Letter to the Editor from a Cuban
From Richmond Times-Dispatch, Monday, July 7, 2008

Dear Editor, Times-Dispatch:

'Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice.  On June 30 I celebrate my independence day, and on July 4 I celebrate America's. This year is special, because it marks the 40Th anniversary of my independence.

'On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba, and a few months later, I was in the United States to stay.  That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

'I've thought a lot about the anniversary this year.  The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there.  In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right.  So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

'When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him.  They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in.  When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed.  When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said, 'Praise the Lord.' And when the young leader said, 'I will be for change and I'll bring you change,' everyone yelled, 'Viva Fidel!'

'But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner's guns went silent, the people's guns had been taken away.  By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed.  By the time everyone received their free education, it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented, Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to Third-World status.  By the time the change was over, more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes.  You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans.  And now I'm back to the beginning of my story.

'Luckily, we would never fall in America for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change?  How will you carry it out?  What will it cost America?

'Would we?'

Manuel Alvarez, Jr.
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Catching Wild Pigs

A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class.  One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back.  He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, 'Do you know how to catch wild pigs?'

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said this was no joke. 'You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming.

When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc.. While we continually lose our freedoms -- just a little at a time.

One should always remember: There is no such thing as a free lunch! Also, a politician will never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government 'help' is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America, you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut!

In this 'very important' election year, listen closely to what the candidates are promising you! Just maybe you will be able to tell who is about to slam the gate on America.

'A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.' - Thomas Jefferson
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What is Marxism?

Marxism is an economic and social system based upon the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. While it would take veritably volumes to explain the full implications and ramifications of the Marxist social and economic ideology, Marxism is summed up in the Encarta Reference Library as “a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.” Marxism is the antithesis of capitalism which is defined by Encarta as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.” Marxism is the system of socialism of which the dominant feature is public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

Under capitalism, the proletariat, the working class or “the people,” own only their capacity to work; they have the ability only to sell their own labor. According to Marx a class is defined by the relations of its members to the means of production. He proclaimed that history is the chronology of class struggles, wars, and uprisings. Under capitalism, Marx continues, the workers, in order to support their families are paid a bare minimum wage or salary. The worker is alienated because he has no control over the labor or product which he produces. The capitalists sell the products produced by the workers at a proportional value as related to the labor involved. Surplus value is the difference between what the worker is paid and the price for which the product is sold.

An increasing immiseration of the proletariat occurs as the result of economic recessions; these recessions result because the working class is unable to buy the full product of their labors and the ruling capitalists do not consume all of the surplus value. A proletariat or socialist revolution must occur, according to Marx, where the state (the means by which the ruling class forcibly maintains rule over the other classes) is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism evolves from socialism out of this progression: the socialist slogan is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” The communist slogan varies thusly: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

What were the Marxist views of religion? Because the worker under the capitalist regimes was miserable and alienated, religious beliefs were sustained. Religion, according to Marx was the response to the pain of being alive, the response to earthly suffering. In Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.” Marx indicated in this writing that the working class, the proletariat was a true revolutionary class, universal in character and acquainted with universal suffering. This provided the need for religion.

For more information, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Marxism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_Marxism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_communism
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Barack Obama Lauded by Marxists
by Michael Gaynor
March 16, 2008

The Soviet Union collapsed, but Marxists did not disappear. For example, the Castro brothers still run Cuba, Daniel Ortega is back in charge of Nicaragua and African Marxists are vying for power in their homelands.

Unsurprisingly, Marxists from Africa to the Americas are lauding young Barack Obama as their "agent of change."

In Kenya, Raila Odinga, Barack's cousin, just secured the prime ministership after violent protests of the re-election of his rival, President Kibaki, in a disputed race with Odinga that suggest that Virginia Governor and current Richmond, Virginia Mayor Doug Wilder's warning of rioting if Democrat superdelegates don't rubberstamp Barack should be taken seriously.

The New York Times: "Rono Kibet, an [Odinga] supporter who less than two months ago was burning down the houses of members of Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group, said: 'We will now stop the fighting. The agreement is very good.'"

"Good" from the perspective of that reported arsonist!

A source familiar with Kenyan politics warns Americans to look into Barack's Kenyan connections before they leap:

"--Raila Odinga is of the Luo tribe to which Obama's late African-Arab Muslim father belonged. Obama's older brother still lives there; Abongo 'Roy' Obama is a Luo activist and militant Muslim who argues that the black man must liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture. He urges his younger brother, Barack, to embrace his African heritage. Barack Obama has a Kenyan grandmother [my note: according to Kenyan usage, not a biological grandmother] and several African brothers and sisters as well.

"--Raila Odinga is Barack Obama's cousin.... Listen to Odinga interview with BBC reporter:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7176683.stm

"--Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak by phone with Odinga, and he did not speak with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. interests? (Investors Business Daily).

"--Odinga explained to another reporter that Obama would call him up to three times a day to check on the election in Kenya. It was controversial, you see. Raila Odinga is a Marxist, and he wants to make a majority Christian Kenya embrace Islamic customs: he wants Sharia law, and he made a pact with an Islamic hard-line group (their terrorist group name is on the Internet) to enforce this law as they see fit. Odinga wants to establish Sharia courts throughout the country; vows to ban booze, pork, and impose Muslim dress codes on women--moves highly favored by Barack Obama's older brother, Abongo 'Roy.'

"--Odinga claimed the election was rigged when he lost, then there were riots and a sort of civil war, but it was the Christians who were getting killed by the Muslims. Christians were burned alive in churches and they were macheted in the streets. It is reported that 1,000 people were killed when all was said and done. Right now, Odinga is claiming the presidency and fighting to be sole president, and in a diplomatic effort, the powers that be allowed him to be co-president until the election is figured out.

"--Odinga also had an interesting political strategist help with his campaign, an American, who used to be a campaign employee of Bill Clinton's. It is the first time that an American poitical strategist has worked on any Kenyan campaign. Recommended by Barack Obama? [Note: That strategist is Dick Morris. Ask him!}

"--Raila Odinga's official presidential website is similar to Barack Obama's, and Odinga's main campaign message and slogan is: CHANGE. Vote for Change. Agent of Change. Look at his website: http://www.raila07.com/

"Furthermore, Raila Odinga has close ties to an oil big shot: Sheik Abdullahi Abdi (oil $) chairs NAMLEF (National Muslim Leaders Forum) which Odinga signed a then secret pact with. (The document is actually available online.) This man has connections to Libyan socialist leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who financially backed and supported Raila Odinga's campaign.

"--Also, Raila Odinga was educated in communist E. Germany, and his father Oginga Odinga led the communist opposition during the Cold War.

"--With al-Qaida strengthening its beachheads in Africa--from Algeria to Sudan to Somalia--the last thing the West needs is for pro-Western Kenya to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."

The Castro brothers aren't the only Marxists in the Americas rooting for Barack.

This year International Herald Tribune celebrated Valentine's Day by published an AP article reporting the delight of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega with the Obama campaign.

AP: "MANAGUA, Nicaragua: President Daniel Ortega, who led the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, says Barack Obama's presidential bid is a 'revolutionary' phenomenon in the United States.

"'It's not to say that there is already a revolution under way in the U.S. ... but yes, they are laying the foundations for a revolutionary change,' the Sandinista leader said Wednesday night as he accepted an honorary doctorate from an engineering university.

"Ortega led a Soviet-backed government that battled U.S.-supported Contra rebels before he lost power in a 1990 election. He returned to office last year via the ballot box.

"In statements broadcast on Sandinista Radio La Primerisima, Ortega said he has 'faith in God and in the North American people, and above all in the youth, that the moment of great change in the U.S. will come and it will act differently, with justice and equality toward all nations.'"

With Marxists speaking of their "faith in God," perhaps even Chris Matthews will think twice about blithely accepting as true whatever someone says about their attitude toward religion.

But don't count of Chris. Check things out for yourself.
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Thomas Sowell on Marxism
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:42 AM  

This morning, I finished reading Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. In some ways, the book was quite frustrating. The discussion of Marxist philosophy was too basic, while the elucidation of the economics came across as little more than a series of floating abstractions. Although Sowell did offer some interesting arguments about the proper interpretation of Marx and Engles, the first eight chapters weren't all that enlightening by themselves. The ninth chapter on the lives of Marx and Engles was revealing in a disturbing kind of way, but it was the tenth chapter which was most philosophically illuminating.

In that final chapter, Sowell focuses on the great errors in the economic theories advanced by Marx and Engles. He argues that the central concept of "exploitation" depends upon the notion of "surplus value" -- and that this "crucial concept in the Marxian theoretical framework was insinuated rather than explicitly established, either logically or empirically" (190). Sowell writes:

As introduced in the fist volume of Capital, surplus value was defined simple as an "increment or excess over the original value" invested in production. From this definition, Marx glided quickly to the conclusion that labor was the factor responsible for this increment in value or of output... It was an assumption deeply embedded in classical economics... [an assumption] devastated by the new conceptions and analyses introduced by neo-classical economics while Capital was in its decades-long process of being prepared for publication.

As a theoretical system, Marxian economics begins the story of production in the middle--with firms, capital, and management already in existence somehow, and needing only the addition of labor to get production started. From that point on, output is a function of labor input, given all the other factors somehow already assembled, coordinated, and directed toward a particular economic purpose... [But] where there are multiple inputs, the division of output by one particular input is wholly arbitrary (190).

(I love the emphasis Sowell places on the somehow in this passage, as it reminds me of Ayn Rand's own characterization of the economics espoused by the looters in Atlas Shrugged.)

A few pages later, Sowell summarizes thusly: "Once output is seen as a function of numerous inputs, and the inputs are supplied by more than one class of people, the notion that surplus value arises from [the] labor [of the proletariat] becomes plainly arbitrary and unsupported (192)."

In addition to stressing the importance of the "managerial ability and entrepreneurial innovation" ignored by Marx, Sowell also notes the importance of "worker's skills and experience" as a form of capital (194). Thus Marx engages in the "fundamental fallacy" of "narrowly conceiving capital to mean physical equipment rather than the human capital which may be vastly more valuable and far more widely dispersed" (195).

Sowell notes that Marx's method of starting in the middle allowed him to "repeatedly ignore the importance of knowledge and risk in explaining the phenomena of a capitalist economy" (198). How so? Because his analysis began with "surviving capitalist firms," i.e. "firms that had correctly estimated consumer demand" and were now "waiting to hire workers," Marx "ignored the key implication of failing firms (a majority of all firms in the long run)--that risk is inherent in anticipating consumer demand, and that profit derives from successfully assuming that risk, rather than from merely hiring people to perform the mechanical aspects of producing goods (198)." After all, "failing firms also hire workers--but their very failure shows that that is no guarantee of receiving surplus value" (198).

Sowell is careful not to blithely attribute the evils of 20th century communism to the communism advocated by Marx and Engles. But he does draw out a number of significant connections which render them both substantially responsible for the horrors of communism in practice. For example, he notes that "the fact that Marx and Engles refused to draw up details of such a [communist] society in advance constituted virtually a blank check for their successors" (206). In addition, "whatever Marx intended, the actual effect of the doctrine of historical justification was to provide wide latitude for the most sweeping violations of every moral principles and every sense of decency and humanity" (207).

Perhaps the most telling example of Marx's ideas in practice is the results of Lenin's early acceptance of the somehow approach to all but labor, as indicated by this quote from State and Revolution cited by Sowell:

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old "state power" have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary "workmen's wages", and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of "official grandeur."

In fact, Sowell observes that:

The early history of the Soviet Union provided the most dramatic empirical refutation of the Marxian assumption that management of economic enterprises is something to be taken for granted as occurring somehow. When economic incentives were drastically reduce or abolished in the heady egalitarian period following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet economy ground to a halt. Widespread hunger and a halt to vital services forced Lenin to resort to his "New Economic Policy" that restored the hated capitalist practices. The later nationalizing of all industry under Stalin and his successors did not restore egalitarianism. Quite the contrary. There were highly unequal rewards to management, including today whole systems of special privilege stores to which ordinary Soviet workers have no access. Moreover, the managers of Soviet industry have been disproportionately the descendants of the managerial class of earlier Soviet and czarist times (193).

Then comes the noteworthy conclusion:

Many observers have seen these developments as mere betrayals of Marxist ideals, missing the more fundamental point that a crucial false assumption must be corrected in practice if people are to survive. Its continuing sacredness in theory can only produce hypocrisy. The betrayal may be real, but in Marxian terminology, "no accident." A similar process is occurring in China, to which many Western Marxists transferred their hopes after disillusionment with the Soviet Union. This too is seen as simply a betrayal of Mao by Deng, rather than a nation's painful learning from experience that a key assumption of Marxian economics is false (193-4).

The gross falsehoods of Marx's communism is why the lament commonly heard from so many communist sympathizers -- that "true" communism was never put into practice -- ought to be rejected. In fact, the ideals of communism -- collectivism, dialectical materialism, the evils of capitalism, the idea of labor as the source of all surplus value, the goal of reshaping of man's nature, the principle of "from each according to his ability to each according to his need," and so on -- were substantially put into practice by the communist regimes of the 20th century. The fact that the result was widespread starvation, forced labor camps, unbearable misery, totalitarian police states, and mass death is hardly a reason to think that the more consistent application of these ideas would result in blissful paradise.

Sadly, in spite of the overwhelming evidence provided by the Soviet Union, Red China, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and other countries devastated by communism, far too many Western intellectuals remain in thrall to Marxist ideals. As for the possibility of the honest Marxist professor, if the millions of dead under communist regimes do not constitute reason enough for a harsh look at the ideals of communism, then no facts and no arguments could possibly persuade them to abandon their precious ideology. Facts and reasons themselves have ceased to matter to such a person, however civilized, amiable, or open they may appear.

And this leads me to a final criticism from Thomas Sowell about the ways in which Marxism promotes the rationalizations which help sustain it:

Philosophic materialism, in its social environmental version, also provides ways of dismissing ideas according to their supposed origins--"bourgeois," for example--instead of confronting them in either factual or logical terms. Grandly dismissing opposing views as "outmoded" or consigning them to "the dustbin of history" eliminates the need to think about them or to meet their challenge to one's existing presuppositions. Such practices have spread well beyond Marxists. Much of the intellectual legacy of Marx is an anti-intellectual legacy. It has been said that you cannot refute a sneer. Marxism has taught many--inside and outside its ranks--to sneer at capitalism, at inconvenient facts or contrary interpretations, and thus ultimately to sneer at the intellectual process itself. This has been one of its enduring strengths as a political doctrine, as a means of acquiring and using political power in unbridled ways (208-9).

In other words, the ideology of Marxism is explicitly hostile to intellectual honesty. So it's no wonder that committed Marxists persist -- at least within the protected walls of academia -- to this day.
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From Marxism to the Market
by Thomas Sowell  (January 2, 2002)

How and why had I changed from a young leftist to someone with my present views, which are essentially in favor of free markets and traditional values? In a sense, it was not so much a change in underlying philosophy, as in my vision of how human beings operate.

Back in the days when I was a Marxist, my primary concern was that ordinary people deserved better, and that elites were walking all over them. That is still my primary concern, but the passing decades have taught me that political elites and cultural elites are doing far more damage than the market elites could ever get away with doing.

For one thing, the elites of the marketplace have to compete against one another. If General Motors doesn't make the kind of car you want, you can always turn to Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and others. But if the Environmental Protection Agency goes off the deep end, there is no alternative agency doing the same thing that you can turn to.

Even when a particular corporation seems to have a monopoly of its product, as the Aluminum Company of America once did, it must compete with substitute products. If Alcoa had jacked up the price of aluminum to exploit its monopoly position, many things that were made of aluminum would have begun to be made of steel, plastic and numerous other materials. The net result of market forces was that, half a century after it became a monopoly, Alcoa was charging less for aluminum than it did at the beginning. That was not because the people who ran the company were nice. It was because market competition left them no viable alternative.

How you look at the free market depends on how you look at human beings. If everyone were sweetness and light, socialism would be the way to go. Within the traditional family, for example, resources are often lavished on children, who don't earn a dime of their own. It is domestic socialism, and even the most hard-bitten capitalists practice it. Maybe some day we will discover creatures in some other galaxy who can operate a whole society that way. But the history of human beings shows that a nation with millions of people cannot operate like one big family.*

The rhetoric of socialism may be inspiring, but its actual record is dismal. Countries which for centuries exported food have suddenly found themselves forced to import food to stave off starvation, after agriculture was socialized. This has happened all over the world, among people of every race. Anyone who saw the contrast between East Berlin and West Berlin, back in the days when half the city was controlled by the Communists, can have no doubts as to which system produces more economic benefits for ordinary people. Even though the people in both parts of the city were of the same race, culture and history, those living under the Communists were painfully poorer, in addition to having less freedom.

Much the same story could be told in Africa, where Ghana relied on socialistic programs and the Ivory Coast relied more on the marketplace, after both countries became independent back in the 1960s. Ghana started off with all the advantages. Its per capita income was double that of the Ivory Coast. But, after a couple of decades under different economic systems, the bottom 20% of people in the Ivory Coast had higher incomes than 60% of the people in Ghana.

Economic inefficiency is by no means the worst aspect of socialistic government. Trying to reduce economic inequality by increasing political inequality, which is essentially what Marxism is all about, has cost the lives of millions of innocent people under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others. Politicians cannot be trusted with a monopoly of power over other people's lives. Thousands of years of history have demonstrated this again and again.

While my desires for a better life for ordinary people have not changed from the days of my youthful Marxism, experience has taught the bitter lesson that the way to get there is the opposite of what I once thought.

*[Editor's Comment: Capitalism Magazine disagrees with the argument that only if people were more noble enough that socialism would be ideal. The truth is the reverse: it is because people can be rational (and must be in rational in order to be productive), that capitalism is the ideal.]

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Obama's Marxism
Tue Jul 29, 2008

Election '08: A plan by Barack Obama to redistribute American wealth on a global level is moving forward in the Senate. It follows Marxist theology -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

We are citizens of the world, Sen. Obama told thousands of nonvoting Germans during his recent tour of the Middle East and Europe. And if the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433) he has sponsored becomes law, which is almost certain if he wins in November, we're also going to be taxpayers of the world.

Speaking in Berlin, Obama said: "While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history."

What the 20th century really showed was a series of totalitarian threats -- from fascism to Nazism to communism -- defeated by the U.S. military. Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Tojo's Japan and the Soviet Union offered destinies we did not share.

Our destiny of peace and freedom through strength was not achieved by a transnationalist fantasy of buying the world a Coke and singing "Kumbaya."

Obama's Global Poverty Act offers us a global socialist destiny we do not want, one that challenges America's very sovereignty. The former "post-racial" candidate obviously intends to be a post-national president.

A statement from Obama's office says: "With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces. It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter and clean drinking water."

These are worthy goals, but note there's no mention of spreading democracy, expanding free trade, promoting entrepreneurial capitalism or ridding the world of despots who rule and ravage countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.

Obama would give them all a fish without teaching them how to fish. Pledging to cut global poverty in half on the backs of U.S. taxpayers is a ridiculous and impossible goal.

His legislation refers to the "millennium development goal," a phrase from a declaration adopted by the United Nations Millennium Assembly in 2000 and supported by President Clinton.

It calls for the "eradication of poverty" in part through the "redistribution (of) wealth of land" and "a fair distribution of the earth's resources." In other words: American resources.

It's a mantra of liberals that the U.S. is only a small portion of the world's population yet consumes an unseemly portion of the planet's supposedly finite resources. Never mentioned is the fact that America's population, just 5% of the world's total, also produces a stunning 27% of the world's GDP -- to the enormous benefit of other countries. Nonetheless, their solution is to siphon off the product of our free democracy and distribute it.

We already transfer too much national wealth to the United Nations and its busybody agencies. Obama's bill would force U.S. taxpayers to fork over 0.7% of our gross domestic product every year to fund a global war on poverty, spending well above the $16.3 billion in global poverty aid the U.S. already spends.

Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development Conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S is expected to meet its part of the U.N. Millennium goals, we would be spending an additional $65 billion annually for a total of $845 billion.

During a time of economic uncertainty, the plan would cost every American taxpayer around $2,500.

If you're worried about gasoline and heating oil prices now, think what they'll be like when the U.S. is subjected in an Obama administration to global energy consumption and production taxes. Obama's Global Poverty Act is the "international community's" foot in the door.

The U.N. Millennium declaration called for a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy production -- oil, natural gas, coal ... fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for the airplane use of the skies, fees for the use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."

Co-sponsors of S. 2433 include Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington, Dianne Feinstein of California, Richard Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey. GOP globalists supporting the bill include Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Richard Lugar of Indiana.

Lugar has worked with Obama to promote more aid to Russia to promote nuclear nonproliferation. Lugar also promotes the Law of the Sea treaty, which turns over the world's oceans to an International Seabed Authority that would charge us to drill offshore and have veto power over the movements and actions of the U.S. Navy.

Obama's agenda sounds like defeated 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry's "global test" for U.S. foreign policy decisions where "you have to do it in a way that passes the test -- that passes the global test -- where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Obama has called on the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming and probably would submit to a Kyoto-like agreement that would sock Americans with literally trillions of dollars in costs over the next half century for little or no benefit.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama has said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Oh, really? Who's to say we can't load up our SUV and head out in search of bacon double cheeseburgers at the mall? China? India? Bangladesh? The U.N.?

In an Obama White House, American sovereignty will become an endangered species. The Global Poverty Act is the first toe in the water of global socialism.

[Note: it's important to remember that the cost of living in those countries is much lower than here, so a statement that people in other countries are living on just dollars a day is irrelevant unless you also take into account the cost of living in those countries. For example, although it varies somewhat country by country, the government just increased the minimium wage in the Philippines to P267/10 hour day ($.60/hour), which buys an equivalent standard of living that the federal minimum wage of $6.55/hour buys in the U.S. Compared with the Philippines, everything costs 50 times more here. Even though it sounds like Americans are rich by comparison to Filipinos because everyone there compares the Foreign Exchange Rate (1USD = P44 today), just like in the RP very few Americans are because everything costs a higher percentage of our wages than they do in the RP (especially now that the government has raised the taxes so much, and is about to raise them quite a bit more!)

The only fair way to compare the cost of living is how long you would have to work to buy a loaf of bread or a small house in the U.S. versus in the Philippines (and that's if you have no taxes or medical bills). For example, a loaf of bread costs 2 to 3 pesos over there, but here it costs 2-4 dollars (about P176). Another example is that a house like my mother-in-laws' would cost about $150,000 here, and you would have to repay the original $150,000 plus another $150,000 interest over 30 years ($300,000 total = P13,200,000 just for a lower-priced house)! If you used all your wages to pay for a house (and if you didn't have to pay for food, clothes, taxes, etc.), it would take 21 years wages to pay $150,000 for the house and $150,000 in interest here, versus 1 year 4 months (P217 per day) to pay for a small house there (P80,000).

Our taxes are much higher here than in the Philippines (and most other 3rd world countries), too (50% tax currently, taking into account all wage, sales, property, and various other taxes, compared with 20% there). The government takes 50 cents from every dollar you make here with all their different kinds of taxes! If there were no tax, you could buy 72 loaves of bread (P3 each) there with 1 day's wages (P217), but only 14 loaves ($4 each) here with 1 day's wages ($56) at minimum wage.

There's no dispute that there is a lot of poverty in the world, but we have to remember that there is a lot of poverty here in the U.S. also; I, for one, don't make anywhere near the $1.6 Million that Obama and his wife make each year, and I'm struggling to make ends meet and buy food, as are many others I know here in America. If some of the rich people here want to donate money to help poor people, that's a noble intent -- BUT to forcibly take money from poor people in the U.S. at gunpoint (they actually do take you in handcuffs at gunpoint to prison if you don't give them your money) in order to give it to people in other countries is criminal! Also, there are many people in many different countries of many races who are starving, such as in the Philippines. It is racist to be so concerned with giving lots of aid to Africa and not equally to people who belong to other races and countries than his father and mother's country, especially when the huge tax increases that he advocates are going to hurt the poor in America even more to accomplish this Marxist "re-distribution of wealth" at gunpoint by the federal government.

You might be interested to know that, with all of the problems facing citizens of this country, one of the main legacies Obama's left us with as a Senator is the bill he co-sponsored to increase the already exhorbitant amount of money that is already being taken from us (many of whom are already having trouble eating) by $50 Billion more and being sent primarily to Africa -- and he wants to increase our taxes by $845 Billion more if he gets elected as president and throw the money away at more of these UN promoted programs. See article: "Obama's $845 billion U.N. plan forwarded to U.S. Senate floor", subtitled: "'Global Poverty Act' to cost each citizen $2,500 or more" below.

The amount of concern for people of other countries (illegal immigrant social progams, sanctuary cities, protecting criminals and not sharing information with federal authorities, prisoners of war being given equal rights as U.S. citizens, along with lobbyists, special interest groups and anyone else willing to kick back money to our policitians, which has gotten way out of proportion, with concerns of Americans being virtually ignored. It has gotten so bad that even with tens of thousands of faxes, phone calls and emails to legislators about various issues day after day, such as illegal immigrants, the politicians use underhanded schemes to pass whatever they want. Our legislators have even resorted to not announcing what was on the agenda so that they could pass it without Americans (remember -- the people they're supposed to represent?) knowing about it and being able to mount a resistance, or tacked whatever they wanted to pass on the end of a voluminous bill that the other legislators admit they never even bothered to read, opting instead for an "executive summary" of the bill by its sponsor -- a summary that either conveniently omits the addition or glosses it over and avoids mention of any of its detrimental effects.

It's really something when the president of a foreign country can come here and dictate U.S. policy and that OUR (not politicians') hard-earned money be spent on social programs for illegal immigrants, and that we not close the border, and legislators listen to him instead of their constituents! Does anyone even remember what the Boston Tea Party was all about?]
---

Obama’s $50 Billion AIDS Bill
AIM Column  |  By Cliff Kincaid  |  July 13, 2008

More support for the extravagant spending has come from the liberal media, led by the New York Times.

Fighting the liberal media, Senate Democrats, some fellow Republicans and the Bush Administration, three conservative Republican senators are continuing to raise the alarm about the federal government’s out-of-control AIDS spending. Senators David Vitter (La.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), and Jim DeMint (S.C.) are making a last-ditch attempt to block the irresponsible and budget-busting $50 billion global AIDS bill (S. 2731).

Debate on the bill, which would even permit entry into the U.S. of HIV-positive aliens, begins on Monday afternoon. The legislation doubles funding for the U.N.-affiliated Global Fund, which disregards U.S. policies on abortion and “needle exchange.”

“The [Global] Fund has serious policy problems, drug quality problems, administrative corruption, and [it] operates programs not bound by U.S. laws on abortion, needle exchange, prostitution/trafficking policy and others,” several senators had declared in a letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Senate offices can be reached by calling 202-224-3121.

Officially known as PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, this reauthorization bill will increase the dollar amount originally allotted from $15 to $50 billion. The bill “triples PEPFAR’s original budget,” noted one congressional source with alarm.

Senator Barack Obama was one of the original sponsors of the bill, but so was Senator John McCain. In fact, the Global AIDS Alliance issued a June 20 press release headlined, “Presidential Hopefuls Add Support to Landmark Global AIDS Bill,” referring to Obama and McCain.

Paul Zeitz of the Global AIDS Alliance has declared that AIDS is comparable to the threat posed by Hitler’s regime and wants international taxes to fight the “AIDS holocaust.” A variation of such a tax, imposed on international airline travel, has been implemented in 8 countries and proceeds are going to UNITAID, whose partners include the Clinton Foundation and several U.N. agencies. (The eight countries are France, Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, Republic of Korea, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Niger.)

However, the United Nations over the years has greatly exaggerated the number of those with HIV/AIDS and it is still difficult to get accurate estimates of the problem. 

Some lawmakers have been intimidated by liberal special interest pressure and AIDS activists coming to Washington to deliver funeral wreaths to those standing in the way of the passage of the legislation. Opponents of the bill have been labeled as “Global AIDS Super villains” by the homosexual lobby.

More support for the extravagant spending has come from the liberal media, led by the New York Times, which published a July 7 editorial accusing a “tiny group of Republicans” of obstructing this “worthy bill.” 

It is officially described as “A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and for other purposes.”

But since the announced discovery of the AIDS virus, known as HIV, the federal government has already spent $200 billion on HIV/AIDS. No cure or vaccine has been discovered and there are increasing doubts about the effectiveness of anti-AIDS drugs.

Increasingly unpopular because of a deteriorating economy, President Bush seems to think that massively increasing spending on foreign aid, especially AIDS in Africa, will create a “legacy” for him. But conservatives argue that excessive federal spending will only make the economic problem worse.

Nevertheless, congressional sources say that the White House has joined Congressional Democrats and the HIV/AIDS “community” in aggressively pushing the bill and trying to force Vitter, Sessions, and DeMint to back down in their opposition.

Unless senators hear from their constituents in strong opposition, the bill could pass quickly.

Senate sources said that the bill would not prohibit funding for HIV/AIDS programs in countries like China, Russia, and India, which have enough money to pay for those programs themselves. 

“These countries are wealthy enough that they have active programs in both nuclear weapons and space exploration,” a source said. “Russia is awash in petrodollars, while China has hundreds of billions of dollars in its foreign currency reserves, and has an exploding military budget.”

Yet the American taxpayers are being called upon to pay for HIV/AIDS programs in those countries. 

The bill even includes funding for studying the value of male circumcision in AIDS prevention and educating males about the dangers of visiting prostitutes. It diverts funding from AIDS treatment for purposes that include providing substance abuse and treatment services and legal services to AIDS victims. 

Richard Darling of the FAIR Foundation told AIM on Friday that federal funding for most diseases is being cut back while spending on AIDS is continuing to rise. He said HIV/AIDS was receiving a “disproportionate” amount of money. In terms of National Institutes of Health research money budgeted per death, figures show that HIV/AIDS gets $206,906, versus $13,365 for diabetes and only $2,639 for heart and stroke.

In addition to official federal funding, Darling pointed out that Hollywood, TV programs like “American Idol,” rock star Bono, and billionaire Bill Gates have been raising and spending tens of millions of dollars on HIV/AIDS.

Other diseases, he pointed out, don’t benefit from such attention and interest. 

Daniel
July 14  at  10:33 am  |  #1  |  Link
As an American citizen I do not approve of United states citizens footing the bill for peoples diseases in African countries or any other countries for that matter. I am ashamed to discover such elected officials would take on the worlds private illnesses; when millions of senior citizens cannot afford their daily required medications here at home. Sen. OBama and Sen. McCain need to restrain themselves from trying to pay for the world’s responsibilities with the tax-paying citizens hard-earned money without their approval. That they are considering such a bill is nothing but a disgrace, an affront, and a betrayal of our elected official, monetary-trust policies to our unsuspecting Americans. Wake-up senators!!!

UN Anger Over Uganda's Successful Abstinence Program Fueled by Loss of Funds Says Researcher

UNITED NATIONS, October 13, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The United Nations' envoy to Africa, Canadian Stephen Lewis, is highly critical of an abstinence campaign that has downplayed the role of condoms but been hugely successful at reducing HIV transmission in Uganda.  Population Researcher Institute's Joseph A. D'Agostino suggests that the success in combating AIDS in Uganda "isn't good enough for UN officials, whose love affair with condoms knows no bounds, and who are also angry with America for funding her own AIDS initiative in Africa instead of giving the money to them."

Uganda, whose abstinence campaign has been so successful as to be likened to a highly effective vaccine, has reduced HIV transmission rates from 18% to 5-7%. "No other nation in the world has achieved such success," writes D'Agostino. "Most sub-Saharan African nations, following the pro-condoms model, continue to suffer from rising HIV infection rates. Ugandan surveys show a reduction in premarital sexual activity among Ugandan youth and a reduction in extramarital activity among adults," D'Agostino added. "The result: less AIDS."

Lewis is highly critical of the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has drawn the focus of AIDS prevention away from condoms to the successful abstinence model adopted by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and his wife Janet. "There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by PEPFAR," Lewis said. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."

"This is a bizarre inversion of the truth, and threatens to do grievous harm to the one HIV/AIDS prevention approach that has actually worked," writes D'Agostino. Even Ugandan Health Minister Jim Muhwezi denied there is no "shortage" of condoms. "There seems to be a coordinated smear campaign by those who do not want to use any other alternative simultaneously with condoms against AIDS," he said.

In 2003, the UN itself (United Nations AIDS agency - UNAIDS) admitted that condoms have a disconcerting failure rate. The study revealed that condoms are ineffective in protecting against HIV an estimated 10% of the time. The admission from the UN, which is far lower than some studies which have shown larger than 50% failure rates, is a blow to population control activists which have aggressively and misleadingly marketed condoms in the third world as 100% effective.

"The UN's approach has failed, and its own statistics show it," D'Agostino emphasized. "HIV rates keep rising, to over 30% in some countries.  Two decades of pornographic sex education and massive shipments of condoms have sent millions of young Africans to an early grave."

"Apparently, achieving results isn't good enough for international grandees," D'Agostino concluded. "It's death by condom or nothing.  But we think the Bush Administration will stay the course."

More support for the extravagant spending has come from the liberal media, led by the New York Times.

Fighting the liberal media, Senate Democrats, some fellow Republicans and the Bush Administration, three conservative Republican senators are continuing to raise the alarm about the federal government’s out-of-control AIDS spending. Senators David Vitter (La.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), and Jim DeMint (S.C.) are making a last-ditch attempt to block the irresponsible and budget-busting $50 billion global AIDS bill (S. 2731).

Debate on the bill, which would even permit entry into the U.S. of HIV-positive aliens, begins on Monday afternoon. The legislation doubles funding for the U.N.-affiliated Global Fund, which disregards U.S. policies on abortion and “needle exchange.”

“The [Global] Fund has serious policy problems, drug quality problems, administrative corruption, and [it] operates programs not bound by U.S. laws on abortion, needle exchange, prostitution/trafficking policy and others,” several senators had declared in a letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Officially known as PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, this reauthorization bill will increase the dollar amount originally allotted from $15 to $50 billion. The bill “triples PEPFAR’s original budget,” noted one congressional source with alarm.

Senator Barack Obama was one of the original sponsors of the bill, but so was Senator John McCain. In fact, the Global AIDS Alliance issued a June 20 press release headlined, “Presidential Hopefuls Add Support to Landmark Global AIDS Bill,” referring to Obama and McCain.

Paul Zeitz of the Global AIDS Alliance has declared that AIDS is comparable to the threat posed by Hitler’s regime and wants international taxes to fight the “AIDS holocaust.” A variation of such a tax, imposed on international airline travel, has been implemented in 8 countries and proceeds are going to UNITAID, whose partners include the Clinton Foundation and several U.N. agencies. (The eight countries are France, Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, Republic of Korea, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Niger.)

However, the United Nations over the years has greatly exaggerated the number of those with HIV/AIDS and it is still difficult to get accurate estimates of the problem.

[Note: instead of urging people to remain faithful and stop promiscuity, like Uganda's successful program -- which costs very little -- this program insists upon encouraging promiscuity and attempting to avoid the consequences with condoms. Also, a growing number of scientists are having increasing doubts about HIV leading to AIDs: On July 20, the New York Times reported from Amsterdam that AIDS is "generally thought to be caused" by HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. Earlier, the virus had been identified as the undoubted cause. But reports, circulating at the Amsterdam conference, of AIDS-like diseases with no trace of HIV triggered a moment of short-lived doubt. The next reaction was to assume a new, hitherto undetected virus was the culprit. Like Ptolemaic epicycles, hypothetical viruses began to multiply.

Another possibility is that HIV doesn't have anything to do with AIDS. This is what Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley has been saying for five years: that HIV doesn't attack the immune system, doesn't cause AIDS, and is in fact harmless. A professor of molecular biology, Duesberg is one of the world's leading experts on retroviruses. I called him at his Berkeley lab and asked what he thought of the news from Amsterdam, and the possibility that we may now have one more lethal virus to worry about. "How many different viruses are we going to have that all evolved in the last ten years and all cause the same disease?" Duesberg asked. "Viruses have been around for billions of years and now they're coming out for the latest AIDS conference." (see http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/tbcould.htm and do a Google search for many more articles about these scientists.]

Some lawmakers have been intimidated by wliberal special interest pressure and AIDS activists coming to Washington to deliver funeral wreaths to those standing in the way of the passage of the legislation. Opponents of the bill have been labeled as “Global AIDS Super villains” by the homosexual lobby.

More support for the extravagant spending has come from the liberal media, led by the New York Times, which published a July 7 editorial accusing a “tiny group of Republicans” of obstructing this “worthy bill.” 

It is officially described as “A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 to provide assistance to foreign countries to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and for other purposes”, but since the announced discovery of the AIDS virus, known as HIV, the federal government has already spent $200 billion on HIV/AIDS. No cure or vaccine has been discovered and there are increasing doubts about the effectiveness of anti-AIDS drugs.

Increasingly unpopular because of a deteriorating economy, President Bush seems to think that massively increasing spending on foreign aid, especially AIDS in Africa, will create a “legacy” for him, but conservatives argue that excessive federal spending will only make the economic problem worse.

Senate sources said that the bill would not prohibit funding for HIV/AIDS programs in countries like China, Russia, and India, which have enough money to pay for those programs themselves. 

“These countries are wealthy enough that they have active programs in both nuclear weapons and space exploration,” a source said. “Russia is awash in petrodollars, while China has hundreds of billions of dollars in its foreign currency reserves, and has an exploding military budget.”

Yet the American taxpayers are being called upon to pay for HIV/AIDS programs in those countries. 

The bill even includes funding for studying the value of male circumcision in AIDS prevention and educating males about the dangers of visiting prostitutes. It diverts funding from AIDS treatment for purposes that include providing substance abuse and treatment services and legal services to AIDS victims. 

Richard Darling of the FAIR Foundation told AIM on Friday that federal funding for most diseases is being cut back while spending on AIDS is continuing to rise. He said HIV/AIDS was receiving a “disproportionate” amount of money. In terms of National Institutes of Health research money budgeted per death, figures show that HIV/AIDS gets $206,906, versus $13,365 for diabetes and only $2,639 for heart and stroke.

In addition to official federal funding, Darling pointed out that Hollywood, TV programs like “American Idol,” rock star Bono, and billionaire Bill Gates have been raising and spending tens of millions of dollars on HIV/AIDS.

Other diseases, he pointed out, don’t benefit from such attention and interest. 

Daniel
July 14  at  10:33 am  |  #1  |  Link
As an American citizen I do not approve of United states citizens footing the bill for peoples diseases in African countries or any other countries for that matter. I am ashamed to discover such elected officials would take on the worlds private illnesses; when millions of senior citizens cannot afford their daily required medications here at home. Sen. OBama and Sen. McCain need to restrain themselves from trying to pay for the world’s responsibilities with the tax-paying citizens hard-earned money without their approval. That they are considering such a bill is nothing but a disgrace, an affront, and a betrayal of our elected official, monetary-trust policies to our unsuspecting Americans. Wake-up senators!!!

UN Anger Over Uganda's Successful Abstinence Program Fueled by Loss of Funds Says Researcher

UNITED NATIONS, October 13, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The United Nations' envoy to Africa, Canadian Stephen Lewis, is highly critical of an abstinence campaign that has downplayed the role of condoms but been hugely successful at reducing HIV transmission in Uganda.  Population Researcher Institute's Joseph A. D'Agostino suggests that the success in combating AIDS in Uganda "isn't good enough for UN officials, whose love affair with condoms knows no bounds, and who are also angry with America for funding her own AIDS initiative in Africa instead of giving the money to them."

Uganda, whose abstinence campaign has been so successful as to be likened to a highly effective vaccine, has reduced HIV transmission rates from 18% to 5-7%. "No other nation in the world has achieved such success," writes D'Agostino. "Most sub-Saharan African nations, following the pro-condoms model, continue to suffer from rising HIV infection rates. Ugandan surveys show a reduction in premarital sexual activity among Ugandan youth and a reduction in extramarital activity among adults," D'Agostino added. "The result: less AIDS."

Lewis is highly critical of the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has drawn the focus of AIDS prevention away from condoms to the successful abstinence model adopted by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and his wife Janet. "There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by PEPFAR," Lewis said. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."

"This is a bizarre inversion of the truth, and threatens to do grievous harm to the one HIV/AIDS prevention approach that has actually worked," writes D'Agostino. Even Ugandan Health Minister Jim Muhwezi denied there is no "shortage" of condoms. "There seems to be a coordinated smear campaign by those who do not want to use any other alternative simultaneously with condoms against AIDS," he said.

In 2003, the UN itself (United Nations AIDS agency - UNAIDS) admitted that condoms have a disconcerting failure rate. The study revealed that condoms are ineffective in protecting against HIV an estimated 10% of the time. The admission from the UN, which is far lower than some studies which have shown larger than 50% failure rates, is a blow to population control activists which have aggressively and misleadingly marketed condoms in the third world as 100% effective.

"The UN's approach has failed, and its own statistics show it," D'Agostino emphasized. "HIV rates keep rising, to over 30% in some countries.  Two decades of pornographic sex education and massive shipments of condoms have sent millions of young Africans to an early grave."

"Apparently, achieving results isn't good enough for international grandees," D'Agostino concluded. "It's death by condom or nothing.  But we think the Bush Administration will stay the course."
---

The $50 billion bipartisan AIDS boondoggle
By Michelle Malkin

The Left is cheering Senate reauthorization of the bipartisan global AIDS bill. Supported by President Bush and the Republicans, it triples spending on HIV/AIDS to $48 billion over five years–with $18 billion more in spending than Bush had requested.

Only 16 Senators voted against the massive spending package that comes in the midst of the stimulus-palooza frenzy and the continued dysfunctional state of federal entitlement programs.

Also in the bill: a provision lifting the long-time HIV/AIDS travel ban.

Is this the right time to be heaping the world’s AIDS health care bill on American taxpayers? The White House and the Democrat leadership apparently think so.

Compassion comes at a steep cost. Sen. Jeff Sessions cites Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new AIDS/HIV-infected immigrants entering after the travel ban is lifted could cost the government more than $80 million over a 10-year period. And that’s just the start.

“Most people just don’t want to talk about that.” Nope. Because you’ll risk getting called a bigot or homophobe for daring to bring it up.
 
The outcome, which included the addition of water projects for Indian reservations, demonstrated the complicity of both major political parties in out-of-control spending designed to benefit a powerful special interest group.

However, the $200 billion already spent by U.S. taxpayers on HIV/AIDS here and around the world has not resulted in any cures or a vaccine, and anti-AIDS drugs are coming under increased scrutiny for their ineffectiveness and side-effects.

In addition to spending $50 billion at a time of growing economic difficulties in the U.S., the bill lifts the ban on entry into the U.S. of AIDS-infected aliens, who could end up adding to the costs of the health care system.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that providing federal disability, health and nutrition benefits to aliens with HIV/AIDS and their children could cost the government $83 million over a 10-year period.

Among those speaking out against the “reckless” overspending in the bill was Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who declared, “When so many Americans are facing economics problems at home, I have a hard time needlessly tripling the funding for this program.”

Bunning also declared, “We need to ensure that these funds reach the neediest countries and not those that can afford their own space and nuclear programs, such as China and Russia. At a time when China is tripling their defense budget and manipulating their currency, I have a hard time sending billions of dollars over there…”

Yet, Senator DeMint’s amendment to limit the countries in which the AIDS money could be spent was defeated 70-24.

Hans Bader at Openmarket.org shakes his head at warped priorities:

U.S. immigration law is full of contradictions. On the one hand, U.S. immigration laws keep out skilled immigrants who would help our economy, by sharply limiting the number of H-1B visas, and making legal immigration a very difficult and lengthy process. (Economists overwhelmingly support allowing more skilled immigrants to come to the U.S.)

Yet, simultaneously, Congress has just voted to repeal a ban on AIDS-infected people becoming permanent residents of the U.S., even though the Congressional Budget Office says doing so will cost taxpayers many millions of dollars. Health care costs associated with AIDS often exceed $100,000 per person per year. Permanent residents, like citizens, can be eligible for Medicaid, as well as the many taxpayer-subsidized health-care programs aimed specifically at people with AIDS. (We wrote earlier about the counterproductive effects of some taxpayer-funded AIDS programs overseas).

Meanwhile, an amnesty for illegal aliens is likely in the next Congress, which will have a bigger liberal majority than the current one.
Crikey.

***

Update: Sen. Jon Kyl’s statement…

“I supported PEPFAR when it was authorized five years ago, and because of its success, I would have voted to extend the original funding and policy for another five years. I could have even considered doubling the original authorization to $30 billion as the President requested, but the level of funding provided in this bill was far too excessive for me to support.

“The bill also made a number of bad changes to existing PEPFAR policy, like removing the requirement that at least 55 percent of the money actually goes to the treatment of AIDS patients rather than to corrupt governments.

“The dramatic increase in funding will also come at a time when Americans are feeling pain at the gas pump, in the housing market, and at the grocery store. Is this really the time to ask Americans to spend $48 billion more on foreign aid? Congress must be mindful of its obligations to American citizens before it funds multi-billion dollar programs abroad.

“For the United States to have the resources to continue funding its responsibilities to its citizens and to help others around the globe, we need a strong economy that creates wealth. I can think of a lot of other things we could do with part of the $48 billion to improve our economy so that we would be better able to help others in the future.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another Obama Marxist
By Lance Fairchok

Barack Obama has a thing for Marxists. He befriends them, listens to their counsel, and he even hires them to work in his campaign.  And they seem to feel the warmth.  President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who led a revolution there in 1979,  says Barack Obama's presidential bid is a "revolutionary" phenomenon, and Americans are "laying the foundations for a revolutionary change." A captured computer revealed that an unknown person chatted with Marxist FARC guerillas on Obama's behalf (they believed), stating he would be the next President and US policy towards Columbia would change. Frank Marshall Davis, a dear Obama friend and mentor was as a member of the Communist Party USA. Barack Obama just seems to attract Marxists.

If the people he surrounds himself with are any indication of his core beliefs, a higher capital gains tax to punish the rich, even if it diminishes actual tax revenue, may be only the beginning. Obama's Official campaign blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, a former writer for the leftist Nation magazine and a contributor to the Socialist Viewpoint, is certainly a believer in class warfare.

The capitalist ruling class of the United States exercises a virtual dictatorship not only over American society, but also over the entire world. This capitalist class rule is the basic cause of the poverty, wars and the degradation of the natural environment.

After being expelled from Socialist Action in 1999, we formed Socialist Workers Organization in an attempt to carry on the project of building a nucleus of a revolutionary party true to the historic teachings and program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. -- Socialist Viewpoint (info@socialistviewpoint.org)

The product of a Harvard education, Sam is an admirer of anti-American academic Noam Chomsky, a hypocrite and fraud masquerading as a political philosopher. Mr. Chomsky, perhaps admired by Obama as by his official blogger, is fond of visiting dictators and terrorists and giving speeches blaming all the worlds' ills on America. All while accepting money from military contacts at MIT. Chomsky was an ardent supporter of Pol Pot, and to this day denies a holocaust occurred in Cambodia (1.67 million died). He is unrepentant about the horrors his vile ideology encouraged and supports Hamas and Hezbollah with the same willful blindness today.

In an article in the Harvard Crimson, Sam writes of his hero:

For me, hearing Chomsky speak for the first time was a life-changing experience. His ability to take preconceptions and destroy them-to completely remodel one's understanding of reality with cold, hard facts-blew me away. When I left what was then the ARCO Forum last fall, I felt as though I had been through the Matrix and back. Chomsky really has this effect because he bombards you with evidence and logic, not empty rhetoric. It is nearly impossible to hear him or read him-once you've actually checked his facts yourself (he even cites page numbers in public addresses)-and deny what he's saying.

For anyone who has actually endured one of Chomsky's muddled rants or tried to verify the claims in his books, young Sam's praise is comical; and a clear indication he has never actually read one. You find very quickly Chomsky is not overly concerned with "facts," as he fabricates them with abandon. He cites page numbers, to his own books, which recycle themselves with astonishing success. Hardly an example of a towering intellect, his tired canards are sufficient to impress the worshipful Sam Graham-Felsen, and endear himself to the same leftist academics that so easily embraced dictators such Ho Chi Min and Pol Pot, idolize Chavez and Castro and legitimized terrorists like Yasser Arafat. Chomsky is the master of post-modern moral relativism, quick to excuse atrocity with obfuscation.

On the day after 9-11, Chomsky wrote:

"The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people."

It may be simple self-aggrandizing hypocrisy that inspires Mr. Chomsky's comments, though I suspect, more likely he mistakes the accolades of twenty year old activists as confirmation of his own genius. He plays what works with the crowd. Here are some other nihilistic gems gleaned from his pedantic and incomprehensible writing:

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged."

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."

"The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.”

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system."

Sam Graham-Felsen, hired to run Obama's blog, writes about Noam Chomsky in a Marxist publications that openly calls for revolution against the American government. This is a Presidential candidate's choice to run the on-line portion of his campaign. That speaks volumes of his character and worldview. Contradicting what he says in public, Obama is surrounding himself with poeple who never seem to learn that their absurd ideologies end in misery and ruin. 

Sam is young and has much to learn, so we can forgive his silly hagiographies, the ones about Chomsky and the ones about Obama. His hero worship is eager and emotional and completely without substance, much as Obama's campaign promises are without substance. Obama is a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky mold, and knows where to get people like Sam who have energy and drive. His staff is nothing if not energetic. He even cut his activist teeth in Chicago, the stomping grounds of Alinsky and so many others in the "progressive" community. One wonders why the windy city still has a murder rate higher than Baghdad, after so many years of enlightened activism.

The adults in the Obama campaign expect us to believe that a campaign staff filled with Marxists and radicals does not reflect the candidate. We are supposed to believe that ideologues who distain America and Americans can improve the system that has brought humanity more prosperity and well-being than any nation before it. Speaking out of both sides of their mouths, they tell us we are great, and then insist we must change because we are responsible for all the bad things that happen in the world. That alone should anger the electorate enough to defeat them. The change Obama will bring will not be the change America needs or expects. It will be the change of naive adolescents, which think Noam Chomsky wise.

We continue to have an optimistic outlook about the revolutionary potential of the world working class to rule society in its own name-socialism. We are optimistic that the working class, united across borders, and acting in its own class interests can solve the devastating crises of war, poverty, oppression, and environmental destruction that capitalism is responsible for. - The Socialist Viewpoint
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Why Exposing Obama Marxism Won’t Work
by Joel Gaines
June 16th, 2008

Of late, there have been a number of articles and blog posts pointing to the evidence of Barak Obama’s Marxist political theory. It is interesting, to say the least, but it is also going to be completely ineffective as a tool to defeat him in November.

I am not debating that Obama is a Marxist. His own words and associations reflect a long-held belief in class struggle, liberation theology, and alienation of those who produce vs. the owners of the production. I am also not trying to define Obama’s Marxism - mostly because we don’t call it Marxism anymore. Marx himself has become irrelevant to the 31 flavors of “Marxism”, which have evolved in various places across the world. That Obama leans toward a “Marxist” view of the world is easy to see for anyone who chooses to remove the rose-tinted lenses.

The issue at hand is more about whether Obama’s Marxism is a relevant criticism of his policy ideas with a goal of using the criticism as a means to expose and defeat him. To my mind, the answer is no.

Most Americans really have no idea what Marxism is. Some may equate it with the former Soviet Union, but Marxism was dead there within a few years of the 1917 revolution. Soviet policies and world view were based upon Communism and Leninism, which is an entirely different animal.

Additionally, the impact of calling someone a Marxist in America is trivial. It will be seen as nothing more than a rhetorical name-calling with the intent of smearing the senator. This isn’t because people can’t believe it is true; it is more because Americans have never been exposed to Marxism as a threat to the nation, as have countries in Europe. It is an undefined experience in the minds of most Americans - the word has no value in America to cause the shock and investigation that it should.

Those who consider themselves Marxist also don’t understand the criticism. Most who define themselves as such are folks who study Marxism - and are more likely to be “classic Marxists”. Obama is certainly not one of those. His political theory is borne in a hybrid - Neo-Marxist tendencies to be certain, but Barak Obama has lived in the cultural Marxist environment of Reverend Wright. Indeed, his Marxist theory - instilled in Barak by his activist mother - was the basis for seeking out Revered Wright’s church as a place to organize blacks for social and economic revolution.

However, many Americans have been blissfully ignorant, and some by choice, at what Barak Obama espouses as his defining world view. The vast majority of these folks are as ignorant about the threat Obama’s Marxist political theory is to what they know today. In the 21st century, Marxism simply doesn't mean anything to most Americans because they lack a knowledge of history and an understanding of what Marxism is, how it has been the foundation of horrific, oppressive governments in the past that we should have learned from and remembered, but unfortunately have already forgotten.

So, calling Barak Obama a Marxist is a great way to define him as applies to his policy beliefs. As a criticism, it just doesn’t work.

Regarding the above, Chris says:
I must say that I understand what you are trying to convey. I’ve often thought the same thing many times. Calling someone a Marxist is almost a badge of honor. Some may even reply ‘Thank you’. They do not understand the history of what they believe in. However I don’t think that it won’t have any effect. There are many people hear who have read The Communist Mannifesto and understand the philosophy and that it doesn’t sound very American. There are also many older people who were alive during the World Wars and the Cold War. They will appreciate the connection. And there are many people here who are migrants from Europe and Asia who know very well what Marxism is and what the real results have been throughout World history. Education is crucial. We can’t miss a beat. Marxism is but one piece of the puzzle. By itself it won’t win an election. But it is needed in order for the other pieces to make sense later on.
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May 28, 2008
Obama, Black Liberation Theology, and Karl Marx
By Kyle-Anne Shiver

What is the secular basis of Judaism?  Practical need, self-interest.  What is the worldly religion of the Jew?  Huckstering.  What is his worldly God?  Money.
Very well then!  Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time."
  - Karl Marx; essay, The Jewish Question; 1844

Not having a theology degree, nor even a Ph.D., and being, too, a bit naïve regarding matters of high-brow philosophical currents throughout the ages, I have to admit that when I first read Karl Marx' essay, The Jewish Question, I was actually stunned by its contents. 

First off, my rather cursory education in various philosophies and in Marxism, particularly, did not prepare me for the bitter thrust of old Karl's potent anti-Semitism.  In fact, until reading this particular essay, I would have never, in a million years, connected much of anything whatsoever Marxian with Jew hate.

Who would?

After all, Karl Marx, himself, was a Jew. Hitler and many others blamed the Jews for Communism, thanks to the number of Jews who played prominent roles in the Russian Revolution. I naturally associated twentieth century Anti-Semitism with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.

Ironically, if Karl Marx had still been alive and residing in Germany or any of the Nazi-occupied countries during WWII, he would have perished along with his brethren, despite his own "self-loathing-Jew" status.

Marx envisioned a society "which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering," because this classless society "would make the Jew impossible."

Personally, I find the opinion of some that Marx was a genius, to be downright laughable.  Regarding his opinions on the Jews, one is left to ponderously consider which ones were dumb, and which were dumber.

Evidently Karl Marx was as utterly ignorant of the true tenets of Judaism (Self-sufficiency does not equate to "huckstering.") as he was of the diabolical possibilities inherent in his own words, once they were in the hands of one Adolph Hitler.

This atrocious irony might be merely a historical oddity if old Karl's words were not still bouncing around in the heads of those who wish to lead new revolutions based upon them.  But Marx' words still dominate much of what happens on the world stage today, even in our own republic.

The word emphasis has changed a bit. The industrial proletariat is no longer the focus. But as a newly prominent American politician is wont to remind us:  words do matter.

Yes, of course, words matter, as many leaders of ambitious movements have mightily declared.

...the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.

Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.   - Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf.

The Oppressed Vs. the Oppressors

Just words. 

But where do they come from, and what do they mean in America today?

I might never have delved into the subject of the oppressed vs. the oppressors if I had not gone to Chicago in January seeking answers about a man who would be president.

When I visited Obama's church, still under the directorship of Jeremiah Wright, I came away with far more questions than answers, and one thing leading to another, have spent the last several months trying to fathom how Marxist political philosophy wound up emblazoned with a cross and a pulpit, and pretending to rely on the Bible for its authority.

It is somewhat difficult to imagine a more contorted blasphemy, with the single possible exception of Hitler himself claiming to be acting by divine decree in the interests of Christianity -- which is precisely what Hitler did do, while hoodwinking the German people into electing him Chancellor.

Hitler sprinkled Mein Kampf with Christian language, most likely to fit with the predominantly Christian German population, and appealed to voters on the strength of his Christian "calling":

"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

As most junior-high Sunday schoolers know, however, a Christian is judged on actions, not words, and Hitler was no Christian.  He was a bamboozler of the lowest imaginable order.

Jeremiah Wright is the tiny tip of Obama's spiritual iceberg.

The phenomenon that raised so many questions for me in January, when I visited Trinity United Church of Christ, was not Jeremiah Wright's sermon, which turned out to be just a call for all good congregants to support Barack Obama for President.  It wasn't the sermon that caught me off guard; I was prepared for that.  I had watched video of Wright, giving five of his fiery sermons. 

The thing that really got me to thinking, reading and searching for answers was the church bookstore.

Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic.  In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale:  Christianity.

Not so in Obama's church bookstore.

I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought.  Black Muslim thought, to be specific.

And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature.  The books by James H. Cone, Wright's own mentor, were prominent and numerous.

Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright's congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."  - Marx and Engels; The Communist Manifesto; 1848

If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be "class struggle" and "oppressed vs. oppressors."

James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr.

All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black.

Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity

The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20 years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies, denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many fronts within the Church herself.

Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church's authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama's spiritual mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next week). 

Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright.

But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even more so to the societies which come to embrace it.

Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation':

"...it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the Marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its Marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads."
  - (Author:  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)

Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone's "Christianity" and Farrakhan's "Nation of Islam."  They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims.

As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power:

"As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives.  God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom.  Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts.  As Malcolm X put it:  ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom.  Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion'."   (p. xii)

And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X:

"The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle." (p. xiii)

(Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation theologies, this book of Cone's was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity -- so much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.)

It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:

"For the Marxist, the truth is a truth of class:  there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class."

Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a "white Jesus," and they must "kill him." (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)

And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself:

"The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution."

Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama.

The revolution is at hand.

And presto-chango, once we've followed Marx, Cone, Wright and Obama down the yellow brick road to revolution, Christianity as we've known it for millennia ceases to exist. 

Obama was raised by his mother, the agnostic anthropologist, to regard religion as "an expression of human culture...not its wellspring, just one of the many ways -- and not necessarily the best way -- that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives." (Audacity of Hope; p. 204)

However, when Barack Obama met Jeremiah Wright in the mid-eighties, between his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, he found a "faith" perfectly accommodating to his already well-formed worldview. 

From The Audacity of Hope:

"In the history of these (African people's) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world." (p. 207)

As Obama explains further, it was Wright's (and presumably Cone's, as required of new members at Trinity) peculiar form of Christianity that Obama found palatable:

"It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) -- that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice...that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity...and be baptized."

Wright's vision of Christianity was perfectly appetizing to Barack Obama; he didn't need to change a thing.

Liberation Theology and the New Order of Things

James Cone devotes many words in all of his books to instructing his disciples to beware of those resistant to the necessary change in the power structure, warning that, "Those who would cast their lot with the victims must not forget that the existing structures are powerful and complex...Oppressors want people to think that change is impossible." (James H. Cone; Speaking the Truth; p. 49)

Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) gives an equally stringent message to Catholics about liberation theology regarding the perversion of the Christian understanding of the "poor":

"In its positive meaning the Church of the poor signifies the preference given to the poor, without exclusion, whatever the form of their poverty, because they are preferred by God...But the theologies of liberation...go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx.  In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle."

According to Pope Benedict's instruction on liberation theology, our understanding of the virtues, faith, hope and charity are subjugated to the new Marxist order:

Faith becomes "fidelity to history." 

We are the ones we've been waiting for, to bring about the final fruition of the class struggle.

Hope becomes "confidence in the future." 

Yes, we can change the world; we don't need God.  Our collective redemption comes when we engage in the Marxist class struggle.

Charity becomes "option for the poor."

All are not created equal.  Special political privilege for the oppressed, socialism, will set us free.

It's the dawn of a new age.

Comments
Kayle-Ann,

I'm not sure that the logical progression you're eloquently presenting is, in fact, logical.

Tying Obama to Wright, Wright to Cone, Cone to Marx and Marx to Hitler requires leaps of logic that would essentially validate the sermon that the Reverend John Hagee gave saying the Holocaust was ordained by God as part and parcel of prophecy.

I think a more even-handed approach to this would be to allow Senator Obama to present what his Christian beliefs entail, rather than making a complex argument that he is a Marxist, which is what I think your article presents.
Posted by: Dan Luther | May 28, 2008 02:07 AM

Obama is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He is at heart a Marxist that if elected will change the U.S. much as Hitler did Germany.
Posted by: D. LeBeau | May 28, 2008 02:13 AM

Regarding the Pope and Hitler: just a month ago, the Pope had warned against all politicians who claim to have all the answers. As a youngster, he lived in a country governed by such a regime.

Yet too many people of all age groups continue to be infatuated with Obama, who is a cult figure. They STILL believe that 'Yes, we can! The Federal Government can solve ALL of our problems! Our families, our clergy, our local authorities and our state governments have no roles to play!'

Duh.

Obama is lying to the gullible. His claim that the US Federal Government is omnipotent is a lie because since its foundation, the USA has been a Union, the members of which all have played some roles. Each American, as well as his/her own family, clergy, local government and state government has a role to play, as does the Fed Government. The Fed Govt. is not a silver bullet, contrary to Obama's claim. It does not have 'all the answers', and neither does any other INDIVIDUAL component of the American society.

What Pope Benedict XVI wants is a very decentralised Union, whereas what Obama wants is a savior Fed Govt. But no Fed Govt. can be a savior - only Jesus can be.
Posted by: Zbigniew Mazurak | May 28, 2008 04:14 AM

Marx was a over rated windbag and those who see him as the messiah are losers plain and simple. In fact, socialism strives for a world without risk for the masses and empowers the flawed who are somehow endowed with a vision for all humanity that never actually transpires. What a boring world they envision. Ever seen or read about the Soviet Union? China during Mao? Cuba today? All for what? Some imaginary utopia where no risk, no failure, no challenges exist? How many generations must these idiots persist if "only the right people are in charge"? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the outcome to be different. Socialists are a prime example of insanity. Personally I think Marx was like most liberals today: a bitter unhappy person who was guilty of the Seven Deadly Sins;

Pride is excessive belief in one's own abilities that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

Envy is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

Could this not describe liberals more perfectly?
Posted by: DaveT | May 28, 2008 04:56 AM

The first major accomplishment of John Paul II was to go to Medelin and inform the worldly Jesuits who swapped rosaries for rifles -that it was over. (liberation theology)
Posted by: Don L | May 28, 2008 06:27 AM

This will be short and for many leftists not so sweet. It will be unequivocal. There are no PhD’s, no laymen, no person on this Earth who understand Karl Marx's Marxism. Marx himself said he was not a Marxist...how messed up is that?
Oh yes, one can easily use all of the definitional phrases and buzzwords, and at one time or another every socialist group does so, but other than to sound intellectual, Marxism to them is a socialism. It is too all who study it. Why?

Karl Marx failed to establish anything close to a coherent philosophy. To one scholar it means one thing, to another something entirely different. It is the noir Gumby of the political philosophies.

One of the most noted Marxist scholars Thomas Sowell stated; "Marx at different times believes different things, he changes his mind, he will contradict himself", a recognition that Marx's work consists largely of works of criticism and diatribes against his enemies. Thomas Sowell rightly points out that "because many of these doctrines have disappeared...later interpreters... have not fully understood the real thrusts and limits of [his] words."

One thing is for sure. When you get a noir a la carte, anti capitalists, limned philosophy it is made use of by every socially misfit faction with a grievance against mankind's freedom -- say like the Democratic Party.
Posted by: Habu | May 28, 2008 07:14 AM

Great article: never have I seen it more eloquently stated that the four big "Axis of Evil" philosophies of the last century - Marxism, Nazi-style fascism, Black Power militancy, and Islam - are intimately intertwined, and collectively must be stamped out in order for the American way of life to survive.
Posted by: Dave D | May 28, 2008 07:25 AM
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WHY AREN'T WE ALL KEYNESIANS YET?
SYNOPSIS: Celebrates Keyne's pivotal role in saving Capitalism

 This year is the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto - and the effort to rehabilitate the discredited prophet is in full swing. Never mind the dismal track record of Marxism as a governing ideology; article after article proclaims that today's turbulent world economy is just what the great man predicted. One writer in The New Yorker even proclaimed Marx 'the thinker of the future'.

 I say phooey. Sure, Marx wrote about economic upheavals; so did lots of people. What he never managed to do was offer either a comprehensible explanation of why such upheavals happen, or any suggestions about what to do about them (except abolish capitalism). By my reckoning, Karl Marx made about as much contribution to economics as Zeppo Marx made to comedy. Or as John Maynard Keynes, rather more elegantly, put it, 'Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and through them, the events of history.'

 Harsh words - but Keynes earned the right to say them, for it was Keynes, not Marx, who cracked the code of crisis economics - who explained how recessions and depressions can happen. And as Japan and the rest of Asia have gone into an economic tailspin, it is Keynesianism, not Marxism that offers useful guidance about how they might save themselves.

 I have often wondered why Keynes - unlike, say, Freud - has never become a pop cultural icon. His life surely was interesting enough. Before the First World War he was a member of the free-thinking, Bohemian cluster of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group (Trent Lott would not have approved of his private life). After that war he became famous as the author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, an eloquent condemnation of the vindictive terms imposed on the defeated Germans; his concern was vindicated by the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the memory of his warnings helped convince a victorious America to aid, not punish, its prostrate enemies after World War II. As that war was drawing to a close, Keynes arrived in New Hampshire as the most important member of the British delegation to the famous Bretton Woods conference - which established an international monetary system that provided the world economy with much-needed stability for a generation.

 But however colorful his resume, only one item on it really matters: his 1936 publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which was to depression economics what The Origin of Species was to biology. Before the General Theory, economists could not explain how depressions happen, or what to do about them. (I've tried going through the pre-Keynesian business cycle literature; it's a vast wasteland). After 1936, they could.

True, there was a long stretch - around 25 years - when many economists turned their backs on Keynes. They claimed, with some justice, that he made assumptions that could not be rigorously justified - and purists argued that a theory whose microfoundations are based on observation rather than axioms should be regarded as illegitimate, no matter how well it might work in practice. The devaluation of Keynes was helped by the non-Keynesian nature of the problems facing the world in the 70s and 80s - inflation rather than deflation (although in the early 20s it was none other than Keynes who provided the first coherent explanation of the hyperinflations then consuming many of Europe's currencies), inadequate saving rather than deficient demand. And for a while various anti-Keynesian ideas - ranging from mathematically impeccable academic demonstrations that recessions can't happen (or if they do it's only because people rationally choose to enjoy more leisure), to popular crank doctrines like supply-side economics - seemed to have crowded Keynes off the stage. But just take a look at Japan - an economy that clearly suffers from a lack of demand, not supply, where the clear and present danger is deflation, not inflation - and tell me that Keynesian ideas are no longer relevant.

So why isn't Keynes a household word? Perhaps because we want our gurus to look and sound the part. Our savior is supposed to look like an Old Testament prophet, and rage against the evils of the world; a bowler-hatted member of the Establishment, who wants to rescue the system rather than destroy it, can't make it past the casting department, no matter how unconventional his private life - or his ideas. Keynes also had an off-putting belief that good economics is the product of hard thinking - 'Economics', he once wrote,'is a difficult and technical subject, but nobody will believe it.' Worst of all, instead of presenting depressions as a morality play, with villains and heroes, he portrayed them as a dangerous but treatable disease in an otherwise healthy patient, one that should be curable with a little minor surgery. Indeed, he once expressed the hope that economists might someday be thought of like dentists - that they would be regarded as apolitical professionals brought in to resolve technical problems.

Now I'm not saying that Keynes was right about everything, that we should treat The General Theory as a sort of secular bible - the way that Marxists treat Das Kapital. But the essential truth of Keynes's big idea - that even the most productive economy can fail if consumers and investors spend too little, that the pursuit of sound money and balanced budgets is sometimes (not always!) folly rather than wisdom - is as evident in today's world as it was in the 1930s. And in these dangerous days, we ignore or reject that idea at the world economy's peril.
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