Bill Lind’s classic.

Doesn’t this sound just like the anti-ATS chorus?

The most deadly aspect of Cultural Marxism/Totalitarian Humanism is that it identifies broad categories of human beings that are undefined as evil by virtue of their mere existence as the principal enemy, as opposed to attacking specific individual actions or institutional policies and structures that are dysfunctional or undesirable. Instead, it creates a dualism where some arbitrary categories of people are considered good and virtuous, but oppressed and deserving of sympathy no matter what their individual circumstances or what they personally do (unless they exhibit ideological non-conformity).  Out of this dualism emerges an apocalyptic outlook where the success of the virtuous is predicated on the complete elimination of the evil.

Modern totalitarian ideologies like Communism, National Socialism, or Totalitarian Humanism are simply secularized versions of the ideas found in classical monotheist religions where the virtuous chosen inherit some reconstructed utopian new world after the flawed old world has been destroyed and the sinners cast into the lake of fire. Concentration camps and gulags are merely a secularized version of eternal damnation with the only exception being that human beings take it upon themselves to create Heaven and Hell on earth rather than sitting around praying and waiting for it to happen in some fantasy netherworld.

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Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.

We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?

We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke, literally in a comic strip, and we tend still to think of it as only half-serious. In fact, it’s deadly serious. It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology. PC is not funny. PC is deadly serious.

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Article by Larry Gambone.

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I see Occupy’s situation today as analogous to that of the Civil Rights Movement. As long as they stayed in the South Northern liberals loved them. But when the movement went North and started confronting racism there, it became “Dr. King, you are going too far!” Perhaps without intending to, the Civil Rights Movement exposed the limits of liberalism and of the socio-economic system of the United States.

Occupy has gotten a lot of back patting and verbal support from political moderates. However, now that the time has come to turn those kind words into taking a real stand with the Occupy Movement, the story becomes, “No, we can’t do that, and you have been here too long anyway. Please pack up your tents and go!” There has to be more to this rejection than just fear of slobbering rightwingers.

One of the most appealing aspects for the public – when they know about it – has been Occupy’s list of demands. So moderate, so reasonable, probably three quarters of Canadians would agree. Yet, I think these sorts of demands are the very thing that upsets our corporate masters and their ideologues the most. If Occupy was demanding the implementation of anarchist communism next week, the movement could be laughed off, but demands that the average person can get behind are dangerous to the greedy and powerful.

Occupys sweet little list of demands is slam-bang up against the dominant ideology – corporatism, also known as neo-liberalism. To paraphrase the Godfather of corporatism, one Benito Mussolini, corporatism is best seen as “Everything by the corporation, everything for the corporation, nothing against the corporation.” A contemporary corporatist, Margaret Thatcher, now dying of brain rot (karma) put it rather cold bloodedly, TINA – There Is No Alternative (to corporate domination)

The age of reforms was supposed to be over. Through their control of the state apparatus, the corporatist ideologues began eliminating the reforms thousands of working people had died struggling for. The neoliberal utopia was one without trade unions, minimum wage laws, laws regulating work hours and even child labour laws. Heaven for the wealthy and powerful, hell for the rest of us.

They beat the drum of corporatist ideology so long and so loud, that it became virtually economic “common sense.” (This is known as hegemony) The mainstream left adopted the ideology but in a smiley face form. They are like someone who says beating you with a broom handle is an improvement over beating you with a chunk of two by four, yet dismissesnot being beaten as utopian foolishness that you must outgrow.

Occupy, thus to adapt a quaint phrase of Lyndon Johnson’s, is guilty of pissing on the corporatist barbecue. Millions of people now want to reverse the neoliberal depredations and push for new reforms. This was not supposed to be in the script!

Getting back to the otherwise friendly politicians – for them to take a concerted stand with Occupy would brand them as enemies in the eyes of our corporate masters and their hacks and ideologues. I wouldn’t be too judgmental if I were you. Few of us are heroic, and often those who are, have nothing to lose anyway. Ultimately, Occupy has exposed the limits of conventional politics.

So says a liberal writer from Salon. Com. 

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Ron Paul, phony populist (Credit: AP)

Article by Kevin Carson.

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If you haven’t watched Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff,” I suggest you do. These videos include detailed examinations of the waste economy, subsidized inefficiency and planned obsolescence.

A recent installment, “The Story of Broke,” itemizes wasteful government spending on things like the military and enormous subsidies to prop up the well-named “dinosaur economy.” But this is only a preface for Leonard’s argument that the government really isn’t broke: If it stopped wasting money on bad stuff, it would have more than enough for “building a better future.”

Her laundry list of good things the government should spend money on includes energy efficiency projects, retrofitting homes, subsidies to alternative energy and green technology, and millions of college scholarships. But her vision of a “better future” reflects the internal contradictions of progressivism.

On one hand, we have the mid-20th century, conventional liberal vision of government intervention to build giant blockbuster infrastructure projects, spur creation of new industries, and “create jobs.”

On the other, we have the green, “small is beautiful” sensibility which emerged in the hippie era, of eliminating waste and mass consumerism.

The two just don’t go together.

When Rachel Maddow stands in front of a giant hydroelectric dam, or talks about the Interstate Highway System, as examples of doing “great things,” she channels the mid-20th century managerialist liberalism that made Galbraith’s heart go pitty-pat. That vision really isn’t compatible with the “green” and “small is beautiful” stuff that progressives also talk about.

You simply can’t have a capital-intensive economy based on large-scale, centralized infrastructures, unless you can guarantee a revenue stream to service all those overhead costs.  Which brings us to the Galbraith’s dark side: Creating social mechanisms to guarantee the output of industry will be absorbed so that the wheels of industry don’t get clogged up with unsold inventory. It was precisely that imperative that gave us subsidized waste, sprawl, the car culture, and all the rest of it in the first place.

The “progressive” capitalism model of Gates and Warren Buffett is a greenwashed version of Leonard’s dinosaur economy. There’s an inherent contradiction in her dismissal of that archaic economy, while calling for government policies to provide “good jobs.”

Expansionist government activity to utilize industrial capacity and keep everyone working full-time is the old 20th century model. But it requires an ever-diminishing amount of capital and labor to produce a given standard of living. If we eliminate the portion of industrial capacity and labor that goes to waste production, we wind up with lots of abandoned mass-production factories, and lots of people working fifteen hour weeks and buying stuff from relocalized garage factories close to where they live. And that’s not the sort of thing Gates and Buffett like, because they can’t make money off it.

Another problem is Leonard’s prescription: “Who has the real power? We do.”

Really? Barack Obama is the most progressive Democrat in at least two generations. He garnered the largest Democratic majority since LBJ defeated Goldwater, entering office with an apparent mandate from the financial collapse. Congressional Democrats picked up a super-majority. If “we” didn’t have the power to do these things with this once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the political stars, it’s safe to say it will never happen.

A government powerful enough to “build a better future” will almost certainly — on the principle that power is drawn to power — use that power benefit the few, the rich and the powerful. A continent-sized representative government, by its nature, is not amenable to control by a majority of millions of people. That’s why we had all those “dinosaur economy” subsidies in the first place.

If we want to build a better future, contesting the corporate oligarchy’s control of the government is probably not the best way to go about it. Fortunately, there are millions of people out there who really are building a better future, and they’re doing it by treating big business and big government both as obstacles to be routed around.

They’re building a new society within the decaying old society of dinosaur capitalism and its pet government, ready to replace it with something better when it collapses under its own weight.

They include Wikileaks, the file-sharing and free-culture movements, and Occupy Wall Street.

They include Linux developers, micromanufacturers in projects like Open Source Ecology and Hackerspaces, permaculturists, and community-supported agriculture.

They include the builders of encrypted currencies, barter systems, encrypted routers, and darknets.

And they’re not waiting for a government to give them permission.

Watch the video.

Article by Fred Reed.

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Justice at Last by dumpdc Count’em by Fred Reed (Editor’s Note: Here is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article about how legislation really works. This is the law of unintended consequences…blowback.) The Look Like America bill, originally H.R. 1533, seemed a perfectly ordinary piece of feel-good legislation when proposed by Barack Osama Obama. “Our diversity is our strength,” he said. “We must increase the representation of minorities in our institutions to reflect our diverse population and ensure the fairness for which America stands.” Congress passed the bill without reading it. It was the sort of thing one passed. Besides, there was no money involved, and the bill was not obviously anti-Semitic. Not obviously. But then one of the obscure policy shops that abound in Washington, the Committee for Ethnic Piety, filed suit against Harvard for noncompliance. The proximate cause was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, about a course called Math 55, the hardest math course at the univrsity and thus, Harvard liked to think, in America. The students in Math 55, reported the Crimson, were 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, and 100 percent male. The class didn’t, said the Committee for Ethnic Piety, look like America. It certainly didn’t. Harvard, ever sensitive to questions of justice, which it conflated with federal funding, agreed to make the class Look Like America. The administration asserted that only through inadvertence had it failed to notice the clear racism, sexism, and continent-ism occurring under its nose. It established a committee of reform, which set to work. More…

Article by Francois de Siebenthal. 

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The following is a lecture given by Mr. François de Siebenthal — an economist and Consul General of the Philippines in Switzerland — at our headquarters in Rougemont, Quebec, Canada, on March 2005. Mr. de Siebenthal demonstrated to those present how easy it is to open a local bank with just the use of simple cards. Mr. de Siebenthal has gone to several countries to explain this system to various interested audiences. In fact, Social Credit is no longer only a theory, but is put into practice in these countries, with local debt-free banks multiplying.

In an age where the use of the microchip is becoming a real threat, this is certainly a way in which one could exchange goods and services without having to bow down to the use of this microchip. Why not read and study what Mr. de Siebenthal has on this subject. It could prove to be very useful in the future!

A simple bank

I will now just to teach you how to open a local bank using Social Credit principles. It is very easy to do and everyone can do it.

Already in past history, small, local banks in Switzerland were established by farmers. The banker is a farmer, the bank is in a farm house, the customers are farmers, and the owners of the bank were and are farmers. These little banks, put together in Switzerland, make up the third largest Swiss bank actually in operation with the best ratio and the best management because the costs are very low. Since the banks are very small and in small houses, and because you do not need big armoured cars and security personal, these banks are very efficient. These little banks can also be found in Austria and some other countries.

The tragedy of debt money

You know that money is created in the form of debts with interest rates, and you know that the theory of Social Credit is true, and that interest kills. The statistics of the International Labor Organization in Geneva state that every day you have 5,000 people dying in work places. That makes more every day than the people who died in the Twin Towers. Every day! That means that because of capitalism and because of exaggeration in productivity, you have every day 5,000 people dying on the work place. And I do not count all the stress, all the psychological problems, suicides, alcoholism, drugs, children at home without the parents because the father and the mother are both working.

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Watch the video.

This is a great discussion, and an example of the kind of civil and intelligent dialogue between the radical Left and radical Right that there needs to be more of.

Article by Jim Goad.

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This has been the Year of the Vermin. With the Arab Spring, the black flash mobs, the London riots, and the OWS camper babies, we’ve had an eyeful of what “the people” really look like. It ain’t pretty. They don’t look nearly as glamorous in real life as they do in the revolutionary paintings.

America’s annual post-Thanksgiving Fatso Stampede known as Black Friday was more chaotic and violent than usual this holiday season, which doesn’t speak well for the notion that the nation’s huddled masses are wallowing in abject poverty. These weren’t food riots. They were toy riots. This wasn’t Wall Street. It was Main Street.

And for the most part, Walmart is the only store left on Main Street. Though there were no reported fatalities to match the Long Island Walmart employee who got trampled to death during a Black Friday mob crush in 2008, Walmarts this year were bursting with fracases, frenzies, fisticuffs, and imbroglios from coast to coast.

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Article by Alexander Cockburn.

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The last time we met Michael Bérubé on this site was back in 2007, and he was up to his neck in a rubbish dump, where I’d placed him, in the company of other promoters of the 2003 war on Iraq: where, I asked, are those parlor warriors now? Had any of them reconsidered their illusions…

“… that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Bérubé had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them… like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.”

Who’s this Bérubé, you ask. Well, for starters he’s the Paterno FamilyProfessor in Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. Penn State’s website informs us that “named professorships provide support for a focused area and are funded by gifts from individual donors,” which means that Bérubé has long been on  Joe Paterno’s payroll – as things have turned out an ironic status for someone who’s spent a fair slice of his time  barking and snapping his jaws at “the left”  for innumerable failures stemming from moral equivocation and blindness to reality. Now that famed football coach Joe Paterno has been fired from Penn State for protecting one of his assistants, Jerry Sandusky,  suspected of raping a ten-year old boy, amidst many other suspected assaults on youths under Sandusky’s supervision, we must await Bérubé’s assessment of how it feels to have been the kept man of this fallen idol. Does the title  “Paterno Family Professor” remain ensconced on Bérubé’s  formal letterhead?

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From The New York Times.

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Parallels between Iraq’s former nuclear weapons program and the Iranian nuclear program have shaped policy debates for nearly a decade. We are still paying the costs of failing in Iraq. Israel now seems determined to make similar mistakes in Iran.

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