Fantastic, Groovy, Super-Cool Big Bird News

So a debate or two ago the Republican (Willard Mitt Romney) challenger for the presidency expressed that as president, he would defund the USA Public Broadcasting System (PBS).  Hopefully there is some unstated plan to lobby the Congress to accomplish the feat, since presidents have not had the power to defund anything on their own since Richard Nixon signed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

As a counter to this "threat" President Obama declared that Romney wanted to "kill" Big Bird, apparently along with the rest of the Sesame Street universe:

Now, if he really knew what he was talking about, President Obama could have picked most any other PBS show and had a shot at being correct.  However, Sesame Street, along with Big Bird, are a self-funding, money producing enterprise owned by billionaires.  For some reason the Obama administration thought these billionaires were not getting enough money via the $444,158,950 federal appropriation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) so he shoved another $1,067,532 their way through a 'stimulus' package.  The Sesame Street crew reported that $1.07 million created 1.47 jobs.

So, now that you know that Big Bird's goose is not cooked, broiled, or fried, can we add public funding for America's largest television network into a defunding plan that also includes NPR and TVA?

Coming soon

Frontline Series: Money, Power And Wall Street

Note:  I have no idea why searches for the "torrent" version of these videos keep getting directed here, but I don't have a clue about "torrent" and it is not here.

This appears to be a pretty good series from anybody, especially PBS.  Unknowingly, PBS exposes how Nationalized Socialism was fast tracked by the Republican George W. Bush administration and injected with steroids by the Barack Hussein Obama administration.

The first is mostly about the sub-prime mortgage beginnings.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Moral Hazard: This episode is fantastic if you know what to look for.  It shows how the moral hazard risk of a relatively free market (segments of little regulation within a heavily regulated industry) was short circuited by the federal government.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Two on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Episode Three - The Obamatrons take over. When Obama comes face to face with the biggest bankers in the United States, he folds like cardboard against a blowtorch giving the bankers all the money they wanted with no strings attached:

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Three on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Episode Four - From shady American municipalities to shady European governments, public officials around the globe jump into financial transactions they had no business getting near and the schemes blow up one by one:

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part Four on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Would You Like Borders With That Socialism?

John Muir: The Beginning of the end of Private Property

Watch John Muir in the New World on PBS.

The founder of the Sierra Club and someone Progressive Theodore Roosevelt sought for more ideas on expanding statism: John Muir.

Which Way Did Those Refugees Go?

In a classically hilarious Firing Line episode from 1969, Noam Chomsky has the laughable position that more refugees fled South Vietnam to the north than fled in the other direction.

One exchange begins at the 15:30 mark.  In that exchange about Vietnam, Chomsky blames Vietcong atrocities on American intervention in Vietnam.

At the exchange beginning on the 27:00 mark, Chomsky spins the fiction that the first Communist insurrection in Greece (the one prior to the WWII German invasion) was really an organic, internal "uprising" and not Soviet sponsored at all.

Back to Vietnam, at 37:29 Chomsky states that "there is more evidence that South Vietnam tried to colonize North Vietnam than conversely". Buckley asks if the "infiltrators" from South Vietnam going into the North bumped into the refugees coming south. This is where Chomsky begins his big whopper of a tale, saying that refugees traveled in both directions. At 38:30 Buckley asks about the people going "north to south" and Chomsky is 'baffled'.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by no means a Western mouthpiece even after the fall of the Soviet Union, here is the breakdown of Vietnamese refugee migration from 1954-1956:

The State of The World's Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Chapter 4: Flight from Indochina, War and exodus from Viet Nam -

With the founding of a communist government in the north, more than a million people moved south in the years 1954–56. Their numbers included nearly 800,000 Roman Catholics, an estimated two-thirds of the total Roman Catholic population in the north. There was a smaller movement in the opposite direction, The State of the World’s Refugees as some 130,000 supporters of the communist Viet Minh movement were transported north by Polish and Soviet ships.2

2 L.A.Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and OtherWar Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954–1975,Westport Press, New York, 1988; A.R. Zolberg et al., Escape from Violence: Conflictand the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, pp. 160–70.

That is greater than a 7 to 1 ratio of people fleeing Communism vs. people fleeing 'oppressive' Western influence.  The number of Catholics alone fleeing North Vietnam vs. those fleeing North is 6 to 1.  Since folks towing the Communist line in the West had a direct line to Soviet propaganda, there is little doubt that Chomsky had the 130,000 number etched in his head.

Years later, after the North Vietnamese took over (with the help of the United States Congress), there was another mass exodus  of Vietnamese.  This time they fled by sea from every port in the country, to any port that would take them.

Socialism, especially the International variety, kills more people than any other ideology on earth and everybody outside of the faculty lounge knows it.

More: No Leftist/Socialist Watches PBS

This is more of a note for references in How Many Borders Would You Like With That Socialism? than anything else.

Some think glasses automatically make you smarter.

I don't know how many times I have been called some version of racist bigot for my "stupid belief" that West Coast Africans sold their fellow men, women, and children into slavery.  Sold to the slave traders of the West.  Any attempt at an intellectual discussion on the topic quickly spiraled into a list of pejoratives directed at yours truly.

At least sometimes Angela Davis speaks the truth on this topic:

“We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.”
― Angela Davis

My wonder of how the Europeans, and later Americans, managed to run about an entire continent, unimpeded, snatching up Black men and women made-to-order for customers in Whitelandia (link to Ron Kuby, who coined the term) began later in life, since I believed the Leftist party line: White people just took any Black person they wanted as a slave and traded them like we trade baseball cards now.

Well, that theory did not hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever.  For example: why weren't the invaders taken prisoner by their much more numerous opponents?  An easier theory to believe is one of slave merchants making contact with Africans, neither side being stupid, and the merchants making offers of value to the powerful African natives for surplus human beings.  I never pursued the details much, but noted what I heard over the years.

Low and behold!  PBS came to the rescue again, albeit with watered down language, supporting the facts that African people were captured by fellow Africans, used as slaves there, with the surplus sold to Europeans:

Enslavement was most often a byproduct of local warfare, kidnapping, or the manipulation of religious and judicial institutions. Military, political, and religious authority within West Africa determined who controlled access to the Atlantic slave trade. And some African elites, such as those in the Dahomey and Ashanti empires, took advantage of this control and used it to their profit by enslaving and selling other Africans to European traders.

This from the PBS special The Slave Kingdoms.

A favorite slave of geeks.

Here is a longer passage.  Read the whole thing here.

In fact, Europeans often acted as junior partners to African rulers, merchants, and middlemen in the slave trade along the West African coast from the mid-15th century on. Two factors contributed to this dependency: the coastal geography and the diseases of West Africa. Seasonal wind patterns along the Atlantic coast of Africa generated heavy surf and dangerous crosscurrents, which in turn buffeted a land almost entirely lacking in natural harbors. Hazardous offshore reefs and sandbars complicated the matter even further for seafarers along the West African coast. European commerce in West Africa took place, therefore, most often on ships anchored well away from shore and dependent on skilled African canoe-men whose ability to negotiate across the hazardous stretch of water between the mainland and the waiting ships made the Atlantic trade possible. Even in places where Europeans were able to conduct trade on the mainland, their presence was limited by an epidemiological situation that impeded their livelihood and threatened their lives. Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases reduced the few Europeans living and trading along the West African coast to a chronic state of ill health and earned Africa the name "white man's grave." In this environment, European merchants were rarely in a position to call the shots.

Furthermore, when Europeans first initiated a trading relationship with West Africans in the mid-15th century they encountered well-established and highly-developed political organizations and competitive regional commercial networks. Europeans relied heavily on the African rulers and mercantile classes at whose mercy, more often than not, they gained access to the commodities they desired. European military technology was not effective enough to allow them this access by means of force on a consistent basis until the 19th century. Therefore it was most often Africans, especially those elite coastal rulers and merchants who controlled the means of coastal and river navigation, under whose authority and to whose advantage the Atlantic trade was conducted.

The next time some do-gooder leftoid  touts the value of PBS and the need for public funding of television, ask them if they actually watch any of the shows.  Then segue into this slave thing and see how things go.  I do not recommend this approach to chat up someone you are attracted to hoping to end up in angry sex with a happy ending.

There is a tie-in to my latest book project in here someplace.  Right now I am looking at the nuance of how the Socialists enslave without much regard to race, although racism is core to their worldview.

No Leftist/Socialist Watches PBS

Scroll down for update related to #OccupyChicago

Several years ago I saw Chicago: City of the Century, on a Washington, DC area PBS station.  What is amazing about this documentary, like many others, is that it blatantly destroys fallacies of the Left without a single cry from a Leftist.

Gustavus Swift

Witness this transcript from Part 2 of Chicago: City of the Century - and read what was said about Gustavus Swift (also see his competitor Philip Armour):

Swift: Gustavus Swift would walk out to Bubbly Creek, which was this terrible little sewer that ran out of one of his plants, with his top hat, his dark suit, he'd have his pants tucked into his Wellington boots, and he would wade into Bubbly Creek to check what was coming out of the sewer. And if he saw any grease or fat then he knew that was waste because you could have turned that into lard. And he'd go back and he'd find the source of how that happened and correct it. He was a very hands on manager.

Nancy Koehn, Historian: You can't understand industrial capitalism without understanding the importance of pennies, half cents, a tenth of a cent, a hundredth of a cent. And when you think about millions of pounds of beef being processed through a single plant in a year, you begin to understand why a hundredth of a cent was something that kept Swift and Armour and other industrialists up at night.

Get that?  No government agency was poking around looking for "pollution."  The 'evil capitalist' owner was looking for sources of waste and eliminating them.  How could the editorial staff of Slate and The Nation miss that one?  Probably because they want federal money squandered on PBS and they do not bother witnessing what is escaping from Room 101.

Part 2 continues and makes quite a few of the expected Leftist mistakes that one would expect from PBS.  Like how railroads had cut wages by 40 percent.  They actually mention this happened just after the end of US slavery, but fail to connect the dots.  Two dots really, new labor flood begets lower wages.

This is also the part that covers the rise of Socialism in the USA, in 1877, with the Bohemian pied pipers from what is now the Czech Republic.  (Just 23 years later, Yellow Socialism, aka, National Socialism, would emerge from the same area).  It mentions how members left the Socialist Labor Party and joined the International Working People's Association.  Without any fanfare, PBS casually mentions that the IWPA is an "Anarchist" organization, without noting that the big difference between the Socialists and Anarchists is nothing but the label.  Even in 1877, Anarchy and Socialism were identical.  Albert Parsons, publisher of the Alarm, moved effortlessly between Socialism and Anarchy.

The beginnings of the Red/Black Alliance (or Black/Red, if you like) -
On Thanksgiving Day 1884 the anarchists unveiled their new symbol. The black flag of hunger and death joined the red flag of social change.

Narrator: The Sunday picnics that Chicago's Germans enjoyed became more than picnics. They were a chance to spread the word and recruit. One Sunday, anarchist leader Samuel Fielden spoke of the wonders of a new invention, dynamite, which, he said, "science has placed within the reach of the oppressed." On Thanksgiving Day 1884 the anarchists unveiled their new symbol. The black flag of hunger and death joined the red flag of social change. Playing the anthem of the French revolution, the Marseillaise, they began a march which took them past Potter Palmer's elegant hotel, the Palmer House. Then on to the Prairie Avenue mansions of the capitalists who had "deprived them," their leaflets said, "of every blessing during the past year." "Every worker, every tramp must be on hand to express their thanks in a befitting manner."

Miller: They're marching down Prairie Avenue, okay, the very citadel of capitalism. And it's hard to march on a plant, but they're right at the homes of the capitalists. Never happened anywhere else like that. They collect what they call hoboes but they're anarchists as well. And they're going up and they're ringing the doorbells. And of course nobody's answering the doors. But they're screaming that they want bread or power. There'd just never been a direct demonstration quite like that.

Narrator: Albert Parsons read from the Epistle of St. James: "Your riches are corrupted...Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust shall eat your flesh as it were fire...We do not intend to leave this matter for the Lord," he concluded. "We intend to do something for ourselves."

Narrator: They approached the Prairie Avenue mansion of Marshall Field, whom Parsons had attacked for discriminating against immigrant women shopping in his store. "Our international movement is to unite all countries and do away with the robber class," Samuel Fielden told the marchers. "Prepare for the inevitable conflict."They marched on the Prairie Avenue mansion of George Pullman.

Adelman: George Pullman was absolutely horrified with the sight of poor people walking up his street and ringing his doorbell. The next day he went to his attorney, Wert Dexter, and he said, "I want you to get this guy Parsons."

Schneirov: They were Catholic, they didn't speak English, they spoke German, they drank beer on Sundays, they went to saloons on Sundays. They were a threat. They were totally alien to this American, Protestant way of life.

Narrator: They marched on the Board of Trade when it opened an elaborate new building on LaSalle Street the next year. "The Board of Thieves", they bellowed, stood for "starvation of the masses, privileges and luxury for the few." One in the crowd yelled, "Blow it up with dynamite." To Chicago's business leaders these were not idle threats.

Miller: They're reading in newspapers about assassinations abroad. There're people being killed in Europe, including Czar Alexander at this time. The movement is extremely strong in Germany And now their speakers are coming from Germany to agitate. So they know the anarchists are serious.

Narrator: "The better classes are tired of the insane howlings of the lowest strata," warned General Phil Sheridan, "and they mean to stop them." On May 1st 1886, the anarchists did something unusual. They teamed up with the main stream labor movement - disgruntled railroad workers, packinghouse butchers, Bohemian socialists. Albert and Lucy Parsons led 80,000 workers down Michigan Avenue as part of a nationwide strike for labor's big issue, an eight-hour day. With its Mayor Carter Harrison supporting it, Chicago became the center of the strike.

Pacyga: "Eight hours a day for work; eight hours a day to sleep; eight hours a day to play in a free Americ-kay."

Schneirov: The anarchists didn't lead the eight-hour movement, but they attempted to commandeer it. August Spies, felt strongly that this was a demand that was, in effect, a revolutionary demand, even though it didn't openly say so. It was a demand that could not be won under the existent circumstances, and it was a demand that would inevitably lead the eight-hour movement into a revolutionary situation, under the leadership of the anarchists.

Miller: They told capitalists, Your function in life is to die. We're going to get you. We're going to bomb your factories. We're going to tear apart your system. The general strike's going to bring down capitalism. You'll be shot afterwards.

Pacyga: The streetcar lines are shut down. The city is shut down. This is a general strike. And there's tremendous amount of tension. Workers, of course, were winning, you know, the eight-hour day in the packinghouses.

Narrator: Workers struck the packinghouses on May 2nd. The packers, Chicago's largest employers, conceded to an eight-hour day - the same pay for eight hours that workers had gotten for ten. What happened May 3 at the McCormick Reaper Works got the anarchists involved in another labor dispute and ignited the most sensational labor incident of the 19th century. Cyrus Hall McCormick, the Reaper King, had died in 1884. A floral reaper adorned his casket. His last words were "work, work, work." His son mechanized the plant. Blades that used to be forged by hand were now forged by steam hammer. This threatened the skilled iron workers. In May 1886 they had been on strike for months. McCormick hired scabs to take their place.

Schneirov: The McCormick strike was over a long-standing dispute that had begun before the 8 hour day had begun, that turned on the attempt of McCormick to mechanize the whole process of iron molding and thereby to get rid of one of the strongest unionized forces, the iron molders union. And these were largely Irish. And so there was a very bitter struggle that was going on at that time. Some of the Bohemian lumber shovers and other socialists and anarchists had gone up there in solidarity with the McCormick workers. August Spies had made a very militant speech.

Narrator: When the whistle blew to end the shift on May 3rd, locked out strikers attacked the scabs as they left the plant. Police rushed in to protect the scabs. They killed two of the striking workers.

Adelman: Spies witnessed this, from behind a boxcar. He saw it. And he ran back to his office on Wells Street and he wrote a protest, and he left it on the desk and said, I want this circulated the next morning. And he told them to put a banner on it. Well, to his great dismay the banner that somebody put on it was "revenge", which was the last thing that should have been put on it. Because he didn't mean it to be that kind of thing.

Narrator: A second circular called for a rally the next evening at Haymarket Square. Haymarket Square was an open air market by day. By nightfall on May 4th, the pushcarts were gone. Chicago's popular mayor, Carter Harrison, was there and made certain the crowd saw him. It would ensure order.

Pacyga: It was a very peaceful rally. The anarchists were saying things that they always said. Death to the owner class, revolution. Mayor Harrison rode up and everybody yelled, "Hoosah, hoosah, Mayor Harrison." You know, and he took his hat off and he waved at the people and said his little campaign thing. And he stayed at the back and then the police captain, Captain Bonfield, came up, said, "What should we do with this rabble, sir?" And he said, basically, "Let them speak. They've said many worse things than they're saying tonight. And there's no one here. And he says, "I'm going to go home," and he goes home.

Narrator: Captain Bonfield dismissed most of his men. Not all. The last speaker, Samuel Fielden, remembered the men shot at the McCormick Works: "The law is framed for...your enslavers.," he said. "Throttle it, kill it...do everything you can...to impede its progress." Bonfield considered this inflammatory. He ordered the police to march. Fielden was winding down. "He that has to obey the will of another is a slave. Can we do anything except by the strong arm of resistance? ...War has been declared on us. People have been shot. Defend yourselves!" No one noticed the man lurking in the shadows. "Any animal will resist when stepped upon. Are men less than snails or worms?" In the name of the state of Illinois, I command you to disperse," the police captain said. "But we are peaceable," Fielden protested.

Narrator: Seven policemen were killed, mostly by friendly fire. The Chicago Times called the workers "rag-tag and bobtail cutthroats of Beelzebub from the Rhine, the Danube, the Vistula, and the Elbe." Labor's largest paper called them "wild beasts." The respected Albany Law Review called them "long-haired, wild-eyed, bad smelling, atheistic, reckless foreign wretches."

So, there you have it (and there is more in the documentary), a bunch of Anarchists, indistinguishable from Socialists, attacked innocent workers as they left the McCormick plant.  The police were protecting victims under attack and some violent attackers were killed.  Somehow over history, and a bit in this documentary, this has been twisted by the Leftists as some heroic stand for the Labor Movement.  In reality, it was a bunch of thankless children in adult bodies who fell for the nonsense that fair wages were not enough and they deserved a business that they never invested a dime in.  The Albany Review was down right prophetic in describing the later rally attendees as "long-haired, wild-eyed, bad smelling, atheistic, reckless foreign wretches," since nothing about their appearance or manner has changed in over one century.

Update: In a probably unwitting attempt at freshness and uniqueness, the funky, smelly #Occupy crowd plan to replicate the Prairie Avenue incidents mentioned above, this time in the Chicago suburbs, as reported by Roe Conn and Richard Roeper on WLS 890 AM, Chicago.  Targets include towns where "high profile members of the 1% live"  Check for updates on their blog.

Something very disappointing about this post is how hard it was to find the PBS information, vs. a CSPAN clip.  PBS does not have the video online, one must order a DVD.  If it were on any CSPAN channel, it would be free to view and share.  Finding the transcript was easy, if you knew of its existence in advance.  Trying to find it through the events mentioned is fruitless.  Hopefully, this humble blog post will help others find this hidden gem for their research.