Tag: Karl Marx

Obama: 14 years later…Still Redistributing

On By kingsjesterIn Politics4 Comments

Well, the Romney Campaign struck back hard yesterday, as the Obama Campaign and their lackeys, the MSM, tried to land crippling blows to Mitt, because of his “47%” Speech from May.

FoxNews has the story:

A newly released audio recording purports to feature a young Barack Obama saying he believes in government “redistribution” — a comment that Mitt Romney quickly seized on to claim his opponent thinks “the government should take from some to give to the others.”

The tape, posted on YouTube, was a throwback to the web video that emerged in 2008 showing Obama telling “Joe the Plumber” he wants to “spread the wealth around.”

This recording purportedly was from a 1998 conference at Loyola University. In it, the young Obama tells the audience he believes there has been “a propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action and its efficacy.”

“I think that what we’re going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government action can be effective at all,” Obama says. “I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution — because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”

The broader context of the talk is unclear. But Romney, who on Tuesday faced criticism about some of his own comments in a secretly recorded video, pointed to the Obama recording in arguing that he and his opponent have sharply different views on government.

Romney said there’s a “great divide” in the country.

“I know some believe the government should take from some to give to the others,” he told Fox News. “I think the president makes it clear in the tape that was released today that that’s what he believes. I think that’s an entirely foreign concept.”

Romney, for his part, has endured a wave of criticism from Democrats over a video showing him speaking at a private fundraiser back in May. In the video, Romney could be heard saying the 47 percent of people who don’t pay federal income tax “believe they are victims” and will support Obama “no matter what.”

Romney defended his comments in the interview with Fox News on Tuesday — and then cited the Obama recording to underscore his point that he and the president come at the job with two entirely different philosophies.

“Frankly, we have two very different views about America,” Romney said. “The president’s view is one of a larger government. There’s a tape that just came out today (with) the president saying he likes redistribution. I disagree.

“I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America. … The right course for America is to create growth, create wealth.”

Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus also flagged the YouTube link on his Twitter account, with the comment: “TELLING !”

The Obama campaign has not responded to a request for comment. But Obama hit back at Romney during a taping of the “Late Show” with David Letterman, disputing that Americans who aren’t required to pay federal income taxes are “victims” and taking issue with Romney’s comment that he didn’t have to worry about those voters.

“My expectation is that if you want to be president, you have to work for everyone, not just for some,” Obama said.

Uh huh. That would be just fine and dandy, Scooter,  if the “everyone” you were talking about, were Americans.

However, your socio-economic philosophy, from the getgo, has been out of touch with mainstream America. Remember what you said in 2008 to Joe the Plumber?

Here’s a report from ABC News, from October 2008 to help you remember, Mr. President:

Outside Toledo, Ohio, on Sunday, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was approached by plumber Joe Wurzelbacher, a big, bald man with a goatee who asked Obama if he believes in the American dream.

“I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year,” Wurzelbacher said. “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

Obama said, “First off, you would get a 50% tax credit so you’d get a tax cut for your healthcare costs….. if your revenue is above 250 – then from 250 down, your taxes are going to stay the same. It is true that from 250 up – from 250 – 300 or so, so for that additional amount, you’d go from 36 to 39%, which is what it was under Bill Clinton. And the reason why we’re doing that is because 95% of small businesses make less than 250. So what I want to do is give them a tax cut. I want to give all these folks who are bus drivers, teachers, auto workers who make less, I want to give them a tax cut. And so what we’re doing is, we are saying that folks who make more than 250 that that marginal amount above 250 – they’re gonna be taxed at a 39 instead of a 36% rate.”

Responded Wurzelbacher, “the reason I ask you about the American dream, I mean I’ve worked hard. I’m a plumber. I work 10-12 hours a day and I’m buying this company and I’m going to continue working that way. I’m getting taxed more and more while fulfilling the American dream.”

“Well,” said Obama, “here’s a way of thinking about it. How long have been a plumber?”

Wurzelbacher said 15 years.

Obama says, “Over the last 15 years, when you weren’t making 250, you would have been given a tax cut from me, so you’d actually have more money, which means you would have saved more, which means you would have gotten to the point where you could build your small business quicker than under the current tax code. So there are two ways of looking at it – I mean one way of looking at it is, now that you’ve become more successful through hard work – you don’t want to be taxed as much.”

“Exactly,” Wurzelbacher said.

Obama continued, “But another way of looking at it is 95% of folks who are making less than 250, they may be working hard too, but they’re being taxed at a higher rate than they would be under mine. So what I’m doing is, put yourself back 10 years ago when you were only making whatever, 60 or 70. Under my tax plan you would be keeping more of your paycheck, you’d be paying lower taxes, which means you would have saved…Now look, nobody likes high taxes.”

“No,” said Wurzelbacher.

“Of course not,” said Obama. “But what’s happened is that we end up – we’ve cut taxes a lot for folks like me who make a lot more than 250. We haven’t given a break to folks who make less, and as a consequence, the average wage and income for ordinary folks, the vast majority of Americans, has actually gone down over the last eight years. So all I want to do is – I’ve got a tax cut. The only thing that changes, is I’m gonna cut taxes a little bit more for the folks who are most in need and for the 5% of the folks who are doing very well – even though they’ve been working hard and I appreciate that – I just want to make sure they’re paying a little bit more in order to pay for those other tax cuts. Now, I respect the disagreement. I just want you to be clear – it’s not that I want to punish your success – I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you – that they’ve got a chance at success too.”

Looking back on the country’s reaction yesterday, Romney’s speech is not costing Romney anything. In fact, in a CNBC poll yesterday, 75% of those who responded, agreed with Mitt.

As far as Obama’s wish to “share the wealth” , we’ve all heard that political philosophy before:

From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs

Karl Marx

Ryan Vs. Harris-Perry…Freedom Vs. Spreading the Wealth Around

On By kingsjesterIn Politics5 Comments

This past weekend, Rep. Paul Ryan, the Vice-Presidential pick of the presumptive Republican Nominee, Mitt Romney, talked abut the idea of America, and where our rights come from.

Realclearpolitics.com has the quote:

“We look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment, because we know that as more Americans work hard, take risks, succeed, more people will prosper, more communities will benefit. And individual lives will be improved,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said today at the Romney campaign event announcing him as the VP.

“America, America is just more than a place, though. America is an idea. It’s the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not from government. That’s right. That’s who we are, that’s how we built this country. That’s who we are. That’s what made us great. That’s what made us great. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes,” Ryan said.

Of course, Liberal heads exploded. Especially, the one belonging to the weekend host on the seldom-watched, Obama boot-licking cable news channel, known as MSNBC.

Realclearpolitics.com has this quote, also:

“The thing I really have against him is actually how he and Gov. Romney have misused the Declaration of Independence,” MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry said on Saturday in reaction to the the Paul Ryan decision. “I’m deeply irritated by their notion that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ means money for the richest and that we extricate the capacity of ordinary people to pursue happiness. When they say ‘God and nature give us our rights, not government,’ that is a lovely thing to say as a wealthy white man.”

So, who is this “little ray of sunshine and tolerance”?

Per thenation.com:

Melissa Harris-Perry is professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She is author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. She is also a contributor to MSNBC.

Back on Independence Day, the birthday of this blessed land, this “contributor” to the seldom-watched MSNBC, said:

“It’s ours, all of it,” she said. “The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”

“Independence Day is more aspirational than actual,” she began her monologue. “We have longed defined the American Dream with commodities, a home of ones own, better education for the kids, family vacation and a car to the vacation in. And if we measure the dream by acquisitions, we’re in trouble. National unemployment remains above 8 percent. Wages have dropped, and the median net worth of American families plummeted by almost 40 percent.”

Harris-Perry noted that “financial security is important, but it’s only an outward manifestation of the American Dream. Freedom itself is both more elusive and more complicated.” She explained that America’s founding wasn’t about profits and loss but that “our founding is an unlikely narrative of young men, so inspired by an age of ideas that they threw off the yoke of colonialism and founded a free nation — men who were embarrassingly imperfect.”

The imperfections she listed: “The land on which they formed this Union was stolen; the hands with which they built this nation were enslaved; the women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class.”

“But all of this is our story,” she continued. “Each of us benefits from the residuals of oppression and each of us is harmed by the realities of inequality. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it: The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”

She continued on to explain that her favorite story for this Fourth of July is one of people who are “not technically free.” She described a group of 27 inmates who recently completed their GEDs at the jail on Rikers Island. “Despite being incarcerated, they hold fast to the optimistic belief that education, hard work and second chances are still the stuff of America. And that they have a right to take part in the dream.”

“So on the Fourth of July,” Harris-Perry concluded, “I’m going to think of the Rikers Island graduates, and I’m going to wave a flag without hesitation — not because I’ve forgotten my nation’s many wrongs, but because I remember them. And I am nonetheless proud of my country, not for its perfection, because the alternative is too grim, the alternative is to give up on the dream of the nation founded in the belief, if not yet the practice that all are created, all deserve freedom, and all have the right to pursue happiness. Now, that is a dream worth celebrating — with fireworks.”

Karl Marx, the Father of Communism said,

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

And, he also said

In a higher phase of communist society… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

After watching and hearing Ms. (Dr.) Harris-Perry, both quotes seemed strangely appropriate.

Obama Wants to Spread the Wealth Around…Again

On By kingsjesterIn Politics6 Comments

If you ever had any doubts that the 44th President of the United States is a narcissistic socialist who believes his own mythology, his pronouncement yesterday should drive those doubts away:

Politico.com has the story:

President Obama, while villifying Mitt Romney for opposing the auto industry bailout, bragged about the success of his decision to provide government assistance and said he now wants to see every manufacturing industry come roaring back.

“I said, I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.

“I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China, I want those jobs taking root in places like Pueblo,” Obama told a crowd gathered for a campaign rally at the Palace of Agriculture at the Colorado State Fairgrounds here.

He made the remarks while pushing for the renewal of a tax credit for wind energy manufacturing – something Romney opposes – and for the creation of credits for companies who bring jobs home from overseas, as well as the elimination of loopholes for offshoring.

“Gov. Romney brags about his private sector experience, but it was mostly invested in companies, some of which were called ‘pioneers of outsourcing,’” Obama said. “I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing. I want to insource.”

Back in February, nationalreview.com had an article debunking the myth of Obama’s economic genius concerning how wonderful the auto industry bailout was:

Unfortunately, assertions that “all loans have been repaid to the federal government,” that the bailout “saved more than one million American jobs,” that “U.S. automakers are hiring hundreds of thousands of new workers,” that GM is again the “number-one automaker” — all are based on creative accounting.

The money the government spent adds up quickly: $50 billion in TARP bailout funds, a special exemption waiving payment of $45.4 billion in taxes on future profits, an exemption for all product liability on cars sold before the bailout, $360 million in stimulus funds, and the $7,500 tax credit for those who buy the Chevy Volt. GM’s share of other programs is harder to quantify but includes, for example, some of the $15.2 billion that went to Cash for Clunkers. Those costs are in addition to the billions taken from GM’s bondholders by the Obama administration.

A look at the accounting shows the trouble with contentions that much of the TARP money is getting paid back. The Obama administration compares the $50 billion in direct bailout funds with the price it will eventually be able to get for selling the GM stock it owns. But that assumes that the stock price won’t reflect government subsidies, including GM’s exemption from paying $45 billion in taxes. By the Obama administration’s logic, if the stimulus grants to TARP recipients were simply large enough, all the TARP money could be paid.

Claims that GM paid back its TARP loan are true but misleading. President Obama clearly wants to create the impression that all the money given to the auto companies has been paid back. But the $6.7 billion loan to GM was just a tiny fraction of the money given to it. As TARP special inspector general Neil Barofsky explained, GM used “other TARP money” to pay off the loan.

So what about President Obama’s boast in a White House speech in late April that the bailout “saved probably a million jobs” and that “GM is now the number-one automaker again in the world”?

The “million jobs” contention is quite a stretch. Before filing for bankruptcy in July 2009, GM had 91,000 employees in the United States. You can reach a 400,000 total by assuming that all of GM’s jobs, as well as all the jobs of its parts suppliers and car dealers, would have been lost. Last year, employment in the entire automotive industry in the U.S. (counting Ford, Toyota, and other companies and their suppliers, in addition to GM and Chrysler) was only 717,000.

Obama’s economic advisers told him during an April 2009 meeting that job losses in the auto industry would be only a fraction — 10 to 20 percent — of these claimed numbers, even for the much weaker Chrysler. The advisers reported the obvious: Bankruptcy would not kill all jobs at GM and, even with cutbacks, suppliers would pick up other work. But Obama keeps using numbers that his own advisers told him were wrong.

Even saving 20 percent of 400,000 comes at quite a cost — at least $780,000 per job. How many workers would have been willing to quit working for GM for a $400,000 severance payment?

The “number-one automaker” assertion is no more accurate. Obama’s sales totals include 1.2 million mostly cheap commercial vehicles built by China’s Wuling, a company in which GM owns a small stake, and it excludes sales by vehicle makers in which Volkswagen owns a majority share. Fortune magazine lists GM’s revenue as smaller than Toyota’s and Volkswagen’s.

The only real winners from the GM bailout were unions, which were protected from pay cuts, from losing their right to overtime pay after less than 40 hours a week, and from cuts to their extremely generous benefits. They faced only minor tweaks in their inefficient union work rules.

As for “hundreds of thousands of new workers,” the truth is closer to a tenth of that.

And, he wants to extend this “helping hand” to every industry in America?

Marx would be so proud.

Happy May…errr…Labor Day

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

The 44th President of the United States appears to have that rule down pat.

In advance of a major Occupy rally planned for Tuesday, President Obama delivered a speech this [yesterday] morning filled with class warfare rhetoric.

The president warned union members that Republicans would rather give “rich folks” more tax breaks, than invest in the American worker.

“Republicans in Congress would rather put fewer of you to work rebuilding America than ask millionaires and billionaires to live without massive new tax cuts on top of the ones they’ve already gotten,” Obama declared in a speech to to construction union members at the Hilton hotel in Washington.

Obama added that Republicans’ economic plan depended on tax cuts for the rich and “dismantling your unions.”

“I mean, if you ask them, what’s their big economic plan in addition to tax cuts for rich folks, it’s dismantling your unions. After all you’ve done to build and protect the middle class, they make the argument you’re responsible for the problems facing the middle class,” Obama added.

The president praised the unionized middle class as the for contributing to an economy based on the middle class.

“You believed prosperity shouldn’t be reserved just for a privileged few; it should extend all the way from the boardroom all the way down to the factory floor.”

According to marxists.org:

Out of its traditions the American labor movement has given the international working class two fighting days which the revolutionary workers consider as mile posts and which they must pass each year on their way to ultimate victory. Those who were midwives at the birth of these “days” have renounced them as soon as they have acquired revolutionary meaning. The A. F. of L. helped with the inauguration of May Day. It has long expiated that sin against American capital and it is never held against it.

The Socialist Party, a close, even if poor, relation of the A. F. of L., must be considered as having contributed to the origin of International Women’s Day, celebrated each year on March 8. About twenty years ago the Socialist women of New York organized, in contradistinction to the bourgeois suffrage movement, a mass participation of proletarian women in the movement for woman suffrage. This particular action took place on March 8. The success of the New York demonstration led to the establishment of March 8 as Women’s Day on a national scale. The International Socialist Congress in 1910 made March 8 international.

With the granting of woman suffrage in the United States, March 8 was abandoned by the S. P., since the ballot and election to office has always been the alpha and omega of that party. The Russian working women did not forget March 8 and, following the October Revolution, rejuvenated this important fighting labor day. The Communist International made International Women’s Day again a living reality. As in the case of May 1, only the Communist parties are carrying on the traditions of March 8, with men and women workers jointly utilizing this day to call upon the proletarian women to take their place in the struggles beside the men workers.

For the May Day, 1923, edition of the Weekly Worker, C. E. Ruthenberg wrote: “May Day – the day which inspires fear in the hearts of the capitalists and hope in the workers – the workers the world over – will find the Communist movement this year stronger in the U. S. than at any time in its history…. The road is clear for greater achievements, and in the United States as elsewhere in the world the future belongs to Communism.” In a Weekly Worker of a generation before, Eugene V. Debs wrote in a May Day edition of the paper, published on April 27, 1907: “This is the first and only International Labor Day. It belongs to the working class and is dedicated to the Revolution.”

Bloomberg.com reports that the Occupy Wall Street movement is ready to celebrate today, in their own inimitable classless style.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe today calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.

Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower.

“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.

Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Alinsky and Marx would be very proud of these “useful idiots”.

Just a Fluke?

On By kingsjesterIn Politics6 Comments

President Barack Hussein Obama has stuck his nose into a political firestorm of his own device.

Reuters.com has the story:

President Barack Obama called a law student on Friday to express his support after she was branded a “slut” by controversial right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh for her outspoken support of Obama’s new policy on contraception coverage.

Sandra Fluke, a 30-year old student and women’s rights activist at Georgetown University in Washington, has been caught in the middle of a contentious election-year fight between Obama and Republicans over the policy, which requires health insurance plans to cover contraception.

Religious-affiliated organizations, the Roman Catholic Church and social conservatives have protested Obama’s new policy as an infringement on religious liberty. An effort by Republicans in the Senate to overturn it failed this week.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, distanced his party from Limbaugh’s comments. A spokesman for Boehner called them “inappropriate” in a statement that also criticized Democrats for using the issue to raise funds before the November 6 election.

Fluke has spoken out against the Republican effort to scrap the birth control policy and advocated making contraception available to all women, drawing fire from Limbaugh and some other conservative commentators.

In an interview, Fluke told Reuters she was initially hurt, then outraged by Limbaugh’s remarks, but said she hoped the incident had raised awareness about the new policy.

She said had received “an avalanche” of supportive emails from women and men around the United States, including many from women who said they needed contraception to respond to medical conditions such as seizures, not just to prevent pregnancy.

The president called “to offer his support and thank me for helping to make heard the voices of all the women who will benefit from this regulation,” Fluke said. “He just wanted to clearly express his distaste for the types of comments that have been made about me. He was very kind.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama thinks Limbaugh’s comments were reprehensible.

“It is disappointing that those kinds of personal and crude attacks could be leveled against someone like this young law school student, who was simply expressing her opinion on a matter of public policy,” Carney said.

On his program on Friday, Rush Limbaugh replied to this rapidly-escalating mess:

What can I do to the women of America?

Do I have the power to raise their taxes? I do not.

Do I have the power to regulate their behavior? I do not.

Do I have the power to make health care decisions for them? I do not.

Do I have the power to withhold birth control pills from them? I do not.

Do I have the power to audit their tax returns? I do not.

Do I have the power to take their little four-year-old kindergarten student’s lunch and throw it away and make ’em eat something else? I do not.

Do I have the power to look into their personal life and leak the information to the media? I do not.

Is there one bit of freedom that I can deny them? Can I raise their taxes?

They want to blame me as being the person they should fear, when in fact the people doing all these things I just said I have no power to do, the Democrat Party is doing. That’s who everybody’s afraid of in this country. You know that story about the four-year-old girl who had her lunch taken by the federal agent? When those stories happen, have you noticed the people involved don’t want their names known? Who are they afraid of? They’re afraid of Democrat Party. They’re afraid of the Obama administration. The Obama administration will take away your birth control, and if you let ’em do that, they’ll tell you when you can and can’t take it. And then they’ll tell you when you can and can’t have sex, and then they will tell you when you can or cannot have an abortion!

You give them this power, that’s what they want.

I can’t do any of this.

So, to recap, it turns out that the “sweet little co-ed” has turned out to be a 30 year old “Women’s Right’s” (i.e., Abortion) Activist, who entered Georgetown, a Catholic University, with a dual purpose:  to achieve notoriety and advance her political ideology.

Stepping back from all the “Who Shot John” and the P.T. Barnum-esque nature of this whole contentious media-driven exercise, starting with the opening salvo, i.e., the forcing of Catholic Hospitals to acquiesce to offer the “Holy Sacraments” (birth control pills and the morning after abortion pill) of the Obama Administration, I’m reminded of the words of one Karl Marx from A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (December 1843-January 1844):

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

One of his most famous quotes was:

Religion is the opium of the masses.

He also said:

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

And, of course:

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Evidently, Ms. Fluke is very needy.