Steven Yates -- Ticking Time Bombs, Part 1

TICKING TIME BOMBS
PART 1 of 2

By Professor Steven Yates
July 16, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

A minimum of four ticking time bombs threatens to take down not just the U.S. but much of the rest of the developed and developing worlds. It is becoming a question of how much of Western civilization will survive to see the year 2020.

In the U.S. these are (in no particular order): (1) the political correctness time bomb; (2) the Obamacare time bomb; (3) the unemployment / underemployment time bomb; and (4) the financial markets time bomb. Some would point to rising Muslim populations and their calls for sharia law to be imposed on Western cultures a fifth time bomb. There are places in Europe where this is very possible, although my opinion is that violence by blacks against whites is the greater danger, in the U.S. at least. Others would point to the dangers of amnesty for illegal aliens, currently being pushed through. I don’t think this is a time bomb. While it would undoubtedly turn the U.S. into a one-party nation as the majority of the newly legalized aliens would vote for Democrats, one or more of the other time bombs will go off probably before this has time to happen.

The political correctness time bomb

The public response to the George Zimmerman verdict is telling. The jury members weighed the evidence they were given and found Zimmerman not guilty. In the days after, I found myself amazed at the number of people whose reaction implies they know more about Zimmerman’s state of mind and conduct than that jury. Should we be surprised?

Mainstream media reported this case dishonestly from the get-go. They regaled television viewers for weeks on end with a picture of Trayvon Martin as a smiling, innocent-looking child. The problem: the picture was over five years old. The insinuation: Zimmerman had murdered this innocent, smiling little tyke for no reason other than racism. For this he was basically subjected to a media lynching, even though there isn’t the slightest reason to believe that the person depicted in that photo is the person he faced in the street that night.

In fact, what evidence we have suggests that Martin towered over the slightly pudgy Zimmerman; forensic reports suggest that Martin was indeed on top of Zimmerman and pummeling him. The formers hands had marks on them consist with this; Zimmerman’s hands had no such marks, but his head and face had numerous lacerations consistent with his claims that Martin attacked him and was pounding his head against the pavement when Zimmerman shot him. Zimmerman is guilty of nothing worse than poor judgment; he disregarded a police dispatcher’s order to stay in his vehicle—but the dispatcher was not on the scene, and Zimmerman made an on-the-spot judgment call.

The U.S. is a cauldron of racial hostility—all the proof one needs that multiculturalism-by-force does not work. Most of the hostility is black against white although other ethnic groups can become targets (media have downplayed the fact that Zimmerman is part Hispanic, and thus technically a minority himself). Preferential programs of various sorts—affirmative action for blacks in universities (preferential admissions, attempts to recruit and preferentially hire black faculty, etc.), set-asides in industries such as construction—in almost half a century, none of it has worked. We can argue till we’re blue in the face over why these programs don’t work; the bottom line is, they don’t. While the U.S. has produced black entrepreneurs—a small community that has always existed, by the way—by and large not only have larger black communities not budged economically or educationally over the past 40 years, but the economic dislocations that began in 2008 have probably hurt blacks more than other groups. For this they blame “whitey.” The idea that “whitey” is to blame for their problems is now part of black subculture. A few years ago the idea was floated that “whitey” owes blacks massive reparations. The idea may not be dead.

A lot of blacks saw a guilty verdict against Zimmerman as just one more entitlement, and took to the streets in large numbers when they didn’t get it. It is worth noting, however, that a lot of whites took to the streets as well. There may have been more whites than blacks out there marching for “justice for Trayvon.” This suggests there is more to this story than just race. We can see the effects of an ideology for which facts in evidence, logic, and the rule of law are unimportant. Zimmerman’s finances are in a shambles, and he can’t work. He’s a marked man; even his attorney admitted as much. Because of threats against his life, he wears a bulletproof vest outdoors. His parents and even his attorney have also received death threats. His enemies are now unwilling to concede defeat. Those in the grip of ideology never do. The Justice Department might continue the pursuit, with federal civil rights charges. George Zimmerman could find himself hounded to the ends of the Earth until he and his family are broke and their lives destroyed.

I hate to say it, but some of us have been warning for over two decades that this sort of thing could happen. In the late 1980s, Thomas Sowell argued using a wealth of examples from around the world that government-sponsored preferences never work. What they do is breed mutual resentment between preferred and nonpreferred groups. In the U.S. this includes a worsening of whatever racism affirmative action was supposed to correct for. The programs don’t work, and the majority group is blamed, although most whites just want to be left alone. Barriers remain; such incidences as this raise tensions until they threaten to explode. (Had Zimmerman been found guilty, street celebrations could still have turned violent.)

In 1994 I published a book entitled Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong with Affirmative Action (ICS Press). Few people read it, or probably even heard of it. In terms of visibility and connections, I’m not Tom Sowell. I’m also white. As the book argued against one of the sacred cows of contemporary academia, it probably ended my teaching job at the time and very nearly cost me my academic career.

Civil Wrongs made several predictions. It predicted that political correctness (PC), developed to protect race and gender preferences among other leftist shibboleths, would spread from college and university campuses to the every corner of society if it did not face a united and principled opposition. This came true, as opposition to PC was scattered, poorly organized, and above all, underfunded. I also predicted (as had Sowell) that the number of those claiming grievances and demanding protected status would enlarge until it became the dominant component of the population. This came true. We saw this the past few days in the number of marchers demanding “justice for Trayvon.” Homosexuality, moreover, was barely on the radar screen in 1994. Today it is not just out of the closet but in our faces, everywhere. It is even spreading, little by little, to very traditional cultures such as Chile.

I didn’t predict that we’d see an affirmative action president in our lifetimes; that seemed a bit much even for me to swallow. But only a now-dominant affirmative action mindset can explain how a relatively unknown two-term state senator can literally come from nowhere, leapfrog over many vastly better qualified people, and get his party’s nomination, with hardly anyone batting an eyelash; only PC can explain how he was handled with kid gloves back in 2008 by nearly everyone including Republicans, although the near-collapse of the economy for which Bush II was vulnerable doubtless helped. Obama’s empty promises of “change you can believe in” riveted the poorly educated, starry-eyed twentysomethings—the Brave New Generation (see here and here and here) who have grown to adulthood never having known a world without PC.

It was a fraud, of course. Those with real power had little trouble hoodwinking this generation. Obama is finishing the job Bush II started continuing his predecessor’s ill-advised wars, starting new ones, furthering the police state, and protecting the interests of megacorporations and the superelite behind them. I don’t see how any progressives can still stand him; he’s sold them down the river as completely as any unprincipled sociopath.

This is, of course, independent of the political correctness time bomb—although there is good evidence that the Obama regime was involved in the media lynching of Zimmerman. He once said that Trayvon could have been “his son.” I don’t think a U.S president has ever involved himself in a domestic criminal case to this extent—again without anyone batting an eyelash.

There are now countless hate-driven attacks by blacks on whites, many of them far more vicious than anything Zimmerman allegedly did to Trayvon Martin. I could not begin to list them all. Cases like the Wichita Horror or the torture-murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome do not garner the kind of national media attention this case received. Many receive almost no attention at all, even when the perpetrators are caught and punished.

With evidence from demographics indicating that the number of whites having children is falling, while the number of minorities having children is rising, things do not look good for whites on the racial front, and one can imagine more and more situations where whites find themselves in situations like Zimmerman’s and are persecuted (not merely prosecuted) if they use deadly force in self defense. Could there be a racial conflagration? Of course there could. One incident where a group of whites fight back with deadly force, or a court case involving such that is not decided in a PC fashion, could ignite an explosion leading to martial law over the affected regions.

The Obamacare time bomb

The Obama’s Regime’s singular domestic “accomplishment” has been the Affordable Health Care Act, which is proving to be anything but affordable and obviously has almost nothing to do with actual health care. It was true enough that health care in the U.S. needed fundamental change; for strictly speaking, the U.S. doesn’t have a health care system, it has a sick care system—an illness maintenance system. Sick people spend more money on doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals than healthy people do, feeding corporatism. Obamacare does nothing to change this. The only thing that would give us a real health care system is a large scale effort to educate the public about sound nutrition, the need to stop being couch potatoes and get regular exercise, etc. There is not a word of actual health promotion in Obamacare, because that’s not its purpose, which is to centralize sick care, fatten the profits of both Big Pharma and Big Insurance, and very possibly find a legal way of dealing with an aging population that will otherwise eventually break the Medicare and Social Security banks. I don’t know that Obamacare really creates “death panels” as Sarah Palin called them. It doesn’t have to. What it will do is use bureaucracy to cut costs, which will mean triage. It will cut services by limiting doctor time with patients, limiting treatments for the elderly, and this will place health care out of the reach of many aging baby boomers in a deteriorating economy. The “useless eaters” will be triaged and sent home to die in the care of hapless relatives if they have any. Meanwhile, the costs of the bureaucracy Obamacare will create will gradually escalate.

Obamacare is already proving to be an economic wrecking ball. It is costing jobs and lowering incomes as companies either lay off employees to get under the 50 full time employee limit the law establishes, hire only part-time workers or cut the hours of existing employees to part time; or do not hire at all. Smaller companies in particular cannot afford the costs of compliance; some are already closing their doors, meaning that none of their employees now have jobs! The law creates a ceiling of 30 hours a week a part-time employee can work. Thus the number of part-time workers in the U.S. economy has exploded since Obamacare became law.

Those not presently insured, however, are required by the law to purchase health insurance through one of the government’s “health insurance exchanges”—this despite the well-known difficulty unemployed or marginally employed people have buying food and paying bills now.

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The law proposes to use the IRS to penalize those who don’t comply, which means either money out of their pockets they can’t afford to spend, or more money out of the pockets of a dwindling number of taxpayers when the government caves and pays for their health insurance. The “constitutionality” of Obamacare’s forcing individuals to purchase private health insurance was upheld by the Supreme Court: one of its most irrational decisions ever, describing compliance as a tax, as it is administered by the IRS. Visible refusal to comply with the IRS can send you to jail, of course. Some refuseniks will end up as political prisoners if they stand their ground—unless, of course, one of the other time bombs goes off first and renders Obamacare irrelevant. For Part two click below.

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