.The idea of creating one great Unit of Measurement - of all human activity - and using it as a brutal political proxy, will astound people for decades to come.
The politics of climate change is really a Dead Duck now - the mitigation policies are unsellable to a democratic electorate at any price - and as the realisation sinks in, the movement behind them is fragmenting in lots of interesting ways. These aren't being reported, so let this be a tentative first step.
On the extreme fringe are people who really like whittling sticks by candlelight - the DIY crowd, who in the 1970s spent every waking moment planning for a post-apocalypse. Or making TV dramas about it. These are people who are quite happy bartering goods, while keeping an eye on their investment portfolios and PEPs. This sort of chap was satirised in the sitcom The Good Life: Self-sufficiency in potatoes then, "energy security" now.
Single males are overly represented in this group: they can DIY everything they need, why shouldn't everybody else?
Then there are people who are quite happy to go along for the ride, so long as there's money behind it. This includes large chunks of academia (the ZCT is a good example - over a dozen institutions were involved in producing Zero Carbon Britain 2030), the bureaucracy (eg. recycling officers and sustainability quangos), and individuals with a canny eye for a hand-out. They can fit a solar panel to the roof, grab a subsidy, and hope to ride the gravy train as long as it's feasible. Even George Monbiot has pointed out that feed-in tariffs are a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the middle-classes (the middles classes with solar panels, natch).
So the second group, the free-riders, are people who really aren't deeply ideologically committed, but are perhaps able to persuade themselves that (say) man-made global warming or Peak Oil is really worrying, or that resources are finite, so long as the money keeps flowing.
There's an important difference between the Jihadists and the Free-riders, though - and that's the necessity or quantity of suffering humans necessary. I note that even the Malthusian chief scientific advisor to our Department of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay (author of bloggers' favourite Without Hot Air), doesn't see misery as necessary.
Both groupings will have to face the same, fairly unpalatable realities quite soon, however.
The policies of carbon mitigation are now unsellable - they mean political suicide. In an election year it makes all the difference: Obama wisely won't touch it, the only Republican behind climate change has turned turtle, and it helped cost the Australian PM his job. Politicians will still use it as an excuse for taxes - the Tories dropped anything to do with climate mitigation but still used it as justification for increasing air taxes. But the fact is, the more people realise that mitigation means misery and costs - there's no way of disguising either - the less popular it becomes.
Did anyone really think it would work - one great unit of measurement, one (and only) one measure of how much things in life are worth? Or was it just a pose - a way of saying you're more caring and compassionate and earthy than the chavvie chap next door, with his Plasma TV?
Bootnote
(And just for fun: see if you can tot up the split between "Jihadists" and "Free-riders" in the Comments below; we'll compare tallies in seven days.) [Thanks Andrew, can't wait - the Moderatrix]
The Destruction of U.S. Border States
While the 1980s and 1990s were dominated by optimistic reports and government statements on the contributions of illegal aliens, reality had to be faced soon. The three states—California, Texas and New York—harboring the most illegal aliens in America financially collapsed by the weight they chose to carry. They built up giant welfare programs, they paid for the education and incarceration of the aliens who filled their schools and jails and they watched the closures of large numbers of hospitals that were forced to care for the aliens by law. Some counties in Arizona spent as much as 30 percent of their health budget on illegals.
The constant injection of millions of illegal aliens have weakened and undermined the financial balance of all the U.S. border states to a degree where most of them are presently close to bankruptcy and suffer the financial effects of lowered credit ratings. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that the approximately two million illegal aliens cost $4.7 billion a year in Texas alone. The estimate incorporates the medical, educational and incarceration expenses spent on the aliens but no one can place a dollar value on a degraded society where the White working class was literally chased out of state by the dramatic reduction of wages and businesses that moved away.
Orderly cities were replaced by chains of crime-ridden third world slums. There are 1,880,000 jobs lost by Americans to illegal aliens every year (FAIR) and the aliens’ lower wages are subsidized by taxpayer resources making big business the ultimate winner and American society the ultimate loser in this game. Walmart was employing close to 1.2 million people in 1993 and regularly educated her low paid employees on how to tap into welfare and Medicaid resources to subsidize their income. Federal agents raided 61 stores in 21 states in 1993 and arrested hundreds of illegal aliens hired by the company.
In 1994 California paid $215 million to deliver 74,987 anchor babies for illegal aliens and the total number in the U.S. was approximately 300,000 for that year. After birth comes education, welfare, food stamps, Medicare, incarceration and the millions of relatives who cannot resist the invitations.
By the early 1990s the situation was clearly getting out of hand in California and the “Save Our State” (SOS) Proposition 187 was set into motion by Ron Prince, an accountant in Orange County in 1994. At the time around half of all illegal aliens arrested along the 2,200-mile U.S.-Mexican border were arrested on a 14-mile stretch in San Diego, Calif. Proposition 187 was approved by 59 percent of the voters—over five million votes—after thousands of citizens donated their time to collect the hundreds of thousands of signatures to place it on the ballot. The main goal was to take public benefits away from illegal aliens and deny schooling to their children—a reasonable action if we consider the state’s white population was being dissolved and replaced by the aliens.
However, Proposition 187, which reflected the will of the majority of the voters, was sabotaged by Federal Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, who declared the measure unconstitutional, and Gov. Gray Davis, who stopped
appeals in the legal process. As a result, a number of absurd cases surfaced in the following years. After waiting at the San Diego border crossing, a woman ran across the border, grabbed a lamppost and delivered a new “American citizen” in front of a video camera. Mexicans were running across the border on the I-5 freeway in California along the center divider among the moving cars and crossed the border by the hundreds in front of federal agents. An agency of the California government paid for billboard advertisements in Mexico that promised free medical care in California to all.
This is how California, the Golden State of the 1980s, was turned into the Slumlord State of 2010, constantly fighting off creditors, unable to pay state employees and dancing on the edge of a knife to avoid bankruptcy.
The constant injection of millions of illegal aliens have weakened and undermined the financial balance of all the U.S. border states to a degree where most of them are presently close to bankruptcy and suffer the financial effects of lowered credit ratings. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that the approximately two million illegal aliens cost $4.7 billion a year in Texas alone. The estimate incorporates the medical, educational and incarceration expenses spent on the aliens but no one can place a dollar value on a degraded society where the White working class was literally chased out of state by the dramatic reduction of wages and businesses that moved away.
Orderly cities were replaced by chains of crime-ridden third world slums. There are 1,880,000 jobs lost by Americans to illegal aliens every year (FAIR) and the aliens’ lower wages are subsidized by taxpayer resources making big business the ultimate winner and American society the ultimate loser in this game. Walmart was employing close to 1.2 million people in 1993 and regularly educated her low paid employees on how to tap into welfare and Medicaid resources to subsidize their income. Federal agents raided 61 stores in 21 states in 1993 and arrested hundreds of illegal aliens hired by the company.
In 1994 California paid $215 million to deliver 74,987 anchor babies for illegal aliens and the total number in the U.S. was approximately 300,000 for that year. After birth comes education, welfare, food stamps, Medicare, incarceration and the millions of relatives who cannot resist the invitations.
By the early 1990s the situation was clearly getting out of hand in California and the “Save Our State” (SOS) Proposition 187 was set into motion by Ron Prince, an accountant in Orange County in 1994. At the time around half of all illegal aliens arrested along the 2,200-mile U.S.-Mexican border were arrested on a 14-mile stretch in San Diego, Calif. Proposition 187 was approved by 59 percent of the voters—over five million votes—after thousands of citizens donated their time to collect the hundreds of thousands of signatures to place it on the ballot. The main goal was to take public benefits away from illegal aliens and deny schooling to their children—a reasonable action if we consider the state’s white population was being dissolved and replaced by the aliens.
However, Proposition 187, which reflected the will of the majority of the voters, was sabotaged by Federal Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, who declared the measure unconstitutional, and Gov. Gray Davis, who stopped
appeals in the legal process. As a result, a number of absurd cases surfaced in the following years. After waiting at the San Diego border crossing, a woman ran across the border, grabbed a lamppost and delivered a new “American citizen” in front of a video camera. Mexicans were running across the border on the I-5 freeway in California along the center divider among the moving cars and crossed the border by the hundreds in front of federal agents. An agency of the California government paid for billboard advertisements in Mexico that promised free medical care in California to all.
This is how California, the Golden State of the 1980s, was turned into the Slumlord State of 2010, constantly fighting off creditors, unable to pay state employees and dancing on the edge of a knife to avoid bankruptcy.
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