Lipset on The New York Times, Republicans and Fidel Castro

"...True, the United States worked with Batista before he was overthrown, as did the Cuban Communist party. But Castro's rise was made possible by American help and sympathy. The New York Times, the paper with closest connection with the State Department, was the first to bring Castro's struggle to the attention of the American people and world public opinion in a highly sympathetic series of articles, published at a time when his armed supporters numbered in the hundreds. Although the American military co-operated with Batista until his fall, Castro was able to secure arms from America, and the State Department clearly opposed Batista long before he left Cuba, and demanded he hold genuinely free elections and give up office. Right wing senators and organs of opinion in the United States have, in fact, blamed State Department policy for Castro's rise to power. American officials, including then Vice-President Nixon have reported that they sought to discuss financial aid to Castro during his first tour of the United States, but that he refused, a contention that has been confirmed by Castro's former finance minister and others of his entourage before they broke with him."

---Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: the Social Bases of Politics.

Fidel Castro can truly say, "I got my job through the New York Times." And what of the difference between Republicans and Democrats? It would seem that international relations and the State Department reflect a field dominated by quacks.

E-mail to Radio Announcer Mark Simone

Dear Mark--I was listening to you on my way to NYC from Woodstock, NY. I teach at Brooklyn College. I heard a caller call in somewhat stridently claiming the need for stimulus. You did not question him. His claims about the Great Depression having been resolved by the heavy borrowing of World War II went unrefuted. This is bad.

You cannot cure America's addiction to socialism if you accept socialist monetary and business cycle theory, i.e., Keynesian economic theory. There is no reason to. Keynesian theory was refuted in the 1970s by Milton Friedman. Your caller, and today's economists, and the media, and all advocates of stimulus, the bail out and the recent inflationary monetary expansion by the socialist Bernanke Fed and Ol' Hammer and Sickle George W. Bush (not to mention his Comintern follower, Goosestepping Socialist Barack Obama) are all ignorant fools.

There is no need for stimulus. Stimulus is not the solution. It is the problem. Unemployment did not become a major problem until AFTER the creation of the Fed and stimulus. In a system of free banking and a gold standard business cycles would be muted. They only exist because of the banking system and stimulus. Trying to cure today's problems with government spending, inflation and stimulus is like trying to cure cancer by drinking a bottle of chlorine.

You might consider inviting a guest from the Cato Institute or my old friend Howard S. Katz at (http://www.thegoldbug.net and http://www.thegoldbugnet.com) to educate your listeners about a more realistic approach to the business cycle than the socialist crap that has become a single chorus Democratic and Republican Hammer and Sickle version of L'Internationale.

Americans Are Unfit for Self-Government

President Andrew Jackson suggested that when expedience became the basis on which the Constitution was interpreted, then Americans would no longer be fit for self governance. That day passed a century ago.

I have watched the City of New York, once a great industrial, artistic, cultural, and port center deteriorate and all of its vibrancy wither. It has become a cash cow for real estate and Wall Street interests. All of its innovative callings have fled. This was done in accordance with mandates of the City's democratic vote: urban renewal, taxes, corruption, city projects, expressways, rent control, and mismanagement.

I have watched the nation raise taxes on its citizens so that Americans are no longer free, but are wage slaves to the government, paying half or more of their incomes to corrupt, morally depraved programs like Social Security and the Department of Education.

I have watched Americans accept the debasement of their currency without effort to understand the relationships among banking, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank and diminishing American expectations.

I have watched Americans allow their educational system become a plaything for extremist cranks who indoctrinate, brainwash and defraud, but do not educate.

I have watched Americans passively accept waste and failed bureaucracies: the Department of Labor; the Department of Energy; the Department of Education; the Department of Health Education and Welfare. The taxes extracted to subsidize these are paid without protest by brainwashed fools, made dull witted by the American educational system.

I have watched American culture deteriorate to the point where the flagrant stupidity that passes as entertainment and the ignorance that passes as news shocks and disorients the observer, and makes me wonder about the possibility of some widespread mental contagion.

Because Americans are unfit for self government, they have allowed a succession of special interests, Wall Street, education, employers' associations, labor unions and health care lobbies to dictate spending and taxation levels, government programs and tax systems, silently and smugly accepting the abuses of corrupt lobbies.

If future generations might look back and recall the contribution of 20th century Americans to the course of history, they will remark that this was a people that was given a great nation, and through cupidity and stupidity proved that republicanism does not work.

President Andrew Jackson on Infrastructure Improvement

"...I will not detain you with professions of zeal in the cause of internal improvements...for I do not suppose there is an intelligent citizen who does not wish to see them flourish. But though all are their friends, but few, I trust, are unmindful of the means by which they should be promoted; none certainly are so degenerate as to desire their success at the cost of that sacred instrument with the preservation of which is indissolubly bound our country's hopes...When an honest observance of constitutional compacts can not be obtained from communities like ours, it need not be anticipated elsewhere, and the cause in which there has been so much martyrdom, and from which so much was expected by the friends of liberty, may be abandoned, and the degrading truth that man is unfit for self-government admitted. And this will be the case if expediency be made a rule of construction in interpreting the Constitution...."

----President Andrew Jackson, on the veto of the Mayville Road, 1830. In Henry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay, Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, p. 179.