Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Sonny Bunchinterviewed Benicio Del Toro, the star of the biopic "Che," only to have the film star storm out the door, pleading "uncomfort," when asked about the Cuban revolutionary's mass murder:
“I’m getting uncomfortable,” Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie’s portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. “I’m done. I’m done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”
With that, the Oscar-winning actor walked away, abruptly terminating an interview conducted late last week to discuss director Steven Soderbergh's "Che" ...
Mr. del Toro doesn’t deny that Guevara’s persona had some darker aspects. “We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life,” he said, “but we’re not omitting the fact that he’s for capital punishment, which is the essence of that.” ...
“They didn’t do it blindly; they had trials,” Mr. del Toro said. “They found them guilty, and they executed them - that’s capital punishment” ...
Read the whole thing. I've written a least a couple of post on Che's hold on "progressive" culture, so I'll let Michael Goldfarb have the last word:
At 4.5 hours long, it can't be very easy to watch either, but hopefully that doesn't stop all the asthmatic children who, with the right amount of love and encouragement, can still grow up to execute the enemies of the revolution.
(But don't miss the short video clip with Bunch as well.)
Tucson Unified School District has insisted repeatedly that its ethnic studies program does not violate the terms of Arizona's new law placing restrictions on such courses. Are those statements true? A closer look at TUSD's teaching materials casts doubt on some of TUSD's denials. But even so, that does not answer the larger question of whether students have a right to study the material or whether Arizona has a right to stop them ....
What are the facts?
9 on Your Side took a closer look. One of the textbooks that TUSD uses in its ethnic studies program is Chicano!, by F. Arturo Rosales. The book teaches the history of racism and oppression in the United States directed against the Mexican, Mexican-American, and Hispanic populations. As the name implies, a large portion of the textbook is devoted to the Chicano movement that sprang up to fight social injustice and to push for civil rights. There are some similarities between the Chicano movement tactics that the book documents and the tactics some TUSD students have practicing recently.
The cover of the book features graphic art of protesters with their fists in the air. Pages 248, 249 and 253 feature photographs of Chicano movement members with raised fists. The photograph on page 253 shows a student with a raised fist sitting in a classroom with other students; the text on that page makes the point that Chicano studies programs in the Southwest are "the most visible vestige" of the Chicano movement. A review of KGUN9 News footage over the past week shows many TUSD students raising their fists in the same fashion as those shown in the textbook.
Page 185 shows a picture of students walking out of school as part of a protest. Such student walkouts have been a major component of recent protests in Tucson against the ethnic studies restrictions and against Arizona's controversial immigration crackdown.
And then there is the brown beret issue. Pages 193 and 199 of the textbook show pictures of demonstrators wearing brown berets. The book acknowledges a link to Che Guevara as an inspiration for the berets. Interestingly, the textbook does not explain who Guevara was. Guevara was a Marxist revolutionary leader and a major figure in the Cuba's communist revolution, revered by some as an inspiration to the downtrodden, but reviled by others as a ruthless killer who bragged about personally shooting defectors.
Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.
Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.
Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.
In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.
Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.
Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.
Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?
In fact, from their reactions, all that dancing in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana this week-end seems to strike some talking heads as odd, if not downright unseemly.
But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial. It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.
The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.
Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.
Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.
“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.
On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.
Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”
“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We executive from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.
Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.
According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.
It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:
“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)
"Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend." (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)
“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)
“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)
"Castro's personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country." (Barbara Walters.)
“Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)
Like many other Latin American intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was initially a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro. He studied Marxism in depth as a university student and was later persuaded by communist ideals after the success of the Cuban Revolution. Gradually, Vargas Llosa came to believe that Cuban socialism was incompatible with what he considered to be general liberties and freedoms. The official rupture between the writer and the policies of the Cuban government occurred with the so-called Padilla Affair, when Fidel Castro imprisoned the poet Herberto Padilla. Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Castro protesting against the Cuban political system and the imprisonment of the artist. Vargas Llosa has identified himself with liberalism rather than extreme left-wing political ideologies ever since. Since he relinquished his earlier leftism, he has opposed both left- and right-wing authoritarian regimes.
Some hard-left Democrats see their chanceto even the score a bit, although all I'm seeing here is a collection of campaign memorabilia rather than a full-blown statement of revolutionary fervor at a Barack Obama campaign office (compare below).
Among the images that greeted visitors to the John McCain campaign office in Pompano Beach this week was a sign headlined "Barrack Hussein Obama” that compared the Democratic presidential candidate to Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro.
Shown a picture of the sign Thursday night, Broward Republican Chairman Chip LaMarca said he was "disgusted" by it and would immediately go to the office and remove it.
"I'm speechless at the ignorance," LaMarca said. "It's not something we can condone.
"We're trying to promote positive messages for our candidates. I understand people want their candidate to win. It's ridiculous. I'll find out who put it up there, and maybe they'll volunteer somewhere else."
The sign on an 8 1/2 by 14 inch sheet of paper looks as if it was printed from a personal computer. It's part of a gallery of posters and signs on the wall immediately inside the front door of the Pompano office, near the intersection of Sample Road and U.S. 1.
Others signs on the wall include a portrait of McCain and his wife, Cindy, Republican elephants, patriotic sayings, and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin holding a large hunting rifle.
The sign in question mocked Obama's call for change and asked what other figures "called for change in this fashion." The answer: Marx, Hitler, Castro, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini. "And you want Obama for President? Are you nuts,” the sign said.
So, the Broward Republican Chair moved quickly to have this volunteer's poster taken down...
Meanwhile, I don't recall a similar outrage on the left when Ohio's James Burge, a Lorain County Common Pleas Judge, mounted a companion set of wall-sized images of Che Guevara and Barack Obama in his county governmental office.
Hmm, maybe we're seeing a bit of desperation on the left...
In Barcelona, the social activist elected mayor says she will clamp down on the overdevelopment of tourism, while allowing some government decisions to be determined by online referendums. In A Coruña, home to three of the 10 richest Spaniards, the former law professor taking charge at city hall vows to implement “99 measures for the 99% of the citizenry,” including a reduction of his own salary as mayor.
A new wave of leftist leaders is taking power in city halls across Spain on Saturday, replacing career politicians sullied by economic crises and corruption scandals. Generally political neophytes, they were chosen by alliances among left-leaning parties and citizen movements that finished strongly in May 24 municipal and regional elections.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party lost absolute majorities in 127 of the 154 largest cities it won in elections in 2011. In coalition bargaining that could stretch into the summer, the party also stands to lose control in several of the nine Spanish regions where it ran as the incumbent.
This urban shift could be a harbinger of national elections later this year in which Mr. Rajoy has said he would seek a second term. Cities “are to a large extent showcases for trends in national politics,” said Carlos Flores Juberías, a constitutional law professor and political analyst at the University of Valencia, noting that success in local races presaged national electoral triumphs by the Socialist Party in the 1980s and the Popular Party in the 1990s...
Radical leftists stateside are hoping that our crop of Marxist mayors will be a harbinger as well. Doubtful, but we'll see. For all of Hillary Clinton's leftist preening, she just doesn't come off as an authentic acolyte of Che Guevara and the like. As it is Obama's Marxism has only been halted by the system of separation of powers created by the founders, and even then Che Barack has been roundly criticized for his far-left executive authoritarianism, not the least from ideological leftists.
We've got a lot of work ahead of us restoring limited government (and basic human decency) to this country in the years ahead. Thank goodness we're not so far gone as the unlucky bastards about to be plunged into a communist nightmare in Spain.
I've been chronicling Barack Obama's embrace by the progressive/radical left for some time now. Thus it's no surprise to me that Obama supporters have turned to artistic iconography to build a cult of personality around the Illinois Senator.
As the Washington Post indicates, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer pictured above, has created the Democratic primary's "equivalent of the Che poster," an agitprop pop-art image for the Bolshevik-constructivist set.
More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light--clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy clouds illuminating his sacred head. But even away from the Obama mother ship, graphic designers and pop artists have adopted the candidate as their own, producing a raft of posters and prints in support of his campaign.
Last summer, an Obama poster began appearing in downtown Chicago, plastered randomly in public spaces. Drawn in mustardy yellows, Obama appeared from the shoulders up, staring straight at viewers, with a sunburst exploding behind his head. Below the image, in large block letters, the poster proclaimed "The Dream." At the time, the artist was identified only as "CRO," but, as the posters spread, CRO was revealed to be Ray Noland, a 35-year-old graphic artist....
To get a sense of Noland's politics, you need only look at the details. In one print, a crowd of Obama supporters is waving tiny placards, some of which read "Surge of Diplomacy" and "Peace Is Patriotic." Another poster, titled "No! From the Go," bears the slogan "U.S. out of Iraq."
Noland's designs attracted a huge amount of attention in the art community, and even some interest from the Obama campaign. At first, campaign officials asked him to donate his images, according to the New York Post. He declined. But the campaign finally did purchase a poster, which was used as part of the official promotion for a September 2007 rally in New York City.
Shepard Fairey was the next to step forward. He is best known for his early 1990s underground "Andre the Giant has a posse" campaign, a cultural phenomenon designed around a small, easily reproducible likeness of the wrestler. Fairey distributed thousands of stickers and posters bearing the image, which eventually took on a life of its own, turning up in cities and towns across the globe--the image itself becoming part of the popular culture. Fairey specializes in this sort of epiphenomenon, which he calls "propaganda engineering." As his website proudly proclaims, he's been "manufacturing quality dissent since 1989."
Fairey is not new to politics. As he told Creativity-Online.com, "I've been paying attention to politics since the mid-'90s." In 2000, he created an anti-Bush poster. In 2004, even though he "wasn't really that impressed" with John Kerry, he mounted what he calls a "pretty aggressive anti-Bush poster campaign" called "Be the Revolution" in support of Kerry. It wasn't until Obama appeared on the scene that Fairey really fell for a candidate. He would later explain that he admired Obama's "radical cachet." "I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace."
In January, he unveiled two posters in support of Obama. Done in blood red and grays, the prints depicted a large, iconic Obama, head thoughtfully cocked. One version of the poster proclaims "HOPE," the other, "PROGRESS." As Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum noted, the Fairey motif was something like "Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art," all of which suggests that the subject might be "a Third World dictator." But the American Thinker's Peggy Shapiro grasped the poster's more proximate ancestor: Fairey was using "the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda . . . [recalling] the idealized portraits and personality cult of the 'Beloved Leader' such as Stalin and Lenin."
Fairey's posters have become huge hits--you often see them at Obama rallies adorning either T-shirts or signs and plastering urban places such as bus kiosks....
Artists keep flocking to the Obama campaign, designing posters, sometimes selling them, and often giving them away for free....
Designer Jean Aw, trying to explain the attraction, told the Huffington Post that "By placing such an emphasis on building a visually appealing brand, Obama is validating the importance of design in communication. This in turn builds support from the design community, who might feel that a design-conscious candidate best represents their personal beliefs."
Of course it is equally possible that artists are responding instead to an ideological kinship with Obama. The Upper Playground is an artist collective in San Francisco, which the San Francisco Chronicle helpfully describes as a "multiplatform international lifestyle brand encompassing artist-centered clothing and housewares." In February they endorsed Obama, writing, "For too long we have been plagued by mediocrity and incompetence at the Executive level. As an international company, we feel that it is time to support a candidate that truly embodies the American spirit in both his campaign and his ideologies. We believe that Barack Obama is that candidate."
The Obama poster has spread Fairey's fame, but is the image good for the candidate? Like the photograph-turned-icon of Che Guevara -- which graces the T-shirts of countless hipsters who barely know who the guy is -- Fairey's Obama poster is rooted in the graphic style of agitprop. There's an unequivocal sense of idol worship about the image, a half-artsy, half-creepy genuflection that suggests the subject is (a) a Third World dictator whose rule is enmeshed in a seductive cult of personality; (b) a controversial American figure who's been assassinated; or (c) one of those people from a Warhol silk-screen that you don't recognize but assume to be important in an abstruse way.
This cannot be the Obama campaign's idea of good public relations...
Well, the Obama folks apparently think so.
Totalitarian chic is popular, and as this is widely considered the "change" election, voters have only themselves to blame if, God forbid, they eventually succumb to the cult of Obama in November.
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have certainly not shunned the Marxist label, it would seem today’s left is authentically Marxist.
But, except at its edges, the present left is not what it claims to be. Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; and using that term to designate the characteristics of our current left is at best problematic. Neither Marxists nor Marxist-Leninist governments evidenced the cultural radicalism that today’s left expresses every day. Although there have been Communist Party members in Western countries who have been sexual exhibitionists, and even a brief period in Russia after the November 1917 Revolution when free love was allowed, generally communists have been on the conservative side of issues like homosexuality and the questioning of fixed sexual identities. The traditional left would have attributed our LGBT activities to “bourgeois decadence.”
In the Soviet Union and for a long time throughout the Soviet bloc, artistic experimentation was frowned upon, including music of the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone technique, as well as abstract expressionism. Communist regimes sent gays to labor camps, and communist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara raged against homosexuality and, in Guevara’s case, blacks.
It is hard to view these Marxist revolutionaries as precursors of the present intersectional left. Indeed, corporate capitalists stand much closer to this force than traditional Marxists do or did. Are the executives at PepsiCo, Citibank, and the NFL, who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) and wish to stamp out opposition from the cultural right, economic revolutionaries yearning for a socialist society? Pardon my skepticism!
Real Marxism has been about socioeconomic contradictions and transformations, not about the need for transgendered restrooms and the abolition of gender roles. Communist parties in Western Europe after World War II vehemently opposed the immigration of cheap labor from abroad, viewing it as an attack on the indigenous workforce. The current left, by contrast, is about open borders and filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations as an act of contrition for white Christian racism, or as a source of so-called cultural enrichment.
The Soviet regime and Communist parties outside the Soviet Union condemned the Critical Theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School as a distortion of Marxism. One can only imagine what they would have thought of the further evolution of what Lind and others have styled “cultural Marxism.” Lind correctly observes that the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany provided the cradle for this movement, which tried to fuse Freud’s theories about sexual repression with socialist economics. But the result looked much more like a cultural war against reactionary social attitudes than a serious effort to plan a Marxist economy.
After Critical Theory migrated to the U.S. by way of Columbia University in the 1930s, it came to look even less like Marxism and much more like a prelude to our current cultural revolution. Some socialist boilerplate remained attached to this brand of thinking, but it became extraneous to its real message, which is the subversion of what seemed to me as a child in the 1950s to be a normal society.
I am unwilling to concede to cultural Marxists a Marxist pedigree simply because they have claimed that ancestry. Nowadays, media and political celebrities claim all kinds of labels for themselves, and one can easily prove the falseness of most of them. What makes a lesbian feminist on Fox News a “conservative” other than the fact that she appears on a generally Republican channel and claims that she votes for the GOP? What makes a culturally radical commentator on CNN a “liberal” other than the fact that some in high places decided to apply this term to themselves? What does columnist Jonah Goldberg have in common politically or philosophically with Edmund Burke, or for that matter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Thomas Jefferson? If I decide to call myself something I am not, it does not become any more true regardless of how much media support I can find to back me up.
I concede to Lind that today’s cultural radicals, who are unfortunately becoming mainstream, are of the left. They are leftists because they are driven by four defining leftist principles or practices. One is globalism or universalism, which in the case of the current left takes the form of a boundless revulsion for Western Christian society and its majority white population. The left in its essence denies particularity and the sanctity of local and national traditions.
The second quintessentially leftist principle that informs our cultural revolutionaries is the worship of equality as the highest value. One can easily imagine non-leftists recognizing some limited good in the idea of equality, for example, granting legal equality to all authorized citizens or subjects of a state. But the left is fixated on equality and seeks to harness political and educational power to obliterate human distinctions.
The third leftist principle or practice is the call for expansions of what they call human rights, since the historically grounded natural rights do not advance equality or “human dignity,” by which they mean the extinction of social and historical distinctions. This inverts Aristotle’s sage advice at the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, that laws (nomoi) should fit specific governments (politeiai). The leftist position is exactly the opposite: Long established customs and conventions should give way to what journalists and academics deem conducive to greater equality.
A fourth leftist belief concerns the putative fluidity and malleability of human nature, seen for example in the insistence that all gender identities are subject to change. Public administrators and courts must defend our right to redefine our gender whenever we want; and others should then be required to treat us in accordance with our changing gender identity. This last leftist belief stands in striking contrast to the conservative notion that human identities are rooted in tradition and nature. Perhaps nowhere more than in this emphasis on gender fluidity do we behold the most radical form of the left, perhaps in an even more grotesque manifestation than in such harebrained schemes as nationalizing the economy...
You can try to put “conservative” lipstick on the lawless amnesty mob. In the end, however, it’s still a lawless mob. The big government/big business alliance to protect illegal immigration got a lot of mileage using foolish Republicans Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan as front men. But the true colors of the open-borders grievance-mongers always show through.
After America said no to a pork-filled security-undermining amnesty bill in 2007, the No Illegal Alien Left Behind lobbyists changed their overtly thuggish tactics. They put down their upside-down American flags, stopped wearing their commie Che Guevara T-shirts and cloaked their radical reconquista aspirations in the less divisive rhetoric of “reform” and “opportunity.”
It was all just an act, of course. Inevitably, the mask has slipped. Over the weekend, illegal alien protesters descended on the private residence of Kansas Secretary of State and immigration enforcement lawyer Kris Kobach. As Twitchy.com reported on Saturday, 300 amnesty activists marched into Kobach’s neighborhood and barged up his driveway and right onto his doorstep. It’s how the Alinskyite “community organizers” roll.
Shouting into a bullhorn and waving their fists from his front porch, the property rights-invaders dubbed Kobach “King of Hate” for his work representing border security activists and federal customs enforcement agents who are fighting the systemic sabotage of immigration law. Thankfully, Kobach, his wife and their four young daughters were not home at the time. (See The Right Scoop for interview with Kobach on Hannity.)
But the aggrieved amnesty demanders are not done yet. And Kobach is not the only one in their crosshairs.
After tea party activist turned Kansas state representative Amanda Grosserode condemned the mob action publicly on Facebook, racist insults and threats littered her page. Roberto Medina Ramirez wrote: “I’ll give her something to be disgusted about!” Doris Lynn Crouse Gent chimed in: “OMG! Maybe her drive should be next.” Matt S. Bashaw echoed the call: “Maybe her house should be next.” Facebook user Jude Robinson also ranted on Grosserode’s page: “Since Kobach steals taxpayer money spreading hate around the country, he deserves what he gets.”
Dennis Paul Romero left this message for Grosserode: “(N)azi kkk and she is proud of it.” A user writing as “Paul-says Fckmarkzuck” left death threats under Romero’s comment: “Gotta start killing all the Nazis. Politicans (sic), bankers, and priests. Cops, lawyers, and Judges. ASAP.” The same user added: “Just another b*tch that needs to die off already.” (Note: Many of these comments have now been deleted. Trying to cover their tracks.)
Mary Anastasia O'Grady's the best journalist writing on Latin America, as she demonstrates once more in her column today, "The FARC Files":
Colombia's precision air strike 10 days ago, on a guerrilla camp across the border in Ecuador, killed rebel leader Raúl Reyes. That was big. But the capture of his computer may turn out to be a far more important development in Colombia's struggle to preserve its democracy.
Reyes was the No. 2 leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been at war with the Colombian government for more than four decades. His violent demise is a fitting end to a life devoted to masterminding atrocities against civilians. But the computer records expose new details of the terrorist strategy to bring down the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, including a far greater degree of collaboration between the FARC and four Latin heads of government than had been previously known. In addition to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, they are President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega and Bolivian President Evo Morales.
Mr. Chávez is said to have been visibly distressed when told of the death of Reyes, a man he clearly admired. He also may have realized that he played a role in his hero's death, since it was later reported that the Colombian military had located the camp by intercepting a phone call to Reyes from the Venezuelan president.
Mr. Chávez rapidly ordered 10 battalions to the Colombian border. Should the Colombian military cross into Venezuela in search of FARC, he warned, it would mean war. That may have seemed like an unnecessary act of machismo. But the Colombia military has long claimed that the FARC uses both Ecuador and Venezuela as safe havens. Now it had shown that it wasn't afraid to act on that information.
There is a third explanation for Mr. Chávez's panic when he learned of the strike: He was alarmed about the possibility that his links with Reyes would be exposed. Sure enough, when the Colombian national police retrieved Reyes's body from Ecuador, it also brought back several computers from the camp. Documents on those laptops show that Mr. Chávez and Reyes were not only ideological comrades, but also business partners and political allies in the effort to wrest power from Mr. Uribe.
The tactical discussions found in the documents are hair-raising enough....
The more significant revelation is the relationship between the FARC and Mr. Chávez, Mr. Correa, Mr. Morales and Mr. Ortega. All four, it turns out, support FARC violence and treachery against Mr. Uribe.
This reminds me of the Soviet Union's policy of supporting Marxist-Leninist insurgencies around the world in the '70s and '80s. The Reagan administration came to power after the atrophied Carter years determined to restore America's rightful position in the global hieararchy of powers.
While America's unrivaled by the Soviets today, we now face challenges to the South no less significant than when Reagan was in office. John McCain recognizes this:
We must also work together to counter the propaganda of demagogues who threaten the security and prosperity of the Americas. Hugo Chávez has overseen the dismantling of Venezuela's democracy by undermining the parliament, the judiciary, the media, free labor unions, and private enterprises. His regime is acquiring advanced military equipment. And it is trying to build a global anti-American axis. My administration will work to marginalize such nefarious influences.
And not too soon!!
Let's just hope Barack Obama's not elected. In the Illinois' Senator's major policy statement from last fall, there's no mention of the ominous Latin American spector rising around Chavez and his FARC allies.
Holy shit. Guardian just did an NSA story sourced to insane crackpot Wayne Madsen. Is their Google broken? http://t.co/Mcb3vd0OdE
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) June 29, 2013
And Louise Mensch calls out Madsen:
Guardian and Observer Weakend - run front page NSA story based on word of conspiracy theorist crackpot (Obama's gay, Israel caused 911)
— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) June 29, 2013
At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".
Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.
Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (Sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.
Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.
And it's clear the Guardian's editors knew of Madsen's reputation as a conspiracy theorist, as the article makes mention of their source's controversial background:
In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the "half story" told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA's activities in Europe.
He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the "NSA gets the lion's share" of the Sigint "take". In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received "highly sanitised intelligence".
Madsen said he was alarmed at the "sanctimonious outcry" of political leaders who were "feigning shock" about the spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying when their country had a similar third party deal with the NSA.
Although the level of co-operation provided by other European countries to the NSA is not on the same scale as that provided by the UK, the allegations are potentially embarrassing.
"I can't understand how Angela Merkel can keep a straight face, demanding assurances from Obama and the UK while Germany has entered into those exact relationships," Madsen said.
I'll update with developments, but it's pretty telling that the far-left Guardian went ahead with a front-page story, with the hard copy print runs already rolling, while sourcing a hardcore 9/11 truther and Jew-hating conspiracy theorist. Well, come to think of it, that's not too different from Glenn Greenwald's ideological program, so there you go.
I'll be heading up to Los Angeles after classes today for an education panel, "Schools for Subversion." I'm meeting Professor Mary Grabar for coffee before the event, held at the Luxe Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Mary's announcement is here.
CJHS Hosts Expert Panel to Dissect Controversial Topic, May 6, in Los Angeles
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Los Angeles, CA
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, a Los Angeles based non-profit activist group, is sponsoring a symposium and expert panel discussion, Schools for Subversion: How the Public Education Lays the Foundation for University Radicalism, on Monday, May 6, at the Luxe Hotel Sunset in Los Angeles. It has become common knowledge that universities are bastions of political correctness, but that waterfall is spilling down through public education institutions all the way to the elementary level. Even a cursory look at headlines reveals that innocent children are being subjected to an all too often vicious form of political indoctrination designed to create a liberal mindset as early as possible.Doris Wise Montrose, president and founder of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors said, “The Nazi model for outcome based education was to transform the world by changing the children. Hans Schemm, leader of the Nazi Teacher’s League, clearly stated: ‘Those who have the youth on their side control the future.’ We know how that ended and we must connect the dots. We have been asleep at the wheel with respect to public education. America must wake up and act before it is too late.”It begins early in elementary school, when children are inculcated with lessons steeped in “social justice,” which is essentially radical egalitarian, social engineering. Although parents may not be aware of it, social justice creeps into just about every subject: social studies, language arts, science, even math. It’s weaved into state curriculum standards. It is the focus of colleges of education. It is promoted by curriculum companies (sometimes tax-supported and tax-exempt) to teachers, cloaked in innocuous titles and feel-good text.The roots and real goals of this radical pedagogy will be examined by this panel. Among the topics for discussion:
• The latest Pew poll shows that 49 percent of young adults believe that socialism is a viable economic system. Only 43 percent say they have a negative view. The poll also found that just 46 percent of people age 18-29 have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views.
• Even “global warming,” ostensibly a scientific issue, is really about the expansion of government. According to the alarmists, the alleged climate change has been the product of unbridled corporate America, so the government must rein them in.
• Is Islam really a “religion of peace?”
• Does Che Guevara deserve to be idolized?
• Does “The Three Little Pigs” really have a Eurocentric message?
• Is teaching anti-racist math really necessary?
• Why is it okay to teach young kids about the joys of collective bargaining but not about why capitalism is the best system on earth?
Larry Sand, retired teacher and one of the panelists said, “This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is essential that the public become fully aware of this troubling phenomenon and get more involved in their local schools with the goal of returning them to centers of learning rather than hubs of indoctrination.”
The expert panel includes:
Kyle Olson – Author of Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism and publisher of EAGnews.org, a news service dedicated to education reform and school spending research, reporting, analysis and commentary.
Larry Sand – Retired teacher, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, blogger and regular contributor to City Journal. Having taught for over 28 years, he has seen firsthand what Olson has written about.
Mary Grabar – Professor who’s forever battling the “re-educators,” and not coincidentally, forever battling for her continued employment in Georgia. She has written extensively about influence of radicals in our colleges, most notably chronicling the legacy of the late Howard Zinn whose politically charged and factually challenged “textbook,” A People’s History of the United States, is in wide usage in schools across the country. She is organizing the Resistance to the Re-Education of America at DissidentProf.com.
Bruce Thornton – Professor of classics and humanities at Fresno State University and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of eight books, a regular contributor to FrontPageMag.com and perhaps the most articulate and prolific conservative college professor working today.
Ben Boychuk, moderator – Currently an associate editor of City Journal, and a columnist for the Sacramento Bee and ScrippsHoward News Service, where he writes eloquently on a wide variety of topics. He has long been involved with education issues, including a recent stint at Heartland Institute where he was managing editor of School Reform News and remains a policy advisor on education issues.
Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (CJHS) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit tax exempt organization dedicated to educating the public in the United States and abroad about the intellectual and cultural climate that led to the Holocaust, and the ideas and philosophy that bring about a totalitarian dictatorship. CJHS seeks to protect freedom by raising awareness of the aggression and scapegoating that inevitably follow the abandonment of individual rights and the embrace of collectivism. CJHS advances these goals by hosting educational events concentrated in four areas: (1) examining U.S. diplomacy toward Israel and the Middle East, with a focus on the right of the State of Israel to exist and be recognized as a Jewish State; (2) restoring the teaching of and respect for Western values in K-12 education; (3) documenting anti-Semitism and promoting human rights; (4) exposing the existential threat posed by Islam to the liberties and freedoms of western society. We know how it ends
Brad Butler
UniGlobal.Com Public Relations
Los Angeles, CA
323-410-7511
I'll be on Twitter throughout the night, and will be back to blogging ASAP.
So now Lawyers, Guns and Money is a Jew-bashing, BDS-backing, anti-Semitic hate-site? Well, of course we know that Robert Farley worships Che Guevara, so fanatical Israel-hatred is the logical next step for LGM. The confirmation is in Scott Lemieux's jihad against Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, a Member of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, who has spoken out against the the university's plan to give an honorary degree to gay socialist playwright Tony Kushner. Here's the screencap of Lemieux's attack on Wiesenfeld this morning, "The CUNY Disgrace."
I’m calling you out right now as an Israel-basher, Scott. And a hypocrite. You’re for free-speech for Israel’s critics but you want to punish Israel’s defenders. Seriously. You’re a sick fucker.
And here's the hypocrisy, from an earlier post where Lemieux decried "political correctness":
If there was a contest among the trustees to see who could commit the most egregious breach of CUNY’s mission and traditions, I think we have a winner! Well, at least we know that Roger Kimball has a point about “political correctness” running amok on campuses ...
Actually, the issue here isn't political correctness. It's whether some forms of speech, while protected, are unworthy of the legitimacy and recognition that's conferred with an honorary degree. Frankly, Kushner's attacks on Israel are anti-Semitic, as Wiesenfeld wrote in an essay at The Algemeiner:
When you hold the State of Israel – a nation in a struggle for its survival from the beginning, a target for the misogynist, racist, anti-western, dictatorial regimes which surround it – to a standard you would hold no other nation under normal circumstances, let alone under such exigencies – and when you spew libel against our sole regional democratic ally for “crimes” concocted by delegitimizers, you are an anti-Semite.
A New York arts world that considers a hard-core leftist theatrical polemicist like Tony Kushner to be “compassionate” and fair-minded must find it hard to accept the fact that there are people in the world who deem his anti-Zionism so hard to stomach they refuse to remain silent when asked to honor him. The belief that Kushner is a “writer of rare intellectual scope” with an “extraordinary, active empathy that pervades every one of his plays” is clearly the dominant viewpoint among the city’s chattering classes, and it is hardly surprising that dissenters like Wiesenfeld will be treated harshly as a consequence. The drumbeat of incitement against Wiesenfeld, in which Kushner is falsely portrayed as a victim, will accelerate in the days to come. By the time this nonsense is played out, Kushner may be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize.
That is the way the cultural elites play hardball. Wiesenfeld must understand that he will not be forgiven for his act of lese majeste against a leading cultural liberal. But in standing up against a man whose opposition to Israel has always brought him honor rather than the shame it deserved, Wiesenfeld has restored a little bit of balance to New York’s cockeyed world of high culture.
I once labored at the City University of New York (CUNY). I am amazed but thrilled that enough (five) members on their twelve member Board of Trustees actually viewed Kushner’s views on Israel as “racist.”
I once taught a graduate course at the very branch of CUNY which proposed Kushner. Once, I was friendly with some of the professorial union thugs who literally occupy positions to the left of Stalin.
Yes, many are gay, many are feminists. Some are also homophobic and sexist. Life is complicated over there at Communist U because I am describing the same people as well as their opponents.
God bless CUNY Trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, who was the first to speak against Kushner. He said that Kushner had tied the founding of the state of Israel to a policy of “ethnic cleansing.” He was surprised that he got the votes necessary to knock Kushner’s honorary degree off the table.
Andrew Sullivan has posted an attack on CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for blocking a politically motivated honorary degree that was to be given to the over-rated, crypto-communist and Israel-demonizing playwright Tony Kushner. Andrew’s intelligence is on display in the opening paragraph of his piece where he reiterates his clear-headed views of Kushner’s inflated literary reputation. Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning agitprop, Angels in America, is a puerile embarrassment and in recognizing this Andrew shows that he is capable of breaking out of the bubble of liberal derangement when it suits him. All the more reason that Andrew’s attack on Wiesenfeld is an instructive illustration of the unhinged attitudes of current “critics” of Israel, who are apologists for Hamas and their Gaza supporter.
This is the front-page photo from today's Los Angeles Times, which accompanies a report on the city's services for the four Oakland police officers who were killed last week in a shoot out with Lovelle Mixon, a local hoodlum.
The flag-draped caskets of the four slain Oakland police officers at their funeral.
Unfortunately, there were more pernicious commemorations this week as well, when demonstrators marched in support of cop-killer Mixon, chanting "police oppression," or some other such baloney.
Today the city of Oakland, the Bay Area and the entire country say goodbye to four police officers who were murdered by a parolee, no-good street thug. Thousands are expected to attend the funeral of officers killed Saturday: Sgts. Mark Dunakin, 40, of Tracy; Erv Romans, 43, of Danville; and Daniel Sakai, 35, of Castro Valley. Officer John Hege, 41, of Concord, also was shot Saturday and declared brain-dead Sunday. He was taken off life support late Monday.
Lovelle Mixon, the cops' killer and a suspected child rapist, is now a popular icon in the sick and twisted minds of those who support Mixon's murderous actions and hate the cops. The other night on TV, a reporter held pictures of Mixon's victims and some maniacs stepped forward and spit on the photographs. It was sickening, but what do you expect from street punks who take no personal responsibility and worship the likes of Che Guevara, a mass murderer, the Black Panthers, and now Mixon, the pervert and cop killer.
Mixon's apologists are proud of themselves and are not only spitting on pictures of the officers who died in the line of duty, but they're marching in the open, videotaping themselves and trying to intimidate folks who don't believe in their radical lunacy.
They don't work. They're as privileged as you can be, benefiting from an economic system that's made them (well, their families, really) among the most fortunate people in the world. Remember that. Remember these are the young idle rich. These are the same kinds of young people whom the Bolsheviks murdered in the revolution's obscene orgy of indiscriminate retributory violence ("Anastasia screamed in vain..."). These idiots, rather than be grateful... Rather than work to help those less well-off... Rather than just, say, work for charity and human emancipation through global poverty reduction (and through free markets)... Or, frankly, rather just work --- toil! --- and make their own damn money and mind their own damned business... They're guilt-ridden and mad.
Remember, it's always the affluent intellectuals who form the "vanguard" of radical movements, waving the red flag at the head of the worldwide proletarian revolution. Che Guevara was trained as a physician. Ho Chi Minh was the son of Confucian scholar and teacher, and after literally traveling the world, he received his political education in Paris, that destitute human hellscape of haute couture, Impressionism, the Guide Michelin, and world-foundational enlightenment philosophy. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Comrade Lenin) actually enjoyed a comfortable petite middle-class status and studied physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University, one of the top technical institutes in Russia at the time. He was expelled for "revolutionary activities." Stalin was the son of Besarion Jughashvili, a shoemaker and successful small-business owner who ultimately cracked under pressure and descended into a long drunken vodka vacation. Son Joseph (Joseph Besarionis dzе Jughashvili a.k.a Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) was a very promising student who attended the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia, on a generous scholarship. He'd been mentored by Father Christopher Charkviani into the Orthodox priest-pipeline, a promising career path to economic stability (if not wealth and prosperity). Mao Zedong, as a child, was raised in a wealthy family in Hunan Province. He attended the First Normal School of Changsha, one of the best educational institutions in regions --- and he then quickly absorbed himself in all kinds of anti-imperialist revolutionary agitprop, naturally. Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, received an education at the "upper class" Silvania Főgimnázium (the Silvania National College), a prestigious bilingual high school in Zalău, Romania. It was Béla Kun who, in 1919, led the fight against counterrevolutionary troop units, crushing the incipient counter-rebellion, which resulted in 1,000s of dead and tortured over a two-year period (1919–1921) known as Hungary's "White Terror."
These people are not the product of the capitalist "lumpenproletariat," that most despised and downtrodden class in all of Marxist-Leninist theory.
And so it goes: For America's sheltered Millennial youth of today, as entitled as they are --- because of racism, sexism, microaggressions, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples, the "environment," and (of course) Israel --- the solution is the burn it all down in an apocalyptic ideological war against phantom "oppressors."
Gird your loins, people. They're coming after you. Sooner or later, they'll have your name and number (listed in the new regime's social media social credit system database, built in collaboration with the recently nationalized ideological-purity industry firms of Silicon Valley, now elevated under the new Biden politburo as the Big Tech Komsomol Thought Crimes Sanitary Correction Unit). Get ready for Kamala's "Truth and Reconciliation Committee." Wealthy Ivy League and elite private college students will be the party's Red Guards in America's 2020 "Cultural Revolution."
Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away.
“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.
A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.
Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history — the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade.
And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime.
Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance — debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives.
In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. And over the last six years, millennials have taken the Democratic Socialists of America from a fringe organization with an average member age of 60 to a national force with chapters in every state and a membership of nearly 100,000, most of them under 35.
Mr. Jacobs, as both a trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist, is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he isn’t alone in trying to figure out, as he put it, “what it means to be with the 99 percent, when you’re the 1 percent.”
Challenging the System
“I was always taught that this is just the way the world is, that my family has wealth while others don’t, and that because of that, I need to give some of it away, but not necessarily question why it was there,” said Rachel Gelman, a 30-year-old in Oakland, Calif., who describes her politics as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”
Her family always gave generously to liberal causes and civil society groups. Ms. Gelman supports groups devoted to ending inequality, including the Movement for Black Lives, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group.
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.”
According to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and baby boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by 2060. These fortunes began to amass decades ago — in some cases centuries. But the concentration of wealth became stratospheric starting in the 1970s, when neoliberalism became the financial sector’s guiding economic philosophy and companies began to obsessively pursue higher returns for shareholders.
“The wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the expense of a fleeting American dream that is now out of reach to most people,” said Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has published 12 books about class and inequality.
He said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”
Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from Indigenous and Black power movements. “The happenstance of me being born into this wealth doesn’t mean I’m somehow omniscient about how it should be used,” she said. “It actually gives me a lot of blind spots.”
She also donates to social justice funds like Third Wave Fund, where grant-making is guided by the communities receiving funding, instead of being decided by a board of wealthy individuals. The latter sort of nonprofit, Ms. Dashevsky said, “comes from a place of assuming incompetence, putting up all these hurdles for activists and wasting their time on things like impact reporting. I want to flip that on its head by stepping back, trusting and listening.”
Of course, an individual act of wealth redistribution does not, on its own, change a system. But these heirs see themselves as part of a bigger shift, and are dedicated to funding its momentum.
The event was held at Los Angeles City College, on Vermont Avenue, just north of U.S. 101. I parked on a sidestreet, and as I was walking over to the campus I snapped this shot of a street vendor's display. Che Guevara's quite hip with the L.A. homies:
Here's the scene inside the LACC Chemistry Building upon entering:
Some readers might remember the communist "sales" woman from the Westwood protest a couple of weeks ago. I hope she's making good money (despite ideological prohibitions against capitalist profiteering), because no doubt by now she's heard the Marxist-Leninist line ad nauseum:
Notice the black and green book at the lower-left of the display stand. That's the new release by ANSWER'S Richard Becker, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire. I picked up a copy. More on that below.
This is Michael Prysner. He spoke at the Westwood demonstration against the Afghanistan war. I noticed him as I was finding a seat and asked if I could take his picture:
An Iraq war veteran, Prysner's a cadre with March Forward!, ANSWER's military resistance cell. During his talk, Prysner parroted the March Forward! talking points, which include such gems as:
Service members should no longer be sent to fight, kill, die, be seriously wounded and/or psychologically scarred furthering the domination of U.S. corporations over other nations. We have nothing to gain from these wars. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan serve only the interests of the rich, not the service personnel who are sent over and over to repress people who have the right to determine their own destiny. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our enemies. The more than 800 U.S. bases in 130 countries around the world should be shut down and the troops, fleets and air power brought home.
I'm still a little dumbstruck by his speeches. Not mentioned in the March Forward! media-babble is Prysner's call for insubordination and mutiny in the ranks. Enlisted personnel should "fight the system" from the inside to sabotage the U.S. military's neo-imperialist global campaign. Disaffected G.I.s would join with the "entire nation" to repudiate the "criminal" deployments launched to fill the coffers of the hegemonic U.S. multinational corporations. It's not particularly original, but Prysner make up for it with an enthusiastic communist esprit de corps.
Okay, below is the start of the "teach-in" lectures. That's Muna Coobtee pictured. An activist with the National Council of Arab Americans (an ANSWER front group), she M.C.'d the Westwood Afghanistan rally on October 7th. Ms. Coobtee laid out the raison d'etre for the day's events. And like Michael Prysner, she hewed closely to the party line. The most important theme for the communists is that Afghanistan's a doomed neo-colonial war, and that American military goals are exclusively to "avoid defeat ... or to avoid the perception of defeat." Ms. Coobtee was following the script in ANSWER's communist pamphlet, Liberation. Specifically, Brian Becker's, "Afghanistan and Iraq Will NEVER Accept U.S. Colonialism."
Ms. Coobtee was followed by ANSWER's Peta Lindsay (a longtime cadre with the Party for Socialism and Liberation) and Blase Bonpane (of the Office of the Americas and KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles). Toward the end of his address, Bonpane argued that "the art of revolution is the art of organizing the majority of Americans to end the warfare state."
A number of other speakers also addressed the audience, seen below (and including those not pictured, probably seventy-five or so people altogether):
At the end of the lectures, I moved out to the building's front hallway to get a photo of Richard Becker:
Becker's part of ANSWER's national steering committee and he's the West Coast Director of the International Action Center (according to the website, the "IAC defines itself as an 'anti-capitalist' and 'anti-imperialist' organization").
Becker was talking to a supporter when I took the picture above. He was spooked and asked me who I was? I told him my name was "Donald," and Becker snapped back, "Donald Douglas?" I was surprised! I asked how he knew my name? "Someone said you were going to be here," was the reply (I guess ANSWER apparatchiks are reading my blog). He continued, clearly agitated: "What right-wing organization are you with?" I gave him my business card and told him "No one. I'm a professor." I hung out in the hallway a little longer but one of Becker's thugs starting herding people out of area, so I decided I'd better take off.
Richard Becker's a longtime U.S. communist hardliner. He's got a write-up at Discover the Networks, where it notes that "Becker detests America and has written, 'No one in the world ... has a worse human rights record than the United States'."
During his lecture, Becker made an extremely twisted defense of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Based on a single source (a 1998 interview with Carter NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski), Becker argued that the Soviet incursion was a strategic counter-thrust to U.S. imperial influence in Kabul. That is, the CIA had plans on tap for a U.S. colonial outpost in Afghanistan. The ultimate goal was to consolidate U.S. control over Caspian crude and to establish an oil pipeline to the Arabian Sea and the waiting arms of global capitalism's "Big Oil" multinational tanker fleet.
The region's geopolitics, of course, are much more complicated that than; and indeed, Moscow's interest was in propping up Kabul's pro-Soviet government that took power the early-1970s. American interests kicked up after the assassination of Muhammad Taraki by forces of the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It's very difficult to impute U.S. imperial causes to the overthrow of Taraki's predecessor, the Mohammed Daoud regime. The Soviet invaded to bolster a pro-Moscow communist regime, not to overthrow an American neo-imperialist puppet (See, "The April 1978 Coup d'etat and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.")
In any case, Becker went on about how a defeat for the current American deployment under General Stanley McCrystal would strike a blow to the American "empire" in South Asia: "Every empire falls, and this empire will fall as well."
I was rolling my eyes, but the audience erupted in applause at Becker's exhortation for America's defeat.
Plus, recall that Becker's got his new book out, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire. I was actually hesitant to purchase a copy, but after listening to this man's perverted historical revisionism my sense was that I'd do well to read the book. This type of anti-imperial gobbledygook has a way of making it into college classrooms, and I might as well be prepared to rebut the radical left's latest demonizations of Israel and the West.
P.S. Note that International ANSWER is organizing a National March on Washington, for Saturday, March 20, 2010. See the announcement here.
I write this, remembering that when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968, the shock to my system was so severe I lost the child I was carrying. This shock, this assault on the psyche and body, is what is intended.
A sick, sick woman.
Alice Walker likens Che Guevara to Martin Luther King, likens death of Trayvon Martin to a political assassination http://t.co/rliALAFpIV
— TakingHayekSeriously (@FriedrichHayek) July 16, 2013
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a movement whose activism is planned and coordinated via a free, open-source social-networking website that is maintained by an independent group of organizers who describe themselves as “committed to doing technical support work for resistance movements.” Strongly anti-capitalist, OWS characterizes America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where “lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of perpetual economic "growth for the sake of growth," says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation ... to cover the world.” OWS's prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy....
Front groups of the community organization ACORN played a major role in organizing the OWS protests nationwide. For instance, the Working Families Party (WFP), a longtime ACORN front, helped mobilize the demonstrations in New York City. "[We are] actually trying to change the capitalist system that we have today because it’s not working for any of us," WFP organizer Nelini Stamp told Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV in an interview.
Meanwhile, ACORN’s newer front groups were likewise deeply involved in launching and expanding the OWS movement throughout the fall of 2011. For instance, New York Communities for Change -- led by longtime ACORN lobbyist Jon Kest -- helped WFP organize the demonstrations in lower Manhattan. In Pennsylvania, Action United participated in the "Occupy Pittsburgh" rallies. In Florida, Organize Now took part in "Occupy Orlando." The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment led the "Occupy L.A." protests. And New England United for Justice, headed by former ACORN national president Maude Hurd, participated in the related “Take Back Boston” rallies in Massachusetts.
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was also heavily involved in OWS's formation and early growth. At the heart of "Occupy Los Angeles," for instance, were two Southern California communists -- veteran Party leader Arturo Cambron and his comrade Mario Brito. In early October 2011, Brito declared that OWS's chief objective was to achieve “economic justice,” and added: “This is an international movement ... The vast majority of Americans actually believe income inequality is a major problem. The only reason they haven’t acted upon it is because there hasn’t been a mass movement.” In an October 15, 2011 address to the nearly 3,000 attendees at an "Occupy Chicago" rally, John Bachtell, a spokesman from the CPUSA's national board, claimed to “bring greetings and solidarity from the Communist Party”; he received a number of loud ovations from the crowd.
The early OWS demonstrations imposed considerable monetary costs on the cities in which they were staged. By mid-October 2011, for example, the protesters' then-month-long siege of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan had already cost New York taxpayers some $3.2 million for overtime police pay. Meanwhile, Boston City Council president Stephen Murphy reported that the costs resulting from the protests in his city were approaching $2 million.
Quite popular at OWS demonstrations across the United States are T-shirts and speeches glorifying such renowned Marxists as Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata and Mao Zedong; lionizing convicted cop-killer Troy Davis and WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning; promoting the DREAM Act and 9/11 Trutherism; and denouncing Fox News, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Wisconsin's Republican governor Scott Walker, the Koch family, the New York Police Department, and "Nazi Bankers" and Jews.
Indeed, anti-Semitism is clearly in evidence at many “Occupy” events nationwide, where placards and chanted slogans denouncing the alleged conspiracies of “Jewish bankers” (and "Zionist Jews") square neatly with OWS's relentless condemnations of “greedy Wall Street bankers” and thus go unchallenged by the protesting throngs. According to the American Nazi Party, which supports OWS, the movement strikes a welcome blow against an obscenely corrupt "Judeo-Capitalism."
