Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Showing posts with label Obama Administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama Administration. Show all posts
In January 2014, when I first wrote about the controversy between radical feminists and transgender activists, it seemed to me a bad joke. “The Competitive Victimhood Derby,” I called it — two rival tribes of left-wing nutjobs vying for the coveted Most Oppressed Award. Subsequent research, however, convinced me that the radical feminist nutjobs were actually right on the basic issue — being male or female is a fact of science, not subject to politically motivated revision — and transgender activists were wrongly seeking to hijack “gender identity” (and feminism, along with it) in a way that amounts to Female Erasure, to quote the title of a recent radical feminist anthology on the subject. “Facts are stubborn things,” as John Adams said, and there is something fundamentally dishonest about the ideology of the transgender cult.
Young people are becoming seriously confused by the transgender cult. Or perhaps the causation works the other way, and confused young people are magnetically attracted to the cult belief that, with the “treatment” of synthetic hormones and surgery, they can escape their adolescent woes by “transitioning” into the opposite sex. Feminists have identified the factor of social contagion in what they call “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Through the influence of peers, and also through online recruitment by transgender cultists, many teenagers are quite suddenly convinced that they were “born in the wrong body.” In a matter of months or even a few weeks, an otherwise healthy teenage will develop an obsession with “gender transition” and demand that parents not only accept their new transgender identity, but often threaten suicide unless parents support them in seeking hormone “treatment” immediately. This kind of emotional blackmail is part of the transgender cult’s ideology, as activists claim that anyone who opposes them is effectively sentencing teenagers to death by denying them acceptance and “health care.”
This brings us to the case of Aryn Maitland who, in April 2016, posted the following fundraising appeal on YouCaring.com...
This young, er, *person* is a sympathetic figure, especially since she/he appears to be very attractive and intelligent. Then radical leftism destroyed her/his life. (Or is it "they/them's" life? I can't keep up with the inanities of gender identification.)
Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was in a coma when he was released by North Korea, has died in Ohio. He was 22.
His family said in a statement that Warmbier died Monday afternoon.
The family thanked the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for treating him but said, “Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.”
It may very well be that this week was the week that Israel and the US put to rest former president Barack Obama’s policies and positions on Israel and the Palestinians.
If so, the move was made despite the best efforts of Obama’s team to convince the Trump administration to maintain them.
The details of Obama’s policies and positions have been revealed in recent weeks in a series of articles published in Haaretz regarding Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry’s failed peacemaking efforts, which ended in 2014.
The articles reported segments of two drafts of a US framework for a final peace treaty between the PLO and Israel. The drafts were created in February and March 2014.
The article series is predicated on the assumption that Kerry and his team were on the precipice of a historic breakthrough between PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But a close reading of the documents shows that the opposite was the case.
There are two reasons that Kerry had no prospects for reaching a deal.
First, he, Obama and their advisers were too hostile to Israel and its citizens to ever convince Netanyahu that Israel’s interests would be secured.
A February 2014 draft framework agreement, which was based on conversations Kerry and his team held with Netanyahu and his advisers, makes this clear. The draft includes Netanyahu’s demand that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria not annexed to Israel would remain “in place” after the implementation of a peace deal, and presumably, become towns in the future Palestinian state.
In other words, Netanyahu demanded that the Israelis in Judea and Samaria whose towns would be located in the territory of “Palestine” would enjoy the same rights and protections as Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy.
Kerry and his team would have none of it. The February draft agreement notes, “[US] negotiators need to check with PM [Netanyahu] on whether he wants to [maintain this position]… They believe that if so, he will push strongly for ‘in place.’ ‘In place’ is inconsistent with US policy and therefore unacceptable to us as well as the Palestinians.”
In other words, the position of the Obama administration was that all Israelis living in areas that would become part of the Palestinian state must be forcibly removed from their homes and communities.
Haaretz reporters Barak Ravid and Amir Tibon recalled that in previous rounds of negotiations, the Palestinians – unlike the Obama administration – had not rejected this Israeli position out of hand. That is, in demanding the mass expulsion of Israeli Jews from their homes, the administration adopted a policy more extreme than the PLO.
But then, this is exactly what leftists have been pushing for --- total power over the family unit, the demonization and destruction of God-fearing traditional parents.
Petition calls for repeal of ‘totalitarian’ bill allowing children to be taken from Christian homes https://t.co/n2IGe3wz6x
TORONTO, June 5, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — LifeSiteNews has launched a petition for the repeal of the Kathleen Wynne Liberals’ Bill 89, which passed last week by a vote of 63 to 23.
Pro-family advocates warn the bill gives the state power to seize children from families that oppose the LGBTQI and gender ideology agenda, and allows government agencies to effectively ban couples who disagree with that agenda from fostering or adopting children.
“Make no mistake, Bill 89 is a grave threat to Christians and all people of faith who have children, or who hope to grow their family through adoption,” says Jack Fonseca, senior political strategist for Campaign Life Coalition.
“This is a direct hit against parental authority,” echoed Tanya Granic Allen, executive director of Parents As First Educators (PAFE), which along with the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) has been at the forefront of lobbying against the bill.
Bill 89, or the Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act, 2017, repeals and replaces the former Child and Family Services Act that governs child protection services, and adoption and foster care services.
It adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” as factors to be considered “in the best interests of the child.”
At the same time, it deletes the religious faith in which the parents are raising the child as a factor to be considered, and mandates child protection services consider only the child’s own “creed” or “religion” when assessing the best interests of the child.
Pro-family advocates point to public comments by Minister of Child and Family Services Michael Coteau as evidence the Liberals will use Bill 89 to enforce a pro-LGBTQI, gender ideology agenda in the home.
Coteau told QP Briefing shortly after he introduced the bill that he sees questioning teenagers’ self-identification as LGBTQI or telling them to change as abuse.
“I would consider that a form of abuse, when a child identifies one way and a caregiver is saying no, you need to do this differently,” Coteau said.
“If it’s abuse, and if it’s within the definition, a child can be removed from that environment and placed into protection where the abuse stops.”
Coteau reiterated this to QP Briefing after Bill 89 passed Thursday...
This is really shocking piece, considering how nonchalant everybody is about spying and intelligence these days. All this hacking and leaking and political payback can get you killed. A lot of people are getting killed.
At NYT, with the response at Zero Hedge:
Killing @CIA Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations, rivaling if not worse than Ames/Hanssen betrayals https://t.co/U22mdiTTvt
Over six years of war, millions of Syrians have suffered; beyond the almost 500,000 killed, many more have been paralyzed, disfigured, blinded, traumatized, and uprooted from their homes and communities. As of January, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had registered nearly five million Syrian refugees, in addition to the six million displaced within the country. The demolished neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo make this brutally clear. They contained more than half of Aleppo’s population, until opposition fighters began seizing the area in 2012. Although measures of population movement are guesses at best, international aid agencies report that at least 50,000 eastern Aleppines fled to the western part of the city to avoid shelling by the regime or chaotic jihadist rule. Thousands more made their way to the government-controlled, war-free coastal cities of Latakia and Tartous, to Lebanon, or to Turkey, which offered visa-free entry, work permits, and, for many months in 2015, a blind eye to any who dared the perilous sea route to Europe.
In December 2016 the Syrian army, with Russian support, conquered the last insurgent strongholds in Aleppo’s east. UNHCR officials believe that about 36,000 people, rebels and their families, departed by bus under Russian protection for the opposition redoubt in Idlib province. What they left behind conjures memories of Dresden, Coventry, and Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II. The multiple forms of destruction testify to the ingenuity of the world’s arms factories. Bombs have transformed Aleppo into an Escher-like vision of six-foot-thick concrete slabs twisted into braids; five-story apartment buildings compressed into piles ten feet high; and collapsed façades of entire streets exposing rooms with ceiling fans eerily intact and revolving in the wind.
This is the horrorscape to which many residents are returning, only to find themselves still homeless. They camp in makeshift tents beside the remains of their homes, sticking close by to deter thieves from seizing unclaimed land at a time when many deeds have been lost or destroyed. Some sleep inside buildings that are exposed to the elements and subject to collapse at any moment. Children die when balconies crumble or they find shiny objects that turn out to be unexploded bombs...
In terms of power, controlling the executive branch bureaucracy's up there with holding the majority on the Supreme Court.
It's going to take a while to clean out Obama's treasonous deep state, but the extremely politicized "Office for Civil Rights" at the Department of Education (in charge of Title IX regulations) is an excellent place to start.
Report: New Head of Federal Anti-Rape Agency Is a ‘Libertarian Feminist’ and Clinton Critic; Candice Jackson will allegedly become deputy secretary at the Office for Civil Rights. “A conservative legal activist known for defending the women who accused President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment has been tapped to head the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on a temporary basis. OCR is the agency that regulates Title IX compliance, and is responsible for the recent effort to compel schools to police sexual assault internally.”
Marines from an amphibious task force have left their ships in the Middle East and deployed to Syria, establishing an outpost from which they can fire artillery guns in support of the fight to oust the Islamic State from the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, defense officials said.
The deployment marks a new escalation in the U.S. war in Syria, and puts more conventional U.S. troops in the battle. Several hundred Special Operations troops have advised local forces there for months, but the Pentagon has mostly shied away from using conventional forces in Syria. The new mission comes as the Trump administration weighs a plan to help Syrian rebels take back Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State. The plan also includes more Special Operations troops and attack helicopters.
The force is part of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which left San Diego on Navy ships in October. The Marines on the ground include part of an artillery battery that can fire powerful 155-millimeter shells from M-777 Howitzers, two officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deployment.
The expeditionary unit’s ground force, Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, will man the guns and deliver fire support for U.S.-backed local forces who are preparing an assault on the city. Additional infantrymen from the unit will provide security, while resupplies will be handled by part of the expeditionary force’s combat logistics element. For this deployment, the Marines were flown from Djibouti to Kuwait and then into Syria, said another defense official with direct knowledge of the operation.
The official added that the Marines’ movement into Syria was not the byproduct of President Trump’s request for a new plan to take on the Islamic State...
House GOP leadership faced mounting opposition Tuesday after introducing an Obamacare repeal and replace bill that was rejected by small government conservatives, panned by Republican moderates and given only lukewarm support from President Trump.
One day after unveiling the GOP’s long-promised effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better, the new American Health Care Act already appears to be on life support, unlikely to survive the onslaught of friendly fire unless Trump personally rallies his party.
But Trump’s intervention looks uncertain. While the president embraced “our wonderful new healthcare bill” in an early morning tweet, he also suggested it’s just a starting point “for review and negotiation” — opening the floodgates to alternative ideas and proposals that could take weeks to sort out.
Later, in a White House meeting with House Republicans, he offered a stronger endorsement, saying he was "proud to support" their plan and expected it to pass “very quickly.”
At the same time, though Trump is also accepting back-channel calls from conservative Republican opponents — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who are warning him off legislation they view as nothing more than a revamped federal entitlement program. Conservative lawmakers are being backed by the Koch network, whose supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday, and other influential groups including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They dismiss the GOP leadership’s bill as “Obamacare 2.0” or “Obamacare lite.”
“This is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is leading the GOP opposition with Paul and the House Freedom Caucus. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also raised objections.“We promised the American people we would drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington. This bill does not do that,” Lee said. “This is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for, and it is not what we promised the American people.”
For seven years Republicans have promised to end Obamacare, and after winning repeated congressional elections on their promise to repeal and replace the law, they were confident Democrats would have no choice but to join them.
But Democrats have shown no interest in the GOP bill, saying it would drop millions of Americans from healthcare coverage without offering them viable alternatives. Rather than being spooked by their November election losses, Democrats have been buoyed by the outpouring of support for Obamacare by constituents and protesters flocking to lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country...
Was former Secretary of labor and assistant attorney-general Tom Perez’s victory over Congressman Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.
Along these lines, Prof. Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who promised to quit the party if Ellison was elected due to his documented history of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel, hailed Perez’s election. Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz said that Perez’s election over Ellison “is a victory in the war against bigotry, antisemitism, the anti-Israel push of the hard Left within the Democratic Party.”
There are two problems with Dershowitz’s view. First, Perez barely won. Ellison received nearly half the votes in two rounds of voting.
Tipping his hat to Ellison’s massive popularity among the party’s leadership and grassroots, Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced.
There is a good reason that Perez is so willing to cooperate with Ellison in running the DNC. And this points to the second problem with the claim that Perez’s election signals a move toward the center by Democratic leaders.
Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democratic Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”
Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman. Only hard leftists participated in a meaningful way in the race for leadership of the second largest party in America – a party that less than a decade ago controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
The implications of this state of affairs are disastrous for the US generally. It is inherently destabilizing for a nation when one of the parties in a two-party political system is taken over by people who have a negative view of the country.
While America as a whole will suffer from the radicalization of the Democratic Party, perhaps no group will suffer more from the far Left’s takeover of the party than the American Jewish community. The vast majority of American Jews give their partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party and their ideological allegiance to the Left.
While Perez made a name for himself by fighting the enforcement of US immigration and naturalization laws against illegal immigrants, and Ellison rose to prominence for his activism in radical African American and Islamic circles, thanks to the so-called intersectionality of the far Left, that makes the cause of one faction the cause of all factions, today Perez is as much an apologist for Israel bashers as Ellison.
Perhaps in response to the danger that the far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party represents, Malcolm Hoenlein, the long-serving professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called on Sunday for the convening of a global conference on antisemitism. In a meeting with The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board, Hoenlein said that one of the goals of the proposed conference would be to reach a universally accepted definition of antisemitism...
The main reason, of course, is that leftists want to destroy Donald Trump. I don't believe there's any real increase in "hate incidents." For example, those vandalizing and terrorizing Jewish cemeteries are probably leftists. We won't know until there are some arrests. And as for the rest of the so-called "hate incidents" against Jews, every year anti-Semitic attacks top the Justice Department's hate crimes statistics. There's no new "increase." They're just being sensationalized for political gain.
We're looking at at leftist double-standard, designed to make President Trump's administration look like the coming of the Third Reich. It's despicable.
Why Were the 7,000 Antisemitic Incidents Under Obama Largely Ignored? by Seth Frantzman https://t.co/vjFkrkBDTd
She's got an interesting interview, at ISR, "A Sense of Hope & the Possibility of Solidarity." She's a full-blown, unabashed revolutionary Marxist. Remember, my motto is "know your enemies." I'm constantly surrounded by people just like this at my college, and lots of students suck this stuff up like so many ganja fat ones:
The struggles of Indigenous people have a rich history, and really came together in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s with other movements for liberation. In your books, it’s clear you are making the connection between land dispossession, labor, and class—basically Marx’s approach of historical materialism. You even quoted Marx from Capital in the beginning of chapter two, entitled “Culture of Conquest.” Why is this approach important to struggles for liberation?
I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology.4 He didn’t know much about non-European peoples, yet making generalities about the whole world can seem imperialist. However, I found out when I was doing my dissertation, that using Marxism to look at the history of land tenure in New Mexico at different stages from Spanish colonization through US conquest and colonization was essential. Marx describes the initial looting of the Americas as reckless abandon, as well as the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of Native Americans, and this describes the initial Spanish invasion and occupation of New Mexico, which led to the All Indian Pueblo Revolt driving the Spanish colonists out for more than a decade.5 The second period of eighteenth-century Spanish colonialism was far more of a negotiated relationship. It was still colonialism but it wasn’t the most vicious kind, and the Spanish army was there to defend that zone from French and British expansion.6
Through the history of Mexico becoming independent and then New Mexico being taken by the US, I tried to look at capitalist development and to link this with imperialism. I read all kinds of things from Marx and participated in Marxist study groups. At the time I hadn’t done a real study of Capital. I started reading about Oriental despotism, and Marx’s analysis of how the pyramids were built. These grand public works were built by forced labor, and I connected that to what I was seeing in precolonial Indigenous New Mexico—they had elaborate irrigation systems, which were also throughout Mexico and Central America. You have almost a dictatorship to control water, but the way Indigenous peoples organized it was with serial dictatorships. The ditch boss would be elected for one year and had total control of the water in each pueblo. These ninety-eight city-states along the Rio Grande and its tributaries also went to war with each other periodically over water, so it could be very serious. They could starve as a result of being in the desert. With the water supply, they had an absolute autocratic ditch boss and everyone had to contribute labor. There wasn’t a class of laborers, and after a year the ditch boss could never again be in that position. It had to change every year so that they didn’t get used to the power.
This history shows how people can organize themselves in different ways; capitalism and exploitative labor were not inevitable in human history. Just because capitalism came to dominate the world through European and United States imperialism, forcing the world to live under capitalism does not mean it was inevitable. We need to build upon Marx’s brilliant comprehension of how capitalism arose in Europe and how it works. But the social and political systems that produced ancient irrigation systems and widespread agricultural production in the Americas were not despotic.7 It has been said the beginning of the class system started in ancient Egypt, but I found things that didn’t fit that mold. I tried to apply the basic tenets of Marxism and especially what is known as “primitive accumulation”.
I want to mention here that there are a lot of words Marx used that should be retranslated. For instance regarding primitive accumulation, it’s just easy to say “primary” or “higher” but Marxists don’t know what you’re talking about unless you say primitive. In other languages, primitive means primary.8 It doesn’t necessarily have the baggage that the word “primitive” does for Indigenous peoples subjected to European ethnography. It became clear to me while working on my thesis that the first big onslaught of the primitive accumulationprocess that set off capitalist development happens over and over again, even today. This has entered into a part of Native studies with Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks, in which he makes that argument.9 Coulthard identifies with the anarchist tendency, but he takes on Ward Churchill’s piece in Marxism and Native Americans.10 Coulthard says it’s ridiculous to not use such an important tool as Marx’s work.
In all my work, I try to apply historical materialism. However, I don’t think any of the original Marxists and following generations of European Marxists dealt with colonialism as the avatar of capitalism. Lenin theorized imperialism, but he dealt with it in the most technical way of financial capital, which is really important. And he did deal with national liberation. But I don’t think Marx or Lenin even began to understand the role the US was playing throughout the nineteenth century as the vortex of capitalism, and what I try to show is that from the very beginning the United States was based on colonial conquest, and on overseas imperialism following their independence from the British Empire.
*****
We’ve been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is European, you miss the point of the theory. People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers.
I worked hard on the first chapter of my book about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.”
This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark, but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs.
Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?
Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism. In settler colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today.
I want to make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience. Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.
It’s inaccurate to speak, for instance, of “the California Indians.” The eighteenth-century Spanish colonization of the coastal region from San Diego to San Francisco was carried out by Franciscan missionaries with the use of the Spanish army in seizing people in the whole region to be incarcerated in the missions, and to work for the missionaries in their commercial pursuits. So these weren’t typical settlers, but it was settler colonialism. On the other hand, the nearly half of California north of San Francisco was not colonized until the United States confiscated the northern part of what had become Mexico, and the rush of settlers arrived as gold seekers with the 1850s gold rush. These were not typical settlers either, combining extraction with genocide.
Colonialism in general is disruptive, destructive, damaging, sometimes depopulating entire areas, such as the Natchez villagers of the Mississippi Delta, and the Nahuatl-speaking villagers of western Nicaragua and western Honduras who were seized by Spanish slave traders in the sixteenth century, then transported to work in the mines of Peru. European settlers didn’t arrive to those nearly depopulated areas until later. This was similar to the way villagers of West Africa were captured, enslaved, and sold in the Americas, losing their existence as particular nations and peoples.
I would say that settler colonialism was an exceptional mode of colonialism. English settler colonialism in the North American colonies took its specific form from the mid-seventeenth-century English conquest of Ireland, in which English forces under Oliver Cromwell drove subsistent Irish farmers off their land and gave land grants to English and Scottish settlers. The developing English capitalism based in the wool industry required surplus labor to work in the factories, as well as large swaths of grazing land for commercial sheep production. The process of fencing the commons and driving English farmers off the land created that surplus labor force, but also a pool of settlers who were promised free land in America. The Protestant Anglos and Scots, who settled Northern Ireland, made up the majority of frontier settlers in the British North American colonies.
The Portuguese and the Spanish were specifically seeking gold and silver. Their hoarding of gold and silver actually limited their ability to develop capitalism. They didn’t really have a basis for that in the Iberian Peninsula after they deported all the farmers, craftsmen, architects, and other producers who were Muslims and Jews. Only in the eighteenth century did Spain begin establishing settler-colonies in the southern cone of South America, employing the same genocidal methods of eliminating or driving out the Indigenous peoples, which continued when Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became independent.
However, only the United States developed effective capitalism outside of Britain. By 1840, it was already the largest economic power in the world on the basis of the global cotton trade and textile factories, also providing cotton to the British textile industry. Until recently, economic historians have dated the development of US capitalism to post–Civil War industrialization in the North. Several recent books have convincingly made the case for the cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley being the site of the birth of full-blown capitalism prior to the Civil War, based on slave labor and the capital generated by the value of the slaves’ bodies.13 This development included the parallel expulsion of the five large Native agricultural nations from the Southeast during the 1830s and 1840s, generating huge amounts of capital in land sales.
We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.
There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.
Actually, I'm quite enjoying the current administration, thank you.
Federal agencies are prohibited from partisan activities, particularly political support or agitation for one party or another (although rules on employee political contributions have been trimmed by court rulings).
So this looks improper, to say the least, via Hadas Gold:
