Archive for July 2009

All through the night they stood at the gates, ready to repel the invasion.

The old RAF camp had never seen an army like this, not in all its years of proud service.

There was a nurse, a lorry driver, a shopkeeper and ambulanceman, several young mothers with children at their side – and a Staffordshire bull terrier called Kandie.

No way through: Women, their children and their pet dogs guard the main entrance to the estate

Blockade: Jason Bickley, left, and Simon Evans with one of the piles of hardcorel bought in to block an access road

It might not have looked like a task force assembling for action. But yesterday, in the drenching rain of a West Country morning, it became the front line in a war against a formidable new enemy – the traveller.

In a landmark action to stop the blight that has hit so many communities, residents of a housing estate that now occupies the former RAF Locking have barricaded themselves into the 100-acre site and mounted a 24-hour guard. Every car coming in or out of the estate near Weston-super-Mare was checked.

Anyone lingering outside the perimeter fence was stopped and politely questioned. At random intervals, the unlikely figure of an elderly man in a high-visibility jacket patrolled the grounds in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, checking for breaches of security.

To anyone who has never experienced a traveller invasion, all this may seem a little over the top.

But last weekend, after 15 or 20 caravans were evicted from a nearby field, some of the ‘gipsies’ drove around the Locking site and took photographs.

One of them let it be known they had targeted the privately-owned estate and intended to set up camp on some of the open, grassy landscape where children play and people walk their dogs. He reportedly warned residents not to resist, adding: ‘We’ve got guns.’
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Last week a story which gained very little traction hit the financial newswires.  The U.S. Treasury is working on an internal project informally called “Plan C” which seeks to deal with further problems in the economy before they occur.  The anonymous report came out stating the administration is reluctant to commit any additional money especially to the level mentioned in the report.  However this is a disturbing new development in our bailout nation since this is one of the first times that the U.S. Treasury will try to preemptively deal with a financial problem.

The issues with this Plan C is that it is setup to be a buffer on further deterioration in various loan categories but the big one is commercial real estate.  The commercial real estate market is gigantic and many of those loans are still active:

Some $3.5 trillion in commercial real estate loans are out in the market.  The problem is complicated because commercial real estate holders simply rollover their debt into new loans.  That of course has changed since the economy and credit markets have shutdown and many of these properties are now severely underwater.  Take a look at how many loans will be turning over:

*Source:  ZeroHedge

The amount of maturing loans in commercial real estate will double in 2010 and will continue upward into 2010.  The chart is very clear and this is only for debt in CMBS and not held by regional banks which is over $2 trillion.  This is the next multi-trillion dollar bailout you have yet to hear about.  In fact, while many are discussing a second half recovery higher up officials are already planning a bailout for the commercial real estate industry.  The challenge with this bailout is you are asking a public with 26,000,000 unemployed and underemployed Americans to shoulder the debt of largely speculative plays.  To many it is palatable to bailout the residential real estate market because the public can understand that (even if it may be wrong) or bailing out the 2 large U.S. automakers.  Yet bailing out the commercial real estate market is going to be a political nightmare.
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By Chilton Williamson Jr.

“A Call to Jihad, Answered in America” was the headline on the front-page news story, printed above the fold in the New York Times for 12 July, 2009.

The story, by Andrea Elliott, was about four young Somalis who arrived in the United States as refugees when small children and were enthusiastically transplanted to Minneapolis by the state and local authorities. Later, all four attended the University of Minnesota to train for professional careers.

Then, in 2008, one of the four, Mahmoud Hassan, an engineering student, had a bright idea. “Why are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?” he asked his friends. Several months later, Hassan and two other students left Minnesota for Somalia where they joined up with the Shabaab, a violent Islamist group allied with Al Qaeda in the attempt to overturn the imperiled Somalian government.

The NYT story continued,

“The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since September 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert M. Mueller, has said Mr. Ahmed was ‘radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota.’”

The reporter added that Ahmed’s story reveals the presence of a widespread jihadist movement in “America’s heartland“ that is attempting to recruit other young Americans to holy war, and mentioned the FBI’s concern that the jihadists might use their training and U.S. passports to stage attacks in the United States.

Two days before the Times printed the piece, VDARE.com had posted an article by Joe Guzzardi—Al Franken On Immigration: The Bad and The Good (Yes, I Said “Good”]—noting that Minnesota is 88 percent white, and only four percent Hispanic.

By coincidence, I spent the weekend of July 3-5 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, attending a family wedding. I trust Guzzardi’s demographic data regarding Minnesota. But no one could possibly guess, from a visit to the Twin Cities, that the state is 88 percent white.

The day after the wedding, I took a taxi to the Como Park Zoo in St. Paul to visit the zoo’s four African lions. Como Park, which was founded more than 100 years ago, is a pretty little zoo with a relatively small collection of well-kept animals and a beautifully designed and unusually spacious Large Cat Exhibit. As for the human population, it must have been, on the day of my visit, 95 percent nonwhite, including some Hispanics, a large number of blacks, native and otherwise, and a huge majority of Asians, principally Thais, Vietnamese, and Hmong.

I remained with the lions for a couple of hours, surrounded by visitors most of whom spoke a language other than English. How the zoo staff copes with the multiple language barrier I cannot imagine. My guess is they don’t bother to try. Spanish-language classes for docents, which many American zoos offer, would be ludicrously insufficient here.

My wife and I were driven into the city from the airport at one o’clock in the morning by a Somali cabby, and around town by mainly local blacks. These drivers were, without exception, friendly and polite. St. Paul’s business district, where our hotel was located, abounds with foreign faces, languages, and restaurants. We ate lunch the first day at an excellent Thai restaurant, operated by Thais, who like all Thais I have met were soft-spoken and gracious. The place looked prosperous, and the waitress—probably one of the owners—mentioned that the restaurant is a luncheon favorite of employees of the big financial companies housed in the proximate high-rise towers.

We did not spy any suspicious-looking Al Qaeda types about, though we could easily have overlooked them among the pressing crowd at Como Zoo, which offers free admission.

Still, as a contributor to the Star Tribune Sun put it, “It’s a long way from your grandmother’s Twin Cities.”
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July 30 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and seven other U.S. banks paid $32.6 billion in bonuses in 2008 while receiving $175 billion in taxpayer funds, according to a report by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo analyzed 2008 bonuses at nine banks that received Trouble Asset Relief Program financing from the U.S. government. New York-based Citigroup and Merrill, which has since been taken over by Bank of America Corp., received TARP funding totaling $55 billion, Cuomo said.

“When the banks did well, their employees were paid well. When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well,” Cuomo’s office said in the 22-page report. “When the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well. Bonuses and overall compensation did not vary significantly as profits diminished.”

The study, called “No Rhyme or Reason: The ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’ Bank Bonus Culture,” comes as Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission examine whether to limit the compensation paid to top corporate executives.

“One senior bank executive noted recently that individual compensation should not be set without taking into strong consideration the performance of the business unit and the overall firm,” according to the Cuomo report.

Upside, Downside

“As this executive put it, ‘employees should share in the upside when overall performance is strong and they should all share in the downside when overall performance is weak.” But despite such claims, one thing is clear from this investigation to date: there is no clear rhyme or reason to the way banks compensate and reward their employees,” the report said.
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Absent a miracle, Judge Sonia Sotomayor will take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the Republican minority still has an opportunity to use her nomination to educate the American people about the dangers of politicizing the judiciary.

President Barack Obama made a politically astute pick. Sonia Sotomayor is a competent jurist who symbolizes hard work, personal achievement, and ethnic diversity.

However, as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) argued during the hearing on John Roberts, “the burden of proof for a Supreme Court justice is on the nominee.” Judge Sotomayor has not met that burden.

While talking up her background, Sotomayor’s advocates have emphasized her moderate record on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. However, Circuit Court judges remain constrained by the possibility of Supreme Court review — and the hope of advancing to the high court. Judge Sotomayor’s testimony was useless, as intended, in assessing her judicial philosophy. Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick concluded: Sotomayor “dodges, hedges, and evades her way through softball and hardball questions alike.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) put it more harshly: the Judge was “evasive, lacking in substance and, in several instances, incredibly misleading.”

In trying to assess how Justice Sotomayor would behave, we should consider the president’s expectations. Then-Sen. Obama, who voted against both John Roberts and Samuel Alito, emphasized the “quality of empathy.” While most cases can be decided on the basis of case law and precedent, said Sen. Obama, there remain five percent which “can only be determined on the basis of one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world words, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” Alas, this latter category, however few in number, accounts for most of the important issues about which we most care and which most divide us.

Sonia Sotomayor’s rhetoric and background suggests that she shares the president’s general perspective. For instance, she has been involved in ethnic identity activism and politics throughout her college and professional life. She spent 12 years as a board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which promoted the usual ethnic agenda of coerced diversity and multiculturalism as well as the usual liberal agenda including support for abortion and opposition to capital punishment.
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A black president nominates a Latina for the Supreme Court. She had made a ruling against white firefighters. That ruling gets reversed by her prospective high-court colleagues.

It was pretty easy to guess what would come up in her confirmation hearings.

America, it seems, isn’t over race after all. Rather, now the race card is being dealt in every direction.

More and more whites — weary of a generation of minority racial preferences, fighting for scraps in a feeble economy, feeling the sting of skin color as a disadvantage — are joining minorities in crying foul.

“The pendulum is swinging where people are challenging things on both sides,” said Denise Drake, a Kansas City employment lawyer. “Everybody is saying, ‘You don’t get to consider race at all.’ ”

Earlier this month, two of Kansas City’s white budget analysts filed suit against City Manager Wayne Cauthen, who is black, and the city, claiming that age and race discrimination led to the losses of their jobs and the retention of minority workers.

Their attorney accused the city of a “whites need not apply” policy.
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THE U.S. NAVAL Academy’s PowerPoint display explains diversity by saying, “Diversity is all the different characteristics and attributes of individual sailors and civilians which enhance the mission readiness of the Navy,” adding that: “Diversity is more than equal opportunity, race, gender or religion. Diversity is the understanding of how each of us brings different skills, talents and experiences to the fight — and valuing those differences. Leveraging diversity creates an environment of excellence and continuous improvement to remove artificial achievement barriers and value the contribution of all participants.”

Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of Naval Operations, says that “diversity is the No. 1 priority” at the academy.

Diversity at the Naval Academy, as at most academic institutions, is not about equal opportunity but a race and sex spoils system to achieve what the Navy brass see as a pleasing race and sex mix. They accomplish that vision by the removal of “artificial achievement barriers.”

Let’s go over what the Naval Academy sees as an artificial achievement barrier. A black candidate with B and C grades, with no particular leadership qualities, and 500 on both portions of the SAT, is virtually guaranteed admittance. A white student, who’s not an athlete, with such scores is deemed not qualified.
Many black students are admitted to the Naval Academy through remedial training at the Naval Academy Preparatory School (NAPS) in Newport, R.I., which is a one-year post-secondary school. Finishing the year with a 2.0 GPA, a C average, almost guarantees admission to the academy. A C average for remedial work is nothing to write home about.

Occasionally, when students don’t make the 2.0 GPA target, the target is renegotiated downward. Minority applicants with SAT scores down to the 300s and with Cs and Ds grades (and no particular leadership or athletics) are also admitted after a remedial year at the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

Bruce Fleming, an English professor at the academy for 22 years, teaches a remedial English class and finds that in his spring 2009 class, most of NAPS’s students earn Cs and Ds and many are on probation. About seven years ago, Professor Fleming was on the admissions board, where the standing instruction is not to write anything down because “everything is ‘FOI’able” — meaning it can be demanded under the Freedom of Information Act.

Such an instruction highlights the dishonesty of race preferences. The dishonesty doesn’t stop there. The academy will go to great lengths to retain black students.
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There is reality gap between the dominant anti-British ideology and our common sense view. In “The Abolition of Britain” Peter Hitchins descibes it as being like a civil war as the two sides are mutually incomprehensible. Edmund Burke summed up the idealistic view: ”You think you are combating prejudice but you are at war with nature.”

When it comes to immigrants orthodox people lose control and become sentimental and unrealistic. They treat them not as having human nature like us but as “victims.” They are invested only with good qualities and can do no wrong. Ethnic crimes are kept quiet by the media as they pretend immigrants are all virtue and sentimentalised like Sarah’s “Cuddly Bunnies.” (1)

This is a legacy of colonial arrogance as they did not give up deep-seated ideas but changed so instead of lording it over colonials the elites become goody goody and want to care for them and give them privileges over us. The Imperial attitude gave way to charity and caring but still wants to rule their lives as they treat them like children. To put it in the vernacular, the rulers lost their bottle.

Corruption and this PC attitude are linked because they see themselves as separate from us by ideology and we are regarded as the new primitives because our views are treated as backward and unenlightened; yet, they impose this on us but do not live it themselves by mingling with ethnics. They send their own children to the best schools while condemning us for objecting to our own children becoming a minority in state schools. (2)

In fact to see how corrupt and evil they are consider this: they introduced smoking bans in pubs throughout the country and destroyed much of our community spirit but smoking is still allowed in the House of Commons bars!
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Councilman Emilo Martinez is accusing fellow Councilman Manuel Bersamin of being racially divisive in a letter to the manager of Malo, a band scheduled to perform at the Monterey  Bay Berry Fest on Aug. 1 and 2. The festival is a rival to the city’s own Watsonville Strawberry Festival at Monterey Bay, to be held the same weekend downtown.

A story about the letter will be published in Wednesday’s Sentinel. Here’s the letter, which Martinez requested and received from city staff.

Dear Mr. Gonzalez,

MALO is booked to perform at the Monterey Bay Berry Fest in August 1 and 2, 2009.

This Berry Fest that MALO is booked for is not the original Watsonville Strawberry Festival. The original Strawberry Festival was controlled by the City of Watsonville City Council for many years.

The promoter has taken our Strawberry Festival from a Latino city that has a population of low-income immigrant Mexicanos.

The Watsonville City Council is a Latino majority council. Most of us are Chicanos who have supported MALO all of our lives as younger men. Now, as mature men,we are the Latino leaders of the city that we grew up in. We are the sons of Mexican immigrants who came to Watsonville to work in the fields to harvest lettuce, apples and strawberries.

We are proud of our Latino heritage and we are fighting to uplift our Raza. Under our Latino leadership on the city council, this Strawberry Festival was meant to honor our fellow Mexicanos working in the fields.

The promoter of the Berry Fest event that MALO is booked for in August lied to our city by saying he would hold the event within the city limits. We have held this event within our city limits so that the low income Latinos who make up 90 percent of the city’s population could easily walk to and attend the event after a hard days work in the fields. Most of the people in Watsonville are Latino and many of the residents, like myself are children of low-income farmworkers.

The Watsonville Strawberry Festival was founded to honor the product of strawberries. When Latinos gained control of the Festival, we wanted to honor the workers and we decided to make the festival easy to get to here in the city limits.
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