Obama’s Ideology-Driven Presidency

By Guest Writer Greg Lewis

Barack Obama stood in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and stared through binoculars at the remnants of a country. He was dumbfounded as he looked northward at the barren wasteland that a communist dictatorship had created. It was as if he was seeing for the first time what the word “communist” means.

He sounded more like a 7th-grader than the president of the United States as he marveled, “It is like you are looking across 50 years into a country that has missed 40 or 50 years of progress.”

The president went on:

"If a country can't feed its people effectively, if it can't make anything of any use to anybody, if it has no exports other than weapons and even those aren't ones that in any way would be considered state of the art. If it can't deliver on any indicators of well-being . . . for its people . . . then you'd think you'd want to try something different."

If he’d prefaced these comments with “Gee, Wally,” we’d have been right back in an episode of “Leave It To Beaver.” His teen-worthy incredulity at seeing what the very Marxist ideology he embraces brings to the people who are forced to endure it should be the beginning of an awakening for Obama. It should cause him to muse, “Hmm-m-m, maybe I shouldn’t try so hard to inflict my own socialist ideology on the American people. Maybe I ought to rethink this whole idea of the state controlling the lives and behavior and economic endeavors of its people.”

Not bloody likely, I’m afraid.

Jerry Casale, one of the founders of the new wave rock group Devo, was fond of saying, “You can’t be it and see it,” meaning it’s impossible to get a perspective on your own behavior when you’re as ideologically committed as someone like Obama is. The president, like the leftist ideologues he’s installed in every important U.S. government post, is incapable of stepping back and looking at what he’s doing to the greatest nation on earth. He can’t entertain even the thought that perhaps his policies and his ideology are essentially the same as those that have caused the economic failure of every communist nation in history.

It falls to those of us who understand that Obama is ultimately out to make the U.S. into his own version of North Korea — right down to the people in the audiences at his appearances fainting at the very appearance of their glorious leader — to remove this ideologue from office in November and insure that we don’t go any further down the path to failed-statehood than he’s already taken us.


Greg Lewis Ph.D. is the author of The Politics of Anger, which systematically lays out the communist/socialist foundations of the liberal political agenda by examining the important writings of leftist thinkers of the past 75 years.

Lewis also co-authored "End Your Addiction Now : The Proven Nutritional Supplement Program That Can Set You Free."

Greg Lewis.org

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Only A Democrat Could Try To Create A Board To Determine 'Reasonable Profits'

By Susan Duclos

Everyone that starts a business does so to earn as much in profit as possible. It is capitalism and the American dream to not have a limit of how high you can fly.

Which is why The Hill headline "Dems propose 'Reasonable Profits Board' to regulate oil company profits," simply astounded me.

Democrats want to set up a board that would determine what type of business profits are "reasonable" and not even have any industry representative on the board.

Brings me right back to 2010 when Barack Obama went off script and teleprompter and informed an audience that "at a certain point you’ve made enough money."

I repeat... only a Democrat would propose creating a board to determine what "reasonable profits" are for a company that is in business to make as much money as possible.

Turning this over to Hot Air's Ed Morrissey for some context here:

First, a reality check is in order. While politicians like to hyperventilate over the gross dollar amounts of profit from oil companies, profit is most accurately measured as a percentage — the ratio of profits to the cost of producing those profits. Does the oil industry have a record of exploitive profit margins? Hardly. For 2009, the oil and gas industry ranked 9th on Fortune’s list with a margin of 10.2%, exactly half of that of the network/communications industry, which finished first in 2008 as well. In fact, the margin for oil/gas decreased by three and a half points between 2008 and 2009.

The 2009 list is actually rather instructive. Internet retail has a 19.4% margin, and no one in Congress would dare talk about seizing profits from Amazon (for instance) as “unreasonable,” even though the margin in that industry is almost twice that of oil/gas. That, however, highlights a pattern of politically-motivated outrage for Democrats on profit. Remember in 2009-10 when Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats castigated insurance companies as “villains” who profited while Americans suffered? They finished 22nd on the Fortune list with a barely respectable 4.5% average profit margin.

So let’s put this in real terms. If the oil/gas industry had $500 billion in sales, then a 10.2% margin would be roughly $60 billion in profit — after investors spent $440 billion to generate those sales. Is that unreasonable? That’s a decision that should be left to the investors and the consumers who buy the product. Guess who gets excluded from the “Reasonable Profits Board”?

Oil Related

Washington Post "Obama's Keystone pipeline rejection is hard to accept."

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American suckers.

I think it was Marx who said that "Democracy is the road to Socialism".

"There was a time when the captains of finance and industry were proud of the label capitalist. “Forbes—Capitalist Tool” was a magazine popular with the Wall Street crowd. Schools taught about the benefits of capitalism over its biggest enemy, socialism.

Somewhere along the way, the enthusiasm for capitalism began to wane. Maybe it had to do with the fact that real wages were dropping and benefits were being slashed while the super-rich were whooping it up. More popular-sounding phrases began to take over. Countries were being pressured to accept “free markets.” The people who put up “venture capital” were called“entrepreneurs.” The magazine of multi-millionaire Steve Forbes became just plain “Forbes.”

Then came the housing crisis, the stock market dive, the jobs crisis, the budget cuts, the credit card crisis—in other words, the boom-to-bust crisis of capitalism that was inevitable in this profit system. The super-rich demanded, and got, trillions of dollars from the government to shore up their banks and other financial instruments.

But for millions of workers and dispossessed, the bottom has dropped out of their lives. More and more they are realizing this is the product of capitalism.
A national telephone survey was conducted recently by the polling firm Rasmussen Reports. It asked a simple question: Which is better, capitalism or socialism?

Just four months ago, in December, a similar poll asked people if they preferred a “free market economy” over one managed by the government. Some 70 percent were for the free market. But now, it seems, they don’t think capitalism is so “free.” In the new poll, two-thirds said big business and big government work together against the people’s interests. Now only 53 percent say they prefer capitalism over socialism. Among younger people, 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism, and 30 percent are undecided.

After so much Red Scare propaganda in this country, a lot of people are confused about socialism—although fewer than before. What if the questions were phrased this way:

Would you prefer an economy run by workers (socialism) or by bosses (capitalism)?

Would you prefer an economy geared to meeting people’s needs (socialism) or geared to producing profits for a few (capitalism)?

Do you think people should have a right to a job, a home, education and health care (socialism), or that the rich should have the right to fire, evict, foreclose, underfund the schools and deny medical care (capitalism)?" [Source] 

Republicans are always calling Obama a Socialist. He is not. In fact, he is closer to everything that they hold dear than to someone who is progressive in his thinking or leadership.

The irony is, of course, than under Obama wealthy corporations in A-merry-ca have become wealthier than they were under their great leader, W. The middle class has been shrinking for a long time, and under Obama, thanks to the disdain that those who control wealth in A-merry-ca feel for him, it has been getting worse. 

They sit on record profits and refuse to invest in jobs, and they outsource more jobs to other countries, causing more A-merry-can workers to lose their jobs here at home.

Don't expect this to change anytime soon. If things hold true to form Flipper Mitt will take the White House come November, 2012, and they will be partying on Wall Street once again.

Sadly, the folks on Main Street really won't care, because they understand that while the ideologues on the right celebrate a political victory, their lives will not change. In fact, unfortunately for them, it will only get worse.     

  

Lessons Unlearned

The Price we Pay

In 1989 millions of people were suddenly freed from socialist oppression when most of the communist world collapsed because of the failure of their socialist economies and the firm military pressure of the United States under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Yet virtually no media acknowledgement has been made of the twenty year anniversary of what might arguably be called the most important year in modern history. The only commemoration I've seen locally is a display in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.



How did we win the Cold War, and yet seem to have completely forgotten the lessons of that victory? Part of it is due to the domination of our higher education system by leftists, who at the time of the socialist collapse were still preaching about the "historical inevtablity" of socialism. The fall of the Berlin Wall should have been followed by the mass resignations of the heads of the humanities departments of nearly all our leading colleges and universities. Instead, they stayed on and pretended the fall of the socialist world had no significance. Therefore most Americans have never been properly educated about the Cold War, what it meant, and the important lessons to be learned. While the rest of the world is embracing free markets and enjoying the prosperity it brings, ironically the United States is trapped in a leftward drift with fading freedoms and a government crippled economy. Reason magazine helps to explain what went wrong.



November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s.

In the long fight between Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, even the democratic socialists of Europe had to admit that Friedman won in a landslide. Although media attention was rightly focused on the dramatic economic changes transforming Asia and the former East Bloc, fully half of the world’s privatization in the first dozen years after the Cold War, as measured by revenue, took place in Western Europe. European political and monetary integration, widely derided as statist by the Anglo-American right, has turned out to be one of the biggest engines for economic liberty in modern history. It was no accident that, in the midst of Washington’s illegal and ill-fated bailout of U.S. automakers, Swedish Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson, when asked about the fate of struggling Saab, tersely announced, “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

When Western Europeans are giving lectures to Americans about the dangers of economic intervention, as they have repeatedly since Barack Obama took office, it’s a good time to take stock of how drastically geopolitical arguments have pivoted during the last two decades. The United States, at least as represented by its elected officials and their economic policies, is no longer leading the global fight for democratic capitalism as the most proven path to human liberation. You are more likely to see entitlement reform in Rome than in Washington where, against the global grain, the federal government is trying to extend its role.

Cool Ad

This commerical from Alabama is a masterpiece of reverse psychology.



Amherst Antics

One good way to decorate this abandoned storefront in downtown Amherst is to let kids paint Halloween pictures on it.



The UMass Chess Club holds its meetings in the Blue Wall, the better to attract new members.



I was walking past the headquarters of the UMass Cannabis Club and saw that libertarian activist Terry Franklin was hanging out. I stopped in and took his picture.



Then he took mine.



Across the hall I saw this safe sex bulletin board decorated with drawsings of vaginas. Click photo to enlarge.



Wow, I remember just a few years ago there was a big stink at UMass about a public display of the image of a cock in a condom with a mouth near it. There was even a decency rally. Click photo to enlarge.



Personally I do not find images of genitalia offensive. But why the protest by some over the male anatomy display but not the female? Is there a double standard?

Good News

This coffeshop on King Street in Northampton is very popular.



Walking past it the other night after it was closed I saw this sign in the window that no doubt thrilled some anxious biker.



Today's Video

A beautiful performance by Storm the Ohio in Northampton last week.

Establishment Tool

Obama is No Radical



Back during the Vietnam War, when people were protesting by the thousands against U.S. policy, conservative elements of the media resorted to an old and dishonest trick to make the protesters look bad. They would single out the craziest looking person from the protest rally, interview them, photograph them and then put that protester on the front page as the most visible symbol of the entire rally. While most of those protesting were much more normal looking and acting than the crazy they singled out, people reading about the rally got the impression that it was only a buch of nuts that were opposing the war.

It's therefore ironic to see the same technique revived today from the Left to portray the critics of the Obama Administration. Media sources friendly to the Administration have been going to the numerous protests against President Obama's policies and focusing on the nontypical extremists in the crowd, hoping that the public will assume that is what those who oppose Obama are like. The thousands of working men and soccer moms attending with their children are ignored, while the two drunken rednecks accusing Obama of being a Nazi get all the attention.

Such techniques usually don't work in the long run if there are genuine issues to be raised. No matter how much the media tried to portray the anti-Vietnam movement as consisting of crackpots, doing so could not prevent the growing doubts of average Americans about the war. In the same way, the media attempts to dismiss the anti-Obama protesters has increasingly less traction as more and more Americans conclude that regardless of who is protesting and how, there are legitiment reasons for deep concern.



However, the protesters are wrong in their portrayal of Obama as a radical. Instead he is something much worse - Obama is defending and preserving an unacceptable and unsustainable status quo. Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine explains:

Most people on the right will tell you, quite accurately, that the Bush years didn't do much to shift the country toward greater social or economic conservatism. I expect most people on the left will say something similar when Obama exits office. Thus far, the president's domestic agenda has been many things, but radical it isn't. Radicals make sudden turns. Obama sometimes slams his foot on the accelerator-just look at projected spending for the next few years-but he hardly ever tries to change direction. Radicals tear down centers of power. When Obama is faced with a crumbling institution, his first instinct is to prop it up.

That was most obviously true with the bailouts, a series of corporate preservation programs that began before he took office and have only increased since then. Candidate Obama voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2008 bailout for failing financial institutions, and he personally intervened to urge skeptical liberals to support it. After Congress refused to authorize a bailout of the car companies, Obama followed George W. Bush in ignoring the plain language of the law and funneling funds to them anyway. Like Bush before him, Obama took advantage of such moments to adjust the institutional relationship between these nominally private businesses and the state: firing the head of General Motors, urging the company to consolidate brands, pushing for new controls on Wall Street pay. But the institutions themselves were preserved, in some cases enriched. The radical thing to do would have been to let them collapse.



And no, I'm not using "radical" as a euphemism for "free-market libertarian." A radical Obama still might have extended assistance to the people displaced by the corporate failures, perhaps even setting up a generous guaranteed income scheme. He might have broken up the big banks. He might have done all sorts of things, some wiser than others. But he would not have strengthened the corporate-state partnerships bequeathed to him by Bush....

The president could pal around with militiamen, hook a money hose from the Treasury to ACORN HQ, and sleep each night with a Zapatista plush doll, but as long as his chief concern is preserving and protecting the country's largest corporate enterprises, the biggest beneficiaries of his reign will be at the core of the American establishment.

Sounds of Summer

This is a picture of a girl being attacked by a cadydid.



Here is the sound of a cadydid Jeff Ziff recorded when we heard it one summer night. Voices are Jeff, me and Jordan Williams. Click here to listen.

In case you want to wear bugs on purpose there are examples of bug jewelry on display in the window of the Skera Gallery in Northampton.



Today's Video



Frank Sinatra was undoubtedly a legend,, but too often overlooked is the brief but brilliant career of his daughter Nancy, who unlike her old man had the sense to retire before she was past her prime. I remember how my straight friends used to drag me to divey Springfield strip clubs where Nancy's These Boots Were Made for Walkin' was played several times a night while the strippers made stupid S&M moves. The audience always went crazy. Straight people - I'll never understand them. This is the best version of Nancy Sinatra's best song.