A Brand New Intelligence Test

After considerable (and painful) research I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that there is no other publication in this entire world as intellectually insipid as the London Review of Books. I just finished a twenty something paragraph long piece arguing that the recent protests in Turkey was the rising of the proletariat against their capitalist oppressors. (LRB "explains" that capitalism and Islamism are synonymous terms, or something.)

I nearly passed out from laughing so long and derisively.

The test? Oh, if you find the premise of the Turkish protest as precursor to communist revolution silly, congratulations you are smarter than everyone affiliated with the London Review of Books. (Yes, I know I just damned you with faint praise. Sorry about that.)

If you don't find the LRB premise silly, you need to get out more.

Hmm...The Dalai Lama Doesn't Seem To Be A Very Good Buddhist

Um, let's just say this is interesting:

Usually what we hear from the Dalai Lama is an insistant yet soothing voice for compassion and peace.

So Tsering Namgyal, a journalist based in Minneapolis, was jolted by the Dalai Lama's talk to 150 Chinese students this month at the University of Minnesota. Writing at Religion Dispatches, he says:

Midway through the conversation, His Holiness, much to their surprise, told them "as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist ... But not a Leninist," he clarified....

Marx was not against religion or religious philosophy per se but against religious institutions that were allied, during Marx's time, with the European ruling class.

Wow. This is spectacularly wrong, and I can hardly see how this could be a matter of opinion. (This is true looking at it from either the philosophical or historical point of view.) Marx was very clearly against religion per se. You see, Marx was a materialist. He denied the very possibility of real spiritual existence. The only meaning which can exist for a Marxist is a meaning based upon the relationship of thing to thing, e.g. workers to the means of production, the individual to the superstructure of the state, the worker alienated from the product of his labor, etc.

How can such a materialism be squared with the basic tenets of Buddhism? Well, it cannot, not without making Buddhism a dead thing.

Which would be fine by the Chinese....

Marxist Times Columnist Longs For The Revolution

The nitwits are out again: When Democracy Weakens

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

Uh, yeah. Thanks "Karl" but I'm not buying any "up the proletariat" today. Using the measure of median household income, the United States ranks anywhere from second to fifth worldwide. The vast majority of our "poor" are only poor relatively speaking. Nearly 50% of households earning under $18,500 a year own their own home. Just as a point of comparison, worldwide the median income is $850. Roughly 95% of American households make over $10,000 a year.

Yes, people can and do struggle in this country. However, the largest part of that struggle is not for mere subsistence. It is instead the struggle to get to where people aspire to be for themselves and their families. As a result the severity of the struggle is defined not by some objective standard, as would be Marxists have it, but by the varying standards of those subjective aspirations. It so happens that many people see little or no connection between their personal aspirations and the political process. In effect, they have decided they do not need governmental help in order to get to where they want to go. They may be right or wrong in this belief, but that it exists is beyond doubt. Voter apathy is what it is called.

Don't you fret, however, our Marxist friend knows why this is so.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich....

In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.

Well, let us look at the amount of money we have been spending on Mandatory Spending (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Other Means-tested entitlements, Pensions, Debt Payments):

According to Congressional Budget Office records, federal outlays for mandatory spending were 33.8% in 1965 vs. 59.9% in 2005. They were highest in the Clinton years: 60% in 1995 and up to 62.6% by 2000.

It is even worse than this as we spend more as a percentage of GDP now than we did in 1965. Total government spending was only 16.44% of GDP in 1965. It was 24.67% in 2009. So, we spend more of a larger pie.

So where exactly is this screwing over of the poor?

As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

Got that? Because the Koch brothers are wealthy and libertarian we have had no pollution standards in this country.

AND this Marxist has a bridge he'd like to sell you.

I'm sorry, but what planet is this person writing about? Because it isn't the one I live on. Last time I checked libertarians have held a majority position in the government of the United States for exactly zero days. This guy is seriously pissed off because in this country as presently constituted people are allowed to have a different conception of politics than he has. AND they are allowed to advocate for their vision! Oh. My. God. How can democracy survive?!?

Oh, wait a second. People with differing conceptions of the good competing for power via elections. Actually, that doesn't sound like a threat to democracy. It sounds like democracy in action.

Hey. Are you a little guy? Do you want to have influence and be heard in the political world? Well, there is an avenue open to you. An avenue almost entirely devoid of scary things like "corporate money." Its called local politics. You know, those elections with ludicrously low voter turnout rates? They actually make up a large part of our democratic process. What's that? You are not all that interested? What is wrong with you? Do you hate democracy or something!? Oh, I see. You simply do not see how it really benefits you to be involved in that way and, besides, Jon Stewart rarely mentions local politics on his show. That's cool. Just remember its there if you ever need it.

Look, do immensely wealthy people have an easier time of it than you or I? Absolutely. Do they enjoy more influence? They sure do. Has there ever been a day in the history of the world when this was not true? No, there hasn't. So what do you call this state of affairs? I call it "life."

Our revolutionary continued:

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010....

I'm sure you did. I can hear your battle cry ringing in my ears.....

Viva la stupidité!

Right On Cue

What more can the writer of a blog ask for? Just hours after I write a post where I stated...

...we now live in an age where a scientific elite is demanding the suspension of democratic rule because the stakes are supposedly too high to be left to the vagaries of the ballot box....

Enter Dr. James Hansen:

November's election made it quite clear that the people of the United States do not want to radically change our society in the name of global warming. Pretty much every close House race went to the Republicans, while the Democrats won all the Senate squeakers. The difference? The House on June 26, 2009, passed a bill limiting carbon-dioxide emissions and getting into just about every aspect of our lives. The Senate did nothing of the sort.

The nation's most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the "best hope" to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China's will.

So, if given a choice between the political will of the American people and communism, Dr. Hansen chooses communism.

Is it OK to question the patriotism of someone who wishes to destroy democratic rule and eviscerate the political history of the country? (As if I need to ask.)

So Howard Zinn Supported Stalin

It is confirmed (for any who had doubts), Howard Zinn was a communist. Really it should come as no big surprise given his "intellectual" output. Zinn was a man consumed by ideology (and a particularly violent and hate filled variant to boot.) It oozed like toxic slime over practically everything the man ever wrote, which amounted to making a mockery of the enlightenment idea of history. Zinn is to real history what Lysenko is to real biology, that is, a joke.

Hobnobbing With Spies

I never posted anything about it here on IMW, but last summer I experienced a shock when I discovered that one of my old employees from my Washington DC bookshop days turned out to be, along with her husband, spying for Castro. I did write a post, Working With “Agent 123″, that I published over at Blue Crab Boulevard, but for some reason never talked about it here.

A reporter saw my piece on Blue Crab and contacted me to get a little background on Gwen Myers' time at the old Cleveland Park Bookshop. It was published in Washingtonian magazine in October. It is a good article, and I encourage people to go read it.

I'll admit it strikes even me as odd that I haven't until now mentioned my connection to this relatively big news item on the blog. After all, it isn't the sort of thing that pops up every day. All I can say is there was always something profoundly depressing about the story for me.

Life is strange. If I wouldn't admit it before, I will now.

More Of That Old Time Religion

From Der Spiegel: German Left Wing May Have Ties to Colombian Extremists

According to data found on a laptop confiscated by Colombian authorities, the terrorist group FARC may have had ties to left-wing politicians in Germany. E-mails found on the computer, confiscated after the recent killing of FARC commander Reyes, show that his son visited Berlin.

The Colombian guerrilla group FARC isn't just well connected in the region. According to e-mails found on the laptop of the recently killed FARC commander Raúl Reyes, the group, listed by the European Union as a terrorist organization, also has close ties to the far left in Germany.

Data found on the computer, confiscated following the March bombing raid carried out by Colombia on a guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador, indicate that Reyes sent his son, Ariel Robespierre Devia, on a secret trip to Berlin in January 2005. It also suggests that while in Germany, Devia, who goes by his alias "Roberto," met with Wolfgang Gehrcke, then a member of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) -- the successor party to the East German Communist party -- and now a member of the German parliament with the Left Party and the party's foreign affairs spokesman.

E-mails on the computer indicate that, according to "Roberto," Gehrcke suggested that the PDS could back a bid in the European Parliament to remove FARC from the list of terrorist organizations. "It was a very positive meeting," "Roberto" wrote. "We were able to solidify a number of points to reactivate the solidarity with the fight of the Colombian people."

"Roberto" also met with representatives of the German Communist Party, and the left-wing daily Junge Welt allegedly offered to assist the FARC publication Resistencia.

In June 2007, the Left Party circulated a proposal that FARC be removed from the European Union's list of terrorist groups.

The indications of ties between FARC and the German far left come as the computer files found on the laptop continue to fuel regional tensions. Based on documents found on the computer's hard drive, Colombia has accused Venezuela of having close ties to FARC and of supporting the organization. In response, Venezuela accused Bogotá of having manipulated the computers -- though the international law enforcement agency Interpol has since confirmed the authenticity of the Reyes computer.

Maybe they were just planning to form the Third International, because you simply can't have a socialist political party without conspiring with thugs, terrorists and drug traffickers.

This is the reason the failure of the Pelosi Democrats to support Colombia in its battle with FARC is so damning. Combine that with the seeming inability of Barack Obama to remember which is his real policy concerning Chavez and FARC, and which is the one he will own up to in public, and I don't see how anyone could be confident in the direction events would take in the event of a Democratic victory in November.