IS EUROPE ABANDONING SOCIALISM?

The following article by Joseph Farah will display what is at work here. The utter ruin of American competitiveness. That's the blueprint these Marxist Democratic party apparatchiks are using to shore up power for themselves and render the United States more pliable for the big takeover they have already begun executing. Paranoia or keen insight? You be the judge now, or history will do it for you.

HOW IRONIC IS IT THAT the U.S. is embracing socialism at the very moment Europe and many other parts of the world are running away from it? Somebody needs to ask Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi about this.

In the past five years, 33 countries, including 20 in socialist Europe, always held up as the example for a new American economic model by Democrats, have cut their personal income taxes, according to a study by KPMG, the giant accounting firm. In the past four years, 60 countries have cut their corporate income tax rates. Why have they done it?

Simple. They want to compete more effectively for capital and human resources. Basically, the world has been turned upside-down—with territories even under Communist control recognizing that low taxes is what drives burgeoning economies.

Read it all.

CRASHING THE UTOPIAN BUS

SCRAPING THE BARREL and putting in buckshot, hey, get your hands off my scripture, and help me out from under this utopian bus, please. No, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did find this tasty bit of humor at the clutch hitting Confluence site. Man, will I be glad when this election is over, EVEN if it means that REAL HOPE becomes as rare as the great spotted owl, also. The suspense is killing me! Anyhoover, read on...

Came into work today and saw this notice in the employee lounge:

Notice to All Employees

As of November 5, 2008, when President Obama is officially elected into office, our company will install a few new policies which are in keeping with his new, inspiring issues of change and fairness:

1. All salespeople will be pooling their sales and bonuses into a common pool that will be divided equally between all of you. This will serve to give those of you who are underachieving a “fair shake.”
2. All low level workers will be pooling their wages, including overtime, into a common pool, dividing it equally amongst yourselves. This will help those who are “too busy for overtime” to reap the rewards from those who have more spare time and can work extra hours.
3. All top management will now be referred to as “the government.” We will not participate in this “pooling” experience because the law doesn’t apply to us.
4. The “government” will give eloquent speeches to all employees every week, encouraging it’s workers to continue to work hard “for the good of all.”
5. The employees will be thrilled with these new policies because it’s “good to spread the wealth.” Those of you who have underachieved will finally get an opportunity; those of you who have worked hard and had success will feel more “patriotic.”
6. The last few people who were hired should clean out their desks. Don’t feel bad, though, because President Obama will give you free healthcare, free handouts, free oil for heating your home, free food stamps, and he’ll let you stay in your home for as long as you want even if you can’t pay your mortgage. If you appeal directly to our Democratic Congress, you might even get a free flat screen TV and a coupon for free haircuts (shouldn’t all Americans be entitled to nice looking hair?)!

If for any reason you are not happy with the new policies, you may want to rethink your vote on November 4th.

Okay, that was a wonderful parody of the Obama Doctrine, but did you ever wonder where all this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed utopianism of the Uber Left got started? Here is a scholarly look at this utopianism and its more recent by-product that is currently sweeping the globe, and why incidentally, Barack Obama seems to feel that he is not necessarily America's first Black President, but he expects to be hailed as the first Black Global President by general acclamation, titular head of the United Nations, one presumes.

Don't you just LOVE the truth! Here is a short excerpt from the Lee Harris lengthy essay—The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing (The Utopian Leanings of Latter-day Radicalism).

America-bashing has sadly come to be “the opium of the intellectual,” to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Karl Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams.

This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned—including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend—a struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself.

For the essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the refusal to acknowledge just how much suffering and pain every upward step of man’s ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to dream that there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and it is helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue that the great inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral.

The Left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its dialectical necessity—America is the sine qua non of any future progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress may take.

The belief that mankind’s progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process—whatever these laws may be—must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.

It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read it all.

EDUCATED AND DEADLY SERIOUS

DELIVER US FROM EVIL, while they whisper and smile how much they love us— excuse me, I'm just a poor painter working his way through dreams and nightmares, but could you please tell me Mister Harvard Man, is this stuff I hear real or is it memorex?

TOPPLING A POLITICAL PARTY, ETC.

HERE'S ANOTHER STRONGLY WORDED message from the increasingly radicalized PUMA camp. It seems that indeed the Democratic Party regulars have begun to snatch pages from Adolph's fascist playbook (after all, Naziism, or the National Socialist Party leftist label is self-evident), and are leaving nothing to chance (nee a vote) as they tighten their grip on the party, losing disgruntled millions of their base at the same time.

Eerily, this syncs with what I overheard in a rather strange utterance over dinner with friends at DC's ever so trendy, politically-charged eatery and bookshop—Busboy's and Poets—one evening last December.

I was sitting at the table of a self-professed Marxist political activist plotting and regaling fellow radicals with anecdotes and news of the day. Then I heard this dear fellow suggest in a single phrase that to get the results he and his Naderite cronies wished to achieve, the Democratic Party must be destroyed first. The insinuation was that the Republican Party would only then be strategically vulnerable enough to topple. Not that any of this destructionism makes a lick of sense to me, as a reactionary constitutionalist, even if I were to throw on a Marxist cap for a day, and I think the record will show that I am a piss poor excuse for a venture capitalist perhaps, but a global Marxist, never!

Toppling a political party? Sorry, unintended consequences do tend to foil the best laid plans.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that I to date remain friendly with this particular Marxist Naderite, having been introduced the previous September on a trip to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, but we are hardly what I'd call bosom buddies, although he and his friends are indeed of the touchy-feely hug-a-lot crowd—not that there's anything wrong with that.

Okay, back story finished. Here's the PUMA report by Heidi Li...

Action alert: time to make it crystal clear that under no circumstances does Senator Obama get to pick the next DNC chair. CQ Politics is reporting a new twist in the shameless collusion between Senator Obama and the DNC to suggest that, at a time when the Democratic Party is deeply divided, it is somehow Senator Obama's prerogative to pick the next DNC chair.

Apparently the new Democratic Party way is for one chair to overrride rank and file Democrats and use any number of unscrupulous tactics to install his preferred candidate as the nominee and then that nominee turns around and arrogates to himself the right to pick the next chair, even though it remains entirely uncertain that Senator Obama will win the general election or even if he does manage to do so that he will do more than squeak by.

In any event, one thing we know about Senator Obama: he is not very good at forging coalitions among different segments of rank and file Democrats, let alone being able to "unify" the Party or the country. Since the DNC is meant to be the official representative of all Democrats (not that it has even pretended to live up to that job description under the stewardship of current chair Howard Dean), it is patently absurd to put the future of the Party's internal leadership in the hands of Senator Obama. The cycle of egomanical self-servingness has just been ratcheted up.

Since the DNC claims that the reason Senator Obama gets to dictate who the next DNC chair is, it is ever more important for the medium and long term health of the Democratic Party that Senator Obama not win this election. Here's the passage from the CQ Politics story that informs us that Senator Obama's internal party is based on the assumption he will win the general election, and that if he does win the DNC will once again hold a fake election rather than a real vote for the position of chair:

'“We expect Sen. Obama to be in the White House, and it’ll be his decision as to who’ll be nominated” to succeed Dean, said Stacie Paxton, national press secretary for the DNC.

If Obama is elected, he will designate his choice for the chairmanship, and DNC members would be expected to ratify his decision at a meeting immediately after Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.'

The story goes on to say:

'If the Democrats do not win the White House, a special party meeting would be called for an election to be held between Jan. 1 and March 1, said DNC officials. Dean and his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, were both elected in meetings during the month of February.'

If this is the way the DNC wants to play this, then there is only thing to be done by Democrats who care about seeing their Party survive the civil war that Senator Obama and Howard Dean have already brought to it. Senator Obama must not win the general election. And his defeat must come at the hands of Democrats who now realize that in the new Democratic Party way no compromise is allowed. If no compromise is allowed, if Senator Obama is determined to make the entire Democratic Party revolve around him and the DNC is willing to be a mere satellite to Senate Obama, then responsible and wise Democrats must make sure that Senator Obama loses this election.

Read it all.

And another clear-eyed look at this crisis is Pat Buchanan's (yeah, I know, but just get over it) latest essay. So we've got Hillary's PUMAs, card-carrying Marxists, and rare Robert Taft conservatives, while certainly not in lockstep, all jostling in somewhat relative agreement.

What's that quip about strange bedfellows?

I read elsewhere that political shock jock Lou Dobbs continues to insist that plans for the North American Union are already underway. But one can't unilaterally form a North American Union with a united currency (the Amero) unless the economies of the U.S. and Canada sink to near equal that of Mexico. This economic crash seems to be a case of "Problem, Reaction, Solution" artificially brought upon us by the Federal Reserve which of course is the enterprise of private bankers.

"We were warned. Here's a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

And there we have it, folks. The bottom line is that an unelected financial elite has controlled this country since The Federal Reserve Act and Woodrow Wilson. Within a generation we were off the gold standard, and now, we are swamped in a miasma of worthless dollars. And as a result, what's left of any fiscal morality Americans once knew and practiced has left the building, and is whistling Dixie, otherwise known as just another somebody done somebody wrong song...

HINTS ON INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

(Originally published on the SWORG SWILL LISTSERV on June 21, 1999)

Crash writes: I'm glad that you are so clear on your political position.

Kube writes: This was a joke right? Here are a few clearer generalisations.
1. that everyone is and should be out for themselves (individualism)
2. that everyone is mutually interdependent and only equity (of opportunity to develop what you are) can ultimately deliver what anyone needs (communism, self-interest). That is, the nurturing of the parts is the nurturing of the whole.
3. that such an interdependent and complex system can only work on the basis of control by the people (anarchism, efficiency.)
4. that the task is immense and cannot be perfected overnight (revolution, pragmatism) (also see my position on violence)
5. that human relations are inseparable from material conditions (sociology, biology)
6. that all that is springs from material conditions (materialism, religion)
7. there are loads more, but the above will do to fill in most of the traditional boxes.

Crash writes...
Because I'm still working on my position and feel that I'm constantly evolving, I'm not willing to throw my hat into the standard groups (situs, anarchists, marxists, whatever).

Kube writes...
Well I've been TRYING to throw in my lot with some kind of standard group or other for longer than I can remember, for the simple reason that I felt it necessary to organize and coordinate in order to have a benign effect upon a hostile social order. But the trouble with all these groups is simply that they're all fucking wrong.

And writes...
This is not to say that I disagree with Situationism (I want to live in situations!), Anarchism (I want to be free!) or Marxism (we must work together!), but as doctrines they fail to ensure the enlightenment of their own members let alone society at large, and “therefore” one must induct that as worldviews they are not necessarily wrong, but they are certainly lacking. My opinion is that they all lack much the same thing—a sufficient comprehension of relationship and its role in the creative process (that is, in its creation of the future).

And writes...
Anarchists simply refuse to acknowledge the dynamic expansive essence of human nature—they fall back onto small fragmented self-contained worlds (two hippies in a tent on an allotment); the Situationists fell into the pomo Sargasso of 'going with the flow', everything is permissible and utopia will build itself out of nothing at all; the Marxists developed dialectics—but only to the size of a blastocyst, then stopped. All those libraries of paper, all those pyramids of ponderings on what should be done in Somalia, Timbuktu, Peking when the truth is that their members couldn’t collectively make a chicken casserole out of a casserole and a chicken.

And writes...
Inevitably therefore, the basis of action, or of any cultural or political system which is its objective, must be individualism. In order for other people to be what you want them to be (whether you imagine this to be "sharing", "obedient", "enlightened", "beautiful" or whatever) you must create the conditions for them to make this of themselves. A world held in the shape you want it to be only by your own expenditure of energy is a world in which you suffer eternal hunger, toil, conflict, frustration and boredom. In other words, it's a paradox.

And writes...
This is the world we live in (reality on the ground, as Gabriel puts it).

And writes...
Even the desire to control others "for their own good" leads to a contempt for others which does not desire "their own good" any longer—THEY must instead be punished for being the projected object of YOUR own dissatisfaction.