“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” –The Declaration of Independence

INCREASINGLY, I have no fealty to the U.S. government. This has nothing to do with George Bush, bogeyman of the Left, the war in Iraq, or Halliburton, and everything to do with the reasonable assessment that the United States is too big for its own good. Too big in its 300 million people to be represented by 550 mostly millionaire men (not women) in a far-off swamp called Washington, D.C. I therefore have stopped calling myself a U.S. citizen.

I prefer to be called a Brooklynite or a Moabite, after the two places I call home– Brooklyn, New York, and Moab, Utah–which to me are part of the same nation only in name and only by the force of outmoded institutions. In each there are unities of language and custom, sure, but the fundamental interests of the citizens are not the same. My loyalties to each place will last as long the place lasts, but the fealty is local, my interest zoned within a hundred-mile radius and certainly not tied to the abstraction known as the national interest. “There is no national interest,” the historian Howard Zinn once said. Which brings me to the question of secession–the breaking-off of smaller countries from bigger countries. I am for it in the case of the United States. I am for it because I think we need to rejigger our loyalties to the needs of localities. And I am not alone in this thinking.

What happened in Chattanooga was an American moment, certainly, and not the least of its charms was the irony of the old Left of the North and the old Right of the South standing united in their opposition to the Union. The Associated Press, The New York Times, New York Newsday, The Washington Post, and USA Today carried the story, which traveled to newsrooms in Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, and India, and thence to the ubiquity of eyes on YouTube, and across the airwaves of at least 50 radio stations that ran interviews with the leaders of the convention. By the evening of October 4, the convention had settled on a list of principles they called the Chattanooga Declaration. “The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead,” said the declaration. “The privileges, monopolies, and powers that private corporations have won from government threaten everyone’s health, prosperity, and liberty, and have already killed American self-government by the people.” The answer, it went on, was that the American states ought to be “free and self-governing.” Two hundred and fifty years earlier, the Declaration of Independence asked for a similar dedication to self-governance: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

Indeed, it could be argued that secession is the primal American act, the founding event as old as the concept of the states themselves. What else did our founders accomplish in 1776 but secession from the tyranny of England?

Here’s how it will be with Vermont: The leaders of its secessionist movement, the Second Vermont Republic, want to feed, shelter, clothe, and fuel a free republic broken from the empire. This doesn’t mean the little country will sink into Albanian isolation, its citizens ceasing to trade with China or refusing to watch the rot beamed on DirecTV satellites. It will continue to be a tourist destination, its slopes welcoming New Yorkers and Quebecois equally. But the state’s secesh want to keep their tax dollars at home and put them toward localized food economies (calling it “food sovereignty”), energy supplies based on wind and water, and credit lines out of community lenders freed from the distant tyrannical rate controls of central banks.

One day two years ago, I heard Kirkpatrick Sale speak before 1,500 attendees at a meeting of the SVR. Sale, who has the build and mien of a terrier on methamphetamine, reasoned out the desire for separation from the behemoth. “It is intolerable,” he said, “for a citizen to succumb to a government that is in favor of unjust and unjustified warfare, brutal torture in defiance of all conventions, illegal detentions, the fostering of terrorism, war profiteering, sky-high trade deficits. … It is intolerable, I say, for a citizen to live under such a government, in such a country.”

“But,” Sale went on, “I have no intention of going to Canada, or France. I love my home, and I want to leave this country without leaving home. And the only way to do that, ladies and gentlemen, is … secession.” The crowd exploded, but gently. They were young and old, hippies and farmers, old Right and new Progressive, college educated and tenth-grade educated. The room where they gathered, the great hall of the Vermont State Legislature, was hung with purple velvet, and built of fine wood and marble, and smelled clean. The rebels were not of the type to shame the solemnity of the place.

As Sale slapped out his peroration at the podium, nearby sat the foremost organizer of the secessionist cause in Vermont, the softer-spoken but no less radical Thomas Naylor, 72, a former Duke University economist and social critic, co-author of the bitterly funny Affluenza, a diagnosis of the American consumerist condition as political pathology. Naylor, who knows his history, christened the movement under the title “Second Vermont Republic” because there was once a first Vermont republic–it was no mere colony or state–that ceded its independence and voted on March 4, 1791, to join the nascent American union. Each year, Naylor and his Second Vermonters like to memorialize the event by walking in a mock funeral procession through Montpelier playing a dirge and carrying a casket marked “Vermont.”

Now he took to the podium, looking tall, if a little aged, with white hair, and answered questions from skeptics who wondered if Vermont could indeed go it alone as a political and economic unit, or, more important, if perhaps the secession urge was just a hotheaded reaction to the injuries of the Bush administration. What Thomas Naylor will tell you in answer when you sit him down at his little house in the Vermont village of Charlotte–what he tells every crowd he addresses–is that the problem of the United States as it stands has no solution in the current framework….

“The nation is not sustainable,” Naylor tells me. He thinks the United States is a political and economic monster, stumbling and out of control, a land where bigness in all things has led to military overstretch, runaway debt, mass inequalities, and a government by and for the few. He draws a causal connection with the dire social effects on the ground: Of all the western democracies, the United States stands near dead last in voter turnout, last in health care, last in education, highest in homicide rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth pregnancy, abortion, and divorce–a society which, in keeping with its degenerate morals, wreaks one-quarter of the environmental damage on the planet every day.

“It comes down to the problems of the human condition: separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, fear of death,” he says. “The human condition is not being dealt with in the United States. It is our inability to deal with this human condition that leads to a sickness that I call affluenza.” Affluenza, he says, can be recognized by key symptoms: technomania and e-mania–obsession with technology and the Internet–rampant consumerism, megalomania, narcissism, “robotism,” and “affluenza’s concomitant: imperialism and national aggression.” Consumerism and megalomania and narcissism I get–I grew up in New York City. But “robotism”? As Naylor puts it, all Americans “watch the same TV programs, listen to the same radio programs, subscribe to the same political viewpoints”–the limited amplitude of opinion afforded in the two-party system–”claiming to be a country of individualists while in truth we are the nation of conformists.”

So what to do? “You can commit suicide,” offers Naylor. “You can deny the human condition through megalomania and the pathology of having, owning, possessing, which requires an empire that stomps around the planet stealing resources. Or you can say ‘hell no’ and rebel and confront the human condition and, as Camus says, die happy. Secession is fundamentally an act of rebellion driven by a combination of fear and anger and hope. It’s the ultimate destructive rejection of the system, the strongest possible way you can say to someone like George Bush, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ The creative element is Vermont. A state of small towns, small farms, small churches, small businesses–this is the alternative we’re offering to America.”

Here’s the way it is with Vermont: At the border with New York State, the billboards disappear. They just go, as if aliens had hoovered them away. Vermont, you see, is already a separate country. It is the most radical state in the Union in terms of the number and kind of town meetings–direct democracy in action. Its constitution of 1777 made it the first state to outlaw slavery, it was the first to mandate universal suffrage for all men, and is currently one of only two states that allow incarcerated felons to vote. It has no death penalty and virtually no gun-control laws, yet remains one of the least violent jurisdictions in America. It has no big cities, no big businesses, no military bases, no strategic resources, few military contractors. All three members of its Congressional delegation voted against the Iraq War resolution. It is rural and wild, with the highest percentage of unpaved roads in the nation. And those billboards? It was the first state to ban them along its roads. With its strict environmental-impact laws, Vermont fended off the predations of Wal-Mart superstores longer than any other state, and Montpelier today remains the only state capital in America without a McDonald’s restaurant. Economically, though, Vermont has the smallest gross state product. And the SVR concedes it is still unclear how secession would play out–legally, economically, and logistically.

The idea of it coming to pass in Vermont today is not entirely quixotic: Following mock secession debates during the 1990s in seven Vermont towns, all seven voted in favor of the idea. Statewide, this peculiar contrarianism would need to be harnessed in a legislative vote (the method employed by Confederate states in the 1861 secession), a popular referendum, or a constitutional convention. In each of these cases, a supermajority would be required. Vermont’s governor would then be empowered to present the state’s exit declaration to the U.S. secretary of state. As it stands, a 2007 poll found that just 13 percent of Vermonters say they would opt for it.

The movement’s detractors, of course, have a valid set of concerns, too. Some have expressed discomfort with conferences like the one in Chattanooga, seeing a dire development in the far Left working in tandem with the far Right….

Another concern is that the understanding of the U.S. Constitution today allows no other recourse but armed revolt for a state wishing to go its own way. “Secession is not possible today without violence,” Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…. “It’s to follow the example of the Southern secessionists who thought that they could just leave the Union peacefully, and, nuttier still, get a part of the unsettled territory as a parting gift. … Isn’t it time that Americans began learning something from history? Or must we again bleed ourselves into wisdom?”

In her 1936 book, Give Me Liberty, Rose Wilder Lane, [once] an avowed Leninist, described her travels to the Soviet Union, where she found that the workers “liberated” into the “communal” life of the state were pretty unhappy. One peasant she spoke to said of the new country: “It’s too big.… At the top, it is too small. It will not work.” History bore out the lowly peasant’s judgment, not Lenin’s.

George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment and the national-security state that arose in answer to the Soviet Union, came to the same conclusion about the United States. “There is a real question,” Kennan warned, “as to whether bigness in a body politic is not an evil in itself.” Years later, when Thomas Naylor wrote to the old Cold Warrior outlining a New England secession uniting Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, Kennan personally responded with a letter dictated from his sickbed: “I write to say that in the idea of the three American states’ ultimate independence, whether separately or in union, I see nothing fanciful. [Such] are at present the dominating trends in the U.S. that I see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will not only be endangered but eventually destroyed by an endlessly prolonged association … with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.”

It was the stratagems of George Kennan, who died in 2005, that ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. Naylor sees this as historical irony, and he takes pleasure in drawing a dark comparison between the Soviet Union and the United States: There is the same far-flung geography. The same corporate socialism that defies free markets. The same spread of influence worldwide through violence, murder, and pillage. The same stunted public discourse. The same electoral sclerosis in the legislature (Congress is almost as stable in membership as the Politburo). “No one in the Soviet Union in 1960 or 1970 or even 1980 found it imaginable that someday it would collapse,” says Naylor. So, too, he says, is our certainty today in the stability of the United States of America.

Read the full article at Good Is

QUIETLY AND almost unobserved, a new aristocracy has been evolving for the past two centuries. This evolution has reached the stage where this elite, like the mediaeval nobility, have sympathy for their own class anywhere and contempt and unconcern for the mass of people everywhere. Their power is increasing by bounds. They seek to extend it ever more across national boundaries. Their loyalty is to their class, not their country.

Who are the members of this new nobility? They fall into two groups. The dominant group is drawn from the upper reaches of ruling elites of the ostensibly democratic states of the West. The subordinate group is formed by the super rich in the Second and Third worlds. The latter are to a degree the clients of the Western elites.

This new elite is profoundly dangerous, for after a century and a half of the nation-state standing dominant in the West, political fashion is hot footing it towards the supranational. This is of fundamental importance because the weak have only ever exercised significant control over the powerful where a coherent sense of community has existed together with a sharply defined political authority. Empires and federations containing diverse racial and cultural identities are the enemy of popular control, because their heterogeneity ensures that there is no single national focus of popular dissent and provides ruling elites with the opportunity to exercise power through a policy of divide and rule. It is a sovereign fact that representative government elected on a broad franchise only occurred after the rise of the nation-state.

In Britain we see the consequences of supranationalism most obviously in the ever more public impotence of our government in the face of Brussels. But that impotence is just the tip of a very dirty political iceberg. Throughout the West, such meaningful popular political control as has been developed in the past two hundred years is being steadily removed from electorates. Why is this happening?

The general answer is that ruling elites are immensely durable. Individuals may fall from grace, but ruling elites as a class mostly do not; rather they evolve. Thus in our own time we see the rulers of the Communist bloc effortlessly transmuted into the controllers of supposed new democracies.

Modern ostensible democracies are in fact elective oligarchies; that is, the mass of the people are offered the chance to vote for representatives drawn from a very restricted group of people. That restriction applies regardless of the type of voting system or the strength of party. In Britain with its strong party system and constituency-based representation, the elector is offered the choice of two parties. In Germany the electorate may effectively vote only for a coalition. In the USA the enfranchised choose only from those able to command the considerable amounts of money needed to conduct campaigns. In every case a small elite controls elections by controlling access to the media and the electoral process and, most importantly, by controlling the selection of candidates to stand under mainstream political banners. The practical result is that those standing with any hope of success are those with a big party label or, where party is weak, the backing of political coalitions. The past two centuries have seen the power of Western elites mitigated, but the elites have never lost control.

To understand exactly how successful elites have been in retaining control let us take England as an example. The historian, Lewis Namier, calculated that eighteenth century England was controlled by roughly 200 families. I suspect that even today the figure is no more than 1000 families. Consider who actually makes the decisions and engages in the executive actions which dramatically affect our lives. There is the PM who is effectively a monarch whilst in power. There is the cabinet. There are a couple of dozen senior civil servants. A few dozen men control our media. There are the leaders of the armed forces and senior policemen. There are perhaps two hundred nationally significant businessmen. There are the very rich. And that is it.

The elites have been able to retain control for two reasons. The first is the fact that money, political power, the experience of exercising authority, superior education and social status go a long way to preserving the position of elites as a class under most circumstances. The exceptions — which are only partial because of the ability of elites to move themselves and their capital abroad — are instances such as the treatment of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia and the French aristocracy after the revolution.

The second reason is the corruption of democratic aspirations from within. Early in this century, the German sociologist Robert Michels described a social phenomenon which he named the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Michels saw that institutions ostensibly dedicated to furthering the interests of the masses, such as trade unions and political parties with democratic aims, rapidly degenerated into self-serving oligarchies. This occurred because the elected leaders and officers of the institutions were invariably driven by self-interest to develop ends which were antagonistic towards the interests of the grassroots members, while the bureaucratisation of the institution rendered grassroots members increasingly powerless to prevent the betrayal of the institution’s ostensible ends. The extent of the betrayal in each instance is debatable: the fact that it has invariably occurred is not. A classic example of Michels’ law in our own time is “New Labour.”

The world-weary cynic might ask “Does it matter?” After all, he will argue, the Western elites have not actively oppressed the masses for the past half century. The answer to that is that Western elites have been constrained during that period by a unique set of circumstances which no longer obtain and are unlikely to be repeated. These circumstances include the democratic climate created by the last world war, a comparative scarcity of labour, the widespread availability of low-skill employment and the legal and moral legacy of the previous century, namely a mass of legislation designed to protect the working man and a political climate favourable to the idea of social obligation towards the less fortunate or competent members of society.

Already the portents of a harsher ruling elite ideology are there. The Welfare State is increasingly presented by politicians of supposedly widely different political colours as a grotesque liability rather than a boon. Employees in Britain have less legal protection now than they enjoyed in the early years of this century. The poor are treated as an embarrassment rather than an indictment of the society which fails them. Those in power have lost their social conscience. The old platitudes may be chanted about the need to protect the weak — but that is all they are, platitudes.

What has caused this change of ruling elite mentality? To understand that, one must delve into the political sociology of the past two centuries. With the advent of broad electoral franchises, traditional elites had to adapt if they were to retain political power. Over time the old elite mutated. Formal social rank became largely unimportant. Wealth became God. Plutocracy replaced the old aristocracy. But if the elite evolved it remained an elite. It thwarted democracy by controlling entry into the elite and by manipulating the mass media.

With a mutation of elite personnel came a changed ideology. The 19th century saw both the development of a politically expressed social conscience and imperial expansion. The former event resulted in increasing state involvement to assist the poor. The responsibilities of empires, both formally acknowledged (European) and unacknowledged (American) produced Western ruling elites accustomed to thinking internationally and paternally. The growth of international trade and movement after the advent of the steamship strengthened the internationalist tendency.

The result was that Western ruling elites developed a paternalism which first embraced their own “masses” and eventually evolved into a concern for the whole of Mankind. After two world wars, political power and leadership in the West passed from Europe to America. The USA transformed the paternalistic ideals of the late imperial period into a global paternalism mediated through the UN and its agencies.

This global paternalism was a dangerous game to play under any circumstances, because the ideals and political systems of the West were simply impractical in most of the world. However, for forty-odd years the system creaked along without causing mortal damage largely because the West engaged in political, not economic, action. Then in the 1980s came the exponents of laissez-faire and international free trade. Both policies thoroughly undermined the idea of society in the form of the state being ultimately responsible for its citizens’ welfare, a social lender of the last resort. When the parties ostensibly committed to social welfare adopted out of desperation the policies of free trade and laissez-faire, the consequence was that Western electorates were left with no meaningful choice.

By the 1990 the old dramatic political lines between right and left were largely gone. An intense community of interest and ideas had developed within the Western elite as a whole, a uniformity best illustrated in Britain by our elite’s public responses to the two greatest political issues of the day, namely our membership in the EU and the consequences of mass immigration.

There is not a single MP who is willing to publicly oppose our membership in the EU. There is not a single newspaper which has as its editorial policy our withdrawal from the EU. Broadcasters and journalists overwhelmingly support not only our membership but wish us to enter the European Monetary Union. As for mass immigration and its consequences, we have the salutary fact that no politician has seriously addressed the question since Enoch Powell in the 1970 election.

The new aristocracy know in their heart of hearts that the policies generated by their ideology are impractical. But they dare not say it. So, just as the benighted ideologues of the Soviet Empire outwardly kept to the dictates of Marxist-Leninism right to the end, so the new nobility blindly follow their secular religious beliefs of “anti-racism,” “nondiscrimination,” “free trade,” “free markets,” “globalisation,” and so forth regardless of the damage being done. The result of this irresponsibility is likely to be international economic dislocation on a massive scale.

The outlook for most people in the West is bleak. The new aristocracy, through their wealth and control of institutions such as the police and the armed forces, will be able to protect themselves from the economic and political blizzards ahead. When shove comes to push they will not give a damn about the fate of those unable to fend for themselves. Rather they will oppress the masses to preserve their own status. The masses, robbed of any meaningful political control, will be powerless. Unless the power of the new aristocracy is controlled, the past two centuries may be viewed in retrospect as an anomaly in human history, the sole brief period when a mixture of technological and political circumstances permitted meaningful control of the powerful by the weak.

How is the power of the new aristocracy to be restricted? Space dictates that that is a subject for another time.

Robert Henderson is the author of Leviathan Politics.

THE National Longitudinal Study indicates that the impact of Affirmative Action laws and diversity-enhancing public policy is far different from that imagined by most Americans. Instead of being over-represented (which equality advocates often view as something in need of “correction”), European-Americans of both sexes and all IQ groups are increasingly under-represented in the economy and are discriminated against in terms of income and higher education. Jewish-Americans are dramatically over-represented.

Most white Americans believe that the vast array of race preferences only effect those whites in lower socioeconomic levels — those in the bottom 20% by IQ and income. Most Whites at the highest socioeconomic levels believe that only the proverbial six or seven Whites denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School because of their race — or others whose stories make it into the media — are adversely affected.

We are going to test those typical thoughts and attitudes against data maintained by the United States Department of Labor, which maintains an elaborate census based on statistical sampling called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY ’79). Over 155,000 youths were surveyed by telephone and 12,686 were finally selected as representative samples to be given an IQ test and then interviewed annually or bi-annually for the rest of their lives to track their progress.

Comparing outcomes for the entire population is misleading because of significant differences in average age (income increases with age) and significant differences in average IQ or ability. Only by comparing racial groups at the same age and ability level can you determine whether race preferences created by the “Civil Rights” laws produce distributive justice, or whether they produce subordination and exploitation.

All of the NLSY’79 interviewees grew up after the racial preferences were put in place by the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, and after implementation of massive school redistricting, school bussing, and massive Federal expenditure on Operation Head Start designed to eliminate racially unequal educational outcomes. Thus, we have the ability to test the relative education and incomes of the races at the same age and IQ level after massive Federal intervention and remediation for the supposed purpose of reducing the inequality of the races. So let us compare our attitudes and assumptions with the data.

Median Income – Males

Above we see the income results for the top 2% of the population by IQ for males. The top 2% includes all those who have an IQ of 130 or above. As you can see, white males do significantly worse than their competitors. Jews are the only ethnic group which has benefited from or escaped the consequences of the racial preference schemes enacted by our Federal Government. All other white ethnic origins are grouped together in a very narrow range with outcomes very similar to the overall white average. So where are the undeserved privileges we hear so much about ??

Above we see the same pattern (in incomes for the 90-97% IQ range) but with somewhat less dramatic differences between races. Once again, whites are at the bottom.

Above we see very dramatic differences in median income for the remainder of the top quarter of the population by IQ. Where are the undeserved privileges we hear so much about?

Below the top 25%, the pattern for males shifts, with white males doing better than blacks but not as well as Hispanics or Jews. Contrary to popular opinion, race preferences have the greatest impact on white males in the top quarter of the population IQ range — at the highest socioeconomic levels.

Here we see the same pattern, with Hispanic males (the largest minority group) doing significantly better than white males, but with black males doing marginally worse. We are beginning to see “small sample” effects here as there are only a few Jews in the sample (and relatively few in the Jewish population at large) below the population median IQ.

Same pattern for the bottom quartile of the population by IQ. But note that Hispanic males earn substantially more income at every IQ level than do white males of the same IQ.

Median Income – Females

Here we see a familiar pattern for females in the top 2% by IQ. The income differences between racial groups for females are much larger than for males, with white women at the top of the IQ spectrum earning only 30% of what Hispanic females earn at the same IQ level. In a very large sample of over 3000 blacks, there were no black females who scored in the top 2% of the population.

Here we see the same dramatic occupational and pay discrimination against white females in the top 10% of the IQ spectrum. Is the statutory inclusion of “women” as a protected class under “civil rights” laws just eyewash and a diversion intended to focus white female anger at white males rather than upon real threats to their economic well being?

We get the same pattern for the remainder of the top quarter, but with a “small sample” effect for the Jewish females in that IQ group.

Here, the experience for white females begins to deviate dramatically from those of white males, as white females in the lower IQ groups earn significantly less than their racial competitors at the same IQ levels.

While white men in this IQ category do reasonably well compared with their racial counterparts at the same IQ level, white females do dramatically worse. Ironically, opinion polls show that white females generally support the race preference schemes called “Affirmative Action,” perhaps because white females are entirely unaware of these data.

Again, the same pattern (but with only one Jewish woman in the sample with an IQ in the bottom 24% of the population). If we were to deduce the purpose of the race preference system in the United States based on outcomes — as opposed to wishful thinking and proclaimed intentions — it would be to exploit white females from top to bottom. A secondary purpose of the race preference system in the United States would be to disadvantage and displace white males at the top of the ability and IQ spectrum.

Those of you who are awake and alert may have noticed in the above series of income slides that median income for white women is less than for white men at the same age and IQ level. However, most of the white females in the NLSY ’79 sample marry, and as you will note from this chart, when the husband and wife’s incomes are added together (R+S), white females do better than white males at all IQ levels except the top 2%. A comparison of the black with violet bars gives you a comparison of male and female only income, while a comparison of the yellow bars with the red bars gives you a comparison of male and female family income. This chart shows that a prudent marriage is just as important in the 21st century as it was back in 1815 when Jane Austen wrote her famous novels such as Pride and Prejudice. “R” stands for “respondent” or survey participant, while R+S stands for respondent and spouse. The median income for R+S includes those who never married and those now divorced, thus lowering the difference between single and family incomes in the slide.

Education – A mind is a terrible thing to waste

A complex society needs high IQ people to administer its activities and to solve its problems. Thus, everyone in the top 2% IQ group should go college and receive at least a four-year degree, and the overwhelming majority should receive graduate and professional degrees. As you can see, in contrast to their racial competitors, nearly 15% of whites in this top IQ group fail to get a four-year degree. Again, whites in this top IQ group do worse than those in competing racial groups. So much for white over-representation on campuses.

Drilling down into the nearly 15% of whites in the top 2% IQ group who do not get four-year degrees, we see that nearly 9% of whites at that IQ get a high school diploma only, with no college. A bright mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste, and the study indicates it is the bright white gentile minds that are being denied educational opportunities, at significant costs to our country. This chart, and the preceding one, suggest that there would be no need for the H-1b visas for foreign engineers, programmers, and doctors if the abilities of so many talented, high IQ whites were not being overlooked or excluded from appropriate educational opportunities. Indeed, it is only the existence of the H-1b visas that limits the horrific costs of this waste of high IQ talent and permits its continuance. H-1b visas are necessary to the scheme which you so clearly see in these charts to displace and subordinate high IQ white males.

With the exception of the above chart, all charts in this section on four-year degrees include all those who go on and receive graduate and professional degrees.

Here we begin to see evidence of genuine undeserved privilege in terms of admissions and grading that lead to four-year degrees for those in the 75th to 89th percentile IQ group. Notice how much better Jews do than those groups entitled to explicit racial preference.

Still more evidence of genuine undeserved privilege is seen here, despite it being the opposite of “conventional wisdom” on the subject.

In this chart we see compelling evidence of actual undeserved privilege as opposed to the propaganda version that is so widely preached in our Universities. We also see compelling evidence of a “back door” to college admission which must be operating for those who, while not entitled to explicit preferences, nevertheless seem to do much better at these lower IQs than the racial groups that are entitled to explicit preferences. There is, at best, only marginal utility for society in having people from this IQ group receive a college education. However, there may be significant individual benefit if a degree is required for a job in government or the non-profit sector of the economy — but only if the individuals know in advance that they will have connections in those bureaucracies willing to prefer them for such jobs.

Graduate and Professional

No surprises in this top IQ group. The chart merely continues a pattern seen in the charts for undergraduate degrees.

Again, no surprises in this IQ group that rounds out the top 10%.

As expected, the greatest preferences are going to show up in the IQ group which can only provide marginal candidates for PhD degrees. The surprise is the percentage of Jews in what, for them, is a lower IQ group — more than double the percentage of white gentiles.

We switch now to professional degrees — doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. — and, as you can see, Jews receive more than double the percentage of professional degrees awarded to Hispanics and whites.

In the remainder of the top 10% of our population by IQ a lower percentage of whites attain professional degrees than do Hispanics, blacks and Jews — a clear consequence of race preferences — explicit preferences in the case of Blacks and Hispanics and possibly preferences by administrators exercising their administrative discretion in the case of Jews, who do not fall under explicit preferential laws or policies.

It is in the remainder of the top quartile below the top ten percent mark that we see dramatic evidence of discrimination in favor of the constituent groups within the “Affirmative Action” coalition and against white gentiles.

And once again, the big surprise is that Jews in this IQ range attain three times the percentage of professional degrees as white gentiles in the same IQ range.

In the previous slides in this section on education no distinction has been made as to the quality of the degrees or credentials received. We shift gears now and examine an “Ivy League” school, Harvard University. As you can see, the chart excludes a very large group of Asians, Arabs, North Africans, and North American Indians. The table sets forth data from reliable sources published prior the first Internet exposure of this under-representation. Since that time, Harvard’s racial and ethnic reports have fallen victim to a variant of the Heisenberg principle, namely that reports of politically sensitive demographic data seem to change rapidly once the data are observed. Harvard is now reporting much higher percentages of “whites” but steadfastly refuses to define precisely what that term means — and why their definition has changed recently. Does Harvard’s notion of who is “white” include students from India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, for example? For purposes of this slide we took Harvard’s 1996 report of whites and subtracted Hillel’s report of Jews in attendance to determine the number of European-descended students.

It is clear that Jewish birth rates are so low that the numbers of Jews admitted to Harvard must be in decline in the 21st Century. However, until Harvard stops hiding the ball, their new data can only be greeted with continuing suspicion.

We see a similar pattern of under-representation in the top 15 universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report using data from Hillel and Princeton Review.

Finally we see that the NLSY ’79 made the mistake of asking about financial aid received in 1984. The results were so embarrassing that they never asked that survey question again. The chart shows scholarship grants or tuition reductions only, and does not include loans or work study (which really is no aid at all). The chart includes only those in the top 10% IQ group — where the case for financial aid is most compelling. As you can see, on average American colleges are lying when they say that they provide more aid to students in poverty than to those from middle and upper income families. It is only Hispanics and Blacks in poverty status who get more than middle class students of the same race. The discrepancy for Jews may be attributable to the level of support available from the very well funded Jewish charities.

Regarding the above chart on financial aid, high IQ among the poor is overwhelmingly a white gentile phenomenon, and it is these students who get less financial aid than middle class white gentiles. It is a huge and highly destructive waste of talent. Percents on the Y axis are expressed as decimal fractions of the number one.

Wealth Accumulation

The slide above shows the average net worth of survey participants in each racial group in the top 2% by IQ. There is a data field in which survey participants report their net worth, and a data field for each type of asset — stocks, bonds, houses, rental real estate, business interests, etc., as well as a field for each type of debt — mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, margin, and business debts. An overwhelming number of participants seriously under-report their net worth, and so the slides in this section were prepared by summing the individual asset data fields and then summing and subtracting the debt data fields for each participant for each interview year, and then taking the highest year’s net worth for each individual. Note that the data ends with the 1996 interview year in which the oldest participants were 41 years old, before the effects of inheritance would become significant and before the stock market boom of the late nineties made it easy for those in the right place at the right time to become wealthy. Thus, the income and wealth charts reflect early career rewards for individual effort and “connections,” the latter possibly being very important among members of highly ethnocentric and wealthy groups.

It is in the remainder of this top 10% that we see the real potential power of the previously-mentioned “connections” — and also a source of significant political power, and power to influence admission to private universities. Members of the wealthiest ethnic group are far more likely to become important, prosperous alumni and contribute generously to the university endowment. Note that Hispanics have a higher net worth than whites in this IQ category.

Outside of the top 10% by IQ, the difference between Jews and other racial groups — while still substantial — decreases. Note in particular the relatively low wealth accumulation by blacks at this IQ level, a level at which the most strenuous effects of preferences in their favor are seen in the charts above. Could this lack of savings be caused by a sense that saving is unnecessary because of the safety net that preferences provide?

At this second quartile IQ level, wealth most probably consists mostly of housing rather than savings. But we may also be witnessing lower wealth levels as a measure of “present-orientation” rather than future orientation. You will notice that the average net worth for whites is remarkably similar from the top down to the 50th percentile by IQ.  High IQ does not seem to confer the same wealth accumulation advantage to whites as it does to Jews. When contrasted with the advantage that high IQ confers upon white median income, this suggests that whites are motivated by visible status markers and only to a much lesser degree by the power of savings and wealth — which is largely invisible to their neighbors and co-workers. If you look carefully, you will notice that high IQ does confer a significant advantage in wealth accumulation on Hispanics.

The Big Picture

Above is a chart showing the distribution of the Jewish, Black, Hispanic and White survey populations arrayed by percentage of that population in each 5% IQ decrement beginning with the top 5% at the front left of the slide and the bottom 5% at the right rear. Looking at this chart, is is obvious that only one group within the racial preferences coalition has the capacity to strategize, finance, lead and administer that system. However, such a conclusion would not be obvious absent the preceding slides which show how well that group has prospered under the system they created. In addition you can see reasons that racial harmony and assimilation might be well-nigh impossible to achieve in the United States, as the black and Hispanic populations are overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ spectrum.

In this slide, the Y axis is the average number of children, and as you can see from the completed black fertility rates, blacks in the top half of the IQ spectrum are way below replacement averaging around 1.3 children per woman. It is only in the bottom quartile, those with IQs below 85 that the black population is slightly above replacement. Thus, the black population in the U.S. is facing demographic catastrophe as differential birth rates by IQ render that population less and less competent with every generation. This fertility pattern guarantees ever escalating demands for more preferences and more wealth transfers from the white population. Racial harmony may be doomed.

Above is a chart which shows that white gentiles who are unaware of their European ethnic origins have lower median incomes than do all whites in the IQ category. NLSY ’79 does not poll participants for their views on race, but this data suggests that caring enough about ones ethnic origins to be aware of them is a marker of high status relative to atomized individuals who do not care enough to know about their roots. The chart strongly suggests that racial awareness is a marker of high status — another indicator that current public policies of enforcing preferences and insisting on “racial harmony” are doomed.

Here we see that white fertility in all IQ groups is below replacement and that birthrates of white women in the top half of the IQ spectrum are at catastrophic levels. With far fewer high IQ whites available in future generations, the slide of the U.S., into Third World status will be rapid by historical standards, but slow and painful for the individuals involved. An increasing danger will be the prospect of high IQ white youth leaving the U.S. and emigrating to those countries in Europe with the highest birthrates at the upper end of the IQ spectrum, the lowest support costs for low-IQ minorities, and a governing elite that shares racial kinship (and hence empathy) with its native population.

Even if one tried, it would be hard to design a more socially and politically unstable society than the one illustrated in the above slide and in this study generally. The elites who control the media and what Rasmussen calls the “political class” are well aware of the potential for volatility and conflict within this unfortunate racial and ethnic construct. That is why the elite enforces its semi-cryptic system of censorship on racial matters so vigorously in the U.S., and desperately pounds into our heads the “moral imperative” of tolerance toward this volatile and ultimately doomed mix.

Thus far, the founding population of the United States has been willing to concede substantial economic and educational advantages to minorities in order to buy temporary peace, while remaining largely oblivious to the costs and the escalating burdens as they themselves fall into minority status. Is the nascent Tea Party movement partly a consequence of the rising discontent of this population group? Is the gradual shift in attitude of minority populations from one of desiring assimilation (the “melting pot”) to one of demanding recognition of unique cultures (bilingualism, Afrocentrism, etc.) a sign of the ultimate breakup of America into its component peoples? Only time will tell.

The National Longitudinal Studies

(photo by simmbarb)