BayouVixen's Blog

Back in 2001, I got fired by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., the owners of the Orange Leader newspaper. For about six months after that, I stubbornly tried to find another job in the business but met nothing but dead ends -- no one ever said so, but I have little doubt that my pay grade had a little to do with it and the fact that I was, shall we say, not a "team" player had a LOT to do with it. But for six months afterward I stubbornly tried to hold on to the house we'd bought in Orange, sucking down every dime of the 401K I'd built up before we finally had to call it quits and lose the house to foreclosure.

So for the last 7 years I've struggled with the stigma of a foreclosure on my credit report, living in apartments and rent houses ... when all along all I had to do was simply to tell my mortgage company they just needed to run to Congress to get the money?

I think Homer Simpson probably says it best: "DOH!"

The Senate's vote on a second bailout of mortgage lenders -- I'm glad to see that Sens. Cornyn and Hutchison voted against the measure, my respect for them has risen -- has moved the federal government into an all-new realm. The Nanny State has become the Rich Uncle State -- don't worry about your irresponsibility, the government will bail you out if you get into trouble.

That'd be kind of cool if my new Rich Uncle were just someone who is independenly wealthy -- but see, my Rich Uncle's money comes out of MY pocket. And he's not authorized to use it that way.

It was a Scotsman, Alexander Tyler, who observed in 1770 that Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government because once the electorate figures out it can vote itself gifts from the public treasury, fiscal failure is the inevitable result. We've been seeing that kind of irresponsibility at work since the 1960s, and it's getting worse.

Thanks to the unbridled spending of Congress and the Bush Administration, we are hopelessly in debt. I've heard one estimate that were this debt spread out evenly across the country, every single one of us would owe $500,000 to balance the government's books.

That debt is owed in huge measure to Communist China. Yes, Communist China. All the Chinese would have to do to destroy the United States would be to call in that debt and sell off all their American holdings -- the stock market would crash worse than it did in 1929 and we would enter a depression from which our weak, selfish, ignorant people would never recover.

Yes, a lot of Americans face home foreclosure. They took out loans they couldn't pay for. A lot of investors stood to lose a lot of money. They made loans they shouldn't have made. Call me cold, but having been in their shoes myself, I know what it's like. For seven years I've paid the price that these people don't want to pay.

I have a question for Congress and President Bush, one that was asked of Davy Crockett in the early 1830s. He related that he was out campaigning for his Congressional seat when he was admonished by a farmer for voting a $20,000 expenditure to help victims of a fire in Georgetown. Why, Crockett asked, would the farmer object to helping people out?

"Well, Colonel," the farmer asked Crockett, "where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?"

Just about the time we got to thinking that Justice in Texas was indeed dead, he climbs out of the grave and screws this state again.

U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice -- who last time I remember reading about him had "retired" -- issued a ruling Friday that Texas has until the end of January to "fix" its bilingual education program.

I'm not a fan of bilingual education. It is self-defeating and wasteful because students never learn English, the unofficial official langauge of the United States of America and of Texas. It has become a prop for schools to suck up extra funding by providing a free education to illegal aliens in their own language, simple as that. It is a key factor in the "reconquista" being practiced by the Government of Mexico, creating a distinct, separate Mexican culture that competes with American culture and is in the process of overwhelming it by sheer numbers because of unchecked birth rates.

And Lord knows, I'm no fan of the Texas Education Agency. I've been fighting them since 1995 or so after discovering that the "new standards" they were implementing in this state were, in fact, the same ones Hillary Clinton implemented in Arkansas -- standards that have provided similar results, such as skyrocketing dropout rates and honor graduates who have to take remedial classes before attempting college coursework.

But I'll side with the TEA here. Given the choice between spending money on a harmful program (which it's doing now) and spending even more money on a harmful program to create more votes for Justice's chosen political party, I'd urge the TEA to fight this thing tooth and nail as long as they can.

Or better yet, eliminate bilingual education altogether in favor of immersion. Duh.

"Immersion" is dropping kids straight into English-speaking classrooms, especially in the early grades. Believe it or not, it works.

Unlike bilingual education. In California, Hispanic parents fueled a drive to demand the state end bilingual education in favor of immersion because they were afraid their children would not be able to compete if they spent years getting things in a confusion bilingual way; one poll showed 84 percent favored immersion.The idea of bilingual education, or "facilitation theory," is in fact based on a 1976 study of kids emigrating from FINLAND to SWEDEN. Ja.

Of more than 300 "studies" done supporting the idea of bilingual education, only 72 actually used methodologically-sound research, and 83 percent of those favored immersion.

Judge Justice for years held Texas taxpayers hostage with his legislation from the bench requiring luxuries for Texas prisoners. We shouldn't allow him to do it with our schools; many taxpayers around the state are already at the maximum on property taxes, and in these uncertain economic times that LAST thing we need is higher taxes.  The best way to flick our collective middle fingers at William Wayne Justice is to end bilingual education altogether, immediately.

By nature, I avoid watching most TV news. Having been in the print media for so long myself, I'm aware at how much the broadcasters simply can't give the public. The flip side of that, of course, is the fact that most Americans these days won't read past the first three paragraphs of a real news story, so us guys in print can't claim we actually inform anyone any better. People just don't want the whole story.

But every now and then I see some TV news coverage that makes the steam rise out of my ears, my blood boil and enrages me to the point I want to take that idiot box and chunk it. The case in point would be the coverage of the recent immigration raid at Action Rags USA in Houston.

The wife happened to have the TV tuned to the station which runs her nonsense "swap" shows, so the report in question was not on Fox, but I have little doubt that some manager at the local Fox affiliate had his hands full trying to convince a reporter that no, we don't need another "families broken apart" story. Or maybe they did it and just haven't run it yet, in which case I'll get mad at Fox, too.

Now, here's the situation: the undocumented workers who were "rounded up," who are in this country illegally, are criminals. The people at Action Rags who hired them are criminals. People who make and sell meth are criminals, as are people who murder other people.

Yet of course the sappy reporter for this (other) station had to interview "family members" of those being carted off in the raid to learn how this was "breaking up their families," like maybe Immigration and Customs Enforcement was doing something other than its job -- and God knows, I've been howling at them to do THAT!

But I have to ask: where is this reporter when a bunch of gang members gets rounded up for selling crack? Why is there no story about how these arrests are tearing apart THOSE families? Where is the human interest piece about how our cruel drunk-driving laws tear apart the families of the mindless sots who insist on breaking the law?

What this TV reporter, and the station she works for, are doing is betraying their bias. By supporting those who have invaded our country and are trying to replace our American culture with their own, they are affirming that the very concept of the "United States of America" is completely meaningless to them -- they're fully supportive of the reconquista of the American Southwest by Mexico.

The time is coming, folks, when we're going to have to choose sides.

In 1934, Smedley D. Butler – a two-time Medal of Honor winner who was arguably the most popular military figure of his time – stunned the nation by announcing that he had been approached by a group of businessmen to lead a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt administration – an administration he opposed vociferously.

Butler, a Marine who earned his legendary status during the “Banana Wars” in Nicaragua and throughout the Caribbean, claimed he was asked to led a march on Washington by 500,000 veterans demanding payment of pensions promised them for their service during the first World War. The real purpose of the march, Butler told Congress, was to install a “secretary of general welfare” and take the burden of government off the shoulders of Roosevelt – to make the President a figurehead.

Congress briefly examined the charges during hearings which lasted several months, then petered out, and none of those named by Butler was ever charged. World War II came and the matter was quickly forgotten.

Guess who’s in charge of the United States now?

While certainly nowhere near as merciless, organized or efficient as the totalitarians of World War II, today’s American fascists control every sector of the economy, education and politics. They have taken control subtly and legally by winning elections and by winning over both key figures and by playing on the prejudices of everyday Americans.

“Fascism in America won’t come with jackboots, book burnings, mass rallies, and fevered harangues, nor will it come with black helicopters or tanks on the street,”political journalist Chris Floyd observed in 2001. “It won’t come like a storm—but as a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: Everything is the same, but everything has changed.”

“Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality will have taken its place. All the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns—plenty of bread and circuses. But ‘consent of the governed’ will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small and privileged group who rule for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons.”

Indeed, the way today’s U.S. government operates is chillingly reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s concern, addressed in a letter to a friend in 1864. Lincoln warned of the growing power of corporations and expressed his fear that if that power were not curbed, eventually the moneyed class would use its influence to take charge of the government, and “….our Republic is no more.”

America’s liberals have been howling about our descent into corporate control for years -- and have been roundly scoffed at for their wild rhetoric and radical solutions, especially since their answer was to vote Democrat. Now, however, they’re beginning to be joined by constitutionalists and libertarians fleeing the Republican Party.

“These days, it's hard to read anything without thinking, ‘this can't be true.’ We're living in an age of secret bunker governments and stealth legislation, however, and unlikely scenarios are tempered with the realization our old reality is gone,” liberal commentator Maureen Farrell wrote on Buzzflash. “Yet here we are, scratching our heads, while guardians of the public trust shill for the state.”
Indeed, while the term “fascist” has often been hurled at the Republican Party, especially under its current leader, George Bush, both parties have their adherents. The previous occupant of the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, was also an adherent of Bush’s Third Way politics, and his wife, Hillary, is one of the key architects of the movement’s crowning glory – control over American public education.

This author put the pieces of the puzzle together back in 1996 and termed the movement the “New Utopians” in the Katy (Texas) Times newspaper by exposing the connection between the National Center on Education and the Economy, the Clintons, and Bush’s support of the rewrite of education standards in Texas.

In a letter to Hillary Clinton written in 1992, NCEE director Marc Tucker wrote that Bill Clinton’s election gave the movement an opportunity to finish making the changes to American public education which would cement the system into place: transforming the education system into one which would train “human resources for the state.” Bush’s Texas education commissioner, Mike Moses, used the NCEE blueprint to implement the same standards which had failed miserably under the Clintons in Arkansas – and when Bush was elected President, the system went national via the No Child Left Behind Act.

Many liberals are keen to point out that all the warning signs of fascism are evident in today’s America: powerful nationalism, a “common enemy” to focus the public’s attention on (terrorism), secret prisons and justice system, secrecy demanded, the military glorified, the news media complicit or controlled, corporations shielded from government intervention, corruption unchecked, militarized police, rampant sexism, bullying of intellectuals and stolen elections.

Some of those warning signs can, of course, be argued – while others are easy to identify. Certainly only the most radical elements of the political Left could believe there has been any increase in sexism (or racism) in today’s Politically Correct America. And non-religious members of the conservative movement have for years been howling that Democrats have been rigging elections themselves with tricks like having “volunteers” help the aged vote or helping illegal aliens to cast ballots – the latter having been found to have occurred on a massive scale during this year’s Texas primary elections.

At the same time, several of the warning signs point out the clear and present danger.

Across the country, for example, the right of Americans to defend themselves is constantly under attack – from the very same political leftists, who may unwittingly be playing into the hands of the fascists through their support of universal firearm confiscation. The legal system penalizes those who defend themselves – remember the $8 million award to the burglar who was shot by the Florida homeowner while trying to sneak into the window of a child’s bedroom?

The War on Terror has spawned a secret system of military tribunals and prisons to handle captured terrorists and, some believe, domestic opponents of the fascist programs deemed to be “supporters” of terrorism. The clear evidence of rampant corruption by powerful multinational corporations within the Bush Administration (and its predecessor) is unrivaled in modern American history.

Yet today’s brand of fascism has been successful in gaining at least partial control over the United States because unlike the Nazis it appeals to both ends of the political spectrum. Author Chris Chantrill offers that what we’re dealing with in the U.S. is liberal fascism, or “what I like to call ‘Mommy fascism.’”

“The fascism of the 1930s was a daddy fascism featuring a militarized command economy and smart CCC uniforms with everyone marching in step,” Chantrill writes. Quoting conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, he says: “Mommy fascism is different and Jonah takes the reader through Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village …’In chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born...Then there are the home inspectors, the advisers, the teachers, the social workers.  Clinton relies on her loyal army of experts to dispense advice about every jot of child rearing.”

The difference between the fascists of the 1930s and their snappy uniforms and marching in lockstep and today’s fascists is that today’s fascists have integrated with the true socialist element in politics. 

Chantrill notes: “Liberals would say that ‘liberal fascism’ is an oxymoron, and a hateful one at that.  How could liberals have anything to do with right-wing fascism?  But sixty years ago Hayek in The Road to Serfdom had already made the connection.  He quoted Peter Drucker:  ‘Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.’  Communists and fascists, Hayek continues, ‘compete for the same type of mind and reserve for each other the hatred of the heretic.’”

While the Republican Party is fracturing with the desertion of religious conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians during this election cycle, some liberal commentators believe that Democrats are also just starting to realize their party has been co-opted as well.

“America is almost a de facto one party state where the Democrats pay Bush the highest compliment by trying to imitate him,” notes Yippie writer Stew Albert in “Are We There Yet? Fascism in America.”  “American fascism is flowering in a post socialist era in which global capitalists feels fully free to bury the welfare state. Because of this historical circumstance, American fascism has within itself the potential for an unearthly collective barbarism.”

Lincoln realized in 1864 that Big Money has power, and rightfully saw the European banking interests which sought to provide financing for the Northern war effort as a threat to national sovereignty. And it is the same interests which have taken control today via control of international corporations – business entities which owe allegiance to no state or flag, but to themselves only.

“I suspect that everything I have just recounted is entirely by design … of Big Money interests,” writes Gary Scott in The Rise of American Fascism. “The role of money ensures that only the wealthy and well-connected have any chance of influencing the political process or holding elected office at a significant level. 

“Thus, it was not by sheer coincidence that, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters were given a choice between a Yale graduate, whose father had been President and whose grandfather was a Senator, and a Harvard graduate, whose father was a Senator. And in the 2004 presidential contest, the choice was even more narrow, between a multi-millionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man and a billionaire Yale “Skull and Bones” man. Nepotism, like corruption, discourages most good Americans from participating in elections, to say nothing of running for office!”

With each election, no matter who wins it, we seem to take another step forward the ultimate goal of the fascist movement: world control.

“The fascism of today will not simply be a repression of political life in the imperialist countries to the level of the politically repressive states of many 'developing' nations,” notes an article in the Communist journal, Rally! Comrades. “It will mean the transformation of political rule everywhere, although the process of its implementation and its form will undoubtedly vary around the world. The common denominator cannot help but be a state, global in nature, which guarantees the unrestrained rule of private property on a global scale and the protection of the interests of a supranational ruling class.”

Constitutionalists and libertarians are connecting with the Radical Left on this score: “Since 1990, when George Bush brought the phrase ‘New World Order’ out of the closet (it was Adolf Hitler's pet phrase first) we have entered a new phase,” notes alternative press author Mark Evans. “The push for world government of, for, and by the transnational cartels is on in earnest. The globalists, being thoroughly multi-partisan, … continued to implement the agenda of their New World Order under Clinton, even while utilizing the right-wing in America to attack Clinton as a ‘socialist.’ This scenario has had the net effect of moving the whole dialectic further in the direction of universal fascism.”

Indeed, one of the Nazis’ favorite tactics – publicly denying that something was going on even as it happened in secret – is being employed today. Even while scoffing at the very notion, President Bush and his counterparts in Mexico and Canada moved forward with plans for the formation of the North American Union in New Orleans April 21-22… a treaty never debated by Congress nor even advertised to the American people.

About a decade ago, during the rewrite of the state's education standards by then-Gov. George W. Bush's administration, Bush turned his personal hatchet-man, Karl Rove, loose on several conservative Republican State Board of Education members who opposed his agenda -- an agenda which, it had been proven in print, was lifted almost verbatim from the touchy-feely "New Standards" implemented in Arkansas by Hillary Clinton. Rove used the New York Times to paint the conservatives' objections  as religious extremism, telling the Times: "... in the carnival of life, they are in a far, far booth."

Interesting, isn't it, how time has proven that while State Board fo Education members like Bob Offutt, David Bradley, Donna Ballard and others might have been in a "far, far booth," theirs was the only booth that wasn't fleecing Texas taxpayers for billions of dollars for a few cheap prizes?

After using his popularity as Texas' "education governor" to win the Oval Office, aided by wide support among conservatives who had no idea what he'd done to the conservatives in his own party in Texas, Bush pushed his education agenda through Congress and we wound up with the No Child Left Behind Act. Only a few short years later, the clods who bought that bundle of cheap carnival tricks are realizing just how badly they got burned.  In 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities, graduation rates are now below 50 percent -- hardly the long-hoped-for reversal of fortunes for our struggling urban students. In Texas, the largest school districts are now averaging nearly a 30-percent dropout rate, and some "honor garaduates" still can't make change at a cash register (I know, I fired them!).

It would be temping to dip into my cliche box and point out that we told you so, but I've been part of this debate long enough to realize that the soccer mommies and insurance agents who run Texas still aren't going to listen.

As a newspaperman, I tried to tell folks 10 years ago where the standards being proposed by the Texas Education Agency were coming from, and what the problems with them were -- a complete lack of academic rigor and a focus on "job training" and affective (values and feelings)  skills. Others in the movement imported academic experts from Harvard, from Mathematically Correct and elsewhere to attempt to convey the message. The school administrators called us "enemies of education" and used the Delphi Technique in statewide and local forums to convince the general public that all of this "reform" was stuff thought up by Texans and demanded by the selfsame soccer mommies and insurance agents.

Once the new standards were implemented, we pointed out that something was immediately wrong: high schools which had 600-plus freshmen one year had only 347 graduating seniors four years later but were reporting a dropout rate of "less than one percent." There seemed to be a sudden push to label students as "learning disabled" immediately preceding the high-stakes state tests, and there also appeared to be a high absentee rate on test day. Only in the last couple of years have the state's mainstream media outlets finally realized what was going on and actually started to challenge the education establishment's PR view of the situation: administrators have been caught cheating in district after district.

Now I hear the buzz that once again, we're going to have to "fix" public education -- no doubt at huge taxpayer expense -- one more time. How many waves of "education reform" has Texas and the U.S. exprienced since the federalization of education in 1968?

I wonder: will the public once again leave the issue of "education reform" in the hands of the same educational bureaucrats who screwed it up in the first place? 

Sadly, those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Again and again.

Well, I see Target's new return policy is getting some flack. Small wonder -- for years, retailers have been going out of their way to one-up each other in liberalizing return policies to ensure that customers walk away with a smile.

Yet what we see at work here is one of the big-box chains finally saying, "Enough!" to the organized thieves who are raping retail for billions of dollars a year.

For years, Target -- and other major chains like Wal-Mart and K-Mart -- made it progressively easier for customers to return items. During my time as an assistant manager for Wal-Mart, for example, I actually accepted merchandise for return which actually had a TARGET price tag on it because I was strongly encouraged to "make the customers happy."

But what has happened in the business is that organized crime has moved in. A 2006 story in the Wall Street Journal estimated retail losses to external theft at $37 billion -- but later that same year, Wal-Mart removed its in-store loss prevention associates and re-trained them to concentrate on internal, not external losses. Within weeks, many stores -- including the store I was working at -- were watching thousands of dollars an hour run out the doors in the hands of organized bands of thieves, who were aware that no one would stop them.

As a salaried manager, I was authorized to stop shoplifters -- and one night, I did so when we observed three ladies who had taken a Shop Vac out of its box and had cleaned our shelves of Prilosec, Nicorette and Fusion razor blades, hiding the smaller packages in the shop-vac box. I was only able to grab one of the three, and when we counted up the merchandise the total was more than $4,000. The police who picked up my catch later stopped by the store to tell me that it turned out she and her two friends were wanted in seven states and were part of a black-market ring running merchandise to Mexico -- selling it back to American retailers via flea markets in the Rio Grande Valley.

Wal-Mart senior managamenet told me if I physically confronted a shoplifter again I risked termination -- because I "might have hurt her and she could have sued us."  They were more worried about lawyers than with doing what is right.

But we may be seeing that idiotic view turning around, because retailers react when the bottom line is threatened.

Electronics have been a hot theft item for shoplifters for years, especially drug addicts in need of quick cash. And as retailers liberalized their returns policies -- first extending the time allowed for a return, then finally not even requiring a receipt at all -- theft of small items rose exponentially ... and "returns" of electronics items rose exponentially. Even the addition of the RFID theft-deterrent system did little to curb the practice since customer-service associates and managers have neither the equipment nor the expertise needed to research an RFID tag quickly enough to satisfy customers at a returns desk.

Clothing was another high-theft item I encountered, again since it's relatively easy to remove the theft-deterrent tags with magnets. Again, the retailers' own make-the-customer-happy policies worked in favor of the thieves: when Wal-Mart implemented a policy of putting all returns without a receipt on gift cards, most thieves knew all they had to do was get angry and demand cash and most managers would bow to their wishes out of fear the "customers" would complain to higher management.

The sad part is, legitimate customers are the ones who are being short-changed here, and it's because society does not view STEALING as "wrong" -- after all, it's only a few dollars, and Target has millions of them, right?  I can't begin to tell you how many times I've been threatened by well-to-do daddies after catching their kids stealing cosmetics, Yu-Gi-Oh cards or music CDs.

If customers want to see a return to the days of "the customer is always right" and "we trust our customers," they need to stand up and demand that our legislators enact statutes which provide some measure of protection for retailers from liability over theft-prevention measures, and they need to stand up and say, "THEFT IS WRONG."