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  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] was: An Inconvenient Truth now libertarian thought
  • Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:08:33 -0800 (PST)

This is from a UK Libertarian speculating on what we are about to experince
(politically and socially, not to do with the economy). I , personally, am
afraid part of his speculation might be on track.

I see no "change", at all, coming from BO. I read an article today saying
that the anti-war progressives were very upset, that BO's cabinet was looking
almost as hawkish as that of GWB.

He is filling every void with people who worked for the sociopath Clinton.
He is hiring de-facto lobbyists for cabinet positions, after he promisewd not
to.

Welcome to the same thing with a younger, different colored face. Actually,
because of the huge majorities he has in congress, he could be much worse
than GWB, as hard a feat as they would be to accomplish.

Anyway, from a UK Libertarian perspective:

---------------------------------------------------------------


Barack Obama and America's 1997: Welcome to the Club!
by Sean Gabb
sean -+at+- libertarian.co.uk

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

I have been asked by several of my American readers to comment on their
presidential election. I did think to ignore these requests. Having spent
very little time there, I cannot be regarded as an expert on America. Nor am
I particularly fond of the place. I think its war of independence was brought
on less by the Stamp Act than by Lord Mansfield's judgement on the illegality
of slavery at common law.

I also think its war between the states was won by the wrong side. It would
have been better for humanity had the Union been broken up and its member
states made into British satellites. Sadly, the United States survived, and
was able to grow into the mercantilist oligarchy that took the most
significant—because ultimately the most successful—place in the triumvirate
of Soviet communism and European national socialism that ended the hegemony
of English liberalism.

Having considered the request, though, I do have something to say. The range
of opinion about Mr Obama's election seems to be marked at its limits by the
BBC and by organisations like Vdare and American Renaissance. The former
believes he is a fusion of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, and has
turned its news broadcasts into a hymn of secular joy.

The latter believes that he is indeed Messrs Mandela and Luther King—the
real ones, that is, not the constructs of the politically correct classes—and
that he will surround himself with Black Panther bodyguards and declare
Ebonics the official language of America.

I think both opinions are wrong. The first is not worth commenting on. The
second is wrong because so many American conservatives are still in shock at
the thought of having a black man to rule over them. Mr Obama got his
campaign funds in the usual way—from business interests that will now want
their reward.

He will need to operate within a system that remains dominated by whites.
Within a year or so, the non-whites who are still celebrating his victory
will have noticed that nothing much has changed as it affects their lives,
and will be denouncing him as a white man with a black face.

This is not to say, however, that nothing important has happened. Something
has happened, and it is both important and dreadful for the American people.
America has just had its equivalent of our 1997 revolution. Looking at the
eighty four years until then, power in England had become both more
oppressive and less accountable. But the main features of our Constitution
remained in place, and conservatives had been able to retain sufficient
institutional power to slow down the drift into tyranny. The election of New
Labour allowed the wholesale remodelling of the Constitution, so that little
now remains around which conservatives can unite.

I now live in a country where power is less restrained than at any time
since the sixteenth century—where formal sovereignty has been passed to
various foreign agencies, where the media is controlled, where civil
liberties have been casually squashed, where the armed forces have been made
into instruments of an imperial aggression that brings neither glory to their
nation nor better government to their victims.

So it is now in America. The American Constitution and Bill of Rights have
always been a fraud. From slavery to civil asset forfeiture, they have never
restrained any abuse of power on which the American ruling class has been
determined.

But the country is very large, and there has usually been strong local
suspicion of Washington. Given a ruling class interested mainly in dividing
up the profits of commercial privilege, and prepared to indulge any right
that did not get seriously in the way of this, the American people were left
with the appearance, and often the reality, of much freedom.

The new presidency is no more about having a black man in charge than New
Labour was about having all those Scotch voices in government. It is about a
change in the ruling class. This is the election in which those whose minds
were captured in the 1960s and 1970s by the neo-Marxists have taken over from
their parents. The Clinton presidency was largely a failure because the new
ruling class was still too young, and because the old ruling class had not
grown too old to cling to power—and because the Clintons were too easy to
hate and despise.

All is different now. The new ruling class has no political opposition but a
group of neo-conservatives who disgraced themselves during the Bush
presidency, and who are probably less interested in opposition than in a few
compromises on foreign policy. And it has a figurehead that cannot be mocked
or even criticised without risk of the most horrid accusations.

Mr Obama cannot be more stupid in his actions or more embarrassing in his
utterances than Mr Bush has been. But his essential function as President
will be to shield the new ruling class of America while it carries through a
total transformation of American life.

I do not know exactly how America will change. But I can predict that, come
2016, most Americans will no longer recognise their country. It will be less
free. It will be less prosperous. It will be less American. What has happened
in England, and what is happening in Australia, will now happen in America.

All this is to be regretted. I think increasingly, however, that if those who
are transforming the English world are to be blamed, those who are being
transformed are no less to be despised. In 1917, power was seized in Russia
by men who were prepared to murder anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow at
them. Whether they murdered thirty million or sixty million people is
important in the obvious sense. Where ensuring absolute docility of the ruled
is concerned, it is the first million who matter.

No one can blame the Russian people for grovelling before Stalin. But none
of the almost equally radical governments that have taken over in the English
world has killed any of its own citizens, or is proposing to kill any. We
have been enslaved by a small minority of intellectuals whose most potent
weapon is words. Any people who can be so enslaved deserves to be enslaved.

But I am about to digress. I will only say for now that the American people
deserve Barack Obama. To some extent, he is their punishment for tolerating,
if not welcoming, eight years of George W. Bush. More generally, they are
about to lose nothing more than they have long since abdicated their right to
possess.

So, welcome, America—welcome to the New Labour Club.


http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2008/tle492-20081109-05.html











--- On Thu, 11/20/08, Rebecca Lewinski <rebas_own AT hotmail.com> wrote:








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