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1. 1 Comment by robert m. peters on 19 September 2008:

   There are those who are very concerned, and rightly so, about the nationalizing of the firm AIG, without even a nod from the Congress of the United States, which itself should not be in the nationalizing business. The FED did it simply by fiat.

   However, in my “simple” understanding, to borrow your word, Dr. Wilson, AIG was already nationalized in two aspects: as a modern corporation as opposed to a “mere” business, AIG, as a corporation, is a creature of the state, chartered by the state and operating within the parameters of that state charter, gleaning the benefits of having that relationship with the state; in addition, the very fiat money with which AIG acquired up to 72 trillion dollars of insurance polices insuring loans and bonds, themselves fiat creatures of the state financial system, were “made available” by the state and its partner – sometimes with the face of the state and sometimes with the face of a private entity – namely, the Federal Reserve Bank and the central banks of Europe and Asia. So, this last step of nationalization, creating 85 billion dollars out of thin air and further weakening the dollar and inflating the prices and acquiring 80% of AIG is simply the final step in a long march to nationalization and socialism of the soft fascist variety known a corporatism, well described by Mussolini.

   I laugh, cry and become angry when the news commentators claim that “the American people” have purchased AIG. What has happened is that the elites, flies around the dung of higher and higher piles of fiat currency, have stolen not only more of our liberty but much more of our wealth through the inflation tax as our buying power slides ever more. This faux notion of “own by the collective people” which really means owned by no one was well demonstrated as some friends of mine and I walked through Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago. One of them said, “This all belongs to “we, the people.” My quick retort was, “Get yourself then a hammer and a chisel and attempt to chisel of one 300 millionth of the White House. You’s likely get shot before you reached the masonry.”

2. 2 Comment by Chuck Hicks on 19 September 2008:

   Mr. Peters, you are quite right. The only thing that has changed here is the audacity of the state-corporate system.

3. 3 Comment by Rob on 19 September 2008:

   “The Battle Hymn” is loathsome and I was pleasantly surprised when some Catholics raised a stink when W. played it for the Holy Father at the White House. Of course the usual suspects in Catholic conservatism, from Weigel to Father Neuhaus, were silent.

4. 4 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 19 September 2008:

   From “gummint isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” to “give me your tired, your poor [insurance mega-trust]” in 30 seconds . . . if someone had put this in a futurist political fantasy novel a year ago, no one would have believed it.

   Of course, it’s always been ok to socialize businesses, so long as they’re losing money.

5. 5 Comment by Daniel Maxwell on 19 September 2008:

   ““The Battle Hymn” is loathsome and I was pleasantly surprised when some Catholics raised a stink when W. played it for the Holy Father at the White House”

   And rightly so. The ‘Battle Hymn’ is not only blasphemous to all Christians, but considering the position of the Holy See on the current wars it was a direct slap to the Church’s face. At some of the more war-mongering ‘conservative’ sites, criticism is frequently leveled at Catholic clergy for not supporting the regime’s wars of aggression.

   Not to mention, historically speaking the Hymn is also a slap in the face to Pius IX’s wise policy during the War Between the States.

6. 6 Comment by Matt Weber on 19 September 2008:

   The bailing out nonsense annoys me to no end. One rule that shouldn’t be abandoned is that stupidity should have negative consequences. If a bank gives loans it shouldn’t give, then it fails. Too big to fail? How about too stupid to live?

   At least they fire all the executive boards. By ‘fire’ I of course mean ‘politely dismiss with 20 million dollar severance packages’. That’s about all the silver lining we get though.

   America used to be a major producer of goods; now all we manufacture is hopes and dreams, which inevitably collapse when everyone realizes they’re empty. Obama is the perfect president for this country.

7. 7 Comment by James the Least on 19 September 2008:

   Um, Rob, George Weigel and Fr. Neuhaus are not what any knowledgeable person would call “conservative.” They are the religious equivalents of political neo-conservatives. The true conservatives in the Catholic Church are the traditionalists–the Tridentine-Latin-Mass-or-Death Old Guard(*) attempting to hold the line against the subversives and revolutionaries who have gained power in the Church. In that respect, there is almost a perfect parallel between what is going on in the Church and what is going on in the world at large.

   To illustrate it in terms of the popular, if erroneous, notion of the political spectrum: Weigel and Neuhaus do not occupy the extreme right end of the spectrum opposite their counterparts on the extreme left. They instead occupy the RIGHT SIDE of the LEFT END of the spectrum. The true conservatives in the Church, just as in our political life, are never heard from by mainstream audiences, except when marched out to be laughed at, anathematized, and have their views misrepresented.

   (*) I do not mean, in using this description, to suggest that traditionalists are one-note ponies who only care about the issue of the liturgy. That is very far from the case. However, since this is about the only thing the average person–including those who consider themselves conservatives–will likely have heard about Catholic traditionalists, I am to a certain degree forced to use it.

8. 8 Comment by Robert Bruce on 19 September 2008:

   Mr. Peters,

   We have indeed purchased AIG, but we won’t see any benefits from doing so, only the shmucks who we “bailed out” will see any returns from our “investment”.

9. 9 Comment by James the Least on 19 September 2008:

   Oh, and by the way (don’t want to sidetrack the discussion), great column as usual, Dr. Wilson.

10. 10 Comment by John Willson on 19 September 2008:

    Clyde, I’ve read a few sermons by southern preachers wanting to exterminate my Yankee cousins, so we’re at a wash on that one. But I do want to add to your point about people making things. My great grandfather’s brother made it home from the “late unpleasantness” without significant wounds, but with a family to raise on a very unproductive piece of ground. He decided to learn the cooper’s trade, and spent over two years of his life walking several miles each way to a neighboring town getting the skills (all the while farming and barely keeping his family alive). He decided to make milking pails, because almost all his neighbors were dairy farmers or at least had milk cows. Six months later the first tin pails were marketed, by no means as good as his oak pails but one fourth the price. As far as he was concerned the tin buckets might as well have been made by machines in Bangladesh. It’s a cruel world.

11. 11 Comment by John Willson on 19 September 2008:

    Clyde, I’ve read a few sermons by southern preachers wanting to exterminate my Yankee cousins, so we’re at a wash on that one. But I do want to add to your point about people making things. My great grandfather’s brother made it home from the “late unpleasantness” without significant wounds, but with a family to raise on a very unproductive piece of ground. He decided to learn the cooper’s trade, and spent over two years of his life walking several miles each way to a neighboring town getting the skills (all the while farming and barely keeping his family alive). He decided to make milking pails, because almost all his neighbors were dairy farmers or at least had milk cows. Six months later the first tin pails were marketed, by no means as good as his oak pails but one fourth the price. As far as he was concerned the tin buckets might as well have been made by machines in Bangladesh. It’s a cruel world.

12. 12 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 19 September 2008:

    And of course the latest Bushism, “I’m going to stay in Washington DC where I can keep an eye on Wall Street.” Not only does the decider-in-chief not speak English, he don’t know jogfry neiver.

13. 13 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 19 September 2008:

    When Iacocca begged the Carter government to bail out Chrysler in the 1970s it was dubbed “no-fault capitalism” on the grounds that the feds had imposed such a burden on the corporation that firings and layoffs would be a drain on society through welfare and unemployment benefits/payments. Besides redundant workers have time to do things like riot, protest, loot and pillage the HQ of the bosses who mis-managed their factory. We would not want the social order messed up now would we. Keep Joe Six Pack in a stupor, a BMW and a brick house and we’ll all be OK.

    Since America’s small factory towns are great places to grow up and retire, with nothing to do in between, we make very few of our necessary goods any more, so the money men( I use the term loosely) light out for the big city as they ship production and manufacturing to Central America and the Orient. We no longer make enough to operate the factories that give stocks their intrinsic value. As a result the current shaking out of the market is that brokers and others have finally figured out that the stocks are based on nothing more than the consumers’ willingnees to invest in low grade schlock to clutter up our oversized houses.

    The best result would be to return manufacturing to the empty buildings in the Rust Belt, thus providing employment for those men not willing to have their heads filed with left-wing rantings of idiotic college professors. It would also get them out of big Suburbia, and ease our traffic woes. Housing is a bargain, too, you can buy an empty house in Rome NY for 25 grand. An enterprising company could buy up 3 entire block for a cool million and provide free housing enabling their workers to raise a decent sized family.

14. 14 Comment by NGPM on 19 September 2008:

    “You probably have heard it but not thought about the words. You have probably not read the numerous sermons of 19th century Massachusetts clergymen who preached the righteous duty of exterminating their Southern fellow citizens.”

    When we are hearing only slightly less explosive things across the U.S.A. today from “conservative” clergymen–only not about fellow citizens but about people halfway across the globe whose lives do not even touch ours–I have to ask whether most people would actually care if they thought about the words or read those sermons.

15. 15 Comment by The Fronde on 20 September 2008:

    I think the Fannie and Freddie bailouts are being unfairly misrepresented as an additional burden upon “the taxpayers.” Since the lion’s share of tax revenues are paid by the very wealthy (who have no need of Fannie or Freddie loans), very little of the cost will fall upon the shoulders of the middle classes who did all this irresponsible borrowing in the first place. The damages will be bourn by those who were forced to protect their capital by making high-risk, high-interest loans in order to stay ahead of inflationary Fed policies.

    The middle class bears equal moral responsibility for this mess with the Wall Street big boys. That is why I’m in favor of the bailouts. Let’s go ahead and reinflate asset prices. Let the dollar go down the tubes, and soak the middle class with punitive inflation. They deserve to start paying the true cost of their lifestyle for once.

16. 16 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 20 September 2008:

    Dear John, #8. My grandfather, back from WW I, built up a grocery business in a semi-rural fringe area of a big city. He supported a large family quite well for more than two decades, despite his habit of giving free food to fatherless black families.
    Post WW II, the chain stories turned his life’s work into a losing proposition at the time when some respite from labour was needed.
    #9 I must beg to differ. I think there are very very few bloody Southern sermons, and if there are any, they occurred only after invasion, destruction, and occupation. Even then, the Southern attitude was usually grave rather than hysterical and allowed for the possibility that the Lord had punished us for His own reasons. The Yankee attack long preceded the war, was vicious, hysterical. intolerant and secularly-motivated evangelism. It was condemned by all the orthodox Christian clergy of the North (especially Catholic, both the anti-Southern hatred spewed from the pulpit usually was accompanied by anti-Catholic hatred. as well.). To say that it was “a wash” is to overlook one of the chief catalysts of American history. It is also to overlook my point, which was the similarity to today’s war-mongering clergy.

17. 17 Comment by John Willson on 20 September 2008:

    #13
    Gosh, I agree. There were, I think, more bloody southern sermons than you admit to, and they were often hysterical, but all the rest of what you say is, I think, just, well, true. A student of mine (an undergraduate, which is all we have at Hillsdale) did a seminar paper on Hillsdale County in the years leading up to the war, and could only conclude that there was no sane reason for it. Hillsdale College was an abolitionist school and sent more men to the war than any other school in the north except for the military academy, but the County was about evenly split and when you read the local newspapers from the era you find about the same attitudes we have now about Iraq. Ordinary folks don’t really like war, and are inclined to let their neighbors alone. Having admitted all this, I still think that the extremists on both sides made it “a wash”–and today’s orthodox Catholic clergy are what they were then, opponents of both the self-righteous Yankees and the honor besotted southerners. Both, I still and will always believe, were small minorities, about the same numbers as today’s neocons. Not noble.

18. 18 Comment by Frank on 20 September 2008:

    Dr. Wilson,

    regarding the stock market going down due largely to the recent mortgage crisis: Guess again who’s to blame for U.S. mortgage meltdown: Analysts point not to greed, but to social activist politics.

    I think you’ll find it interesting if you haven’t already seen this.

19. 19 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 21 September 2008:

    @18 Frank

    That was exactly the point I made on WBAL’s Ron Smith show about a month ago. Since I listen to a lot of AM radio I remember the ads clearly advocating dodgy loans to the non credit-worthy. As the old saying goes, if you think government’s problems are bad, then wait til you see their solutions.

    But the banks were also pushing home equity loans so suckers could take dream vacations. These folks also lost their houses after the third and fourth mortgage went sour. Any fool who has read the Bible should be aware of the scriptural caveat that the borrower is slave to the lender. And we know the lenders are playing shenannigans.

20. 20 Comment by thomas miller on 21 September 2008:

    the “Fronde” @ 15:

    Fannie and Freddie arere programs offering government subsidized mortgages primarily for low-income, and especially minority, households. They are not targeted at the “middle class”.

    Yeah sure, it’s the middle class who run those dens of thievery on Wall Street that gave birth to such frauds as Credit Default Swaps and Derivatives. Its the middle class who employ armies of lobbyists in Washington that are the Federal Government’s de facto policymakers. Its the middle class who demanded that Congress repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which laid the groundwork for this current disaster.

    By the way, “Fronde”, what prompted to you to take the name of a French feminist newspaper as your nom de guerre? If you want a stylish sounding French nickname, how about Le Abruti?

21. 21 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 22 September 2008:

    This discussion needs some clear definitions of “middle class” in order to be meaningful.

22. 22 Comment by M K on 22 September 2008:

    #18, Thanks you for you pointing that what MSM and most people will not. If you are a Mortagage Broker you were mandated by law to yield some sort of mortgage to bad credit, no credit, less than perfect credit potential homeowners….ever buy a home in the past 10 years and have them ask you what is your ethnicity?

    That is one main contributing factor in this mess, next is a lot socialized housing from this so called bailout. Read ‘Creature From Jekyll Island”

    A lot of good point Mr. Wilson in your article.

    One more would be to let all these banks and companies falter and not bail them out, just like Chrysler should have done so in 1979-80.

23. 23 Comment by MAP on 22 September 2008:

    John Willson @ 17, I suggest you read the book “The Real Lincoln” written by Charles L.C. Minor and published in 1904. Using Northern references alone (newspapers, correspondence, diaries, histories, biographies, etc. by influential and powerful Northerners) it documents just how opposite the reality was from the fiction we are told. The entire war was the result of one man alone, Abe Lincoln, a mediocre and an incompetent who had little support even within his own administration and party. He blundered his way into the war by creating the attack on Ft. Sumter based on the very faulty belief that secession was the result of radicals in the South, not the solid South as a whole, as was the real situation. He made yet another error of judgment by believing that a battle would be a crushing defeat to the South because the Southern radicals would never be able to muster a force of any size. These ‘oversights’ proved disastrous with a total rout of the Union forces at First Manassas. From that point onward is a tale of a man completely ‘in over his head’. As the chain of events began to spiral completely out of control, he began to unleash a rein of terror across the North in a frantic attempt to control the situation. (Interesting, many references confirm that the North actually sided with the South.) And since he had reduced many major states to police states, his reelection was guaranteed by force and fraud, though even the Republican Party opposed his serving another term, thus his assassination.

    With the empire crumbling out of control and the Washington incompetents behind the wheel, I wonder if we will be subjected to the same. Perhaps the Patriot Act is only the beginning.

24. 24 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 September 2008:

    This is the most obvious and most readily available form on which to share a disturbing experience which I had yesterday. I had occasion to be in conversation with eight seniors from a local private high school, all average to above average intelligence. They are all life-long residents of a region of Louisiana which is a mere six miles from Mansfield where General Richard Taylor defeated General Banks at the battle of Mansfield. Some of the students come from little towns named Longstreet and Stonewall. At least one comes from a town in which there is a rather large Confederate cemetery. In the course of my conversation with them, I mentioned the term “Dixie.” By the look on their faces, I was driven to ask if they were familiar with the term. To a person, they said that they were not. They did not recall ever having heard it. I then sang the first verse of “Dixie” for them. One girl then said that she vaguely recalled having heard the song before but did not remember the word “Dixie.” If I correctly recall, Richard Taylor had a child whom he called “Dixie,” and the child died during the course of the war. It would now seem that Dixie is indeed dead, at least to the group which I encountered yesterday.

25. 25 Comment by Frank on 23 September 2008:

    Mr. Peters,

    Dead nations have a tendency to spring back to life.

26. 26 Comment by TJF on 24 September 2008:

    Weakened states revive, but dead nations? One might want some examples.

27. 27 Comment by Frank on 25 September 2008:

    How about the Cornish nationalism today? The language completely or nearly completely died out and then in 1904 Henry Jenner’s Handbook of the Cornish Language was printed and it has since seen a revival.

    Today, Cornwall is suffering moderate immigration and in reaction Cornish nationalism has revived, probably spurring on adoption of the language and other cultural characteristics.

    I’ve never been to Cornwall, but it sounds as if the culture largely died out and was then renewed when the natives sought it out. Once the natives go though, I’m sure the nation’s dead for good.

    —

    Odinism and the druids had totally disappeared until Asatru and Wicca came about. Now, the former doesn’t know much about what it’s trying to revive, and the latter is probably pure garbage, but they’re examples of attempts at reviving a dead religion (and religion’s of course important to any people, the South couldn’t be the South without Christianity.)

    —

    I’m sure I can think of a better example…

28. 28 Comment by Frank on 25 September 2008:

    Were the Aztec nationalists of today able to locate a book on Aztec religion and culture, I’m sure they’d attempt to restore it. Whether good or bad, the Spanish burned most records.

    Still, I need something older from Europe that would be respected here…

    —

    Now, I wonder if “culture” is meant to include an elite or the people as a whole. That is – is high culture the only real culture? If so, then there’s surely a small elite living among a few paleo and related groups. There remains among them the seed, and among the remnant Southern peoples the fertile soil.

    I’ve never been to Weaverville, but I wonder too what’s become of Weaver’s clan/family…

29. 29 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 25 September 2008:

    @21 Clyde

    George Orwell described himself as upper lower middle class, and so do I because the reference is so obscure. I am a self-employed construction consultant who gets results, White-collar working class. That to me is the middle class.

    People who merely live in 10,00 square foot houses in fashionable zip codes, and swear incessantly at the co-workers are not what I call upper class.

    For low class, just look outside any city liquor store. Sad thing is — our votes are equal.

30. 30 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 25 September 2008:

    @28 Frank

    There is hope out there on the bar band circuit. Since most punk rockers are now self-employed sorts, their lyrics are becoming more anti-statist. These young folks travel from town to town burning up fuel, and selling t-shirts and Cds. At the end of the year they sit down and subtract their cost from their gross and try to wonder whether or not it’s profitable to continue performing.

    As poor as their music was, the Sex Pistols were pretty conservative in thier lyrics. They did as much to change pop music as the Beatles. They also caused Inner City London youth to vote for the tories rather than Labour which had swindled them with broken promises.

31. 31 Comment by H.F. Wolff on 26 September 2008:

    29Etienne Gervaise:

    “Sad thing is — our votes are equal.”

    I agree with your lament.

    There is a solution where the # of votes for an individual is based on merit.

    It is described in a novel entitled “The Seventh Vote”.

    H.F. Wolff

32. 32 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 28 September 2008:

    @31 HF

    I’ll put it on my shopping list, along with Tito’s new novel.

    I had to give up on Spengler’s Decline of Western Civ. It was too boring.