His Name Was Willard Romney, Incorporated (Part 2)

Vulture capitalist turned presidential candidate Willard Romney, Inc. speaks his true opinion of the American electorate in an unguarded moment. In the language of Paul Ryan's guru Ayn Rand, that means nearly half the voters are moochers who exist only to loot the Producers i.e. the plutocratic class of Romney and Ryan. In the mountain tunnel scene of Atlas Shrugged (called "The Moratorium on Brains"), Rand blew a trainful of such people up. But what Romney and Ryan don't know is that corporatists like them are the villains of Atlas Shrugged — in fact, arguably worse: at least Orren Boyle was an industrialist, though an incompetent one whose company continued to exist because of government support. It's Boyle's kind that are behind protectionist laws. Romney himself is in fact worse: he got his fortune from destroying companies and exporting jobs to China. Apparently the vulture capitalist was too horrific a concept for Rand. But now we're stuck with an aristocracy of them. And Willard Romney, Inc. is their standard bearer, their point man in their Social Darwinist crusade against democracy and the common man.

The Real #revo11ution Action: Not in Libya, but in America with #OccupyWallStreet

You probably already know about the brutal crushing of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Oakland and other American cities. It seems more like the revolution going on in Tunisia and Egypt than Libya, where the dictator was finally overthrown by armed guerrilla forces backed by NATO bombers. Rumor has it that Qaddafi was put down because he proposed a new currency to replace the dollar. Well, guess what? Back in the imperial homeland, the issue is still the dollar. But this time, the people — yeah I know, the liberal commie hippie traitors, not the Real Americans commanding the crackdown from their million-dollar penthouses — are the threat to the Almighty Dollar. Therefore, the American people must be crushed. If, of course, they do not march to their bankster masters' commands in the TEA Party. The problem: the TEA Party fell completely under corporate control. In fact, it actually began as an attempt to coopt the Ron Paul Revolution movement. Dr. Paul refused to cave, being the principled libertarian he is, so the banksters started their own astroturf movement catering largely to the most retrograde elements of White America. However, Occupy Wall Street is not under control, and refuses to submit to even Democratic control. That means it must be crushed. If the Ron Paul movement had gained mass support, it too would have been attacked the same way. After all, it opposed the Wall Street dictatorship to the point of calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, a call taken up by OWS. Okay, you tell me, isn't America a democracy? No. It never was a democracy, and was never intended to be one. The Constitution was designed to establish an oligarchic republic. In fact, it was intended to prevent democracy. In The Federalist #10, the Constitution's author, James Madison, states:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The oligarchic republic Madison worked to establish no longer works. It has fallen under the control of an increasingly militant and terroristic faction which believes that its possession of most of the world's money entitles them to rule by divine right. The American Revolution was fought, and the Republic established, to abolish the divine right of kings. However, the constitutional protections against the divine right of oligarchies have all been nullified, so we're back where we started in 1776. I'm not saying this is going to turn into a revolution. Fact is, it already is. The more terrorism the divine-right oligarchy commits against the people, the more the oligarchs deserve to be overthrown. Face it, America is the new Soviet Union. It's already too late. Sorry, conservatives, you can't erase the past and bring back the good old days. The Law of Entropy is already at work bringing the whole tottering edifice to the ground in smoking ruins. The oligarchic republic no longer works. It's merely monarchy with more rulers who are equally clueless. Democracy is the future. The future is already here. This is what the 2011 Revolution is all about.

The #revo11ution Comes to America

That wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East? It didn't stop there. The revolution that started with the toppling of America's Soviet-style satellites, the oil plantations of the Middle East, has come to the homeland at last! It started, interestingly enough, in Wisconsin.

The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has declared war on the civil service unions. He wants to strip them of all collective bargaining rights. Needless to say, in the Midwest's great stronghold of Populism, his action has provoked massive protests in Madison and Milwaukee. Cairo has come to Wisconsin.

What he's doing, of course, is good old-fashioned union busting, what the Robber Barons of Gilded Age I did in the late 19th century. Like them, he intends to call in the National Guard to crack down hard on the protests. If the National Guard doesn't work, he will likely attempt the Robber Barons' other solution: call in the mercenary enforcers: Pinkerton back then, Blackwater today.

Here's Walker's scheme:

1. Give massive tax cuts to giant corporations and ultra-rich corporate welfare kings.
2. Fudge the numbers, the same way the Conservative Book Club games the bestseller lists, to make it look like there's a huge deficit.
3. Blame the public sector unions, call in the enforcers and the Pravda Fox News propaganda machine, and SMASH!

There's some evidence that the 2010 elections were themselves gamed, the same way the Iran election of 2009 was rigged. Vote rigging, of course, is a venerable American political tradition ("Bring out the dead!"). But in this case, the problem is bait-and-switch: run on jobs, then screw the workers over and wage culture and class war. That's what Ahmadinejad did.

Way to go, Governor.

Now witness the TEA Party. What are they doing? Heeding the siren song of the Fox News propaganda machine and rushing to Madison to support Governor Walker! You know what this looks like: the pro-Mubarak counterdemonstrators who rushed the protesters in Liberation Square, on foot and on camelback, and attacked — at precisely 2:15 in the afternoon. I suspected the TEA Party would be their American counterpart. Now we have absolute proof.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian workers are calling for the resignation of all those corrupt union leaders who were in bed with Mubarak. American workers should do the same; after all, the union brass here are in bed with the Wall Street bankster oligarchy.

The 2011 Revolution continues, and the empire of Corporatism had better watch out...

EDIT: Ole Ole Olson at News Junkie Post debunks the TEA Party's defense of Walker here.

Why Patriotism Is a Sin

A front page article in today's New York Times relates the tale of a Chinese student at Duke University who came upon clashing pro-Tibet and pro-China demonstrations. She tried to bring peace between the two groups. However, the pro-China group reacted viciously. She was publicly defamed on the Internet as a "traitor". She, and her family back in China, received death threats. What drove those pro-China people to persecute someone who just wanted to bring reconciliation to her school? Patriotism.. This is the true essence of patriotism: "my country right, right or wrong" — which really means "worship my country or die!"

Patriotism is a cult. The cult is called nationalism. Nationalism is defined as the cult of the State. With the death of Christendom, and Dar al-Islam threatened with being dragged out of the Dark Ages, nationalism has become the new Christendom. Inquisition, crusade, totalitarianism, and terrorism necessarily follow. And that's why patriotism is a sin.

Class Struggle

Back to the subject of my previous post "Populism vs. Elitism". Basically, what lies behind this phenomenon is something people call "class struggle." The idea is older than Karl Marx; it's an Enlightenment idea that predates even the French Revolution. In fact, it's impossible to understand the history of Western civilization since the rise of the Greeks without it.

What is this "class struggle (or warfare)," anyway? First I must explain that people in different roles in society tend to have different interests. Sometimes these interests clash. The most important clash of interests is that between those in power and those out of power. Those in power usually have an interest in exploiting those out of power in order to gain benefits at others' expense. Free riding, for example, is an almost irresistible temptation of power. Those out of power, however, would rather do their thing without busybody authorities constantly interfering in their affairs. This fundamental contradiction inherent in any society based on dominance hierarchy -- which means, right now, any society, period -- has its inevitable consequence in the form of some sort of class struggle.

Two eras have been plagued by wars originating in class struggle. These are the classical societies of Greece and Rome, and the modern age which started with the Renaissance. The cause in both cases is the idea of democracy, which has inspired the common people to resist the oppression of their kings, dictators, politicians, bureaucracies, and churches. Democracy is inherently revolutionary. That's because whenever the common people assert their interests, the people in power are always threatened with the loss of their power, and strike back. That's why revolutions, social and cultural as well as political, are always so violent. No establishment has ever tolerated any kind of popular revolution; so either the ruling establishment is overthrown or at least transformed, or the establishment prevails and the revolution is crushed.

Unfortunately, the rulers have their revolutionary ideologies too. Stalinism, fascism, Nazism, and neoconservatism are among the most popular elitist ideologies that sprang up since World War I. All of these are heavily influenced by synarchism, an ideology that originated in France among Catholic and neo-Gnostic monarchists who revolted against the principles of the French Revolution (but see the note below), and by Social Darwinism, a pseudoscience that tells the elite that they are the vanguard of evolution and that Nature, red in tooth and claw, has preordained them to supremacy over the masses. They are more violent reactions against the popular revolution that steal from the people their language of revolution. All true populists oppose them, since they attempt to use the new revolutionary means to restore the old order by any means possible.

Populism and elitism exist because of the class struggle, and are its political expression. As a libertarian populist, I've long since taken my stand. I'll tell you what I think about certain antipopulist "libertarians" and "objectivists" in a future entry.

Note: If you enter the word "synarchism" in any search engine, most of the entries you'll find come from the Lyndon LaRouche cult. He stole the idea from Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and uses it in his wacko conspiracy theory as a code for his eternal bete noire, the "kike-limey (sic) conspiracy." But he's hiding behind "synarchy" to cover his own lust for dictatorship. Synarchy? Jeremiah Duggan suffered it from LaRouche himself. I'll write a future entry, or a full-blown essay, on this.

Populism vs. Elitism

I said I was sympathetic to certain forms of socialism. Just before I woke up this morning, I realized (or, more accurately, remembered) the reason why:

I'm a libertarian populist.

I know why so many libertarians despair about the future of freedom. It's because they tend to look down on the common people. Some of them go so far as to attack democracy as little more than a means by which the benighted masses can loot their neighbors and legislate various ways of getting something for nothing. They blank out the fact that the common people, especially those in the cities (in the European Middle Ages, these were the merchants, craftsmen, and artisans), who are the traditional driving force of the free market. These are the producers.

But under mercantilism or state capitalism, the government interferes with the market (case in point: the desperate and increasingly futile flailings of the US Federal Reserve as it tries to stop the economic depression the Fed itself started), creating a breed of capitalist courtier (or courtesan: political whore) among managers and financiers that goes to sometimes extreme lengths to get something for nothing, generally at the expense of the taxpayer (through corporate welfare). If the free market is populist, then state capitalism is elitist, since its financial basis is not individual trade but political pull.

There are libertarian elitists. These are the people who preach freedom but practice war and corporate welfare. There's a lot of those in, say, the Libertarian Party.

Likewise, socialism too has its elitists and populists. Socialist elitists make up those small cabals of "nomenclaturists" who oppress the working class in the name of the (alleged) supremacy of the working class. These are the Stalinists and fascists. Socialist populists believe that only the working class can overcome political oppression, economic inequality (extremes of wealth and poverty), and repressive social traditions.

The same goes for liberals and conservatives, and other political stances.

Elitism is based on the assumption of the inherent inferiority of the masses and the alleged enlightenment assumed to inhere in high positions within social hierarchies. Populism trusts the people's ability to rule their own lives and change for the better. In the libertarian populist view, the modern era's moral and ethical advances over the barbaric Middle Ages are due to the trust created by peaceful trade among individual people and the prosperity this creates.

Naturally, since the interests of the people and the elites who rule them are generally at odds, populism and elitism are incompatible and must necessarily clash. This gets into the concept of class struggle. But that's the subject of another post...