Body Parts

Stealth Totalitarianism of the New Left In Action: Obama Approves Domestic Surveillance Drones

There are two routes to one-party rule, loss of liberty, and totalitarianism. One route is the open revolution, as in the October Revolution of 1917 in which Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over the Russian government. The other route is the creeping socialism, in which success in democratic politics gives revolutionary opponents of bourgeois governments the foothold in which, during crisis, they launch one-party government, such as Germany under Hitler's chancellorship in 1933. Less fascist of course is the stealth socialism of Britain. Via either route is the end result is control by the political Big Brother.

Traditional America is being subverted by the second route, creeping socialism, under Obama's political successes. I do not say or believe or imply that Obama is a Hitler; I don't think he is. He is not an original thinker of political theory or of American history. He has simply absorbed the ideological slogans and orientations of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, which now guide his political agenda. But benign Obama's progressivism is not. It seeks to move America to a political and governmental structure in which traditional political liberty and social and economic freedoms are replaced by dictated social progress and economic activity under the command of national governmental regulation.

A necessary component of totalitarianism is destruction of political opposition by governmental power under one-party rule. There are different means of accomplishing this destruction. One is delegitimatization of opposition parties. Another is intimidation of civilian populace. Nothing intimidates liike surveillance. Fear that authorities can learn of your opposition to governmental rulers and their actions and can formally or indirectly retaliate, threatening to take away the welfare you receive from the government and harrassing you with governmental agency power (you are named a "person of interest" without any due process in court because you are accused of no crime), you are isolated socially and politically, your finances and assets are frozen, and you are compelled to expend your savings on lawyers to chase the chimera of invisible power arrayed against you.

There are all sorts of surveillance done by private and governmental agency through video feeds: traffic, mall and school security, bank lobbies, presidential parades, airport boarding gates, and so on. Now Obama wishes to add another level of surveillance: from small, invisible to the naked eye, drones. Drones would capture activity of both public and private and home spaces, both known persons of interest, felons under warrants, and the innocent public. But in this arrangement, every body become a person of interest for some government purpose.

Drone surveillance would be a dramatic step in the destruction of liberty and due process. The Democratic Party under Obama will not renounce this activity. While the ACLU and other civil liberty organizations will raise alarm and perhaps file law suits, only a broad political attack on drone surveillance will reveal to the public the broader and profound danger to traditional liberties. Let obstruction, criticism, and opposition begin!

The New Left are the New Totalitarians and Barack Obama is New Left

Daniel Henniger, editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, gets it: "Obama's Thunderdome Strategy" (WSJ, Thursday, January 31, 2013). The New Left tolerates democratic electoral politics only long enough to secure sufficient power to create a single party state, impose collectivism, and socialize the economy. Welcome to the Brave New World.

I wrote about Obama's political allegiances and ideology some time ago. See the entire series of 17 articles: Obama, Marxist.

Of particular relevance to the issue of the New Left, see my discussion of the intellectual ideology he received in his intellectual baptism and at college: Obama's Philosophy of Justice, Obama's Dream, The Coming Obama Revolution of Collectivism, Obama Grew Up in the Communist Party Culture, Establishment Radical, Obama's Stalinist Iconography, Obama the Communist?.

ObamaCare Will Spawn a Federal VAT

ObamaCare is the law of the land. It is unstoppable now. It was probably unstoppable the moment Romney was nominated GOP presidential candidate. Romney created RomneyCare in Massachusetts when he was governor of that state. He never campaigned as if repealing or reforming ObamaCare was a top priority. This is probably the reason the Republican turnout was down from 2008 - the Tea Party folks stayed away, disappointed by the man who couldn't read what the midterm elections were all about.

Ok, what now? The big news is not the opposition of some states to ObamaCare, or whether some states will create insurance policy exchanges or leave this job to the Feds. The big news is about how ObamaCare will be funded. Despite all the taxes carried into law by ObamaCare, they are woefully inadequate for full funding. The real gold mine to fund ObamaCare is a European-style Value Added Tax. We have no such federal tax today. It is insufficiently unfamiliar to most voters that they won't wake  up to its character until it is law. The VAT would not require raising federal and state income taxes, so it avoids that dreary debate. And it has the attraction for all lawmakers of generating tons, and tons, and tons, and tons of money.

Obama has now put a VAT on the negotiating table (1, 2, 3). It's his secret lust.

What could be wrong with it?

The VAT is a greatly regressive tax. It is a tax on production at every stage of production. It is a tax on consumption. Everybody who purchases a refrigerator, or car, or living room carpet, would pay a tax on their purchase. Every manufacturer who builds and added value to these products would have a tax on the value they added to the products. Everybody means the poor as well as the middle class as well as the rich.

To offset the impact of the VAT tax on the poor and middle classes, Obama would say that these groups are receiving subsidies for health care that the tax is funding. He might call for additional federal welfare privileges to be paid by the VAT to make the tax palatable to the non-rich of America.

But, as I said before, three times in the past three years (4, 5, 6), a VAT is coming to America. If you voted for Obama's re-election, you voted for it. Bend over.

Hamas Cashes Its Obama Promissory Notes

The escalation of Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel subsequent to Obama's re-election is the way Hamas cashes in Obama's promissory notes to the Muslim world. Four years of tolerance of radical Islam in deed, reluctance to intervene forcefully, if not with force, in Iran and Syria when reformers took to the streets and reform became rebellion, and open-handed outreach toward the enemies of Israel by our President has convinced radical Islam that Obama will not support Israel in any meaningful way if they attack the Jewish state.

And don't accept as the truth the media interpretation that Hamas' attacks now are the result solely of the Israel-Hamas/Gaza struggle or a Hamas gambit to obtain political advantage over the PLA. Hamas is supported by Iran. Iran wants to support the Syrian regime. What better way than to distract attention from Syria by prodding Hamas to start a military conflict with Israel. If Israel enters Gaza, watch for rockets from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and stray cannon shells from Syria forces into the Golan Heights. (And let's not forget that the world would be also distracted from the Iranian nuclear weapon issue.)

What will Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel, do? That's not the question. The question is, what will the Muslim Brotherhood leadership of Egypt do, as it has supported Hamas and Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt surely doesn't want a military conflict with Israel; but it could get away with some limited engagements without risking its own sovereignty or the Brotherhood risking their political control. Despite the foreign aid from the US and the US military aid to the Egyptian military, which might be temporarily suspended, Egypt knows that Obama will not do anything to alienate one of the world's largest Muslim nations.

The Muslims have Obama in box. He created this situation. He walked into the Middle Eastern Arab tent and handed them his balls. Now they are squeezing. It would amusing, if it would not be possibly fateful for Israel and Jews, to know how long before Obama starts singing soprano.

Obama Wants Political Control of the State More Than He Wants Prosperity for the People

Obama's behavior during the Great Recession, his campaign for re-election, and his initial political stances in the  past week are all inexplicable if we assume that he approaches the presidency as President of all Americans. He doesn't. He approaches the presidency mainly with the ambition and intent of permanent political control of the state. If Trotsky was the master of The Permanent Revolution, Obama, child of the New Left, is master of the Permanent Political Campaign. This is not an original observation of mine, but other critics have failed to consider the implications of the notion of a permanent political campaign. A permanent political campaign exists above periodic elections and the election cycle. It exists as a permanent seige of the governing apparatus of the state itself. Obama ranks the political party as higher than the electorate, than the "people". As he is the personification of the political ideal, and that ideal is the absorption of the State to a political party of revolution, so he is by implication the personification of the state. L'etat, e'est moi, Barack. Why would Obama identify with the party? Because the party is the agency (in Marxist Leninist theory) of historical change (since the working classes can't be counted upon to do their part by themselves). When Obama said, just before the 2008 election, that he would transform America, this larger context of New Left values and ambitions is what he was signalling. And now it is here. With ObamaCare, it will persist after Obama leaves the presidency; it will be institutionalized as the political bureaucracy and Obama will control it no less than Putin controlled Russia while "out of power".

Obama Has Not Forgotten His Agenda, To Which I Say "Obstruct, Obstruct, Obstruct".

Obama's re-election and his agenda? It's the return of zombie politics. The ideologically dead rise up and stalk the living. To which I say:

Obstruct, obstruct, obstruct.

 

Hammered

I've been hammered. Not from drinking. I went out to Salted Pig with my wife and the Director of Marketing of our company for a mid-evening meal, while we awaited election results. I drank artisanal root beer and decaffinated coffee. My wife declined alcohol, too. Our marketing chief shuns the stuff. We were sober all eve. We got the news of Romney's defeat before we left the restaurant when my wife went to the web on her phone. I was less surprised than disappointed. Then, trying to sleep, instead of counting sheep, I began to enumerate the factors that will push up the misery index in Obama's next four years. Sleep came eventually, but when I woke in the morning, my face felt swollen and bruised. Slick Eddie the Street Smart President beat my face senseless.

Good Luck, Mitt, I Fervently Hope, Pray, That You Are Elected Today

Make Obama's presidency a parenthesis, as George Will put it, in the great Reagan curtailment of the progressive, regulatory, welfare state initiated by FDR and set onto the road to overt socialism by the New Left. It should be an irony of history that the Governor who brought state medicine to Massachusetts, already imposing price controls and already contemplating legally bonding physicians to practice in it as a condition of licensure, should dismantle ObamaCare and help install a free market based on patient choice to the nation. But ... so be it; I was never a big fan of irony, which is the empty calories of critical theory diets.

The March of the American New Left to Power Ends in a Small, Vengeful President

The struggle of the Left for the power to create the rational socialist utopia always ends in power hungry dictators, creators of little worlds, little themselves and vengeful. They think that deceitful personal enemies, rather than the fallacies of their ideologies, have prevented them from achieving their intellectual fantasies. Vengefulness is the human response, as in Obama, to the inevitable failures of doctrinnaire superstitution. Marxists have never stop believing in the truth of one of the most-refuted systems of philosophical trash ever invented by a human being. So, being true believers, they see personal betrayl everywhere, since they cannot imagine their ideas are wrong. This is how political purges begin, as they did in Stalin and in Mao. Sensing the end of his remarkable, regretable journey as the mouth puppet of the Leftist ideas fed to him by his academic teachers and radical preachers, Obama has finally torn aside the last veil that hid his true nature and his failures. He asked his audience at a Party rally to "vote for revenge". We will be grateful for his defeat and removal from political power. 

Ooooh, I get a tingle up my leg. Lena Dunham and Barack Obama are a match.

Lena Dunham advises girls to give up their virginity to a "beautiful" man. And the President's campaign manager says Obama's enthusiasm for campaigning is "coming from his loins". I say, his beautiful loins and her yearning vagina are a match! Let's sell tickets. Oh, oh, oh ... wait ... let's make their historic union a plot for Girls. Slick Eddie Smart Ass of the Street, our pothead Barry, could smoke a tote with Lena before turning her into a woman. Dramatic question for the episode: Would the experience make Barry a man?

(Future episode: former president Bill Clinton tries to butt into the happy Dunham-Obama thing. Dramatic plot twist: Will Lena take to Bill's special twist on sexual relationships? Will she buy a special dress?)