OBAMACARE AND THATCHER'S POLL TAX

                                       by Hugh Murray  
      I think there is a comparison to be made between Obamacare, the "Affordable Health Care Act," and the poll tax levied by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the UK some years ago.  We normally do not compare Thatcher and Obama, but in this case, it may be apropos.  Obamacare mandates that all Americans purchase insurance.  If they do not, the fines for the first year are small, but they rise to become quite heavy fines after a few years.  When Obamacare was challenged in court, going all the way to the US Supreme Court, the American high court ruled in 2012 that Obamacare was legal, it was simply another tax.  In reality, it is another poll tax.
     Thatcher's tax was the product of the British Tories, and the Labour Party and the Left responeded with massive riots.  Implementation of the act was also very difficult to enforce, with local councils unable to be certain who was staying in the government houses, and if they were students, employed, unemployed, and therefore what rate of the tax they must pay.  Needless to say, Obamacare is off to a slow start.
     Thatcher's poll tax was to take effect in 1990, but riots, its unpopularity, its difficulty in implementing, all weakened her leadership.  She also had other rivals in the Tory Party who disagreed with her opposition to closer relations with "Europe," the expanding Common Market.  While on a visit by P. M. Thatcher to Europe, her Tory opponents led a coup inside the Conservative Party, and deposed her.  Margaret Thatcher was no longer Tory leader; no longer Prime Minister.  Her Conservative successor, John Major, scrapped the poll tax.
    Obamacare will raise the insurance rates on most middle-class Americans.  For some, the rates will rise sharply, AND the co-pay may now be thousands of dollars instead of the previous $50 or so.  Worse, with millions more in the pool, and the same number, OR FEWER DOCTORS WILLING TO PARTAKE IN THE NEW PLANS, it may take far longer to visit a doctor.  In effect, Obamacare, with new delays, will probably institute death panels, even if there are no panels - just millions of more patients with fewer doctors.
     Will there be riots against the new American poll tax?  Will Obama fall like Thatcher?  We shall see.     

OBAMACARE = OBAMONSTROSITY

The more we see of the failure of the Obamacare website, and learning how many cannot keep their present plans, and will be forced to pay for plans that do not apply to them, like men having to purchase maternity insurance, one can see more clearly this is a scheme to hurt most productive Americans.  When 40 million uninsured Americans are added to the pool, but the number of medical doctors remains the same, even if the system were cheaper, there would not be enough doctors.  The waiting time to see a doctor will become much longer.  For the elderly, this will mean just what Sarah Palin said it would mean - Death Panels for the elderly, because the doctors will have to see the young.  Obamacare does demand more affirmative action doctors, but recall Dr. Patrick Chavis, the poster doctor of affirmative action in the New York Times Magazine, proof that a-a worked.   Dr. Chavis, it turned out, was so bad, he performed liposuction on his Black women patients without anesthetic, and finally one died, and he was disbarred.  (For more on this, see the excellent book by William McGowan, Coloring the News.)  Or what about Dr. Conrad Murray, who was the physician for Michael Jackson.  Will these be our new doctors?  Affirmative action means NOT getting the best qualified, but the lesser and the unqualified.  Flooding the hospitals with affirmative action doctors will be another way of creating Death Panels.-------Hugh Murray

LAW TO REGULATION TO TYRANNY: CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS & SENATOR EVERETT DIRKSEN

                                               By Hugh Murray

            On June 29, 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts surprised the nation by voting with the liberal bloc of four to rule that Obamacare was legal under the Constitution.  His ruling caused both amazement and confusion.  Roberts did side with the conservative four to rule that the mandate to purchase health insurance under the commerce clause was unconstitutional; this part of the court’s decision was read first, causing both CNN and Fox News to conclude that the essential financial part of the law had been struck down.  However, Roberts went on to write that the law was Constitutional because it was covered by the taxing powers granted to Congress.

            Roberts and the Supreme Court had been under some attack by the liberal media because of the Court’s decision, earlier that week, to reaffirm the Citizens United ruling of 2010 allowing corporations and unions to spend as much as they like supporting political candidates  under the rubric of free speech.  Moreover, ever since the oral arguments on the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare), many feared that the Court would find the law unconstitutional.  Both liberals and conservatives assumed that the swing vote would be Justice Kennedy, a Republican appointee whose voting pattern is rather unpredictable.  But in this instance, Kennedy voted solidly with the conservatives of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.  It was the usual conservative Justice Roberts who abandoned the conservative camp to save Obamacare.  And suddenly, there were more favorable stories in the media praising Roberts, and his picture was the cover of Time Magazine, 16 July 2012 with the clever title, “Roberts Rules.”

            My point here is not to analyze the health care law of over 2,000 pages.  Nor is it to analyze the sophistry of Roberts ruling.  My objective is to compare Roberts to another Republican leader who, at a crucial time, also stepped forward to save the day for liberals – Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

            In 1964 Democratic President Lyndon Johnson urged passage of civil rights legislation.  The trouble was that most of the opponents of the proposed law were some of the most influential Democratic Senators.  As in the past, these Democrats threatened to filibuster, that is, talk the bill to death without ever voting on it.  The Southern opposition was composed of 22 Senators (21 Democrats and one Republican).  Northern and liberal Democrats had more votes than the opposition, almost 40 Senators.  But to stop a filibuster, a vote of 2/3s of the Senate was required – some 67 votes.  How could the liberal Democrats attain enough votes for cloture and the end of debate on the law, so that finally a vote on the proposed law could be taken?

            The Southern opponents of the bill were led by Georgia’s Sen. Richard Russell, but they included men like Sen. Sam Ervin, who would win the acclaim of liberals later in his career when during the Watergate investigation into dirty tricks by the Nixon Administration, Ervin pressed hard questions on the defenders of Presidential Privilege and secrecy.  Also, among the opponents of the civil rights bill was Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, who would become one of the early critics of the Vietnam War, and an inspiration to a young Arkansan, Bill Clinton.

            Northern Democrats promoting the civil rights law were led by Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey.  He had first come to prominence in 1948 as the young Mayor of Minneapolis who proposed a civil rights plank to the 1948 Democratic Convention.  The hot convention hall became even more heated in the debate on this issue, and when it passed, with only 52.8% of the delegates favoring it, numbers of other delegates stormed out of the convention.  They abandoned Harry Truman’s Democratic Party to establish the States’ Rights Democratic Party (known as Dixiecrats) and carried four states in the November election.  Humphrey had led the victorious fight for adoption of the civil rights plank in the Democratic platform in 1948.  In 1964 he was leading the fight for passage of a civil rights bill for all Americans.  In the convention, he needed only a simple majority.  Similarly, to pass the legislation in the Senate would merely require a majority, but to cut off debate so the Senate could vote on the legislation would require a  2/3s majority, or 67 of the 100 Senators.  To achieve that large a majority, the Democrats would have to rely on Republican Senators.

            The eastern establishment of the Republican Party was quite comfortable with civil rights legislation.  The first state Fair Employment Practices law had been passed in New York state with the support of Gov. Thomas Dewey.  It earned Dewey few Black votes when he ran against Truman in 1948, and the NAACP basically became a front-group for the Democrats, even firing a founder of the organization, W. E. B. Du Bois, when he endorsed Progressive Henry Wallace.  Some of the more Mid Western Republicans were undecided about a federal civil rights bill, and one prominent Senator, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, opposed a national civil rights law.

            Not all Americans were pleased with the prospect of the federal civil rights legislation.  1964 was a presidential election year, and everyone assumed that Lyndon Johnson, sworn in only in late November 1963, would easily become the Democratic nominee.  However, segregationist Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama entered several Democratic primaries in Northern states.  Johnson was not on the ballot, but had surrogates run on his behalf as favorite sons.  The returns were a shock to many liberals.  Staunch segregationist Wallace won 25 to 42% of the Democrats voting in the primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland.  Clearly, some Northern Democrats were expressing their opposition to the proposed civil rights movement, Black riots, and pending civil rights legislation.

            The Republican Establishment promoted several presidential candidates acceptable to the liberal, Dewey wing of the party, and most of these fell behind another liberal, New York Republican Governor, Nelson Rockefeller.  The more conservative wing rallied round Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who, though supporting civil rights at the  state level, had voted against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

            In hindsight, we know Goldwater lost to Lyndon in a landslide.  Yet surely, some Republicans hoped to win by wooing that 25-42 % of Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights law – those who showed their beliefs by voting for Wallace.  In this effort, Goldwater failed.  He lost the vote national 60 to 40, and carried only his own Arizona and the four Dixiecrat states of 1948 and Georgia.  The era of Reagan Democrats would have to wait.

            The point is that in the spring of 1964 there was no guaranty that the CR Act would pass Congress and become law.  Republican Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen stepped to the plate.  He had already become famous for his discussion of federal finances: “A billion here, a billion there; and soon you’re talking about real money.”  Dirksen declared that he and other Republican Senators would vote for cloture of debate (and thus allow a direct vote on the proposed CR legislation) if the bill were modified by accepting some of his amendments.  Most of his amendments, and those by a few others like Sen. John Tower of Texas, were meant to make it abundantly clear that the new legislation would not be a quota bill, that standardized examinations could be used, and if some groups failed to pass, there would be no hiring to promote racial balance.  Indeed, that would be illegal, for that would be hiring for racial reasons.  Only intentional discrimination in hiring was to be a crime.  All these amendments were incorporated into the CR bill.

            In summer 1964 most Republican Senators joined with the liberal Democrats to vote cloture and end debate.  Voting for cloture were 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans; voting against were 21 Democrats and 6 Republicans.  While 69% of the Democrats wanted to end the filibuster, 82% of the Republicans voted to do so.  A few days later the bill passed 71-29, with similar percentages.  The media would have us forget that a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the CR Act than did the Democrats.  Indeed, 78% of the no votes came from Democratic Senators.  President Johnson signed the bill into law in 2 July 1964.  Sen. Dirksen had saved the day, and he too was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, 22 June 1964, with the cover story, “The CR Bill: Product of Principle and Compromise.”  Of course, in 1964 Time’s influence was far greater than in 2012.

            However, despite all the guarantees that language and law can provide, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was subverted and perverted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency meant to enforce it.  With the aid of liberal judges, and worse, the appointees to the Suprme Court by Republican Presidents, the CR Act was twisted into a quota law, requiring hiring for racial (and later ethnic and gender) balance.  Statistics were used to find guilt of discrimination even when no intent to discriminate was proven.  For example, if an employer sought to hire only high-school graduates, the EEOC charged that this was illegal for it would have a disparate impact because a smaller percentage of Blacks than whites had attained that level of education.  And so that requirement was struck, as well as performance on aptitude tests, IQ tests, criminal records, etc.  The only objective test permitted was the quota test for racial and other balance. (Indeed, on 5 July 2012 a federal judge in New York struck down a firefighters’ exam because few Blacks could pass it, and ordered quota hiring instead.)

            Liberal President Nixon offered a Supreme Court seat to liberal Republican Tom Dewey, but Dewey declined.  Nixon then appointed as Chief Justice Warren Burger, who wrote the Griggs decision, which was sophistry at it worst, and which turned a law which forbade quotas into the quota bill we have endured for 40 years.  Under Nixon, quotas became the law of the land, and he expanded them to include women, Hispanics, Amerindians, and later, some Asians.  Nixon made affirmative action preferences and quotas national policy.

            Some readers will be incredulous that I refer to Nixon as “liberal.”  This is not what they learnt at university and on television.   Yet, as Phil Ebersole summarized on his blog, Nixon “created affirmative action in its present form. He responded decisively to an economic emergency by imposing wage and price controls.  He proposed a Family Assistance Plan which would guarantee a minimum income for all Americans, and a Comprehensive Health Insurance Act which would have provided a public option as an alternative to private health insurance.  He endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment for women.

“The Comprehensive Health Insurance Act was rejected by Congress. So was the Family Assistance Plan, but the Earned Income Tax Credit was enacted as a substitute and compromise.

“The President did sign into law the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act.  His administration established the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Council on Environmental Quality.”

            Early in his Presidency, the Nixon Administration had to lobby the NAACP to support the Philadelphia Plan, with its hiring by racial quotas.  The bill barely squeaked through the House of Representatives.  Yet, this was the official beginning of affirmative action as we now know it.  And in addition to domestic policies, the Nixon Administration negotiated with Mao’s China, severing some of our foreign policy from rigid anti-Communism.

            Sen. Dirksen, by the late 1960s was clearly disillusioned with what was happening in the name of the Civil Rights Act, some of which had been written in his senate office.  Dirksen went to Nixon to complain about the subversion of that law into quota requirements with preferences given to lesser qualified and unqualified applicants for positions, in clear violation of the wording and spirit of the law.  Dirksen was even thinking of openly opposing Nixon on these policies.  But Dirksen had cancer, and passed from the scene in November 1964.  Liberals then used their domination of universities and media, the academedia complex, to convince most Americans that the Civil Rights Act had been passed to impose quotas, racial balance, and preferences for the pet groups of the EEOC.

            Dirksen was crucial in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  However, once the camel’s head was under the tent, it moved in, not with one hump, but with two and more.  Despite the clear language to the contrary, the US has been suffering under quota hiring, quota promotions, quota university admissions, quota scholarships, quota contracts since Nixon – and in obvious violation of the words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

            Perhaps, the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can clarify what happened.  Speaking of the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), she said  on 9 March 2010 we should pass the bill to find out what is in it.

            The liberals and the bureaucrats KNOW what is in the Obamacare law: ANYTHING THEY WANT TO BE IN IT.  They do not care about the wording of the law.  They care about the back-door committees that will implement, interpret, and expand that law.  They care about their power.   Just as the EEOC turned the Civil Rights Act of 1964, - a law that forbade quotas, hiring for racial balance, that permitted tests in which some groups might do poorly, forbade racial discrimination (race preferences), all this was consciously subverted by the EEOC, the agency meant to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.   And so Obamacare will be manned by those who will make the law into anything they want it to be, even if it directly contradicts the law they are supposed to enforce.

            I suspect one day Chief Justice Roberts will rue his Obamacare decision, as Sen. Dirksen was disturbed by the subversion of the civil rights law he did so much to enact, and the subversion of which was already evident prior to his death.

Jobs Bill for America: Not Obama's

HOW TO CREATE MILLIONS MORE AMERICAN JOBS:

NOT OBAMA’S JOBS BILL

            Tonight President Obama presented his “Jobs Bill” to Congress and the American people.  His proposal exposed that he is not really interested in creating jobs for Americans.

            America has been losing jobs to foreigners for decades.  Obama and the liberal Republicans seem to believe there is nothing, or little, that America can do to stem the tide.  Obama and the liberal Republicans are WRONG.

            There are an estimated 10 to 15 million illegal aliens in the United States.  Either they are working or they are not.  If they are working, they are foreigners who do not belong in the United States.  They should not be working here; they should not be here.  Deport them.  Many of those millions of jobs in construction and factories could then be filled by Americans.

            If the illegals are not working, they may be on welfare of some kind or another.  Deport them.  This will save hospitals, schools, and welfare agencies considerable sums of money.  If they are in jail, when they have served their time, deport them.  They do not belong in the US to break our laws again.

            To provide greater protection for American workers, the government would have to hire more Border Patrollers, more Immigration inspectors, and people to construct a wall where necessary on the border with Mexico.

            The result of my proposal would be millions of more Americans employed, replacing illegal foreign labor.  Furthermore, many welfare agencies would save considerable sums now spent on illegals.  Finally, there would be a safer border to protect Americans from further invasions of illegals who may want out welfare, our jobs, to distort or destroy our culture, or who may simply be terrorists.  America would be safer, and more prosperous with my job proposal.  Can the same be said of Obama’s?

                        Hugh Murray

Death by Liberalism

Dunn’s Done Well
A review of J. R. Dunn’s Death by Liberalism:
 The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies (New York: 2011)
Reviewed by Hugh Murray

            J. R. Dunn has written a wide-ranging indictment of liberalism, contending that it is murderous.  He notes that American liberals showed that malice is NOT necessary for democide (government-sponsored killing), just carelessness, arrogance, and ineptitude.  However, Dunn provides sufficient evidence to demonstrate that liberals are indeed motivated by malice, along with guilt/shame, anti-white racism.

            It is easier to view Dunn’s larger picture of liberalism by analyzing his final chapters first.  Dunn provides excellent quotations from environmentalists who have concluded that the main cause of the earth’s problems is over population.  Their solution is simple: depopulation.  So one environmentalist concludes that the problem is a “plague of people.”(p. 244)  We must systematically reduce the world’s population from 7 billion down to about 2 billion.  Objections?  One was disappointed because the AIDS epidemic had killed so few.   Another responded, “Who misses all those who died in the Second World War?...the 20 million executed by Stalin?...Hitler’s six million Jews?”(245)  Who indeed?  Surely such environmentalists reveal a malice toward 5 billion living humans and millions of the dead.  Dunn concludes that with such environmentalists “the human race has been downgraded to the status of universal pest.”(246) 

            It is not liberal “compassion,” but liberal malice that is its major modern attribute.  This can be illustrated by the liberal war against the generally harmless, effective DDT.  It is the best insecticide for exterminating disease-infecting mosquitoes.  After DDT was banned, about 500,000 Third Worlders died due to malaria.  Most would have lived had DDT killed the mosquitoes.  Instead, sick and dying humans who had been infected by mosquitoes caused decades of deadly “silent summers” in the Third World.  Blame the compassionate liberals for these mass deaths.  And in America today we experience the resurgence of the bed bug, a pest nearly wiped from our shores by earlier, effective use of DDT.  As bed bugs return, people suffer not only from bites, but possibly some revived epidemic because of the new bed bug infestations.

            The malice of the liberal government is displayed in other areas too.  For asthma sufferers, the best medication has been a small, light-weight inhaler that the afflicted may personally apply when necessary.  Because these inhalers contain a miniscule amount of fluorocarbons, the US Government demands their prohibition in order to prevent expansion of the ozone hole.  (The science that these inhalers affect the ozone hole is questionable, and even whether the hole simply waxes and wanes with the seasons.)  However, there is little question that denying asthmatics these inhalers will cause suffering and possibly deaths.  That a person who is suffocating and cannot breathe should be denied assistance from the inhaler is another example of liberal “compassion.”  I call it malice.  Malice and murder.

            In order to reduce reliance on oil during the shortage of the 1970s, the government encouraged and then required American automakers to produce smaller, lighter cars.  The policy did save gasoline, but for those involved in accidents, they paid with their lives.  The liberal government traded gas for lives.  President Obama now expands of this policy.  Ironically, some of the same crowd who shouted no lives for oil in wars in the Middle East, may be causing more American deaths by requiring fuel-efficient, lighter automobiles that can be deadly in accidents.  Unfortunately, in the US there is little discussion of this crash policy.

            Some types of asbestos are quite toxic, but most are not so dangerous.  Yet, the asbestos scare, and the hurried removal of the insulation from so many schools, offices, and public buildings probably left more asbestos in the vicinity and in the air to be inhaled.  Dunn believes it would have been safer, and less expensive, if most asbestos buildings had been left intact.

            Liberals are intent upon shoving America into a new Dark Age with the upcoming prohibition of incandescent light bulbs.  If one of the recommended mercury bulbs breaks, the instructions on the removal of the toxic mercury are so complex that television host Glenn Beck made a comedy routine by trying to follow their directions.  Meanwhile, America will pay higher prices for dimmer lights.

            Some liberal environmentalists, viewing humans as pests, responded by unleashing real pests upon us.  Bring back the grizzly bears, restore the coyotes, reintroduce the cougars, wolves, alligators, etc.  Encourage them to do what they naturally do.  And ignore the cries of angry people when they report the killing of their pet dogs or cats, the death of their infants, the mauling of their daughters.  Compassionate liberalism must not yield to such emotions.

            The liberals, including those like Republican Governor Rockefeller of New York, sought to close those “horrible” insane asylums.  Despite the romanticizing of the crazies in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the demonizing of Nurse Ratchet and those others who sought to restrict the mentally ill, the great liberal experiment of releasing the unstable has failed.  It is such a flop that many of the homeless (who even have no flop-houses) and many in prisons are simply the thousands of refugees who lost asylums when mental institutions closed.  Groups like the ACLU have prevented the sick from receiving mental treatment while unleashing and inflicting the crazies on to every public spot in urban America.  Life in America has become intolerable for the poor, honest, and sane who cannot afford to reside in gated communities and posh suburbs.  The poor must endure the loss of their parks, trains stations, and sidewalks, or share them with shouting crazies who may turn violent at any moment.  Meanwhile, the mentally sick suffer the loss of their space while they seek to survive in a hostile world.  No wonder, some of the sanest among them choose to go to jail.

            Dunn has a terrific chapter in simple English on the major problems of Britain’s National Health Service, Canada’s Medicare, and Australia’s Medicare.  His point is that the compassionate liberals who enacted Obamacare are leading us down the same unhealthy, socialist path.  For example, in the UK in 1948, at the onset of the NHS, Britain had 480,000 hospital beds and a staff of 350,000.  By 2008 there were only 160,000 beds and a staff of 1,368,000!  Will Obamacare work any better in the US?

            Dunn has chapters on other topics, like abortion, medically assisted suicides, and other topics, too.

            His weakest chapter is that on crime.  Dunn does mention race here and there, but he fails to understand race as the core reason that brought about America’s change in attitudes toward crime, criminals, and the right to defend oneself.

            First, in the early 1960s the newly expanded television news programs pictured a new type of criminal: the well-dressed, well-behaved individuals who openly defied certain laws they deemed wrong and immoral.  The lunch-counter sit-ins occurred almost daily somewhere and were seen on the nightly newscasts.  Sometimes cameras also presented scenes of those opposed  as they spat, cursed, yelled, and even beat the peaceful protestors.  True, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred earlier in the 1950s, but the story lacked emotion because there were no cameras when Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat.  Moreover, the pictures of bus stops where no one enters the bus are hardly exciting television.  The crowds screaming in Little Rock at the few Blacks who sought to integrate Central High in 1957 was riveting news fare, but the story came and went.  It was the sit-ins that sparked a nation-wide movement, and one in which most of the viewing public sympathized with the “criminals.”  Indeed, by the end of the 60s, the media had portrayed sheriffs of the South as sinister villains, criminals worse than those who had violated the law.

            Meanwhile, the non-violent protests at lunch-counters were followed in 1961 by non-violent Freedom Riders, and non-violent marchers, and children attempting to attend integrated schools.  Much of America was becoming more sympathetic to the “criminals,” and more critical of both the law and the law-enforcers.

            First, then, one had the change in the images of the “criminals,” and of law-enforcement, and indeed of the law itself.  In 1963 the large, non-violent March on Washington sought to pressure the government to pass civil rights legislation.  A few months later, following the shocking assassination of President Kennedy, pressure increased, and in July 1964 the Civil Rights Act was enacted, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission created to enforce it.  Equal opportunity was the name of the game.

            But it soon became clear; most Blacks were not equal to the task.  When objective standards were used, few Blacks could compete with whites for jobs, promotions, university admissions, or scholarships.  Many Blacks believed they were being discriminated against even after passage of the Civil Rights Act.  Their anger rose as riots raged.

            These race riots of the mid-to-late 1960s included sacking of stores, setting ablaze trash cans, autos, buildings.  It also meant beating whites or anyone who sought to thwart the mob.  Police now were targeted as “pigs,” and some were killed trying to keep order.  Government responded with blue-ribbon panels like the Kerner Commission, which blamed the violence – not on the rioters - but on “underlying factors” like insufficient numbers of Black police, insufficient numbers of Black reporters, and more generally, white racism.

            The elites, now fully aware that equal opportunity would not help that many Blacks move up, behind the scenes colluded with the EEOC, The media, and the courts to destroy the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by turning it on its head: Equal Opportunity now meant preferences for Blacks (and later, other pet groups) and the denial of Equal Opportunity of white men; no hiring for racial balance was now to mean hire for racial balance; and the CR Act that had banned quotas was now used to require quotas – only calling them goals and timetables, or later diversity.  While most Americans had accepted the notion of equal opportunity for all embedded in the CR Act, few were aware of the maneuvers behind the scenes, that were destroying this policy, and in an Orwellian manner, requiring the opposite of what the act proclaimed.(For more on this process, see my "White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression").  Republican President Nixon essentially made affirmative action and racial balance national policy.

            The underlying principle upon which the new policies were framed was that of proportionalism, racial balance, and quotas.  If Blacks did not have a certain percentage on the police force, it must be due to racism.  Testing, in which few Blacks could compete, had to be abandoned or so watered down that almost all taking the test could be declared “qualified,” and then the administrators would hire by quota among the “qualified.”  Similarly, physical testing, in which few women could compete to be firefighters, had to be abandoned or so watered down that almost all taking the test could be declared “qualified,” and then the administrators would hire by quota.  And this process extended throughout society.  The current fashionable term for this proportionalism is diversity.

            The notion of proportionalism, diversity, has been absorbed into the liberal idea of justice.  If Blacks did not have the same percentage in college as whites, the cause of the disparity must be racism.  If women were underrepresented in the sciences, it was due to sexism.  If Hispanics were underrepresented among bank CEO’s; racism.  Even today the media, using statistics of underrepresentation of this group or that, expose “racism” and “sexism” almost weekly.

            So why are Blacks so overrepresented in jails?  It must be racism.

            I worked in a court and people would come to my window.  I would ask, ”Why are you here.”  “Driving while Black” was the quick retort, shouted so all could hear.  Their response implied that the only reason they were in court was because of the racism of the patrolmen.  Some years ago liberals in New Jersey charged the state police with ticketing more Blacks than whites because of racism.  Statistics verified that a higher percentage of Blacks were issued tickets.  However, cameras were installed at many major traffic stops, and the photos showed a much higher percentage of the violators were dark-skinned.

            In Cincinnati and from time to time other areas reports surface of alleged racism in schools because the percentage of Blacks expelled, suspended, or reprimanded is higher than that of whites.  What if a higher percentage of Blacks are disruptive in schools?  Expel more innocent whites?  Lower the standards so fewer disruptive Blacks are expelled, thereby making classroom teaching impossible?  The courts have less interest in teaching quality than in avoiding charges of racism.  The government's chosen policy is evident by the fact that now many public schools have metal detectors.

            Though some Americans may oppose the death penalty on religious or ethical grounds, I doubt if this is the case for liberals.  They oppose it because most of the accused are Blacks.  Surely, a higher percentage of Blacks than whites are convicted of murder.  Dunn includes the 1972 decision of the US Supreme Court banning the death penalty as “cruel and inhuman” punishment.  (Note that all of the justices swear to uphold the Constitution of the US, and the Constitution itself prescribes the death penalty for certain crimes.  But to liberals, a Constitution can mean anything the justices decide it to mean.  Just like “equal opportunity” now means preferences for favored minorities and a majority, women, and discrimination against white men.)  The high court later permitted the death penalty, but only after many expenditures had been made by the prosecution.  In 1987 liberals sought to disrupt things again by claiming there was disparity in treatment of those who had murdered whites and those who had murdered Blacks.  This time, a slightly more conservative court rejected the liberals’ charge of racism by a slim 5-4 margin.  If murderers of Blacks (mainly Black) were to receive the death penalty at the same rate as those who murder whites, then death rows would be overwhelmingly Black, and new charges of racism about the penalty would ensue.

            While Dunn places much of the change in attitudes toward crime in the 1960s on the theories of sociologists, social workers, and Karl Menninger, in stressing treatment and rehabilitation for the criminal, I would suggest the theories were less important than the media’s changing depiction of race in the 1960s

            1) Some “criminals” like Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights activists were really heroes; conversely, come sheriffs and police were sinister, brutal racists.

            2) Urban ghettos were like colonies with few rights.  The white police were like an occupation army.  Blacks had a right to seek power in their communities (like Gold Coast, Nigeria, and other African colonies were doing in the 1950s and 60s in achieving independence from Britain.)  Making the comparisons, Blacks had a right to seek power in their American communities, even if it meant destroying white-owned shops, firing white autos, and firing on white police and civilians.  Therefore, riots were justified, and crimes (riots in slow motion) were justified also.

            3) Because the crimes were justified, if caught, and if prosecuted (two big ifs, after the Miranda and similar help-the-perpetrator rulings), criminals should received the lightest possible sentencing.  Prisons lost population, while those in community service, on parole, and in rehab of some sort rose.  Of course, crime was skyrocketing.

            Dunn is good at showing the change of view as to the “victim.”  The violent criminal (if Black) was now seen as a victim: of society, poverty, racism.  Meanwhile the victim of that criminal (often white) was dismissed as an oppressor, deserving of the broken arm, the cut eye, or whatever damage the perpetrator had inflected.  It became ever more dangerous to be around Blacks.  If whites lived near them and moved out, they were judged racists, fleeing to the suburbs.  If too poor to move, and continued to reside near Blacks, they might be beaten, burgled, and some in the family killed.  (See some of Jack Cashill’s writings about growing up in his integrated neighborhood in Newark, and what happened in the late 1960s.  But he is a poor white, so the elites of both parties can dismiss his approach.  Of course, the liberals have made Newark what it is today – and Detroit, and …)

            Dunn asserts that Blacks suffered most from the pro-crime policies of the liberals.  I dispute that.  True, poor and honest Blacks left in ghettos dominated by drug-dealing gangs did duffer.  But white refugees from liberal Urbania, who earned little and had suffered physical or mental scars, would receive no special preferences, no special scholarships, for minorities, no affirmative action admissions, no pro-minority jobs, no…no.

            Dunn estimates that the cost of liberal crime reforms is 265,000 deaths.  I suspect the figure is higher.  I also urge readers to look again at Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions, especially his chapters on crime.  Also check the internet work, The Color of Crime to evaluate the role of race and crime.  I suspect if Dunn had stressed the importance of race, his book might not have been published by an imprint of Harper Collins.

            Despite my quibbling here and there, Dunn has written a book with a wide scope.  It is easy to read, and provokes thought.  It should be widely read.