Today is the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s famous speech, known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, although that phrase appears nowhere in it. Read the whole thing, courtesy of VDare.com. I’ll have more to say later.

Another person who noticed this is Trevor Phillips, the United Kingdom “race czar”

The Press Association: UK need to shed ’shadow’ of Powell
Britain needs to shed the “40-year shadow” of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech and begin a renewed debate on immigration, the head of Britain’s race watchdog has said.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the infamous speech had left the country with suppressed political debate on the subject.

Speaking to a crowd of about 200 people at the same Birmingham hotel Enoch Powell gave his speech, Mr Phillips was speaking 40 years after the Wolverhampton South West MP’s notorious pronouncements

He said: “For 40 years we have, by mutual consent, sustained a particular silence on the one issue where British people most needed articulate political leadership. Powell so discredited any talk of planning that we have plunged along with an ad hoc approach to immigration.”[More]

First of all, Britain is not in the shadow of Enoch Powell, it’s in the shadow of Trevor Phillips, the man who can prosecute you if you say the wrong thing. A large part of Powell’s speech concerned not mass immigration itself, but the nascent Race Relations Act, which could put people in jail for speaking out against immigration, which is why there’s a “particular silence” on this subject.

Addressing representatives from local authorities, police, and a range of equality groups present at the MacDonald Burlington Hotel, Birmingham, Mr Phillips said he thought Mr Powell’s dire predictions had not been fulfilled.

Tell that to the victims of the London Bombings, of the riots, and the crime, and of the EHRC itself. Powell was right.

“Hit-and-run” just got a whole new meaning.

Newspaper readers see stories all the time of accidents caused by drunken, Mexican, illegal immigrants who ran away, after crashing their cars. Like many readers, I have often wondered:

1. How can someone who was driving so blind drunk that he just maimed and/or killed people and totaled his own car, be in any shape to run?; and

2. What’s the point? In the past, police would identify the vehicle’s owner, and the drunken killer would be rounded up in no time at all.

Apparently, such incidents also gave pause to some of the finest minds in state government in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. And they came up with a solution: Those states no longer require applicants for car registration and title to furnish proof of identity, just proof of address.

Those government bureaucrats must have been upset by the stereotyping non-undocumented workers (i.e., the demographic group formerly known as “Americans”) would engage in, saying things like, “Look at that dumb undocumented worker, running from the scene of an accident. Law’s just gonna chase him down, anyway.” Now, they can say, “Look at that smart undocumented worker, running from the scene of an accident. He just might get away with murder.”

These reflections were prompted by the April 12 article, Police struggle to find drivers ‘that don’t exist,’ by reporter Carol Vaughn, in Virginia’s Dellmarva Daily Times, a Gannett paper.

Vaughn reports on an accident that demolished the front porch of Darryl Hopkins’ house on Fisher Road outside of Parksley, Virginia, and almost killed Hopkins. Hopkins was sleeping in a recliner in his living room, just a few feet from the front door, whose splintered glass landed in his lap. The car lay outside his door on its side, its lights on, but with no driver to be found. It was registered to a ghost named “Fidel Chavez Escalante,” according to the license left behind in Sr. Escalante’s wallet.

It was the second crash on Hopkins’ property by a ghost driver in the past year.

More progress: Not only did the non-existent driver escape, but the car had Mississippi plates front and back, unlike a previous crash Hopkins recounts that occurred across the road, in which a ghost driver’s car had Mississippi plates on one end, and Tennessee plates on the other.

Vaughn interviewed Virginia State Police First Sgt. J.P. Koushel, who is seeing more “hit-and-run cases involving falsified vehicle registrations.” Koushel said,

“We can’t solve these [cases] because in Mississippi, this car is registered to a person who doesn’t exist.”

“These cars are untraceable; they all come back to a fictitious person. If you don’t have to prove who you are, what’s the use of registering and titling a car? If migrant workers can do it, criminals can do it.”

Vaughn reports,

“A search of General District court records this week turned up three cases involving a person with the name on the license found in the car with a Parksley address — one for speeding, one for not having a Virginia driver’s license and one for no license. The man was found guilty in all three cases and paid fines ranging from $75 to $100.”

She quotes Hopkins as saying, “It’s a zoo back here. This is a major corridor for drugs, alcohol and illegal immigrants.”

This writer was surprised to see Gannett permitting one of its reporters to be so frank about illegal immigration.

(E-mail Carol Vaughn, to thank her for doing such a bang-up job. )

A tip ‘o the hat to faxdc.com’s Minuteman Steve, who sent me Carol Vaughn’s article.

Peter S. Goodman writes at the New York Times:

The gradual erosion of the paycheck has become a stealth force driving the American economic downturn. Most of the attention has focused on the loss of jobs and the risk of layoffs. But the less-noticeable shrinking of hours and pay for millions of workers around the country appears to be a bigger contributor to the decline, which has already spread from housing and finance to other important areas of the economy.While official unemployment has risen only modestly, to 5.1 percent, the reduction of wages and working hours for those still employed has become a primary cause of distress, pushing many more Americans into a downward spiral, economists say.[Workers Get Fewer Hours, Deepening the Downturn, by Peter S. Goodman, April 18, 2008]

As I reported in The Jobs Crunch, there has been a serious erosion of many dimensions of job quality. Reduction of disposable income is one dimension of this erosion. We can see folks moving from low rent rural areas to high rent urban areas and have significantly less income left after taxes, housing, insurance and transportation costs. Another dimension is that people in a harsh economic climate may take jobs that are simply unpleasant or even morally offensive to them.

I tend to think that in many respects, jobs quality and living standards may have peaked in the US right before the Kennedy-inspired expansion of immigration. The result has been transfer of trillions of dollars of assets into the hands of the wealthy-and the gutting of the American economy.

Turning around over 40 years of gross mismanagement of a huge economy will be hard. What articles like this one in the New York Times are suggesting is that the economic decline of America is becoming so obvious, it cannot be ignored any longer.

A reader writes about Obama’s popular Soviet constructivist-style propaganda poster:

Here is the official poster sold at the Obama campaign website:

It’s sold out of its limited edition of 5,000 at $70 apiece.

The artist who created this image is Shepard Fairey.

Apparently, that’s his real name.

As Time Magazine puts it, SF is “The man who launched the sticker revolution.”

Previously people who did “graffiti art,” like Warhol find Jean-Michel Basquiat, spray painted buildings. Even if they did the same image over and over again, each spray painting was unique. Fairey hit on the idea of pre-printing his vandalism as stickers and then covering an urban area with the endless repetition of the same image.

The first idea Fairey had was a sticker of the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant:

In Fairey’s mind, Andre the Giant gets mixed up with Big Brother, since Andrea, is, well, big. This produces Fairey’s next sticker campaign: “Obey Giant:”

Hitting upon Soviet aesthetics, Fairey became a big hit with those who wax nostalgic for the return of the USSR. He founded BLK/MRKT Visual Communications to sell his rebel hipness to Hawaiian Punch. Here’s one of Fairey’s various Lenin/Stalin posters:

The art side is run out of http://obeygiant.com …

Here are some examples of that work:

http://obeygiant.com/archives?nggpage=7

http://mkgallery.com/artists/fairey/fairey_2006_3.html

Of course God reminds us not to value this life to too highly by allowing it to endlessly descend to lower and lower levels of self parody. Thus it came to pass, my comrade, that when Penguin Books was getting around to reissue the Orwell “backlist,” they picked Fairey to do the covers for “1984″ and “Animal Farm” … i.e., a guy who thinks Stalin was cool will now insert himself into the history of these texts:

http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/the_penguin_blog/2008/04/it-was-a-bright.html

Here is the NYT article that prompted this all:

What does it all mean? Obviously, the Obey Obama the Giant poster isn’t “ironic.” Humorless credulity, not irony, is the hallmark of Obama fans.

Instead, the Obey Obama poster just shows once again what Michael Blowhard and Shouting Thomas pointed out recently: Most artists aren’t very smart. They like shiny stuff:

“There was a stretch in the ’90s when edgy theater artists were showcasing garish colors, laughtracks, snappy pacing, game-show formats and such. The critics were treating themselves to a field day explaining that what these deep, complex, and (as always) “critical” artists were up to was subverting our media-drenched assumptions with their media-based strategies. Vanessa, who actually hung out with a number of these actors and directors, laughed and said to me, “What nonsense. These kids are creating theater pieces that resemble live versions of television because TV is what they really like. They like TV, and they want the theater they create to be like TV.”"

So, all these Obama fans are buying posters done in the style of Soviet propaganda posters because … because they think they look cool. Which explains a lot about their politics, too.