One of the seminal films of the 20th Century was Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." A story of a troubled man (a Vietnam Vet) quite literally driven insane by the insane city around him. The current unrest of a "Long Hot Summer" with outright riots in London and Black "Flash Mobs" in the US is unlikely to produce any reaction other than flight and opt-out from the overwhelming mass of the White middle class public. Because Middle Class people even crazy ones have too much to lose. But opt-out and flight have their own consequences, far more severe than any random act of violence.
Here are a few scenes showing the power of screenwriter Paul Schrader and Director Scorsese's vision:
In the movie, the sick and dysfunctional city makes Travis Bickle even crazier. Only a quirk of fate leads him to kill people who need killing (the pimps, hustlers, and corrupt cops keeping a 12 year old as a prostitute) instead of the Senatorial candidate. In other words, a Breivik who kills say, vicious pimps instead of school kids on a resort island. Bickle like Breivik is of course quite scary in that his insanity is matched by organizational toughness. A corrupt, lawless city has a thriving black market in guns. Bickle is obsessive about working out. His initial idiotic dry run on the Secret Service leads to a change of plans and a sudden Mohawk (completely changing his appearance). Crazy cities create and nurture crazy people.
But that's just a movie. And real life is not a movie. In real life, Morgan Freeman is not the voice of God, but a weird guy aiming to marry his (adopted) Grand-daughter. In real life, Woody Allen is not a charmingly neurotic artist but a guy who married his step-daughter. In real life, Whoopi Goldberg is not the Wise Black Woman but a nutty host on "the View." In real life, we've had about fifty plus years of multicultural, PC-driven, "anti-racist" stuff that tolerates the kind of scum that made Bickle wish for a real rain to wash it all away.
And the type of rampages aimed against PC and Multiculturalism amount to just one: Breivik. That's it. Oh sure there's the "Beta Male Rampage" (probably not the best word for it) of disturbed guys like Cho, Sodini, and others. The killings of various jihadis, probably including the Beltway Snipers, Lee Boyd Malvo and John Mohammed. But the only guy who even approximates Travis Bickle in the last fifty years is some Norwegian guy who was a Freemason, an organic farmer, and a member of the middle class who spoke another language (English) and could write it as well.
There won't be any violence against "the Long Hot Summer" of Black Flash Mobs, and various organized lootings/beatings/robberies/arsons (as in London). Because its a LOT easier to simply run away. Opt out. Stay away.
REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) are going to pay a heavy price. All those yuppies wanting to move to city centers to find better mates, are going to re-think and move to the suburbs when their leases are up. New leases and sales will be hard to come by, and heavily discounted, hurting cash flow and rates of return. Thus you'll see heavy pressure on mayors and such to do what it takes, to suppress the mobs, but likely far after anything effective short of the National Guard remains.
Meanwhile, Amazon looks to reap rewards from people stopping their mall-shopping habits in favor of online shopping. Netflix, Amazon, and other online video folks will benefit as people seek entertainment at home, and online dating places will gain as people shun city centers as mate-market auctions. Bars and restaurants will hurt, and telecom providers win, as the shift to opt-out becomes easier.
No one wants to live in Travis Bickle's world. Even in the mid 1970's, it was relatively easy to avoid the hell of NYC for suburban places. Now its even easier. Which has several strategic implications.
First, an opt-out White population is going to want specific subsidies aimed at THEM, and have little patience for the populations that in effect cleansed them out of public spaces. This means no money for Black/Hispanic public schools, and lots of money for online education. The same goes for Welfare, TANF, WIC, and so on. Travis Bickle shooting a pimp and some corrupt cops and johns doesn't fix a corrupt to the core NYC. But White flight/opt-out changes the funding completely.
Secondly, the "magic" of the First Black President is over. He's now, Tyrone Willingham. People demand results. A miserable economy, a lost AAA credit rating, a stock market dive, and a "Long Hot Summer" of Black Flash Mobs and possibly, London-style riots/arson/looting won't cut it. People expect results. Obama had about three years to produce results, and considerable good will, all gone now. Hostility and intimidation is likely to produce, not surrender but opt-out. It is not the 1960's any more. People are experiencing hard times themselves, have no sympathy for rioters, and are more likely to agree with the basic desires of a Travis Bickle if not the methods.
Third, the impact of Black Flash Mobs has been to harden racial attitudes (basically, the view that Blacks and Hispanics are dead-weight that White America would do well to shed in a desperate economic struggle). A "Long Hot Summer" won't result in vigilantes, but a ruthless restructuring to regain economic competitiveness and exclusion of non-Whites and non-Asians from most public expenditures and public life. Gone: Affirmative Action (too expensive). Gone: policies investing in urban centers (hostile territory to the White Yuppie/Middle class). Gone: investing in education and in particular physical public schools. Gone: faith in the elite to even tie their own shoelaces, much less order the nation from the food people eat to light bulbs in their homes. Gone: legitimacy or even interest in the media, which has acted to suppress information about the Black Flash Mobs.
The worst thing that would happen for the Liberal Welfare State and the associated NGOs (Ford, Pew, Annenberg, and Gates Foundations), talking heads, permanent governing class, and media hangers on would be a "Long Hot Summer" of most American cities burning down in racially motivated riots. Something like that is impossible to ignore, and will harden attitudes of the pressed White middle and working class immediately. It is not 1968. Whites are not likely to react with buy-off appeasement and guilt. Indeed, 1968 is as distant to us in 2011 as 1925 and the Jazz Age was to 1968 and the original "Long Hot Summer." Flappers and Al Capone were as relevant to the time of the Watts Riots as Martin Luther King's assassination is to us today.
Margaret Thatcher said that the problem with Welfare States is that they eventually run out of other people's money. The problem is far worse, and accelerated, when there is a huge economic dead weight of those with far lower wealth. The Wealth Gap per household is $113,000 for Whites, $6,000 for Hispanics, and $5,000 for Blacks (median net household wealth) according to the Pew Foundation.
Hard pressed White households, watching say Cleveland, Detroit, Philly, and Obama's hometown of Chicago burn, mostly fueled by Black mobs, in a "Long Hot Summer" are likely to conclude that hey, the money would go a LOT further, and be spent on THEM, if say, those people were included out of the disbursements.
People want results. Notre Dame and Washington have not hired another Black coach since Tyrone Willingham. With the great turn-over in college and pro coaches, Willingham is not coaching currently according to Wikipedia. Obama had a long leash to produce results as the First Black President, but even he had to produce results. His likely play of Chicago-style politics (all he knows) of urging the mobs forward, and then posing as "the one man able to turn off the violence" is likely to only further harden attitudes.
It won't be a Taxi Driver Summer. No matter what sort of riots and mobs happen. Bickle is a sad, crazy figure because he's totally alone, and the alienating city only makes that worse (by making nearly impossible any social connections the character wants). But he's just words on a page and a performance by a gifted actor. He wasn't and isn't real. He's just a character. Real life features not White violence in mobs or vigilantes but massive opting out and a reshaping of the social and political and economic life of America. The challenges are just too great.
...Read more
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Will K-12 H1-Bs Peel Off Obama's Support?
As noted here, Obama still has some core White support: College Educated White women. Who alone benefit from Affirmative Action (non-College White women have the highest disapproval rates for all Whites). And are a good cultural fit for Obama as First Rockstar, the Celebrity to rule Celebrities. But the Center for Immigration Studies has a new report that suggests a wave of H1-B usage is breaking upon Education, particularly K-12, and could spread to other areas. Which might finally put College Educated White women in the same boat as their male counterparts, and non-College Whites of both sexes.
As noted in the report, H1-Bs have been used with great success in the Computer Science area in replacing older, more expensive American workers with visibly cheaper Foreign ones, who are younger besides (lower health care costs, perceived "hipness" etc.) The report for the Center for Immigration Studies notes:
[The report author notes that the Dept. of Labor, unlike other Federal Depts, makes their raw data available. The link to the Dept. of Labor data, sadly all in Microsoft Access files is here. For those unable to run MS Access directly, and needing a dump into CSV or directly into MySQL, there are instructions here that have been known to work. From the reports by users at the link it seems the best/safest way is to make a CSV dump of each table, and then import them manually into manually created tables in a new MySQL database. Tedious but effective.]
Among the findings were: the employers using H1-Bs in K-12 were concentrated in Texas (1,426 certifications), California (247), and Louisiana (313), besides Maryland with 632 certifications. Houston and Dallas accounted for most of the Texas certifications. Baltimore most of Maryland. For occupational breakdowns, most of the certifications were for special education teachers (305) , or bilingual teachers (664).
The implication is that K-12 is transitioning to H1-B visa employment. These holders are significantly cheaper, younger, and most of all, compliant. They can't fuss to the Union, because they can be replaced at any time and sent home with near unlimited manpower in other places. So far this usage of H1-B visas in K-12 is limited to the bigger city school systems. But the advantages for hard-pressed school boards (cheap teachers who can be easily replaced without union fuss) is obvious. So long, "nice White lady" from "Teach For America!"
Interestingly enough, bilingual teachers form a large portion of the H1-B visa pool in K-12. Suggesting that school boards (and charter schools) want cheap, compliant non-natives brought over on the H1-B visa rather than native Spanish speakers. This is quite interesting because it kicks a major prop out from under school system support -- local Hispanic patronage. Most Latino majority school districts are not oriented towards teaching students but maximizing job patronage. Since the school is often the city's biggest employer. Even Latinos can get hurt by diversity, a useful point to make. As Machiavelli noted in the Prince, a man will forgive the murder of his parents sooner than being made poor.
H1-B visas mean only one thing for wages: considerably lower ones. Essentially we are seeing teaching being lowered to Third World levels, and probably quite rapidly. Because we have a Third World population, particularly with K-12 students, but demands for a First World education system. Something has to give, and that will be, first, teacher salaries. Those hanging on to their jobs will do so at H1-B visa rates, just like in computer programming and the like.
Also notable is that Charter Schools are the worst offenders in participating in H1-B visa programs, and have the most complaints against them (for teacher abuse, fees, and the like) lodged against them with the Dept. of Labor. Bizarrely, there is a fellow named Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamist of mixed reputation foolishly granted a green card by the US State Dept. after first being denied, who has gamed the US Charter school system.
Essentially what Gülen is doing is gaming the Charter School system. He sets up a Charter School, gets federal money (a lot of it, with very little oversight) and imports lots of teachers, on the H1-B visa program to ostensibly teach Turkish. The demand for which is near zero. It is basically a corrupt scam to create a massive kick-back and patronage system. Once again an ethnic, nepotistic network scams a government system set up for trustworthy Calvinist New Englanders.
There are also massive pay differentials among the H1-B visa holders, in places right next door to each other (New York and New Jersey, Elgin and Chicago IL) amounting to as much as $30,000 or more. Could there be … kickbacks?
Yes Obama's education bubble, with massive amounts of federal stimulus money (now expiring) shoveled into schools, created the same kind of exploitation and crook-dom that the housing bubble, and its no-document loans did. Not surprising.
Essentially, the market as it existed for K-12 teachers, employing "nice White ladies" and men, would not and did not last. We are seeing its dying already. Regardless of "mean Republicans" cutting state budgets, local districts and shady businessmen, running "regular" and charter schools respectively, are sure to pick up on the ability to create cheap and compliant labor forces. Not just for teachers, but every type of administrative function except the top. For the Charter School operators, most being "not-for-profit" (but that's a mere bagatelle) the ability to kick-back a portion of above market salaries that are paid for by federal and state funds must be an overwhelming temptation. Particularly since Education is not built on the assumption that people operating it are mostly crooks. Rather, it is built on the trust that nearly everyone involved sincerely loves teaching, education, and a better future for the students.
People vote their pocketbooks. College Educated White women are overwhelmingly employed in places like K-12 Education, the media, health care, corporate finance, human resources, and the like. Instilling bare, naked fear that they could be replaced by a person younger, more subservient (conservatives cannot stress this enough), and CHEAPER than themselves … and will be, unless a nationalist approach is taken through conservatism, is probably the most productive action conservatives can take against Obama. Obama's great weakness is that his coalition is prone to fighting amongst themselves over the limited spoils. White Women with College Education can be made to fear. Know the fear that their male peers in Engineering, or Finance, or Accounting, have already felt: replacement.
Particularly if "subservience" is stressed, the idea that say, a "fat and brassy" White College Educated woman will be replaced by a "meek and mild" Vietnamese girl at half the cost, and with deference to (beta) White males at the very top, is something that will go over like gangbusters. There's nothing White women hate more than being told they're being replaced by a younger, more subservient (to beta males) model. Since most of the top management at most places resembles a cross between Tim Geithner and Don Knotts, rather than say Charlie Sheen or Russell Brand, this wedge has some power.
Already, nursing save the ER staff is mostly H1-B. You can't visit a hospital room or floor (save perhaps ICU or CCU) and not find mostly or all H1-Bs (now from Vietnam or the Philippines). Trust me on this, I know. The same can be true, for HR people, or media ad buyers, or really almost any office work. While it is true that Mexican-origin illegal aliens from Chiapas or Cuidad Juarez won't be good fits, women and men from India, or the Philippines, or Vietnam certainly will. Many of them already are, in occupations like Radiology, or dental assistance, or even now K-12 education.
Yes, the usage of K-12 H1-Bs is small now. So is the first trickle of water bursting through a fractured dam or dike. Eventually it will be a tidal wave. With nowhere for College Educated White women to go. What will they do? How will they work? How can they support themselves? They can't. They won't. And this is precisely the argument conservatives should make to this target. Obama is bad for their bank account because he'll replace them with H1-B visa holders. Younger and more subservient, and definitely cheaper.
...Read more
As noted in the report, H1-Bs have been used with great success in the Computer Science area in replacing older, more expensive American workers with visibly cheaper Foreign ones, who are younger besides (lower health care costs, perceived "hipness" etc.) The report for the Center for Immigration Studies notes:
n FY 2010, the Department of Labor certified 6,578 new K-12 jobs to be filled by H-1B workers, about 10 percent of the new certifications within the 65,000 general purpose ceiling; many other H-1B workers were approved for the 20,000 ceiling for those with advanced degrees, and others who came into the system outside of the numerical ceilings (primarily people in higher education.)
The H-1B K-12 educators were thus a small minority within the H-1B program, and a much smaller minority within the universe of kindergarten, elementary, and secondary teachers, but what did the use of this program by some school districts show?
My sense, after pouring over the detailed DoL data on this single year’s worth of K-12 certifications, is that some of the implications of this limited database are troublesome (in two different ways), some are bizarre, and others are puzzling.
[The report author notes that the Dept. of Labor, unlike other Federal Depts, makes their raw data available. The link to the Dept. of Labor data, sadly all in Microsoft Access files is here. For those unable to run MS Access directly, and needing a dump into CSV or directly into MySQL, there are instructions here that have been known to work. From the reports by users at the link it seems the best/safest way is to make a CSV dump of each table, and then import them manually into manually created tables in a new MySQL database. Tedious but effective.]
Among the findings were: the employers using H1-Bs in K-12 were concentrated in Texas (1,426 certifications), California (247), and Louisiana (313), besides Maryland with 632 certifications. Houston and Dallas accounted for most of the Texas certifications. Baltimore most of Maryland. For occupational breakdowns, most of the certifications were for special education teachers (305) , or bilingual teachers (664).
The implication is that K-12 is transitioning to H1-B visa employment. These holders are significantly cheaper, younger, and most of all, compliant. They can't fuss to the Union, because they can be replaced at any time and sent home with near unlimited manpower in other places. So far this usage of H1-B visas in K-12 is limited to the bigger city school systems. But the advantages for hard-pressed school boards (cheap teachers who can be easily replaced without union fuss) is obvious. So long, "nice White lady" from "Teach For America!"
Interestingly enough, bilingual teachers form a large portion of the H1-B visa pool in K-12. Suggesting that school boards (and charter schools) want cheap, compliant non-natives brought over on the H1-B visa rather than native Spanish speakers. This is quite interesting because it kicks a major prop out from under school system support -- local Hispanic patronage. Most Latino majority school districts are not oriented towards teaching students but maximizing job patronage. Since the school is often the city's biggest employer. Even Latinos can get hurt by diversity, a useful point to make. As Machiavelli noted in the Prince, a man will forgive the murder of his parents sooner than being made poor.
H1-B visas mean only one thing for wages: considerably lower ones. Essentially we are seeing teaching being lowered to Third World levels, and probably quite rapidly. Because we have a Third World population, particularly with K-12 students, but demands for a First World education system. Something has to give, and that will be, first, teacher salaries. Those hanging on to their jobs will do so at H1-B visa rates, just like in computer programming and the like.
Also notable is that Charter Schools are the worst offenders in participating in H1-B visa programs, and have the most complaints against them (for teacher abuse, fees, and the like) lodged against them with the Dept. of Labor. Bizarrely, there is a fellow named Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamist of mixed reputation foolishly granted a green card by the US State Dept. after first being denied, who has gamed the US Charter school system.
Essentially what Gülen is doing is gaming the Charter School system. He sets up a Charter School, gets federal money (a lot of it, with very little oversight) and imports lots of teachers, on the H1-B visa program to ostensibly teach Turkish. The demand for which is near zero. It is basically a corrupt scam to create a massive kick-back and patronage system. Once again an ethnic, nepotistic network scams a government system set up for trustworthy Calvinist New Englanders.
There are also massive pay differentials among the H1-B visa holders, in places right next door to each other (New York and New Jersey, Elgin and Chicago IL) amounting to as much as $30,000 or more. Could there be … kickbacks?
Yes Obama's education bubble, with massive amounts of federal stimulus money (now expiring) shoveled into schools, created the same kind of exploitation and crook-dom that the housing bubble, and its no-document loans did. Not surprising.
Essentially, the market as it existed for K-12 teachers, employing "nice White ladies" and men, would not and did not last. We are seeing its dying already. Regardless of "mean Republicans" cutting state budgets, local districts and shady businessmen, running "regular" and charter schools respectively, are sure to pick up on the ability to create cheap and compliant labor forces. Not just for teachers, but every type of administrative function except the top. For the Charter School operators, most being "not-for-profit" (but that's a mere bagatelle) the ability to kick-back a portion of above market salaries that are paid for by federal and state funds must be an overwhelming temptation. Particularly since Education is not built on the assumption that people operating it are mostly crooks. Rather, it is built on the trust that nearly everyone involved sincerely loves teaching, education, and a better future for the students.
People vote their pocketbooks. College Educated White women are overwhelmingly employed in places like K-12 Education, the media, health care, corporate finance, human resources, and the like. Instilling bare, naked fear that they could be replaced by a person younger, more subservient (conservatives cannot stress this enough), and CHEAPER than themselves … and will be, unless a nationalist approach is taken through conservatism, is probably the most productive action conservatives can take against Obama. Obama's great weakness is that his coalition is prone to fighting amongst themselves over the limited spoils. White Women with College Education can be made to fear. Know the fear that their male peers in Engineering, or Finance, or Accounting, have already felt: replacement.
Particularly if "subservience" is stressed, the idea that say, a "fat and brassy" White College Educated woman will be replaced by a "meek and mild" Vietnamese girl at half the cost, and with deference to (beta) White males at the very top, is something that will go over like gangbusters. There's nothing White women hate more than being told they're being replaced by a younger, more subservient (to beta males) model. Since most of the top management at most places resembles a cross between Tim Geithner and Don Knotts, rather than say Charlie Sheen or Russell Brand, this wedge has some power.
Already, nursing save the ER staff is mostly H1-B. You can't visit a hospital room or floor (save perhaps ICU or CCU) and not find mostly or all H1-Bs (now from Vietnam or the Philippines). Trust me on this, I know. The same can be true, for HR people, or media ad buyers, or really almost any office work. While it is true that Mexican-origin illegal aliens from Chiapas or Cuidad Juarez won't be good fits, women and men from India, or the Philippines, or Vietnam certainly will. Many of them already are, in occupations like Radiology, or dental assistance, or even now K-12 education.
Yes, the usage of K-12 H1-Bs is small now. So is the first trickle of water bursting through a fractured dam or dike. Eventually it will be a tidal wave. With nowhere for College Educated White women to go. What will they do? How will they work? How can they support themselves? They can't. They won't. And this is precisely the argument conservatives should make to this target. Obama is bad for their bank account because he'll replace them with H1-B visa holders. Younger and more subservient, and definitely cheaper.
...Read more
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Hispanics Surge in California: Whites Flee
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal reflects the reality of White ethnic cleansing in California. Whites went from over 80% of the population in California in 1960, to 40.1% in 2010. Over fifty years, Whites have been effectively ethnically cleansed out of California. Moving from absolute dominance to minority status. This is not sustainable, and the legally inferior status of Whites (Affirmative Action preferences, no protection by Hate Crimes legislation, Whites ineligible for Civil Rights) guarantees a conflict with the ethnically cleansed Whites in the places where they've fled in refuge. The Tea Party being only the most visible sign of White reaction to being ethnically cleansed out of a great part of (the most desirable places to live in) the country.
From the article: Hispanic/Latino children make up a majority of California's under 18 population in 2010. Hispanics are 37.6% of California residents. Whites are at 40.1%.
Note that most of the cleansing had taken place before 2000. The accompanying chart shows a precipitous fall in White numeric dominance starting from 1960, even though the White population has remained relatively stable and flat. The difference, a tidal wave of Hispanic immigration, much of it quite likely to be illegal aliens, and a huge disparity in children. Hispanics/Mexicans have far more kids, not the least of which is that child-birth among this group often starts at the mid to late teens. There is a world of difference among a population that has kids in the mid to late twenties onward, and has only a few that it can support without massive government subsidies and aid, and one that has kids at 15-16 onwards, requiring massive wealth transfers from the wealthier population.
Welfare/Family Aid/K-12 Education then is basically a matter of taking money from middle class White families, that have only one or two kids at the most, and do not rely on welfare, to fund the welfare-dependent Mexican families that start with (often single mothers) at age 15-16 or so, or at best at age 18-19. This is not a recipe for social stability.
The charts and data show conclusively why California is falling apart. It is not Public Employee Unions. It is not public pensions. It is the ethnic cleansing of a stable, middle class White population that generates ample tax revenues while demanding relatively little social services, and the replacement by very poor Mexicans who have very little income and demand massive government spending.
The standard cry by educators and liberals is "educate them." Well, education has proven ineffective. Educational spending has raised reading scores in the PISA assessments above that of Mexican peers in Mexico, but still far below White reading scores (let alone Asians, who score higher than Whites). Education has done nothing to kill the poverty generation among Hispanics/Mexicans: early child-birth, in the teens, as mostly single mothers, lack of passion for reading, low literacy rates, and lower IQs than the White and definitely the Asian populations.
All the athletic coaching in the world won't make Hispanic and Mexican kids into NBA centers. They lack the physical attributes required: extreme height, strength, quickness, reflexes, explosive power, speed, and amazing hand/eye coordination. That combination is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The Chinese, 1.3 billion strong, have produced exactly one NBA Center: Yao Ming. Athletic talent is not evenly distributed among populations, something no one would argue. Whites are poorly represented in the NBA, and not much better in the NFL. This is not the result of racism, neither David Stern nor Roger Goodell stand in locker rooms barring White players. It is simply the uneven distribution of raw athletic talent among populations. This no more makes Black Americans a super-race than it makes them inferior. They are possessed of the same "natural rights" as any one else, being a great basketball player, or able to throw a tight spiral, means only that. It does not confer moral, spiritual, or intellectual authority any more than being able to deliver a great comic performance makes Charlie Sheen America's natural leader.
All coaching can do is make Hispanic kids a bit better at Basketball. It will not prepare them for NBA careers. The same is true of education. Yes we can and have improved Mexican kids reading scores in the US compared to their Mexican peers. We still have not brought them up to the level of White kids, let alone Asian ones (who score btw higher than White children in the latest PISA round). Because of the inherent uneven distribution of IQ (and yes, Asian kids have a higher mean IQ than White kids, in test after test).
Leaving aside the ugly politics of ethnic cleansing of the White Majority population, with the cleansed or remaining minority Whites not being happy about being minorities (who would?) the economics are frightening. There is simply no way, even with punitive "White only" taxes taking almost the entire earnings of Whites, that California can pay for its social services needed to prevent Hispanic families from starving or engaging in widespread looting and Rodney King style riots/looting/mobs.
The Federal Government is broke, and various Federal levies upon the wealthier, White states to bail out California, and other Hispanic majority states (Arizona, Florida, Texas, Nevada, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina) are likely to be actively resisted. Who's up for another $2 of gas taxes? Or a federal levy on say, satellite TV? Or internet purchases? Or other federal measures designed to tax fleeing White people to pay for Hispanic single mothers who have kids at age 16? How popular is that?
The fiscal crisis alone is a Fort Sumter event. Nope, rebellious state militias won't fire on federal troops. The states will simply refuse to enforce or collect punitive taxes to bail out places like California. Simple as that. Creating a Constitutional Crisis aided by mob mentality. Everyone in the nation watched Wisconsin. Unions are not the only ones able to bring out thugs, and use intimidation, violence, abuse, and threats. The same tactics can be used by ethnically cleansed Whites in places like Idaho, or Tennessee, or Vermont. Not even the SWPL driven hipsters of Portland or Seattle want to give up their money, when it comes down to it, to fund the families of poor Mexican single mothers. Triple Mocha Lattes are expensive! Even more so with coffee prices going through the roof.
At some point, this crisis of far too many poor people than America can afford will come to a head. And yes the politics of ethnic cleansing will play a dominant part.
...Read more
From the article: Hispanic/Latino children make up a majority of California's under 18 population in 2010. Hispanics are 37.6% of California residents. Whites are at 40.1%.
In the conservative bastion of Orange County, for example, minorities for the first time passed whites to become the majority of the population, according to the census figures. Because many minorities are Democrats, political observers say that trend could dilute the historic strength of the Republican Party there over time.
But California's inland areas, which tend to be more conservative, saw some of the state's biggest growth. Fresno grew 15.7% to 494,665 people. San Jose, closer to the coast, grew 5.7% to 945,942.
The other big demographic group to gain in the census count was non-Hispanic Asians. Unlike Hispanics, whose growth slowed from an increase of 43.8% between 1990 and 2000, Asians kept close to their increase of 34.6% in the 1990s. Non-Hispanic blacks, meanwhile, declined 0.8% to 2.16 million.
…
In 2000, whites made up 46.7% of the California's population while Hispanics accounted for 32.4%.
Note that most of the cleansing had taken place before 2000. The accompanying chart shows a precipitous fall in White numeric dominance starting from 1960, even though the White population has remained relatively stable and flat. The difference, a tidal wave of Hispanic immigration, much of it quite likely to be illegal aliens, and a huge disparity in children. Hispanics/Mexicans have far more kids, not the least of which is that child-birth among this group often starts at the mid to late teens. There is a world of difference among a population that has kids in the mid to late twenties onward, and has only a few that it can support without massive government subsidies and aid, and one that has kids at 15-16 onwards, requiring massive wealth transfers from the wealthier population.
Welfare/Family Aid/K-12 Education then is basically a matter of taking money from middle class White families, that have only one or two kids at the most, and do not rely on welfare, to fund the welfare-dependent Mexican families that start with (often single mothers) at age 15-16 or so, or at best at age 18-19. This is not a recipe for social stability.
The charts and data show conclusively why California is falling apart. It is not Public Employee Unions. It is not public pensions. It is the ethnic cleansing of a stable, middle class White population that generates ample tax revenues while demanding relatively little social services, and the replacement by very poor Mexicans who have very little income and demand massive government spending.
The standard cry by educators and liberals is "educate them." Well, education has proven ineffective. Educational spending has raised reading scores in the PISA assessments above that of Mexican peers in Mexico, but still far below White reading scores (let alone Asians, who score higher than Whites). Education has done nothing to kill the poverty generation among Hispanics/Mexicans: early child-birth, in the teens, as mostly single mothers, lack of passion for reading, low literacy rates, and lower IQs than the White and definitely the Asian populations.
All the athletic coaching in the world won't make Hispanic and Mexican kids into NBA centers. They lack the physical attributes required: extreme height, strength, quickness, reflexes, explosive power, speed, and amazing hand/eye coordination. That combination is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The Chinese, 1.3 billion strong, have produced exactly one NBA Center: Yao Ming. Athletic talent is not evenly distributed among populations, something no one would argue. Whites are poorly represented in the NBA, and not much better in the NFL. This is not the result of racism, neither David Stern nor Roger Goodell stand in locker rooms barring White players. It is simply the uneven distribution of raw athletic talent among populations. This no more makes Black Americans a super-race than it makes them inferior. They are possessed of the same "natural rights" as any one else, being a great basketball player, or able to throw a tight spiral, means only that. It does not confer moral, spiritual, or intellectual authority any more than being able to deliver a great comic performance makes Charlie Sheen America's natural leader.
All coaching can do is make Hispanic kids a bit better at Basketball. It will not prepare them for NBA careers. The same is true of education. Yes we can and have improved Mexican kids reading scores in the US compared to their Mexican peers. We still have not brought them up to the level of White kids, let alone Asian ones (who score btw higher than White children in the latest PISA round). Because of the inherent uneven distribution of IQ (and yes, Asian kids have a higher mean IQ than White kids, in test after test).
Leaving aside the ugly politics of ethnic cleansing of the White Majority population, with the cleansed or remaining minority Whites not being happy about being minorities (who would?) the economics are frightening. There is simply no way, even with punitive "White only" taxes taking almost the entire earnings of Whites, that California can pay for its social services needed to prevent Hispanic families from starving or engaging in widespread looting and Rodney King style riots/looting/mobs.
The Federal Government is broke, and various Federal levies upon the wealthier, White states to bail out California, and other Hispanic majority states (Arizona, Florida, Texas, Nevada, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina) are likely to be actively resisted. Who's up for another $2 of gas taxes? Or a federal levy on say, satellite TV? Or internet purchases? Or other federal measures designed to tax fleeing White people to pay for Hispanic single mothers who have kids at age 16? How popular is that?
The fiscal crisis alone is a Fort Sumter event. Nope, rebellious state militias won't fire on federal troops. The states will simply refuse to enforce or collect punitive taxes to bail out places like California. Simple as that. Creating a Constitutional Crisis aided by mob mentality. Everyone in the nation watched Wisconsin. Unions are not the only ones able to bring out thugs, and use intimidation, violence, abuse, and threats. The same tactics can be used by ethnically cleansed Whites in places like Idaho, or Tennessee, or Vermont. Not even the SWPL driven hipsters of Portland or Seattle want to give up their money, when it comes down to it, to fund the families of poor Mexican single mothers. Triple Mocha Lattes are expensive! Even more so with coffee prices going through the roof.
At some point, this crisis of far too many poor people than America can afford will come to a head. And yes the politics of ethnic cleansing will play a dominant part.
...Read more
Saturday, February 26, 2011
It's Basically Over For Anglos
The Houston Chronicle quotes a demographer, Steve Murdock, who notes looking at population projections for Texas, "It's basically over for Anglos." The story reports that two out of every three Texas children are non-Anglo (almost all Mexican origin) and that will become even more pronounced in the future. Murdock is a former U.S. Census Bureau Director and is currently the Director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University. Murdock says that Texas is divided into two: an aging Anglo population and a young, almost entirely Mexican origin population. This sets up the mother of all spoils battles: spend on mostly Mexican kids, or aging Whites. The impact of this spoils battle could conceivably, if it spirals out of control, lead to a break-up of the US along racial lines, at worst. Its been predicted, before, by men who are no fringe figures.
Between 2000 and 2040, the state's public school enrollment will see a 15 percent decline in Anglo children while Hispanic children will make up a 213 percent increase, he said.
The state's largest county - Harris - will shed Anglos throughout the coming decades. By 2040, Harris County will have about 516, 000 fewer Anglos than lived in the Houston area in 2000, while the number of Hispanics will increase by 2.5 million during the same period, Murdock said. The projection assumes a net migration rate equal to one-half of 1990-2000.
…
B y 2040, only 20 percent of the state's public school enrollment will be Anglo, he said. Last year, non-Hispanic white children made up 33.3 percent of the state's 4.8 million public school enrollment.
Of the state's 254 counties, 79 recorded declining population during the past 20 years. All are rural. An additional 30 Texas counties, he said, would have also lost population had they not experienced Hispanic growth.
The state's future looks bleak assuming the current trend line does not change because education and income levels for Hispanics lag considerably behind Anglos, he said.
Unless the trend line changes, 30 percent of the state's labor force will not have even a high school diploma by 2040, he said. And the average household income will be about $6,500 lower than it was in 2000. That figure is not inflation adjusted so it will be worse than what it sounds.
"It's a terrible situation that you are in. I am worried," Murdock said.
Whites are defacto minorities in California, Arizona, Texas, and Nevada. In California, Hispanics outnumber Whites absolutely, while in Arizona, Texas, and Nevada about two thirds of children under 14 are Hispanic, and only about a third White. If one believes in unicorns, rainbows, and fairies (the Tinkerbell kind, not the San Francisco leather-bound kind) then this will be no problem. "Magic" will sprinkle pixie dust on Hispanic children, magically making them achieve the same educational levels, same low levels of criminal activity, same economic levels, as the White populations they are replacing. And everyone will dance around singing Kumbayah and holding hands in one giant post-racial party, happy to have conquered "Whiteness." This is the fantasy of the Puritan-Progressive elite, and post-Quakers, the cultural heirs to the New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers. Who believe in a mish-mash of "elect and damned" and "be nice to others, they'll be nice to you." The latter sound advice when your neighbors are the Amish, not so sound when they are MS-13 or the Zetas.
The reality is likely to be quite different. First, flight. As noted extensively in "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, the response of the British Borderers and their "hillbilly" descendants has been first to flee. Then fight when left with no alternative. Fleeing is easier than fighting, and all cultural groups of White people, the New England Puritans, the Virginian Cavaliers, the Mid Atlantic Quakers, and the Appalachian Backwoodsmen, do their utmost to remove themselves culturally, physically, and socially from non-Whites. No group of White people clamors to live in the Ghetto or Barrio, instead they at best in times of high real estate prices urge gentrification, to move those people out of desirable real estate. At other times Whites cluster in exclusively White areas. Appalachian folk tend towards country music, NASCAR, and rural/suburban areas noted for their lack of non-Whites. Mid-Atlantic Quakers and Post Puritan-Progressives enjoy classical music, jazz and the blues (which Blacks have fled from in panic due to White popularity), 80's music, gentrified urban settings and "hip-trendy" outposts like Asheville NC or Austin TX that are nearly exclusively White. [The Cavaliers of Virginia of course are long dead and gone, culturally.] Even the most enthusiastic proponent in Hollywood of "magical Blackness" (that Spike Lee among others complain about) do their utmost to live in lily-White areas: Malibu, Santa Monica, Brentwood, etc. Indeed, at no time has all of White America been so exclusively White, and culturally as well as physically removed from Blacks and Hispanics. You won't find any Whites not even those most enthusiastic about illegal immigration and "the end of Whiteness" watching Sabado Gigante on Univision.
So fleeing will continue, until there is nowhere to flee to, by average Whites. Upper class, more wealthy Whites have already fled to exclusive White urban zones, such as Malibu or NYC's Upper East Side. But flight is not sustainable forever, and the other notable characteristic of the Backwoods folk is their propensity to fight, often to the bitter end, when cornered and their conception of "natural liberty" is infringed upon. Indeed, as the cultural grouping of Backwoods grows, at the expense of the Mid-Atlantic and Puritan-Progressive groupings, the tendency to fight to "protect your liberty" is only going to get stronger, and tinged with pure racial identification.
Being a Puritan-Progressive, or Mid-Atlantic utopianist, takes money and security. Without money to isolate one's self from non-Whites (and those outside your cultural grouping as well) it cannot be sustained. Without physical safety, a strong and efficient police force that crushes any attempt to victimize the White Puritan-Progressive or the Mid-Atlantic Utopian elites, that cultural grouping cannot be sustained. You cannot believe in original racial sin (Whites) and redemption (making Whites minorities in their own countries to get rid of those Backwoodsmen to whom all sin accrues) during a Home Invasion. Or your kid getting beat up at school due to "Whiteness" or any myriad other violent or hostile encounters with non-Whites asserting physical dominance, control, and so on. It is easy to decry the "stupid racism of Hillbillies" in Malibu gated communities and mansions. Much harder to do it when your neighborhood is over-run with MS-13 or the Zetas, and your kids get beat up every day. Or your household income takes massive hits just for private school to keep your kids from a daily beating. Or rising fuel costs force you into daily and bitterly resented contact with hostile non-Whites.
The ascendancy of the Puritan-Progressive and Mid-Atlantic utopian ideals, of pre-destined damned and saved, and magical goodness of non-Whites, depended on constantly rising incomes to produce enough economic margin to grow and convert Whites to that cultural grouping. A sustained downward spiral pushes Whites to nationalism, high rates of physical mobility, intense personal loyalty to a few leaders, and a desire to fight along clan/family/tribal basis for "natural liberty" i.e. the ideal of being left alone, government being merely a means for others, (in this case non-Whites) to oppress ordinary people. Call this the Hillbilly way. The Hillbilly Way tends to grow (a lot) when times turn hard, for a good long spell. [It was the political genius of FDR to pull Hillbillies his way, by deporting every Mexican he could, and preventing Blacks from unionizing or even voting in the same Democratic Primary as Whites, until 1944.]
Cue the spoils fights. There will be a "stuck group" that will not be able to flee to Whitopia, and indeed the Puritan-Progressive and Mid Atlantic Utopianists (motivated by sheer hatred of "the Hillbilly Way" and Hillbillies) have done their best to encourage a "drowning of Whiteness" (and hated cultural rivals) by importing masses of non-Whites, both Mexican illegal aliens, and various non-White refugees, and settling them in places like Idaho, or Wisconsin, or Minnesota, or Maine. Whitopia is no longer so White. Setting up the fight part of flight or fight.
Will an aging White population tax itself basically out of existence, to educate and provide welfare for non-Whites who are as a matter of course, both innately hostile to them and replacing them totally? The answer is no. Nor will a non-White population tax itself, or even devote a smidgen of public funds, to support aging Whites who they both despise and know they will replace. This extends of course to the current budget struggle in California, where Jerry Brown is hinting he'll dump State workers benefits and salaries, already agreed upon, to spend the money on Hispanics: health care, education, and welfare. Even with massive tax increases, the only way to keep spending mountains of money on the California Hispanic population is by gutting the money spent on mostly White state and local government workers.
At its possible worst, this sets the stage for what Igor Panarin predicted: civil war and secession over spoils and public spending. Widely dismissed as naïve and stupid at the time, Panarin (not a fringe figure, rather a respected dean of Russia's academy for diplomats) seems prophetic. While the exact breakdown of a US split and dissolution might be argued, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Simply because there is no example, in all of human history, of a democratic republic being multi-racial and multicultural. At best, brutal dictators who rule with the help of a favored group, by mercilessly hounding the other out-groups, provide the stability of the grave. Tito, Stalin, Mithridates, Caesar Augustus, Ghengis Khan, all come to mind. Human beings simply are not built to trust and trade resources fairly and freely across racial lines in a republic (rights of minorities and dissenters respected) and democracy (majority rule). It has never ever happened in all of human history and culture, which is considerable. Because, quite likely, the kin-based nature of human evolution has pre-disposed us to cooperate on racial/cultural lines: people who reasonably look, act, sound, and otherwise resemble distant cousins. We certainly do have many examples, as Amy Chua's "World on Fire" show, of democratic majorities constantly victimizing minorities. The difference of course is that in the US, the minorities (Whites) are likely to fight back.
Here is what the man had to say (the map at the top of the post is from the WSJ story):
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
Yes, he sounds at least half-way accurate. Financial, demographic, and economic crisis have all hit the US at the same time. Indeed the crisis are largely driven by demographic trends. Replacing Whites with non-Whites would be problematic (based on human nature) if the replacers were wealthier than Whites. Given that they are in fact much poorer and remain so, this makes conflict of some sort (hopefully only political) inevitable.
Of course, violent secession is not set in stone. But neither is it an unlikely fantasy. Fleeing Whites who were in effect ethnically cleansed out of California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Florida are unlikely to be willing to transfer funds from wealthier White states such as Idaho, or South Dakota, to Texas and the rest of the "Mexico Norte" states. Money to be spent on the very people who ethnically cleansed them out of their homes in the first place. Nor is there any way to construct a "grand bargain" -- Hispanics (mostly all Mexicans) spending money to care for an aging White population in exchange for taxes spent to educate poor Mexicans and provide welfare. First, there will not be enough money to go around, the average income gap per household is about $16,000 of White vs. Hispanic in 2009 dollars according to the US Census Bureau. There has been no narrowing the gap over the last twenty years, instead it has only increased. And socially, Hispanics have had growing maladaptive behaviors to increase income: growing not decreasing levels of illegitimacy, growing not decreasing levels of drop out rates, growing not decreasing levels of Spanish only language skills. Meanwhile the burden of providing health, education, and welfare of a desperately poor population of illegal aliens and one only slightly less desperately poor (the children of illegal aliens and every descendant afterwards) increases exponentially.
There would be barely enough money to provide for White social security and other retirement issues (health care). There is without question not enough money to provide for the "Mexicanization" of much of the United States. The health care, education, and welfare needs are so great that even if no money was spent at all on elderly Whites, there would not be enough to go around. Poor people, it seems, cost a lot.
Which means conflict. This conflict can be done by more peaceful means, through political action that makes decisions stick, by forcing those without means and power to fight back to accept a fait-accompli (basically a re-run of the Trail of Tears, some form of mass deportations of the out-group), or a process that spirals out of control into violence. Given the entrenched interests that benefit from Mexicanization of America, and the sheer hatred of "Hillbillies" by Progressive-Puritans and Mid Atlantic Idealists, a good bet is on the latter. Of course, any such process is likely 15 to 25 years out, but it is highly likely at some point. A good many political analysts predicted the Civil War by 1835, and as note by Panarin, the collapse of the USSR by the 1970's. America could no more remain half-slave and half-free as it can half-Mexican-dominated and half-not-Mexican-dominated. The cultural, economic, political, and mass population conflicts in each case make some sort of total loser/total winner outcome, by whatever means, almost inevitable.
In this case, it is worth noting that the US military already remains in the views of some, dangerously isolated and quite angry at much of Establishment America. This story from Politico touches on the divide between "peacetime America" and the Wartime Military. Columbia Students shouted "racist" at a wounded, wheel-chair bound vet who spoke out for ROTC on campus, while others jeered and laughed at his injuries. Meanwhile US Defense Secretary Robert Gates worries:
A decade of constant conflict has trained a junior officer corps with exceptional leadership skills, he told the cadets, but the Army may find it difficult in the future to find inspiring work to retain its rising commanders as it fights for the money to keep large, heavy combat units in the field.
“Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever-expanding array of clerical duties,” Mr. Gates said. “The consequences of this terrify me.”
Hmmm … let me see now. An officer corps, almost exclusively White, Southern/Western, conservative, mirrored fairly completely down to the lowest detail of enlisted men? A feckless, and clueless national leadership intent on massively changing the way of life of pretty much everyone in the country that is also innately hostile to the Military itself? Mixed with an economic crisis, fiscal crisis, and political crisis all tracing their origins to what amounts to complete demographic replacement of Whites by Mexicans in the US, all without any vote or constitutional amendment? Where have I seen anything like this before? Add to this the de-industrialization of the North and North East, and growing move of what little manufacturing there is to Southern and Western states, and things look different than in 1860.
Naturally, and often fortunately, the future does not move in straight lines. Something is endurable, until it becomes un-endurable. Various agitators are effective, or not. Crisis that should have been foreseen, sneak up on everyone while distraction over piddling events reigns. Human error or courage, stupidity or wisdom, change events from a certainty to a new course. Sometimes even natural disasters can take a hand in shaping history. The Kamikaze originally referred to the near-miraculous typhoon that sunk the Mongol Invasion fleet that would have easily conquered Japan. The Monguls were near invincible. Save for water.
So it is possible, and hopeful, that Mexican immigration into this country slows dramatically, and is even reversed. That sudden cutbacks in welfare spending provoke a soul-searching and wrenching amount of changes in Hispanic behavior, with norms of marriage before children, educational striving, and low crime being a sudden radical shift. Anything can happen. Perhaps an early encounter, with the "aging Anglo population" getting its way with fiscal policy, can create a rapid desire for assimilation by the coming Mexican majority.
The smart bet based on Human History, however, says greed and stupidity will preclude any rational attempt to settle a division of resources and control, short of violence and brutal coercion, and America will indeed slide into the conflict envisioned by Igor Panarin. Not of course, right away. But inevitably, as the call of the trumpets at Shiloh and Bull Run and Gettysburg were heard even in 1835, so the siren call of war and conflict is being heard already. Driven by fundamental conflicts.
It is all over for Anglos in Texas. Also California, Arizona, Florida, and probably Illinois. Whites are now the functional minority, in the US. While being the target of non-Whites for resource extraction, the White to non-White gap in income being considerable and growing. Amy Chua's model of "market dominant minorities" will probably hold for Bill Gates kids, and Warren Buffett's, and perhaps even Mitt Romney's kids. But for the great rest of the average White guy, flight will soon turn into fight. Because life as basically a third class citizen in Mexico Norte is worth fighting to avoid, everything else notwithstanding. With conveniently, a great deal of military men who got battlefield training (Lee and the other Southern Commanders all had extensive experience in the Mexican-American War, the Union Officer Corps till Grant and Sherman were time-serving non-entities who had no real combat/leadership experience) and find little else to interest them. While a great deal of the current New England/Mid Atlantic elite holds them in mutual contempt and disgust.
Ultimately, a non-White America will resemble Mexico, only slightly better off. The same levels of corruption, violence, and government services will prevail. With an added feature of ethnically/racially driven violence and government discrimination. Good government, security, prosperity, all cost money. They can only be achieved, history shows us, with an ethnically and culturally unitary, large and dominant middling class that controls the government and directs its spending and aims for its own ends. There is a reason the Philippines and places like it are chaotic, violent, and poor. Despite the ability to punish and extract at times resources from Chua's "Market Dominant Minorities."
In any conflict, moreover, the initiative remains with a more unified, disciplined, experienced, and smarter opponent. Sheer numbers can at times overwhelm, but at other times provide only carnage and cannon fodder. Speed, mobility, surprise, and most critical of all, discipline under chaos tend to produce the most winners, in politics and in war. Conflict of some sort is coming, that much is certain. You cannot have population replacement, a welfare state, and legalized racial caste systems (Whites on bottom) and not have conflict in some form. Let us hope and pray the basic resource division: spend on older Whites or younger Hispanics, is settled short of violence with conclusive finality, through political means, avoids a break-up of the US, and restores a racial unity and peacefulness to America.
...Read more
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Why 2011 is not 1995
The April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing is thought by many Liberals and the Media (the two are interchangeable, for all practical purposes) to mark the beginning of President Clinton's comeback after Republicans retook the House in the 1994 midterm elections. The bombing, and Clinton's blaming of Talk Radio, Rush Limbaugh, and conservatives, was not the reason for his comeback. The Dot-Com bubble, cheap oil prices (West Texas Intermediate spot oil was $17.3 per barrel on July 1, 1995, which would be equivalent to $24.75 today). Nevertheless, the media and liberals both seized on the parallel, because of their tendency to act like a herd (and group-think), making Sarah Palin the Emmanuel Goldstein subject to the two minutes of hate (for Liberals and the Media, the novel "1984" is a how-to manual, not a warning). Which will ultimately fail. Because the modern media smog, while able to nudge culture in ways it wants to go anyway, is not as effective as people think.
Maudlin, emotion-mongering and two minutes of hate against Palin, might stimulate a few for a while but the effects merge into attention over Snooki and the Situation's antics, the doings (such as they are) of the Kardashians, gossip over a reputed catfight between Scarlett Johanssen and Sandra Bullock, and the return of American Idol. Everything seems to merge together into the culture/media smog, and nothing matters. Constant repetition over years can make some ideas seem "reasonable" (such as Hollywood's constant depiction of a Black President as wise, noble, tough, courageous, and redeeming) but only if the culture wants to go there.
Presidents are like football coaches. They have to deliver. And Obama must produce results. Just ask Denny Green, or Perry Fewell, or Herm Edwards, or Mike Singletary. All fired as head coaches. Results matter. The American people, including even SWPL White women, and professional class women, demand at the very least, no erosion in the amount and value of cash in their bank accounts. People like to spend. Buying things might be "retail therapy" but in the stress of isolation of modern life, it matters. The converse is also true, people, even SWPL women and professional class White women, ground zero of PC and "diversity" and multiculturalism, don't tolerate for long a grinding budget battle, in their own personal spending, as rising prices and stagnant wages make their discretionary spending each month, smaller and smaller.
Obama won, over John McCain, largely because the financial crisis under George W. Bush eroded any argument McCain had over competency, particularly given McCain's fairly obvious attempts to hand Obama the Presidency in order to gain the good opinion of the New York Times. But that same process requires Obama to post victories. Not meaningless legislative victories for passing bills (ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, Gays in the Military) that most oppose or don't care about. Instead, Obama has to get the equivalent of wins and playoff victories in the NFL. Or he will get fired.
Muni bonds are crashing, and the outlook for many bonds of this class is not good. Illinois is as much as five months behind payment to some vendors, and is floating a bizarre deal on Wall Street whereupon Investment Banks like Goldman Sachs would pay the vendors upfront, and then earn 1% each month from Illinois until the state can scratch up enough money to pay back the Investment Bank. Special-purpose bonds for say, Harrisburg's incinerator, or water districts, or sewage districts have already defaulted or are in the process of defaulting. Meanwhile, the WSJ reports:
The tax raises in Illinois, to the tune of 75% or more, are unlikely to raise the revenue projected (people will pull in spending, move jobs out of state, and otherwise reduce their tax exposure as much as possible).
Meanwhile OPEC says no relief from oil price rises. The CEO of Gulf Oil believes $150 a barrel for oil is going to be a lengthy reality. Meanwhile there is a global food crisis that is only getting worse as we compete for China and India for food (and other commodities). The overthrow of the Tunisian President is unlikely to be the only fallout of the crisis. Food price rises have not been as dramatic in the US and developed world, but it will hit us eventually. Massive rises in feedstocks such as corn, wheat, and soybeans, up almost 80% (for some feedstock) from a year ago will increase, radically, the cost of meat, dairy, and eggs. Livestock don't exist on unicorn farts and rainbows. Meanwhile cotton prices are at historic highs, and so too are substitutes such as rayon.
What does this mean?
It means the average White professional woman, will be paying considerably more, in taxes (to bail out bankrupt states and municipalities). While shelling out more for gas every week at the pump, and the grocery store. Cotton clothing will be far more expensive, perhaps unaffordable (given 90% price rises from the past year), and rayon too will be far more costly (rayon being a rather inferior substitute for cotton, and far less comfortable). She'll be eating less of what she likes, and more of what she doesn't. Buying far less clothing, and inferior clothes to what she purchased just a few years ago (under George W. Bush).
These key voters, who will form either Obama's victory coalition (pushing him over the top along with Gay, Black, Hispanic, and elite White voters) or margin of defeat. Obama has already lost White male voters, blue collar White voters, while retaining Black and Hispanic voters. The margin of victory or defeat, is contained within the SPWL, professional class White woman voter demographic.
Obama's allies, no doubt Obama himself, and the media, have bet pretty everything that a massive campaign of two minutes of hate against Sarah Palin, maudlin emotion mongering, and blaming the Tea Party, Palin, and Rush Limbaugh for a leftwing nutcase's shooting of an obscure, if youngish White professional female Congresswoman, will be enough to win the votes of the SWPL female demographic.
It is a poor bet. One likely to fail. Yes, making Limbaugh and others in the Conservative movement in 1995 look responsible for Oklahoma City certainly helped with the Gender Gap, and generating White female votes for Democrats. But the real reason Clinton won was cheap gas and a booming economy. And that was with about 300 people killed. In a year, no one will even remember Gabrielle Giffords, sad to say. The American attention span is short. People are concerned mostly about their own economic situation.
Yes, the victims killed in the shooting were ignored, in favor of the photogenic, SWPL-like Congresswoman, to appeal to the emotions (along with the slain nine year old girl) of SWPL women. No doubt that is partially effective. But far more effective is the argument, "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" It cuts to the heart of the matter. Presidents are expected to deliver results, just like football coaches.
Obama, who has NEVER been able to deliver concrete, measurable results to voters, must now play defense, and deliver results. In less than two years. He must drive gas and oil and energy prices down. Considerably. While creating new jobs, wage increases, and an increase in real purchasing power (by increasing earnings more than price rises for commodities). It does not matter if a few million yuppies have enough money to buy new Iphones. What matters is Jane Professional woman, having enough left over after savings, paying for gas, and food, and other necessities, can spend enough to make her feel good without a gnawing anxiety over her personal budget.
Just ask Mike Singletary.
...Read more
Maudlin, emotion-mongering and two minutes of hate against Palin, might stimulate a few for a while but the effects merge into attention over Snooki and the Situation's antics, the doings (such as they are) of the Kardashians, gossip over a reputed catfight between Scarlett Johanssen and Sandra Bullock, and the return of American Idol. Everything seems to merge together into the culture/media smog, and nothing matters. Constant repetition over years can make some ideas seem "reasonable" (such as Hollywood's constant depiction of a Black President as wise, noble, tough, courageous, and redeeming) but only if the culture wants to go there.
Presidents are like football coaches. They have to deliver. And Obama must produce results. Just ask Denny Green, or Perry Fewell, or Herm Edwards, or Mike Singletary. All fired as head coaches. Results matter. The American people, including even SWPL White women, and professional class women, demand at the very least, no erosion in the amount and value of cash in their bank accounts. People like to spend. Buying things might be "retail therapy" but in the stress of isolation of modern life, it matters. The converse is also true, people, even SWPL women and professional class White women, ground zero of PC and "diversity" and multiculturalism, don't tolerate for long a grinding budget battle, in their own personal spending, as rising prices and stagnant wages make their discretionary spending each month, smaller and smaller.
Obama won, over John McCain, largely because the financial crisis under George W. Bush eroded any argument McCain had over competency, particularly given McCain's fairly obvious attempts to hand Obama the Presidency in order to gain the good opinion of the New York Times. But that same process requires Obama to post victories. Not meaningless legislative victories for passing bills (ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, Gays in the Military) that most oppose or don't care about. Instead, Obama has to get the equivalent of wins and playoff victories in the NFL. Or he will get fired.
Muni bonds are crashing, and the outlook for many bonds of this class is not good. Illinois is as much as five months behind payment to some vendors, and is floating a bizarre deal on Wall Street whereupon Investment Banks like Goldman Sachs would pay the vendors upfront, and then earn 1% each month from Illinois until the state can scratch up enough money to pay back the Investment Bank. Special-purpose bonds for say, Harrisburg's incinerator, or water districts, or sewage districts have already defaulted or are in the process of defaulting. Meanwhile, the WSJ reports:
Moody’s said the vendor assistance idea may alleviate near term hardships on the vendors, but will not deal with the underlying problem: the state doesn’t have the cash to pay vendors. The financing scheme essentially shifts the debt from the vendor to a private investor.
The tax raises in Illinois, to the tune of 75% or more, are unlikely to raise the revenue projected (people will pull in spending, move jobs out of state, and otherwise reduce their tax exposure as much as possible).
Meanwhile OPEC says no relief from oil price rises. The CEO of Gulf Oil believes $150 a barrel for oil is going to be a lengthy reality. Meanwhile there is a global food crisis that is only getting worse as we compete for China and India for food (and other commodities). The overthrow of the Tunisian President is unlikely to be the only fallout of the crisis. Food price rises have not been as dramatic in the US and developed world, but it will hit us eventually. Massive rises in feedstocks such as corn, wheat, and soybeans, up almost 80% (for some feedstock) from a year ago will increase, radically, the cost of meat, dairy, and eggs. Livestock don't exist on unicorn farts and rainbows. Meanwhile cotton prices are at historic highs, and so too are substitutes such as rayon.
What does this mean?
It means the average White professional woman, will be paying considerably more, in taxes (to bail out bankrupt states and municipalities). While shelling out more for gas every week at the pump, and the grocery store. Cotton clothing will be far more expensive, perhaps unaffordable (given 90% price rises from the past year), and rayon too will be far more costly (rayon being a rather inferior substitute for cotton, and far less comfortable). She'll be eating less of what she likes, and more of what she doesn't. Buying far less clothing, and inferior clothes to what she purchased just a few years ago (under George W. Bush).
These key voters, who will form either Obama's victory coalition (pushing him over the top along with Gay, Black, Hispanic, and elite White voters) or margin of defeat. Obama has already lost White male voters, blue collar White voters, while retaining Black and Hispanic voters. The margin of victory or defeat, is contained within the SPWL, professional class White woman voter demographic.
Obama's allies, no doubt Obama himself, and the media, have bet pretty everything that a massive campaign of two minutes of hate against Sarah Palin, maudlin emotion mongering, and blaming the Tea Party, Palin, and Rush Limbaugh for a leftwing nutcase's shooting of an obscure, if youngish White professional female Congresswoman, will be enough to win the votes of the SWPL female demographic.
It is a poor bet. One likely to fail. Yes, making Limbaugh and others in the Conservative movement in 1995 look responsible for Oklahoma City certainly helped with the Gender Gap, and generating White female votes for Democrats. But the real reason Clinton won was cheap gas and a booming economy. And that was with about 300 people killed. In a year, no one will even remember Gabrielle Giffords, sad to say. The American attention span is short. People are concerned mostly about their own economic situation.
Yes, the victims killed in the shooting were ignored, in favor of the photogenic, SWPL-like Congresswoman, to appeal to the emotions (along with the slain nine year old girl) of SWPL women. No doubt that is partially effective. But far more effective is the argument, "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" It cuts to the heart of the matter. Presidents are expected to deliver results, just like football coaches.
Obama, who has NEVER been able to deliver concrete, measurable results to voters, must now play defense, and deliver results. In less than two years. He must drive gas and oil and energy prices down. Considerably. While creating new jobs, wage increases, and an increase in real purchasing power (by increasing earnings more than price rises for commodities). It does not matter if a few million yuppies have enough money to buy new Iphones. What matters is Jane Professional woman, having enough left over after savings, paying for gas, and food, and other necessities, can spend enough to make her feel good without a gnawing anxiety over her personal budget.
Just ask Mike Singletary.
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Saturday, January 8, 2011
Obama's Coalition: The Patronage, Stupid!
A fascinating article by National Journal shows how politics in America reflect the patronage that the Democratic (and Republican) party distributes. Whites, except college educated White women, have turned away from Obama, his policies, and Democrats. Meanwhile both Obama and Dems depend on non-Whites, young voters, and college educated women. It's the patronage, stupid, as Clinton might have remarked. Obama's policies create winners and losers among these groups, and the way for Republican victory over Obama and the Dems is to split off the only group they can win: College Educated White Women, by offering them a bigger cut of the pie.
The article covers racial breakdowns of exit polling on Election Day, 2010, purchased by National Journal from Edison Research. The finding were not released previously by media outlets, obviously for fear of illustrating the vast racial divide (and the vast divide in racial spoils). Every political policy creates economic, social, and cultural winners and losers. As federal and state governments have grown, the winners and losers have won and lost ever more in earnings, social power, and cultural attitudes. Coming to a boiling point, likely irrevocably, in Election Day 2010.
First, the core findings. A full sixty percent of Whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, only 37% supported Democrats. This is better (for Republicans) than the 1994 landslide. White voters also posted deep unhappiness with Obama's performance, the Democratic agenda, and widespread skepticism about the expanded role of government Obama and Dems have pushed. Non-Whites expressed almost exactly the opposite attitudes than Whites.
In a non-Presidential election, the Hispanic vote for Dems slipped to 60%, compared to 66% in 2008 for Obama. About 73% of non-Whites voted for Dems. Meanwhile Republicans took 60% of White voters, something never before seen in three decades of tracking by race.
Meanwhile, Republicans, with their 60 percent showing, notched the party’s best congressional result among white voters in the history of modern polling. Media exit polls conducted by Edison Research and its predecessors have been tracking congressional elections for about three decades. In no previous exit poll had Republicans reached 60 percent of the white vote in House races. The University of Michigan’s National Election Studies, a biennial pre- and postelection poll, is another source of data on voting behavior dating to 1948. Republicans had never reached 60 percent of the congressional vote among whites in any NES survey. Only in the NES surveys had Democrats reached that 60 percent congressional support level among white voters: in their 1974 post-Watergate landslide and in Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 rout of Barry Goldwater.
…
First among those was Obama’s performance. Exactly 75 percent of minority voters said they approved; only 22 percent said they disapproved. Among white voters, just 35 percent approved of the president’s performance, while 65 percent disapproved; a head-turning 49 percent of whites said they strongly disapproved. (Those whites voted Republican last fall by a ratio of 18-to-1.)
The racial gulf was similar when voters were asked whether they believed that Obama’s policies would help the nation in the long run. By 70 percent to 22 percent, minorities said yes; by 61 percent to 34 percent, whites said no. On election night, much attention focused on the exit-poll result that showed voters divided almost exactly in half on whether Congress should repeal the comprehensive health care reform legislation that Obama signed last year or should preserve or even expand it. But that convergence obscured a profound racial contrast. The vast majority of minority voters said they wanted lawmakers to expand the health care law (54 percent) or maintain it in its current form (16 percent), while only 24 percent said they wanted Congress to repeal it. Among white voters, the sentiments were almost inverted: 56 percent said that lawmakers should repeal the law, while much smaller groups wanted them to expand it (23 percent) or leave it alone (just 16 percent).
The gap was also wide in attitudes about two fundamental tenets. Minorities were almost exactly twice as likely as whites to say that life would be better for the next generation than for their own; whites were considerably more likely to say that it would be more difficult. And on a question measuring bedrock beliefs about the role of government, the two racial groups again registered almost mirror-image preferences. Sixty percent of minorities said that government should be doing more to solve problems; 63 percent of whites said that government is doing too many things that would be better left to businesses and individuals.
Clearly, most Whites do not relish being, as Obama has pushed forward, the numerical minority in their own country, in their own lifetime, and being told, as Obama said recently, to "get to the back of the bus." Just as clearly, Whites can figure that a Government run health care plan will generally, screw them over in order to provide more or better care to non-Whites (principally, illegal aliens, who are uninsured at present and likely make up most of the uninsured in America). Whites (particularly White males) are not likely to be able to get jobs in Government, absent high-level political connections (such as Obama Car Czar Steve Rattner, just recently settling a record fine with the SEC and NY AG office for securities fraud). The transformation of America from a mostly private enterprise, small business oriented nation to one of giant corporations and government, makes life good for non-Whites (who gain massive preferences and privileges) but hurts Whites.
This is "baked in the cake" of Democratic politics, though Obama has pushed it farther than most, including Bill Clinton. You cannot construct a massive government run system controlling most of the economy and have Affirmative Action and other myriad preferences and not hurt Whites, particularly Blue Collar White men and women and White collar men. White women with college educations are another matter, as we'll see, but this is the essence of Democratic policies: helping non-Whites by hurting Whites.
Measured both geographically and demographically, these new exit-poll results show that Democrats maintained openings in only slivers of the white electorate. In House elections, the bottom fell out for Democrats in both the South (where they won just 24 percent of whites) and the Midwest (37 percent). The party remained relatively more competitive along the coasts, capturing 46 percent of white voters in the East and 43 percent in the West.
A separate National Journal analysis of the results from exit polls in Senate elections found similar trends. Edison Research conducted exit polls last year in 26 Senate races; in 19 of them, the Democratic Senate candidate won a smaller share of the white vote than President Obama captured in the state two years earlier. Democratic Senate candidates carried a majority of white voters in just seven races and reached 45 percent of the vote in only two more. Except for West Virginia, those states were all near an ocean (or, in Hawaii’s case, in one).
Democrats have been losing support among blue-collar white voters since the 1960s, but in this election, they hit one of their lowest points ever. In House campaigns, the exit poll found, noncollege whites preferred Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 with virtually no gender gap: White working-class women—the so-called waitress moms—gave Republicans almost exactly as many of their votes as blue-collar men did.
These blue-collar whites expressed profound resistance to Obama and his agenda. Just 30 percent of them said they approved of the president’s job performance (compared with 69 percent who disapproved). Two-thirds of them said that government is doing too many things. An approximately equal number said that Obama’s agenda will hurt the country over the long term. Only about one-fifth of these voters said that the stimulus had helped the economy, and 57 percent wanted to repeal the health care law—even though they are uninsured at much higher rates than whites with more advanced education. [Emphasis added]
Well, color this obvious. The transformation of the Democrats from the FDR/Pat Brown dam-builders, road builders, University of California (aimed squarely at White middle and working class people under Pat Brown) … to Jerry Brown and Barack Obama, pushing paper studies, endless race/gender/gay wars over preferences against what Ace of Spades termed "Straight White Married guys" and a government that only produces paper reports, not actual infrastructure built by and for the White middle and working class, was bound to create a backlash by the Blue collar White demographic.
The Senate races, as the National Journal article points out, were different in only a few places. Barbara Boxer of California, and Michael Bennet of Colorado, won despite carrying only 33% or so of Working Class White voters. Russ Feingold in Wisconsin did as well as Boxer and Bennet did among non-Whites, and better than they did among Working Class White voters, about 40%. What doomed him was that there were fewer college educated White women in Wisconsin. Which is why he is now ex-Senator Feingold, and Bennet and Boxer were returned to office.
Democratic support in the heartland, cratered even among college educated Whites. Along the coasts, and Upper Midwest, the Democrats retained about 50% to 45% (depending on region) of college educated White voters. Everywhere else, Democrats did far worse (under 45% support for college educated Whites).
Critical to this difference was the kind of college educated people in key states. In places where Democrats won Senate races, it seems they had far more college educated White women, who are traditionally far more liberal than their male peers.
White-collar men and women also parted ways much more significantly than their blue-collar counterparts did. College-educated white men backed Republican House candidates and registered negative views of Obama’s job performance as overwhelmingly as blue-collar whites did. College-educated white women, though not immune to these trends, displayed more resistance. Although traditionally the most liberal portion of the white electorate, even these women cooled toward Democrats last year. In contrast to the majority support they provided Obama in 2008, they voted 55 percent to 43 percent for Republicans in 2010 House races. In the exit poll, most of them agreed that government was trying to do too much, and a slim majority of them said they wanted Congress to repeal the health care law.
In key Senate races, however, especially in culturally more liberal states, these women backed Democrats in substantial numbers. Both Bennet and Boxer, for instance, carried about three-fifths of this bloc, which proved essential to their victories. Obama’s popularity among these college-educated women deteriorated, but in the exit polling, 45 percent of them still said they approved of his performance, far higher than the rate among most other whites. [Emphasis added, and note Obama's approval by all Whites was at 35%. meaning College Educated White Women approve of Obama by a full ten points higher than Whites in general.]
As the article notes:
Minorities, most important, more than doubled their share of the vote from 12 percent in 1992 to 26 percent in 2008. In his victory that year, Obama won only 43 percent of the white vote (and merely 40 percent among noncollege whites). Yet he captured a larger share of the overall popular vote than any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 by winning 80 percent of that growing pool of nonwhite voters, along with majorities among whites under 30 and college-educated white women.
America is now racially, class/gender, and geographically divided. Non-Whites are growing rapidly, but the growth still remains mostly in the coasts and upper Midwest. College educated White women generally flock to where there are lots of non-Whites, and massive urban centers with lots of wealth and "proper" or "respectable" jobs in fashion, media, finance, corporate HR, government, and entertainment. This is Obama's coalition. The people who vote for him, and Democrats, because they get rewarded. More government (to help pick winners and losers, ala Steve Rattner, or George Soros, or any other Hedge Fund or I-Bank bigshot) that also helps non-Whites, and college educated White women, by hurting White men (both Blue and White collar).
As pointed out in the article:
But Wadhams quickly adds that Obama might be able to persuade some of those voters to support him anyway in 2012 if Republicans select a nominee they find unacceptable, particularly on social issues. Wadhams has painful recent experience with that phenomenon: Despite widespread dissatisfaction with Washington, Bennet won reelection to the Senate last fall partly because so many white-collar Colorado suburbanites (especially women) found Ken Buck, his tea party-infused Republican opponent, too conservative on abortion and other issues. “If our presidential nominee in 2012 … appears too extreme on abortion or gay marriage or some other social issue, there’s a slice of the electorate that clearly could go back to Obama,” Wadhams worries.
…
More specifically—and perhaps more revealingly—Axelrod also has his eye on the Colorado example, where the exit poll found that Bennet lost blue-collar white women by double digits and blue-collar white men by more than 2-to-1. Yet he prevailed by amassing strong support from young people, Hispanics, and other minorities; holding his deficit among college-educated white men to single digits; and routing Buck among college-educated white women. A similar formula, Axelrod suggests, could be available to Obama in 2012, especially if the Republican presidential primary process, as he expects, tugs the eventual GOP nominee toward the right. “The Bennet thing was particularly instructive,” Axelrod said. “They made a big effort there not only among Hispanics but women. The contrast he drew with Buck was very meaningful. That’s why I say the gravitational pull of those Republican primaries is going to be very significant.”
From Axelrod's statements in the article, it would seem that Obama will go all out to cobble together again the anti-White Guy coalition that brought him victory in the first place. More Affirmative Action (to help non-Whites by hurting White guys), more government growth (to help non-Whites and college educated Women by hurting White guys), more importation of Mexico's desperately poor and uneducated, Amnesty, more regulations (more paperwork for the college Educated White women and selected non-Whites to oversee), and more insider picking and choosing of winners (for hedge fund and I-bank windfalls). There will be no move to the center, just re-assembling of what Obama has done all his life: play the anti-White guy card. That is who he is, and it is who the Democrats are.
The battleground will be College Educated White women. They, and they alone, will determine if America slides into a Yugoslavia style ethnic conflict, inevitably, as White voters become more and more tribal as the lose out … on pretty much everything, as numerical minorities in a system designed from the ground up to punish them (for bad things Whites did to Black people fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago).
While seriously difficult, appealing to these voters by conservative Republicans is not impossible. As I've previously discussed, Republicans must go Hunk and avoid female candidates. White women college educated voters have resoundingly rejected the Carly Fiorinas, the Meg Whitmans, the Sharon Angles, and the Christine O'Donnells. RINO, hard right, working class, Ivy League, attractive, unattractive, working stiff, or corporate bigshot, it did not matter. White college educated women don't like these candidates. Avoid them.
Instead, go hunk. College educated White women are still … women. A hunk, with a positive, sunny, Alpha Male attitude of bigshot-ism, is catnip for these voters. Even very conservative, pro-life positions can be swallowed whole (Marco Rubio) if the guy is a hunk, and even better a hunk and non-White (College educated White women voters detest Beta Males).
College educated White women are naturally sympathetic, and like non-Whites, seeing them as allies against their main enemy: Beta Male White guys. The latter acting as both competition for White collar jobs, and lacking any sex appeal while constantly bothering them for dates and such. This SNL skit with Tom Brady illustrates the double standard that exists. [Sorry, can't embed it.] Besides, the cultural clues all point to how lowly Beta Male White guys are: they are the one group that is mocked and disparaged mercilessly. The lowest on the totem pole of Multiculturalism and Diversity and PC.
But beyond mere sex and race appeal (nothing is more undesirable for College Educated White women than Beta White guys, while non-Whites get cultural/social boosts from the better way they are treated), College Educated White women have specific economic interests that are different from, and indeed in opposition to, those of the rest of Obama's coalition: non-Whites.
College Educated White women are at the bottom of the PC/Diversity preference list. They are vulnerable to being pushed out by non-Whites, who have more preference and legal standing our PC caste system. After all, the Supreme Court under Sandra Day O'Connor held under Grutter v Bollinger that is acceptable to discriminate AGAINST Whites (even White women) in the interests of promoting "diversity" and a "critical mass" of non-White students at the University of Michigan Law School, and other places besides. While absolute quotas are out, anything else is pretty much in. Thus, extreme anxiety among College Educated White women about their place and security, and the most rabid support for anti-White guy politics and culture (to affirm their place and beg not to be kicked out for a person of color).
Women are risk averse, generally, compared to men, so offering better opportunities under conservative politics is not going to be a winning hand. Relatively few women played the Dot-Com gamble, after all. Despite the big winnings for those who rolled the dice. Losing was too hard. Instead conservatives and Republicans need to play on the fears of College Educated White women, of losing their place to a person of color. But do so skillfully, so their targets (College Educated White Women) can deny their votes and political actions are taken out of fear (rational in any case) of losing their place to a person of color.
A great way to do this is to use the H1-B visa issue as a wedge between this voting group and Democrats. Conservatives and Republicans should proclaim that Dems and Obama plan to massively increase H1-B hiring in finance, accounting, media, fashion, entertainment, corporate HR, and government, all the places where College educated White women work. To "save money" and pay for ObamaCare with the savings, either direct government expenditure or corporate efficiency (more profits equaling more tax revenues). Republicans can offer then to "save" the patriotic, American worker from the threat of foreign workers "taking their job" and aim it squarely at College Educated White women.
They live in fear, anyway, that they will be found not PC enough, and replaced with someone who is non-White, and thus much more preferred in our complex PC caste system, that has both legal and cultural backing. Make the fear explicit, and cast in terms of patriotism (who can be FOR replacing US workers with foreign ones) that allows this voting group (College Educated White women) to vote their real fears without actually naming it.
Just make sure the Republican Candidate is non-White, and a hunk. Older guys, and women, need not apply. Because College Educated White women will not vote for them. Care also has to be taken not to create fear the other way (the government related employment of College educated White women must not be threatened). Downsizing the government should be carefully positioned as aimed at ObamaCare (which does not yet have massive employment patronage) and various corporate winners-losers picking. Not the "nice White lady" working in education, or some nothing policy department.
A certain loser is going after non-Whites. They'll never vote for Republicans, why would they? They win in a nation where the anti-White guy policies slice the pie to their advantage. No rhetoric will sway them from the reality of a much bigger slice of the pie under Democrats. Meanwhile College Educated White women have rational fears their slice of pie can be taken away at any time. This should be played up as much as possible, with a nice, hunky Alpha Male to sell it.
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Sunday, December 12, 2010
The George Clooney Effect: Female Hypergamy Confirmed
In a story that might as well be titled, "Beta Males Can't Win," Science Daily reports on a new study of women's mate preferences. To the utter surprise of no one, older, higher earning women don't want beta males, or even for that matter hot young guys (they certainly cannot get them, Demi Moore no exception). Nope, they want in effect, George Clooney. Men even older than themselves, and even more successful. This preference makes sense.
Women, no matter how much they protest, don't want or need equalist marriages or want a partner of roughly equal attractiveness and status and age. Women with options (their own independent earnings) confirm this with their choices:
As women now out-number men in the workforce, and out-earn them, this means even more soft-harem forming. Women, as they age out of the younger bad boys, pursue the George Clooneys as they start to earn serious money. Unsurprisingly, the beta male age-peers, who are the same age, same level of attractiveness, and so on, are simply invisible. Or, quite likely, an annoyance given interest that is not shared. Certainly, women don't find men who are the same as they are in status (which includes, looks, wealth, power, and age) exciting.
What matters to women most when choosing partners unconstrained by money/social pressure, is power. Power that comes from social dominance, fame, money, or anything else that a George Clooney type would possess. Including, looks. For which almost anything can be excused. Even Gay Rosie O'Donnell makes excuses for John Edwards, saying he suffered the most, instead of his late wife Elizabeth Edwards. Consider Charlie Sheen. A man who has a questionable history with women at best, considering the accidental shooting of then-girlfriend Kelly Preston, the allegations of abuse and violence by ex-wife Denise Richards, the arrest for putting a knife to his second wife's throat on Christmas Day (and threatening to kill her), and the account of the woman (a porn star) terrified of Sheen in his hotel room rampage. One would think this record would make Sheen toxic to the female audience, but his series Two and a Half Men is hitting new ratings highs. Sheen remains the "good looking bad boy" women aim to tame.
If China has a long-term problem on its hands, with a lot of men who will never marry, and won't as Mark Steyn notes, being turning into the world's first Gay Superpower since Sparta, the US similarly has a problem. Lots and lots of beta males, who even if they strive hard are not even the preference to their female peers, will be at loose ends. With, quite likely the power of the internet and sites like Roissy's and others to explain the reasons why (things worked out so differently for them than their fathers), a built in incentive to change things. So that they are Alpha.
Call it another Silverado Moment.
If the reality of illegal immigration is such that, the only way to create a balanced budget in the States, and not have taxes be so sky-high that they are confiscatory to average working people, is simple deportation of illegals (and their children) regardless of anything else, well then the same holds true for the position of beta males. If it is all about the money (and it always is), then public outlays decrease radically for education, health, welfare, and prison/corrections by simply deporting illegals (and their children, even if they are US citizens) back to Mexico. Eventually States will start doing it, not the least of which is that rule of law cannot exist with some laws not applying (to Mexican nationals) and all other laws applying to a selected few on the bottom of the PC totem pole (Whites and particularly Straight White Beta guys). If the law does not exist, for Mexicans entering the US illegally and working illegally and putting their families on the taxpayer's support, but does exist for those expected to pay out that support, ultimately the law does not exist at all. And Mexicans, eventually, will be deported, one way or another. As White guilt fades and Lifeboat Economics moves to the forefront.
But just as certain is that the same Beta Males are unlikely to stop there. If the problem is the equalist status between men and women, a few will certainly follow PUA guru advice and move to become an Alpha Male. By changing their posture, clothes, personality, and essentially lie about everything:
Yes, women HATE HATE HATE Beta Males (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) They'd prefer that they all be Gay, or gone from the planet. This is almost entirely because, yes, most men are their equal, or indeed inferior in power and status. A few men can make the leap (which has considerable cost as seen above) into Alpha Male status, basically a performance that implies superior status due to superior social power, or network, or looks, or any combination. Even fewer men are lucky enough to be born natural Alphas, the Tom Bradys and such. Early maturers, physically, gifted at Athletics, dominant in some way, so that they have women throwing themselves at them from age 15 onwards and never look back.
Everyone else is likely to come to the same conclusion. It would be better for them if their status were higher. And the only way to do that is to make most women's status lower. By destroying the female job-base: health, education, welfare, marketing, corporate finance, advertising, media, etc. Remaking the economy into one dominated by men: resource extraction, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, engineering. Or, in reality TV terms, destroying the Kardashians and making all of America look like Ice Road Truckers or Axe Men.
If China has a built-in pool of angry young men looking for an outlet of aggression and figuring it would be a very good thing for China to conquer Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, and other places with attractive women nearby, so maybe they can get a girlfriend (by the age old method of killing the boyfriends of said women in the near-abroad), the US has its own problem. Beta males by and large are unattached to most women. A married man would never contemplate destroying his wife's livelihood -- she brings in home money required to run the household, and live better. A single man, contemplating the hard hurdle to become in effect, George Clooney (not in the cards for about 90% of all Beta Males, or about 81% of all men), can figure its better to simply remake the economy so HE is in effect George Clooney by taking down the earnings and income and social position of most of his age peer (and younger) women.
Gone would be jobs in media, in entertainment, in government, in most health and education and welfare roles. Gone would be jobs in corporate HR, or diversity, or any such thing. Welfare for single mothers? Why? Not their kids. Corporate finance and HR and marketing jobs? Move to trim them (by taxing them). Put costs right on top of the entertainment industry to make it a broken shell. The same for media companies, and fashion, and the like.
Now, this effort is unlikely to be successful, in and of itself, but it will certainly be attempted. Men are not stupid, and the bigger the group of beta singletons, unattached (and thus uncaring) towards women (and a particular woman), and the longer that cohort ages, the more they will push for this policy. It won't be labeled as such. The measures will be "fiscally responsible" or "work to welfare" or "improving productivity" or "revenue neutral" but there will be a sizable group of beta men wanting their own preferences by pushing down their female peer's.
Beta males cannot become George Clooney (which is what their age peers in their thirties and older seem to want). Only a select few can create that wealth/power/looks premium that women demand. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's wealthy billionaire founder, has less social power and attraction than say, Grade Z actor Jared Leto. While Sorkin's movie was completely untruthful about how Facebook was created and developed ("the Social Network") he did capture one unpleasant truth: when women have their own money, power, and status, only the most massively dominant of men are attractive. Mere money and brains makes one an afterthought, even at Zuckerberg's levels. The dog that is not barking there, is the complete lack of women throwing themselves at Zuckerberg. Compared to even fairly pathetic guys like … Charlie Sheen or Ashton Kutcher.
Nope. Beta males won't be able to remake themselves into Clooney. Or Sheen, or even Kutcher. But they can reduce their female peers, or at least try to. In this, they are likely to be helped by the "Rendezvous with Scarcity" that Ed Driscoll has predicted. In a later post I will identify the factors driving scarcity of almost everything, from investment capital, to natural gas, to oil, to food, and clothing. But suffice it to say that even marginal improvements in China's average income means a lot more competition for scarce resources, and the likelihood of economic autarky and trade bloc moat building. India and Russia have already banned sugar and wheat exports, respectively, due to bad harvests and the politically sensible desire to keep domestic prices as low as possible. The whole female-dominated super-structure of marketing, advertising, corporate finance, HR, fashion, and the rest including the Kardashians and Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus is coming to an end in a long-lasting age of scarcity and massive international resource competition.
As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's right hand man says, the power of incentives in shaping human behavior is massive. If Beta males cannot become George Clooney, and are not tied to women's income (single men) they are likely to demand their own status become much higher by remaking the economic and social order in any crisis coming to hand. And the new international system hard-wiring instability globally into the US and the West guarantees there will be no lack of shocks and crisis.
If the social order can muddle through, without any real stress, if the economy magically recovers, everyone goes back to work, and the old social-economic-political alliance of White Women, various non-Whites, and connected White social elites, reasserts itself by producing economic good times, of course there is zero chance of Beta males remaking the system. But in a crisis, the old values are upended. New ones come to the fore, when its to the lifeboats. In J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun," pickpockets and thieves rule the Japanese run internment camps for the British and other Western Whites, not the old elites who have no ability to provide food and survival in a brutal new environment. If the markets decide that the US Government cannot repay the implied debt of the States and localities on top of its own debt, without massive inflation or repudiation (same thing), or oil, gas, food, cotton, and money shocks occur, or war breaks out somewhere sensitive (Korea, the Persian Gulf), then it is to the lifeboats. Events themselves will drive survival, and the "thieves and pickpockets," the lowest of the low, (beta White males) are unlikely to return to old ways of deference and social order once one storm has passed and another gathers.
But clearly, everything has its cost, everything is connected, and everything in turn has an effect on everything else. Women's choices in men, preferring George Clooney, are in turn inexorably driving the 81% of all men that excludes into behavior designed to make them that powerful. One way or another.
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Women, no matter how much they protest, don't want or need equalist marriages or want a partner of roughly equal attractiveness and status and age. Women with options (their own independent earnings) confirm this with their choices:
The finding suggests that greater financial independence gives women greater confidence in choosing their partner. Instinctive preferences for material stability and security become less important, physical attractiveness becomes more important, and the age of partner women pick also increases.
"The behaviour of men and women does become more similar as women earn more, but only in terms of the importance of physical attraction," Dr Moore added. "But the similarities stop there: greater income makes women prefer even older men, and men prefer even younger women."
As women now out-number men in the workforce, and out-earn them, this means even more soft-harem forming. Women, as they age out of the younger bad boys, pursue the George Clooneys as they start to earn serious money. Unsurprisingly, the beta male age-peers, who are the same age, same level of attractiveness, and so on, are simply invisible. Or, quite likely, an annoyance given interest that is not shared. Certainly, women don't find men who are the same as they are in status (which includes, looks, wealth, power, and age) exciting.
What matters to women most when choosing partners unconstrained by money/social pressure, is power. Power that comes from social dominance, fame, money, or anything else that a George Clooney type would possess. Including, looks. For which almost anything can be excused. Even Gay Rosie O'Donnell makes excuses for John Edwards, saying he suffered the most, instead of his late wife Elizabeth Edwards. Consider Charlie Sheen. A man who has a questionable history with women at best, considering the accidental shooting of then-girlfriend Kelly Preston, the allegations of abuse and violence by ex-wife Denise Richards, the arrest for putting a knife to his second wife's throat on Christmas Day (and threatening to kill her), and the account of the woman (a porn star) terrified of Sheen in his hotel room rampage. One would think this record would make Sheen toxic to the female audience, but his series Two and a Half Men is hitting new ratings highs. Sheen remains the "good looking bad boy" women aim to tame.
If China has a long-term problem on its hands, with a lot of men who will never marry, and won't as Mark Steyn notes, being turning into the world's first Gay Superpower since Sparta, the US similarly has a problem. Lots and lots of beta males, who even if they strive hard are not even the preference to their female peers, will be at loose ends. With, quite likely the power of the internet and sites like Roissy's and others to explain the reasons why (things worked out so differently for them than their fathers), a built in incentive to change things. So that they are Alpha.
Call it another Silverado Moment.
If the reality of illegal immigration is such that, the only way to create a balanced budget in the States, and not have taxes be so sky-high that they are confiscatory to average working people, is simple deportation of illegals (and their children) regardless of anything else, well then the same holds true for the position of beta males. If it is all about the money (and it always is), then public outlays decrease radically for education, health, welfare, and prison/corrections by simply deporting illegals (and their children, even if they are US citizens) back to Mexico. Eventually States will start doing it, not the least of which is that rule of law cannot exist with some laws not applying (to Mexican nationals) and all other laws applying to a selected few on the bottom of the PC totem pole (Whites and particularly Straight White Beta guys). If the law does not exist, for Mexicans entering the US illegally and working illegally and putting their families on the taxpayer's support, but does exist for those expected to pay out that support, ultimately the law does not exist at all. And Mexicans, eventually, will be deported, one way or another. As White guilt fades and Lifeboat Economics moves to the forefront.
But just as certain is that the same Beta Males are unlikely to stop there. If the problem is the equalist status between men and women, a few will certainly follow PUA guru advice and move to become an Alpha Male. By changing their posture, clothes, personality, and essentially lie about everything:
In the relationship that ended three months ago, I had made the mistake of taking women at their word when they say they want you to be honest about your feelings. Well, I guess women aren’t exactly lying when they say this; it’s more that they just don’t mean it the way you assume. Women do in fact want you to be honest about your feelings, but it’s not so they can love you better—it’s so they know whether to dump your pathetic ass. Women want you to be honest about your feelings the way the IRS wants you to be honest about your finances. What I realized too late was that it was totally within my power to keep that relationship going. All I would have had to do was lie about what I’m really thinking every moment for the rest of my life.
Yes, women HATE HATE HATE Beta Males (you knew it was coming, didn't you?) They'd prefer that they all be Gay, or gone from the planet. This is almost entirely because, yes, most men are their equal, or indeed inferior in power and status. A few men can make the leap (which has considerable cost as seen above) into Alpha Male status, basically a performance that implies superior status due to superior social power, or network, or looks, or any combination. Even fewer men are lucky enough to be born natural Alphas, the Tom Bradys and such. Early maturers, physically, gifted at Athletics, dominant in some way, so that they have women throwing themselves at them from age 15 onwards and never look back.
Everyone else is likely to come to the same conclusion. It would be better for them if their status were higher. And the only way to do that is to make most women's status lower. By destroying the female job-base: health, education, welfare, marketing, corporate finance, advertising, media, etc. Remaking the economy into one dominated by men: resource extraction, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, engineering. Or, in reality TV terms, destroying the Kardashians and making all of America look like Ice Road Truckers or Axe Men.
If China has a built-in pool of angry young men looking for an outlet of aggression and figuring it would be a very good thing for China to conquer Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, and other places with attractive women nearby, so maybe they can get a girlfriend (by the age old method of killing the boyfriends of said women in the near-abroad), the US has its own problem. Beta males by and large are unattached to most women. A married man would never contemplate destroying his wife's livelihood -- she brings in home money required to run the household, and live better. A single man, contemplating the hard hurdle to become in effect, George Clooney (not in the cards for about 90% of all Beta Males, or about 81% of all men), can figure its better to simply remake the economy so HE is in effect George Clooney by taking down the earnings and income and social position of most of his age peer (and younger) women.
Gone would be jobs in media, in entertainment, in government, in most health and education and welfare roles. Gone would be jobs in corporate HR, or diversity, or any such thing. Welfare for single mothers? Why? Not their kids. Corporate finance and HR and marketing jobs? Move to trim them (by taxing them). Put costs right on top of the entertainment industry to make it a broken shell. The same for media companies, and fashion, and the like.
Now, this effort is unlikely to be successful, in and of itself, but it will certainly be attempted. Men are not stupid, and the bigger the group of beta singletons, unattached (and thus uncaring) towards women (and a particular woman), and the longer that cohort ages, the more they will push for this policy. It won't be labeled as such. The measures will be "fiscally responsible" or "work to welfare" or "improving productivity" or "revenue neutral" but there will be a sizable group of beta men wanting their own preferences by pushing down their female peer's.
Beta males cannot become George Clooney (which is what their age peers in their thirties and older seem to want). Only a select few can create that wealth/power/looks premium that women demand. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's wealthy billionaire founder, has less social power and attraction than say, Grade Z actor Jared Leto. While Sorkin's movie was completely untruthful about how Facebook was created and developed ("the Social Network") he did capture one unpleasant truth: when women have their own money, power, and status, only the most massively dominant of men are attractive. Mere money and brains makes one an afterthought, even at Zuckerberg's levels. The dog that is not barking there, is the complete lack of women throwing themselves at Zuckerberg. Compared to even fairly pathetic guys like … Charlie Sheen or Ashton Kutcher.
Nope. Beta males won't be able to remake themselves into Clooney. Or Sheen, or even Kutcher. But they can reduce their female peers, or at least try to. In this, they are likely to be helped by the "Rendezvous with Scarcity" that Ed Driscoll has predicted. In a later post I will identify the factors driving scarcity of almost everything, from investment capital, to natural gas, to oil, to food, and clothing. But suffice it to say that even marginal improvements in China's average income means a lot more competition for scarce resources, and the likelihood of economic autarky and trade bloc moat building. India and Russia have already banned sugar and wheat exports, respectively, due to bad harvests and the politically sensible desire to keep domestic prices as low as possible. The whole female-dominated super-structure of marketing, advertising, corporate finance, HR, fashion, and the rest including the Kardashians and Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus is coming to an end in a long-lasting age of scarcity and massive international resource competition.
As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's right hand man says, the power of incentives in shaping human behavior is massive. If Beta males cannot become George Clooney, and are not tied to women's income (single men) they are likely to demand their own status become much higher by remaking the economic and social order in any crisis coming to hand. And the new international system hard-wiring instability globally into the US and the West guarantees there will be no lack of shocks and crisis.
If the social order can muddle through, without any real stress, if the economy magically recovers, everyone goes back to work, and the old social-economic-political alliance of White Women, various non-Whites, and connected White social elites, reasserts itself by producing economic good times, of course there is zero chance of Beta males remaking the system. But in a crisis, the old values are upended. New ones come to the fore, when its to the lifeboats. In J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun," pickpockets and thieves rule the Japanese run internment camps for the British and other Western Whites, not the old elites who have no ability to provide food and survival in a brutal new environment. If the markets decide that the US Government cannot repay the implied debt of the States and localities on top of its own debt, without massive inflation or repudiation (same thing), or oil, gas, food, cotton, and money shocks occur, or war breaks out somewhere sensitive (Korea, the Persian Gulf), then it is to the lifeboats. Events themselves will drive survival, and the "thieves and pickpockets," the lowest of the low, (beta White males) are unlikely to return to old ways of deference and social order once one storm has passed and another gathers.
But clearly, everything has its cost, everything is connected, and everything in turn has an effect on everything else. Women's choices in men, preferring George Clooney, are in turn inexorably driving the 81% of all men that excludes into behavior designed to make them that powerful. One way or another.
...Read more
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Netflix's Choice and the Return of Louis B. Mayer
The usually reliable Edward Jay Epstein has a new column up at the Wrap detailing the transition Netflix is undergoing. Netflix currently spends around $500 million a year in postage mailing out DVDs and receiving them back. This also requires obviously, distribution centers, and along with an average price of $15 per DVD, accounts for operating profit of about 12%.
Steaming, obviously, is cheaper. No postage fees, no rate hikes in postage, instant gratification. The only problem being that Hollywood is charging premium prices for streaming rights (Netflix can simply buy DVDs from wholesalers and rent them out without costly rights fees). As Epstein notes:
Of course, Netflix can do something else. Create its own content. Which, in order to make money, would have to be very popular. Yes, HBO, Time-Warner Cable (HBO's Parent), Amazon, Itunes/Apple, Hulu, Google/Youtube, are all Netflix competitors, as Epstein notes. Competing on price for streaming, and on every platform: smartphones, Ipads, tablets, TV sets connected to the internet, gaming devices, and more. Netflix very likely has few illusions on this matter. But … they can create their own content.
And that can be their great competitive advantage.
Most entertainment is junk, which also loses money. Hollywood's movie system depends almost entirely on a few mega-hits: Transformers, Iron Man, and other male-oriented action movies, along with Twilight, and a few other female oriented romance movies. Stuff like "the Reader" or "the Woodsman" or "Ghost Writer" don't make money, even if they do win awards and get Hollywood's execs their next job (by catering to stars egos). Among TV series, a few mega-popular reality shows like American Idol make a lot of money (American Idol is estimated to add about $200-$300 million to Fox's bottom line). The repeat value or desire to see these on devices other than TV, live, is fairly low, however. A few other shows like NCIS, and Desperate Housewives, generate high ad dollar purchases by sponsors, and thus make money. But again, the desire by consumers to purchase these shows is fairly low.
What Netflix can do, then, is exploit the gap in broad entertainment people will pay modest amounts to view, by creating their own. Epstein, like many in and around Hollywood, over-estimates the barriers to creating original content. And the sea change a producer like Netflix which cannot survive in the Hollywood model and MUST create broadly popular entertainment across its offerings to prosper against a host of rivals. Which, amounts to a return to mass culture, and the end of niche culture and "de-massification."
Netflix is not HBO. HBO depends on keeping heads of households "happy" by offering female-skewing "edgy" content not available anywhere else. Alpha males in full a-hole glory: Tony Soprano, the folks of "Rome" and so on. HBO, of course, is available in almost all TV households but less than 30% actually pay for it. HBO gets paid if people watch their content or not. It's been very profitable, but depends on lots of excess cash among high income consumers expressing a desire to be "different." Making it vulnerable to economic downsizing and consumers being pressed into dropping the service (and cable altogether). Cable cutting, a real phenomena, is already occurring at the lower end of the income spectrum, as the cost of living inflates while income remains stagnant.
HBO depends on a large pool of high-income consumers expressing their niche content desire by paying premium prices for niche content consumption. That is not Netflix's mass consumer model. Near-premium cable folks like FX, or AMC, rely on keeping their channels as part of the basic subscription model, and thus follow HBO's model: AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad (Alpha male assholes appealing to women), or Nip/Tuck, Damages (Alpha female) fit that model. Mad Men famously got less than 1 million viewers per episode the first season. Yet it was considered a massive success (generating lots of publicity) and was easily renewed. Because AMC gets paid if people watch the channel or not. Again, that's not Netflix's model.
The limits of the HBO model (you cannot grow beyond the niche consumption of high end consumers) and the near-premium cable model of AMC and FX and others, come with risks of being unable to compete on price in a prolonged recession/depression. These entities depend like Hollywood movie studios and TV broadcast networks, on good times rolling not hard times a coming.
Netflix has always been different. Oriented towards mass consumer spending, not pricey niche stuff. Their play, and they are clearly edging towards it, is to create their own content. Aimed necessarily at the broad middle, and those willing to shell out modest amounts for entertainment: men. Yes, Netflix to compete will have to produce its live action competition to Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and Halo. Male skewing tales of adventure, excitement, and action-driven conflict.
Can Netflix do this? Certainly, and they must. After all, soundstages are for rent to whoever can pay. Actors, directors, writers, are all for hire. So too, are many locations outside Hollywood where tax incentives matter. USA Network has already leveraged this, with In Plain Sight shot in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Burn Notice in Miami Florida. Male skewing writer/producer teams like Life's Rand Ravich/Far Shariat and 24's Joel Surnow can be hired. So too, comic creators like Jim Shooter (Valiant Universe creator) or James Robinson or Brian Michael Bendis or Micah Ian Wright. The idea being to produce not just one-off movies but serial entertainment streamed right to men who have other than video games, little competition. A price point of say, 99 cents per episode, or even free with embedded ads. So the male consumer comes back.
Clearly, just trying to make the next "Vampire Diaries" or "Parenthood" is not a way to success. No matter how many tween girls (or their moms) watch, or how many PC plaudits are earned. Netflix is interested in making money, and doesn't have a massive parent to subsidize making Hollywood players happy. Amazon, Itunes, Google/Youtube, and even Coinstar's Redbox can crush them. So whoever races to their own, vertically created, distributed, and sold content gets to replicate …
Golden Age Hollywood. Characterized by "Its A Wonderful Life" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. No metrosexual, "I Love You Philip Morris" stuff, or "TransAmerica." You didn't see John Wayne smooching Ward Bond, in a gay cowboy movie, or Rosalind Russell playing a trans-sexual man/woman. Everything was broadly pitched, straight to the middle, as content was owned, distributed, and revenue collected, by Hollywood's studios.
Hollywood was no less filled with hard left folks in the Golden Age. Heck, many writers and actors were outright members of the Communist Party, when it actually meant something and Stalin was alive. But the economics of the mass media, vertically integrated companies requiring mass sales not niche stuff for premium prices in one way or another meant you got Jimmy Cagney extolling the virtues of the Red, White, and Blue, not a metrosexual, stalker Superman who fights for truth, justice, and "all that stuff."
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Can Netflix create original content for less than licensing it from other creators, that will generate more money than licensed content, in a mass medium model (i.e. not niche content at niche/expensive prices)? Very likely, yes.
TV Networks action/adventure series generally average about $3-4 million dollars per episode. The more action, and the more stunts, obviously the more expensive it is to shoot versus dialog on a soundstage (like ultra-cheap soaps). So on the upper end, excluding tax breaks, it would cost Netflix about $88 million to produce a 22 episode series. Assuming it can sell each episode for about 99 cents or so, its break-even sales volume is about 4 million sales per episode. At about 5 million sales units at that price, Netflix will make about $22 million. Assuming it can build sales to about say, 10 million purchases per episode, it would be generating $132 million per "hit" series, which would be roughly half the views per episode of shows like NCIS (averaging around 20 million viewers per episode per season, excluding repeats). With, critically, revenues rising dramatically as popularity and views per episode go up.
Why was Golden Age Hollywood so mainstream? Because the people who owned it got immediate financial rewards for being mainstream (that's the feedback mechanism of vertically integrated media companies) and punishments for going niche. Warren Buffett's right hand man, Charlie Munger, was quoted as saying:
If not Netflix, then one company not already laden with perverse Hollywood incentives, will push entertainment to a vertical model, where lavish rewards await anyone who can replicate the Golden Age of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, or Warner Brothers. Amazon, Apple's Itunes, Google/Youtube, and perhaps even growth-strapped Microsoft can be players here. Creating their own content, selling it on their own pay/ad-supported network, and collecting hefty profits.
Its far more than a transition from Netflix renting out DVDs through the mail. It is about breaking the stranglehold that Hollywood has had, strangely, in creative content production, for about 90 years. With talent mobile, and lots of money at stake, it is only a matter of time. Particularly as Hollywood's post-80's niche model collapses during hard times.
The return of Louis B. Mayer awaits.
...Read more
Steaming, obviously, is cheaper. No postage fees, no rate hikes in postage, instant gratification. The only problem being that Hollywood is charging premium prices for streaming rights (Netflix can simply buy DVDs from wholesalers and rent them out without costly rights fees). As Epstein notes:
The brutal reality is Netflix’s bargain days for streaming movies and television is coming to an end. As everyone else in the licensing game, Netflix will have to pay real world prices for content. Just the output deal it announced with three of the weakest studios, Paramount, LionsGate and MGM will cost it $200 million a year, a sum that exceeds its operating income last year. And if it wants the kind of output deals the other pay channels have, it will have to pay a great deal more than that.
Of course, Netflix can do something else. Create its own content. Which, in order to make money, would have to be very popular. Yes, HBO, Time-Warner Cable (HBO's Parent), Amazon, Itunes/Apple, Hulu, Google/Youtube, are all Netflix competitors, as Epstein notes. Competing on price for streaming, and on every platform: smartphones, Ipads, tablets, TV sets connected to the internet, gaming devices, and more. Netflix very likely has few illusions on this matter. But … they can create their own content.
And that can be their great competitive advantage.
Most entertainment is junk, which also loses money. Hollywood's movie system depends almost entirely on a few mega-hits: Transformers, Iron Man, and other male-oriented action movies, along with Twilight, and a few other female oriented romance movies. Stuff like "the Reader" or "the Woodsman" or "Ghost Writer" don't make money, even if they do win awards and get Hollywood's execs their next job (by catering to stars egos). Among TV series, a few mega-popular reality shows like American Idol make a lot of money (American Idol is estimated to add about $200-$300 million to Fox's bottom line). The repeat value or desire to see these on devices other than TV, live, is fairly low, however. A few other shows like NCIS, and Desperate Housewives, generate high ad dollar purchases by sponsors, and thus make money. But again, the desire by consumers to purchase these shows is fairly low.
What Netflix can do, then, is exploit the gap in broad entertainment people will pay modest amounts to view, by creating their own. Epstein, like many in and around Hollywood, over-estimates the barriers to creating original content. And the sea change a producer like Netflix which cannot survive in the Hollywood model and MUST create broadly popular entertainment across its offerings to prosper against a host of rivals. Which, amounts to a return to mass culture, and the end of niche culture and "de-massification."
Netflix is not HBO. HBO depends on keeping heads of households "happy" by offering female-skewing "edgy" content not available anywhere else. Alpha males in full a-hole glory: Tony Soprano, the folks of "Rome" and so on. HBO, of course, is available in almost all TV households but less than 30% actually pay for it. HBO gets paid if people watch their content or not. It's been very profitable, but depends on lots of excess cash among high income consumers expressing a desire to be "different." Making it vulnerable to economic downsizing and consumers being pressed into dropping the service (and cable altogether). Cable cutting, a real phenomena, is already occurring at the lower end of the income spectrum, as the cost of living inflates while income remains stagnant.
HBO depends on a large pool of high-income consumers expressing their niche content desire by paying premium prices for niche content consumption. That is not Netflix's mass consumer model. Near-premium cable folks like FX, or AMC, rely on keeping their channels as part of the basic subscription model, and thus follow HBO's model: AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad (Alpha male assholes appealing to women), or Nip/Tuck, Damages (Alpha female) fit that model. Mad Men famously got less than 1 million viewers per episode the first season. Yet it was considered a massive success (generating lots of publicity) and was easily renewed. Because AMC gets paid if people watch the channel or not. Again, that's not Netflix's model.
The limits of the HBO model (you cannot grow beyond the niche consumption of high end consumers) and the near-premium cable model of AMC and FX and others, come with risks of being unable to compete on price in a prolonged recession/depression. These entities depend like Hollywood movie studios and TV broadcast networks, on good times rolling not hard times a coming.
Netflix has always been different. Oriented towards mass consumer spending, not pricey niche stuff. Their play, and they are clearly edging towards it, is to create their own content. Aimed necessarily at the broad middle, and those willing to shell out modest amounts for entertainment: men. Yes, Netflix to compete will have to produce its live action competition to Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and Halo. Male skewing tales of adventure, excitement, and action-driven conflict.
Can Netflix do this? Certainly, and they must. After all, soundstages are for rent to whoever can pay. Actors, directors, writers, are all for hire. So too, are many locations outside Hollywood where tax incentives matter. USA Network has already leveraged this, with In Plain Sight shot in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Burn Notice in Miami Florida. Male skewing writer/producer teams like Life's Rand Ravich/Far Shariat and 24's Joel Surnow can be hired. So too, comic creators like Jim Shooter (Valiant Universe creator) or James Robinson or Brian Michael Bendis or Micah Ian Wright. The idea being to produce not just one-off movies but serial entertainment streamed right to men who have other than video games, little competition. A price point of say, 99 cents per episode, or even free with embedded ads. So the male consumer comes back.
Clearly, just trying to make the next "Vampire Diaries" or "Parenthood" is not a way to success. No matter how many tween girls (or their moms) watch, or how many PC plaudits are earned. Netflix is interested in making money, and doesn't have a massive parent to subsidize making Hollywood players happy. Amazon, Itunes, Google/Youtube, and even Coinstar's Redbox can crush them. So whoever races to their own, vertically created, distributed, and sold content gets to replicate …
Golden Age Hollywood. Characterized by "Its A Wonderful Life" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. No metrosexual, "I Love You Philip Morris" stuff, or "TransAmerica." You didn't see John Wayne smooching Ward Bond, in a gay cowboy movie, or Rosalind Russell playing a trans-sexual man/woman. Everything was broadly pitched, straight to the middle, as content was owned, distributed, and revenue collected, by Hollywood's studios.
Hollywood was no less filled with hard left folks in the Golden Age. Heck, many writers and actors were outright members of the Communist Party, when it actually meant something and Stalin was alive. But the economics of the mass media, vertically integrated companies requiring mass sales not niche stuff for premium prices in one way or another meant you got Jimmy Cagney extolling the virtues of the Red, White, and Blue, not a metrosexual, stalker Superman who fights for truth, justice, and "all that stuff."
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Can Netflix create original content for less than licensing it from other creators, that will generate more money than licensed content, in a mass medium model (i.e. not niche content at niche/expensive prices)? Very likely, yes.
TV Networks action/adventure series generally average about $3-4 million dollars per episode. The more action, and the more stunts, obviously the more expensive it is to shoot versus dialog on a soundstage (like ultra-cheap soaps). So on the upper end, excluding tax breaks, it would cost Netflix about $88 million to produce a 22 episode series. Assuming it can sell each episode for about 99 cents or so, its break-even sales volume is about 4 million sales per episode. At about 5 million sales units at that price, Netflix will make about $22 million. Assuming it can build sales to about say, 10 million purchases per episode, it would be generating $132 million per "hit" series, which would be roughly half the views per episode of shows like NCIS (averaging around 20 million viewers per episode per season, excluding repeats). With, critically, revenues rising dramatically as popularity and views per episode go up.
Why was Golden Age Hollywood so mainstream? Because the people who owned it got immediate financial rewards for being mainstream (that's the feedback mechanism of vertically integrated media companies) and punishments for going niche. Warren Buffett's right hand man, Charlie Munger, was quoted as saying:
‘Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes [without me] getting some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.’ That was Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice-Chairman, speaking before the Harvard Law School on the psychology of human misjudgement.
Munger is resolutely focussed on the power of incentives to influence human behaviour. In his speech he recounts a number of examples where incentives have been used for both good and ill. Federal Express was one such example. It has to transport packages within its network to a central location for sorting before sending them on to their final destination. For the system to work, the sorting must be quick and efficient. The trouble was that, for a time at least, it wasn’t. The company tried all sorts of incentives without much success. Then management came up with the idea of paying their staff by the shift, instead of for the shift. In other words, when the sorting was done the staff could go home. As you can guess, along with the staff at the end of their shift, the problem vanished almost immediately.
If not Netflix, then one company not already laden with perverse Hollywood incentives, will push entertainment to a vertical model, where lavish rewards await anyone who can replicate the Golden Age of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, or Warner Brothers. Amazon, Apple's Itunes, Google/Youtube, and perhaps even growth-strapped Microsoft can be players here. Creating their own content, selling it on their own pay/ad-supported network, and collecting hefty profits.
Its far more than a transition from Netflix renting out DVDs through the mail. It is about breaking the stranglehold that Hollywood has had, strangely, in creative content production, for about 90 years. With talent mobile, and lots of money at stake, it is only a matter of time. Particularly as Hollywood's post-80's niche model collapses during hard times.
The return of Louis B. Mayer awaits.
...Read more
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