Bloodthirsty Liberal

The CPUSA begs to differ:

RUSH: So Obama says he’s not a Bolshevik but, folks, the Communist Party USA loves Obama. Here are just some sample headlines. “CPUSA and Obama Platforms are Identical.” August 8th, 2008: “Forget for the moment about Bill Ayers and Obama’s other Communist friends and mentors of the distant past,” and they go on to cite how his agenda and theirs are platforms, Obama’s and the CPUSA, are identical.

…

It’s just what the Communist Party USA wants, just what Obama is doing. Here’s another: CPUSA: Obama Will change USA Forever,” and they’re happy about it! August 7th, 2008: “Communist Party CPUSA Endorses Obama.”

“Communist Party USA Hails Obama Victory.” “‘From the understandably elated editors of the Communist Party USA’s people’s weekly, formerly the Daily Worker, July 1st, 2009: ‘Communist Party USA Eelebrates Obama’s First Six Months.’” “Communist Party USA to Take the Streets for Obama,” August 10th, 2009. This is to oppose the tea parties and the town hall meetings that were going on. “Communist Party USA Honors SEIU and the AFSCME Union Leaders.” “CPUSA Speech Lays Out Obama Agenda.” I mean, it’s right there for people to see; and these are not, you know, play communists. They’re not all that powerful here. Well, they are actually with Obama in office. But he says that he’s not a Bolshevik. “I’m not. I’m not an ideologue,” but he most definitely is.

QED

I’m going to speculate here, if you’ll allow me.

I recently heard someone mention that the Obama’s still haven’t picked a church to attend in Washington. It makes no difference to me, I don’t attend church, either (and the president might find it easier to get a tee time during services). But it seemed to be a big deal to them.

As this reporter from Time (hardly anti-Obama) observed:

The Obama family attended services at St. John’s Episcopal this morning [Sunday, October 11, 2009], and the Secret Service even let them walk the two blocks across Lafayette Park on this gorgeous October day. It marked the first time the family has gone to church in Washington since Easter, when they also visited St. John’s, although the Obamas have been worshipping at Evergreen Chapel at Camp David whenever they spend the weekend at the Maryland retreat.

It has also been three and a half months since the White House insisted that the First Family continues to look for a church in Washington to join. Few people would blame them if they decided it would be too disruptive to upend a local congregation–Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all chose to largely avoid Washington churches for similar reasons, and conservatives defended their decisions to do so. It’s all the more surprising then that the White House has chosen to dig in on this point and continue to maintain that the Obamas will choose a local church as their main place of worship. It only becomes a Church Watch if they make it one.

Well put.

Now, one could point out the obvious and say Obama, who dismissed the pious as “bitter clingers”, needs at least to pay lip service to a search for church.

But I wonder if there isn’t something else going on, something deeper, something more illustrative to who he is. And, again, I’m paraphrasing Rush here, who frequently declares that Bill Ayres and Van Jones and Valerie Jarrett and Jeremiah Wright aren’t anomalies. They are Obama. And he is they.

Check out this speech Wright gave recently to the publishers of Monthly Review, a “no-nonsense” Marxist magazine, and see if it doesn’t sound like someone who inspired the wealth-spreader-in-chief, the Great Apologizer:

“You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism.”

He called America “land of the greed and home of the slave.”

“My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”

President Obama can’t bear false witness, can’t turn against the one faith that speaks to his soul—and I wouldn’t want him to. Rev. Wright was his pastor for 20 years, performed his marriage, baptized his children. I bet Wright feels the pain and disappointment of Jesus when he told Peter that he would deny him. And I bet Obama feels the shame and guilt of Peter.

The only other reasonable interpretation is that Obama arrived on the scene in Chicago a young man on the make. Smart man that he is (and articulate! and clean!), he quickly saw that his path to bigger things went through Wright’s church. When Wright was no longer useful to him, when no religion was of any use to him, he dropped him, dropped it, like a heavy load. Who needs it.

But I don’t believe that. I believe Obama is a true believer. And I don’t see why he should deny himself his spiritual shepherd, or why we should be denied the truth of his beliefs.

This particular passage from the piece Aggie linked to below rings especially true, today as it would have fifty years ago:

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

They starved to death in the gulags for the greater good, in other words; instead of in the gas chambers for no good whatsoever. I’m sure that must have been some consolation.

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder.

Hollander doesn’t come out and say what I will: that these same flaws are evident—prominent!—in liberals today. The tendency on the left to romanticize socialism is disturbingly coincidental with a red-in-tooth-and-claw attitude toward those who might not agree. We’ve heard it ourselves; we’ve reported it here. Orwell did so sixty years ago.

This is not news—but, frighteningly, it is not history either. Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s dark secrets over fifty years ago; Gorbachev repeated the process over twenty. Yet the Russians are more familiar with the crimes of the Soviet Union than we are. In the media and academia, Reagan is reviled, Ted Kennedy lionized. Yet one faced down the abominable monster of Soviet communism; the other would have done anything (and did do much) to accommodate it.

We’ve had our own Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs. Daniel Patrick Moynihan decried the condition of the black family forty-five years ago, a condition hardly changed despite decades of Great Society programs (and which failure has been acknowledged by many blacks across the political spectrum). Former liberals, from Reagan himself to humble Aggie and I, have called BS on our earlier views and comrades, earning pity at best and disgust at worst.

“Communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions”: remember that line forever.

Venezuela teaches us how to impoverish people

Five months after Venezuela nationalized dozens of oil service contractors in Zulia state, the once-bustling industrial dock on Lake Maracaibo is nearly abandoned, and the 16 red flags raised to celebrate the takeovers are already tattered and faded.

A few small groups of workers remain, hoping to get the jobs they were promised after the expropriations.

“We demand our jobs. Because we haven’t gotten an answer, we’re still here,” said Demostenes Velasquez, who for months has lived under thescorching sun in a tent improvised from remnants of oil union election pamphlets.

Like Velasquez, many workers on the eastern shores of the lake have protested or gone on hunger strikes to demand jobs promised them after President Hugo Chavez’s government expropriated 76 oil services companies on the Maracaibo Lake. The western region has a long history of oil production.

As part of his drive to install socialism in the OPEC nation, Chavez expropriated the companies contracted by state-run PDVSA, with promises of social prosperity and worker justice.

Why can’t we learn from events?

Over the months since then, protests have intensified so much the government sent troops to control the discontented workers. Many of the protesters sewed their lips together and chained their hands and feet to call the president’s attention to their plight.

BROKEN PROMISES

Despite the protests, most of the workers don’t blame Chavez or his revolution, but individual managers of the state oil company.

“Five months ago, our President Hugo Chavez announced the glorious news (of the nationalization) that would benefit the town, but some (PDVSA) managers have contradicted it,” said Velasquez, a self-proclaimed “Chavista” who dresses in the red clothing popular with champions of the president.

The raft of nationalizations in Venezuela since 2007 has brought pressures on the government to improve lives for workers. But petroleum revenues have dropped with crude oil prices in the recession, leaving Venezuela without funds to fulfill the promises made to gain worker support.

- Aggie

Few people realize that communism killed more people in the 20th century than Nazism. The reasons that we don’t know are doubtlessly complex, but part of the problem is that academics and high school teachers still cling to romantic notions of communism. These fantasies have led us to ignore reality or even to outright misrepresent facts (see NY Times, Duranty, Walter).

This is written by a man who lived under communism in Hungary and escaped. Everyone, and I mean everyone should read what he has to say. Self-imposed ignorance is not acceptable.

The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from “voting with their feet” and leaving a society they rejected. The wall was only the most visible segment of a vast system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of miles along the border of the “Socialist Commonwealth.” I am one of those who managed to cross these obstacles in November 1956, when they were partially and temporarily dismantled along the Austrian-Hungarian border. My experiences in communist Hungary, where I lived until age 24, had a durable impact on my life and work.

While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

Communist systems ranged from tiny Albania to gigantic China; from highly industrialized Eastern European countries to underdeveloped African ones. While divergent in many respects, they had in common a reliance on Marxism-Leninism as their source of legitimacy, the one-party system, control over the economy and media, and the presence of a huge political police force. They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being — the socialist or communist man.

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

Read it. Take ten minutes and absorb what he is saying, because it is the truth. What is also true is that Nazism borrowed a lot from communism and that they share certain root beliefs: superior man, common good and scapegoated enemies, lack of tolerance for individual or group difference in thought or ritual. But that is for another day.

I think that the Hollander article should be forwarded to interested friends. Most people do not understand this stuff.

- Aggie

Pay up, stogie boy. We’ll accept payment in cigars and rum. And left-handed starting pitchers.

A Miami judge has ordered Cuba and the country’s governing Communist Party to pay a total of 27.5 million dollars to the mother of an imprisoned political dissident.

In what is thought to be the first ruling of its kind, federal judge Alan Gold said Olivia Saludes, the mother of Omar Rodriguez Saludes, should be awarded damages for the anguish and adverse affects on her health caused by her son’s incarceration.

Rodriguez, a journalist for the Nueva Prensa (New Press) agency was locked up in 2003 with more than 70 other dissidents.

The Communist Party came out worst in the judgement, which was dated September 2, ordered to pay 25 million dollars, while the Cuban government was ordered to pay 2.5 million.

Saludes said she had not seen her son in six years and suffers from insomnia and constant nightmares.

…

Saludes’ lawyer, Pedro Martinez-Fraga welcomed the ruling which was issued on September 2.

“This case establishes a completely new precedent, because for the first time in history (it) recognizes the rights of the family in a case (relating to) damages caused to a political prisoner in Cuba,” he told AFP.

I’m sorry for this lady’s pain (not to mention her son’s), but this might finally give Fidel that fatal infarction we’ve all been waiting for.

Hey, Pig-Pen, don’t look now, but your shortstop just defected!

Just kidding!

While the rest of Asia frets over one suicide story, I (naturally) was taken by this more macabre tale of self-topping:

A man threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a Chinese bridge was approached by a passer-by who shoved him over the edge, local media say.

Lai Jiansheng, 66, said he was fed up with the desperate man’s “selfish activity” which caused huge traffic jams in Guangzhou, southern China.

Chen Fuchao fell 26ft (8m) on to an air cushion and is recovering in hospital, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Xinhua said Mr Lai was “taken away by police”, but gave no further details.

…

Retired soldier Mr Lai at first volunteered to try to talk Mr Chen down but was turned away by police, Xinhua said.

Mr Lai is said to have then broken through the police cordon, climbed to where Mr Chen sat, greeted him with a handshake - and then pushed him off the edge.

…

“I pushed him off because jumpers like Chen are very selfish,” the newspaper quoted Mr Lai as saying.

“Their action violates a lot of public interests. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities’ attention to their appeals.”

In this image taken, Thursday May 21, 2009 shows Chen Fuchao, a man heavily in debt, who had been contemplating suicide on a bridge for hours is seen falling after passer-by Lai Jiansheng, not in picture, came up, shook his hand — and pushed him off the ledge in Guangzhou, China.

Oh relax, he lived.

Much as I may wish to condemn this guy Lai as a monster who represents the monstrosity of modern Chinese society—and I really, really do wish to—I think he’s a kind of hero.

He certainly seems to think so:

The will of the individual survives in China after sixty yeas of heavy-handed, jack-booted Communist rule. Hip-hip, hooray!

If they allow bumper stickers in China (do they even have bumpers?), I’ll bet his looks like this:

We learned of the triumph of democracy in Gaza the other day, when Hamass announced it had won an election held in secret, and even the winners of which were kept secret.

With such “democracy” running amok in Gaza, can it be a surprise to learn that “civil liberties” are following suit?

Several NGOs, including radio stations, are facing closure after the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip decided to impose high fees and new conditions for renewing their licenses.

Human rights organizations in the Gaza Strip on Sunday sent a letter of protest to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh urging him to cancel the new measures.

Last week the Hamas-controlled Communications Ministry sent letters to the owners of radio stations in the Gaza Strip asking them to pay nearly 10,000 Jordanian dinars (about $14,000) as an annual fee for licenses.

In addition, the Hamas government has asked dozens of non-profit institutions to make public statements about the sources of their funding and the financial status of their employees. These institutions have also been asked to pay new taxes to the Hamas government.

The measures are seen by human rights activists in Gaza as an attempt to take control over the international organizations and maintain a tight grip over the local media.

I am really ticked off by this. I mean, major-league outraged. They’re giving President Obama more ideas!

Let Europe or left-wing crackpots have Hamass if they love them so much. If it weren’t for Israel, the left would recognize Hamass for the neo-fascist organization that it is. If you allow that premise, then it is only the existence of Israel that entices people to engage with Hamass.

I was thumbing through my worn copy of Bernard Lewis’s Crisis of Islam, and I was struck—again—by this passage from the afterward (found online in an likely place):

The kind of dictatorship that exists in the Middle East today has to no small extent been the result of modernization, more specifically of European influence and example. This included the only European political model that really worked in the Middle East — that of the one- party state, either in the Nazi or the communist version, which did not differ greatly from one another. In these systems, the party is not, as in the West, an organization for attracting votes and winning elections. It is part of the apparatus of government, particularly concerned with indoctrination and enforcement. The Baath Party has a double ancestry, both fascist and communist, and still represents both trends very well.

So, the Europeans are intrigued with Hamass not only because it is anti-Israel, but because it reminds them of their own fascist/communist pasts (”which did not differ greatly from one another”).

I stand corrected.

The president’s bailout of the auto industry has degenerated into blackmail, extortion, and intimidation:

If the Bush White House had engaged in anything similar to what’s being described here (actually, Hank Paulson did; the question is how much Bush knew), there would be calls for impeachment.

…

What attorney Tom Lauria describes is nothing short of chilling.

What follows is a rush transcription, omitting the intro and wrap-up niceties, of an interview today between WJR’s Frank Beckmann and Tom Lauria, attorney for most of (at the moment) Chrysler’s non-TARP creditors:

Beckmann: So what’s the matter with your vulture clients who are so greedy and selfish. Why won’t they go along with this?

Lauria: Well, they bought a contract that says that they get paid before anyone else does by Chrysler. And they have been told by the government who is in complete control of Chrysler, oddly enough, that despite their contractual right, they do not get paid before everyone else.

So they are standing on their rights, standing on the law, trying to defend in effect what is the Constitution of the United States, to make sure that they get what they’re entitled to for their investors.

Beckmann: Tom, let me make the argument against you in another way. We’ve heard the President say this, “I wouldn’t want to stand on their side.” Ron Gettelfinger says “Everyone else has made concessions. These people won’t; they’re greedy.” Why not take a concession that is being asked of everybody else and is being accepted by everybody else, including other hedge funds that had bought some of these bonds in Chrysler?

Lauria: Well that’s a great question, because let me tell you it’s no fun standing on this side of the fence opposing the President of the United States. In fact, let me just say, people have asked me who I represent, and that’s a moving target.

I can tell you for sure that I represent one less investor today than I represented yesterday. One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House, and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That’s how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.

Beckmann: Was that Perella Weinberg?

Lauria: That was Perella Weinberg.

In other words: Nice hedge fund you got here. Shame if something happened to it.

Now let me just tell you, to be clear, that we do not oppose the rehabilitation of Chrysler. We think it is vitally important that a company like Chrysler be protected to the extent that it can be within the framework of the law. I want to also say that we do not oppose the government backstopping or supporting the pensioneers and retirees and workers of Chrysler.

I actually think that in a troubled economic time like we’re in, that is an appropriate role for the government to perform. What we do oppose, however, is the abuse of the bankruptcy law to coerce first-lien lenders subsidize the rehabilitation of Chrysler or the backstop of the obligations to the pensioneers and retirees beyond what they will do voluntarily.

And just to be clear, these clients of mine have agreed to compromise 50% of their first-lien position to help support the rehabilitation of Chrysler — Contrary to what the President said yesterday in his new conference that “these people will not give to support the effort,” they have agreed to compromise 50% of what they’re owed to support the rehabilitation of Chrysler, despite the fact that they’re under no obligation whatsoever to do so.

There’s a great deal more, and the lawyer also stresses the point I made the other day, namely that hedge funds represent investors: “pensioneers, teachers’ credit unions, personal retiree accounts, retirement plans, college endowments”. The president is abusing his power to abrogate contracts and screw individuals and “worthy” institutions that holds Chrysler’s debt. The unions, on the other hand, are handsomely rewarded for any concessions they have made with de facto control of the company.

I can’t decide which is the more terrifying prospect: the UAW and the White House trying to run an automobile company; the president employing fascist (the word genuinely fits) techniques to extort concessions; his complete disregard for the primacy of contracts; the media’s utter deference to all of the above.

Like the community organizer that lies at his core, President Obama is not above brandishing a pitchfork of his own.

The old Texaco slogan assured us we could trust our car to the man who wore the star—but I don’t think this is what they meant

Chrysler LLC filed for bankruptcy Thursday. But a deal has been reached to combine the company with Fiat in order to allow Chrysler to stay in business.

The bankruptcy filing, which was made in federal court in New York, comes after some of Chrysler’s smaller lenders refused a Treasury Department demand to reduce the amount of money the troubled automaker owed them.

In remarks at the White House, President Obama said that the bankruptcy filing is not a failure for the company but “one more step on the path to Chrysler’s revival.”

The president harshly criticized the hedge funds and investment firm creditors that refused to go along with the deal accepted by larger lenders, saying that they had “decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified, taxpayer funded bailout.”

Well, ahem, they were investors, weren’t they? Anyway, it wasn’t their money, per se, but the money of their investors they were expecting to be made whole. And last, why shouldn’t they expect an “unjustified, taxpayer funded bailout” when that’s all this government has done since taking power?

But it gets better (which is to say worse):

In addition, the United Auto Workers union announced late Wednesday night that its membership at Chrysler had overwhelmingly ratified a concession contract reached between the company and union leadership on Sunday night.

As a result of that deal, the UAW will own 55% of Chrysler.

The hedge fund investors, who actually owned 30% of the company, are publicly scolded, scourged, yet the unions, which owned…. what—nothing, a little?—are handed more than half the company on a chrome platter.

And if the hedge fund investors were so venal, and spit in the proverbial soup, why is he announcing this bankruptcy as a success?

The deals give Chrysler “a new lease on life,” President Barack Obama said.

“This is not a sign of weakness,” he said. “I have every confidence that Chrysler will emerge from this process stronger and more competitive.”

Not least, what the hell good were the billions and billions and billions of bailout dollars if bankruptcy and government takeover are the result?

If all of this sounds familiar:

The feds have decided they should own a neat 50% of GM, yet that is not the natural outcome of the $16.2 billion that the Treasury has so far lent to the company. Nor is the 40% ownership of GM that the plan awards to the United Auto Workers a natural result of the company’s obligations to the union.

Yet Secretary Timothy Geithner and his auto task force, led by Steven Rattner, have somehow decided that Treasury and UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger will get to own a combined 90% of GM.

…

The biggest losers here are GM’s bondholders. According the Treasury-GM debt-for-equity swap announced Monday, GM has $27.2 billion in unsecured bonds owned by the public. These are owned by mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds and retail investors who bought them directly through their brokers. Under Monday’s offer, they would exchange their $27.2 billion in bonds for 10% of the stock of the restructured GM. This could amount to less than five cents on the dollar.

Maybe you think I’ve been kidding with the hammer and sickle imagery I’ve used in the past, or the USA-SSR rhetoric—but I sincerely ask these questions:

What ought we to call it when the workers have been given ownership of the means of production at the expense of private investors? When government intervention and strong-arming have nationalized industries, even whole sectors of the economy? When the propaganda office runs night and day to burnish the president’s image? When he ridicules grass-roots protests against the burgeoning national debt and impending tax increases?

It’s all of a piece, as any student of Soviet history knows, and we’re all students of Soviet history now—or we’d better be.

UPDATE:
Of course, I may have the wrong -ism:

Yes, it is indeed similar to fascism.