Harold Meyerson: Late-stage American capitalism is the father of the fascist Chinese Party-State

Except Meyerson can't bring himself to use the word fascist, let alone Party-State.

"State capitalist power" is his polite euphemism for fascist power, which leftists who want to be taken seriously still must use apparently, ever since George Orwell said in 1944 that fascism had become a meaningless term, you know, like the words man and woman.

He stops short, too, of saying that there is something suicidal built into the West.

The conservative Oswald Spengler identified that something as Christian theology. He said it was the grandmother of Bolshevism, which is probably why Meyerson doesn't mention it! Don't wanna upset the fascists, the Christians, AND the true believers all at the same time.

But the fact remains that the heirs of Christianity in America have sold the rope to the Chicoms which they will use to hang our children after they are finished impoverishing them. 

Meanwhile Utopia still exists for Meyerson, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, cold, wet, snowy, and dark NATO nations which rely on the American nuclear umbrella for their security.

   

Commies EVERYWHERE! 

... there is no such communist power [like the USSR] today.

There’s China, a Leninist-verging-on-tech-infused-Stalinist state capitalist power, but it boasts no virtually ideological adherents either in the States or abroad, and certainly not within the Democratic Socialists of America. It does have spies, and thugs who intimidate dissidents in the Chinese diaspora, but it lacks any support within the actual American left. To be sure, China’s rise to economic world power was fueled by offshoring American companies, but they went to China at the prompting of Wall Street as a way to boost their profit margins, Chinese labor then being dirt cheap. In other words, it was our leading capitalists, rather than any American socialists or communists, who sold out the industrial Midwest. ...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Trump will stop at nothing in his quest for imperial power and will destroy the credibility of US Treasury debt

 

telegraph.co.uk

If you think it’s alarming now, just wait for Trump to wreck the bond market

The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

8 April 2025

---

Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.

It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.

Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.

He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.

He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.

But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.

That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.

You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.

Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.

The Fed will indeed cut rates this year but not until it is able to see through the confusing blizzard of tariffs and the ricochet retaliation of an angry world.

Powell told Congress that the tariff shock is much bigger than expected and may set off “persistent” inflation rather than just a one-off jump in the price level. He came close to damning Trumponomics as a recipe for low-growth stagflation. That is a red flag to a bull.

The current debate over whether or not Trump has the legal power to fire Powell entirely misunderstands the character of the Maga revolution. America’s rule of law is for guidance only these days.

You could say it was ever thus. Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked the New Deal. He failed, and unleashed tax investigations to settle scores, as did Richard Nixon. But Trump is an order of magnitude more outrageous.

Powell will not go without a fight. “I will never, ever, ever leave this job voluntarily until my term ends under any circumstances,” he said during Trump 1.0.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the administration could sideline Powell by appointing a “shadow” Fed chairman, who could steer the markets by issuing forward guidance. But this does not overcome resistance from the Fed board and the hawkish regional presidents.

A secretive team of Trump loyalists drew up a 10-page report before the election proposing more radical measures. These include forcing the Fed to “align policy with administration goals” or even to make the president an “acting” member of the Fed board.

Trump could purge members of the seven-strong Fed board one by one until they get the message. The law states that the president can terminate the 14-year term of a Fed governor “for cause”, usually meaning malfeasance or neglect.

But Trump has just abused his tariff powers on an heroic scale by invoking fictitious “emergencies”. He could no doubt stretch the meaning of “for cause” to anything he wants. The Supreme Court has the last say, but Trump-appointed justices have already shown a strong leaning towards an imperial presidency.

In any case, there are other methods to bring the Fed to heel.

Maga vigilantes are intimidating American judges by having pizzas delivered to their homes – a mob tactic to say “we know where you live”. So we can assume that recalcitrant members of the Federal Open Market Committee will face this sort of treatment.

The major US banks are raising their inflation forecasts to 4pc or higher this year. This inflation will hit before the last three price shocks – Covid, the Putin commodity spike and Biden’s overspending – have faded from immediate memory. It is exactly how inflation psychology becomes embedded.

A variant happened in the 1970s. Nixon bullied the Fed into expansionary policies, with some choice language on “the myth of the autonomous Fed” that later surfaced in the Oval Office tapes.

Loose money stoked inflation, so Nixon ordered a freeze on prices and wages in 1971, declaring war on “gougers”. It was very popular. Illiterate policies often are.

If Trump succeeds in extracting rate cuts from the Fed and tax cuts from Congress, the same problem is going to arise. So my assumption is that he will blame the symptoms and will resort to price controls.

The elephantine difference is that US federal debt was 34pc of GDP in 1971. Today it is 122pc on the Fed measure, and galloping upwards. The fiscal deficit is over 6pc as far as the eye can see.

The US does not have the domestic savings to fund this debt appetite. The savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of national income. It was 12pc in the 1960s.

Foreign investors have been plugging the gap. This soaks up a large part of the world’s savings – the underlying cause of America’s trade deficit.

If you think the stock market gyrations of the last few days are terrifying, just wait until Trump destroys the credibility of the Fed and of US treasury debt, the anchor of the global system.

He could order a captive Fed to relaunch quantitative easing and buy the bonds, but to do that when inflation is running hot would be seen by the whole world as naked fiscal dominance. It would set off a price spiral and a collapse of the currency – the sort of outcome seen over the decades in Latin America, or Erdoğan’s Turkey.

The end destination is a return to US capital controls to stop foreign funds and US investors from taking their money out of America. A man willing to impose 116pc tariffs – including pre-existing ones –  on Chinese goods and shut down the biggest bilateral trade relationship in the world as if it were a TV reality show will stop at nothing.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/08/trump-sell-off-is-bad-wait-until-wreck-us-bond-market/

Conflict is the original fact of life and is life itself

They shout: "No more war" -- but they desire class war. They are indignant when a murderer is executed for a crime of passion, but they feel a secret pleasure in hearing of the murder of a political opponent. What objection have they ever raised to the Bolshevist slaughters? There is no getting away from it: conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself, and not the most pitiful pacifist is able entirely to uproot the pleasure it gives his inmost soul. Theoretically, at least, he would like to fight and destroy all opponents of pacifism.

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934), p. 40f.

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered no harm, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.

 

"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".

 

The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.

 

I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

Rush Limbaugh joins the "No Labels" crowd, now eschews "conservative", Geno from the Bronx tells him off

Mark Levin responded unfavorably to the idea on his show last night, advocating that we still embrace the label, and now an angry Geno from the Bronx has blasted Limbaugh for his shapeshifting, saying what a lot of us have been thinking for years.

It'll do no good, Geno. The guy's unreachable. But good show bro!

Try Labeling Conservatism as “Solving Problems”:

So I would suggest to you, when you’re out and about and if you run into an occasion where you have the opportunity to talk politics, people that don’t agree with you, do not use the word “conservative.”

Do everything else, but don’t call yourself that, don’t promote it, don’t reference it, just talk about we need to solve problems and tell people how you would do it. Leave the label out of it. We’ve got a brand problem. I hate it. I hate having to admit it. But there are too many mind-numbed, brain-dead robots who have a totally incorrect and blasphemes opinion of the word “conservative” and “conservatism” that it’s just — get rid of it. Stop calling yourself that. Just be one. Just talk to people as one.

When you talk to people about issues, refer to them as problems that need to be fixed. Don’t say you’ve got a conservative idea or conservative philosophy. Just articulate it but don’t label it. And my point is I think you’ll have a far better chance of being persuasive if you don’t use the term. And after all, what’s the objective? 

They’ve Destroyed the Conservative Brand. We’re Problem Solvers, Geno!:

RUSH: To the Bronx up next. Geno, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Rush, I’m very disappointed in you and in fact, quite honestly, I’m angry with you because of what you told that lady two days ago and what you told the other call today earlier today in the program. You’re advising us, your loyal audience for 30 years, that have stood by you and that have made you the Moses of conservatism. You are now telling us that we should call ourselves “problem solvers” rather than conservatives so that we can try to get the political power that we need. I’m here to tell you it’s time for you to go back to the way you were and take back what you said today! Because I’m gonna give it to you straight. I live in the Bronx. I’m on the front lines. I every day have to confront left-wing lizards and brain-dead Bolsheviks! And they give me a hard time every day, but I get right back in their face and I tell ’em, “You go to hell!” Because I don’t want my country, I don’t want what my parents and my family and everybody I’ve ever known in my life to surrender to these brain-dead idiots that are gonna destroy our country. And now you gonna tell me that I should back down and that I should somehow say, well, I’m not a conservative, but I’m a problem solver because I should fear these fools that are out there. No, Rush. It’s time for you to get back to basics. You gotta be the same person you were 30 years ago that had my loyalty up until today. You have to be the Johnny Carson that you have been for the last 30 years and say “no!” You get in people’s faces! You tell them no! You’re an imbecile, you’re an idiot, you’re a jackass and you’re gonna help destroy our country from within, if we listen to the crap that you’re trying to tell us. There is no such thing as being transgender, you’re either male or female. There’s no such thing as 37 different flavors of sexism. No. You’re a man or a woman and the same with the abortion issue. You gave that up a long time ago, and so did your other brethren on conservative talk radio, which I don’t even call conservative anymore. Millions of Americans have died because of the schmucks that we have to pay attention to and the scum in the media that have turned everything that’s bad and unholy into what is righteous and it’s completely wrong. So I’m gonna give you an opportunity right here and now, Rush, on your own show to take back what you said to that lady yesterday and earlier today, otherwise what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna come and I’m gonna take that microphone away from you and gonna be the Jay Leno to your Johnny Carson! And I’m gonna be the one that’s gonna be the leader of the new conservative movement. It’s either that or I go to the Trumpster and I tell him to stop giving you interviews and that’s it. It’s gonna be Mark Levin and a handful of others because now it seems to me that you have gone soft and you’ve gone weak-willed. The same way you criticize Republican slobs like Jeff Sessions and the other mutants who stab us in the back every time and you don’t bust their chops anymore, I noticed that recently. Now I’m gonna do that to you and I’m gonna go every other radio program until and unless you take back what you said that we should not say that we are conservatives anymore but that we’re problem solvers. That’s wrong! Admit you’re wrong and do it right here, right now.

RUSH: I never said back down, and I never said not to get in their face. I simply said do not use a term to describe yourself that makes it impossible to have any kind of solution with these people. That’s all. I’m not saying don’t be a conservative.

CALLER: (shouting)

RUSH: Wait a minute, Geno. I didn’t tell you not to be a conservative. I didn’t tell you to back down. I didn’t tell you to tell these scum to go soft or any of that. None of that at all. Do you not…? Let me ask: Do you not agree that just the name conservative has a little bit of a PR problem right now?

CALLER: That PR is because left-wing maggots in the media have made it that way, but when we confront them, then they back down. That’s the thing that you should be reemphasizing like you did 30 years ago. You were my hero for the last 30 years, and now all of the sudden you have backed down because you have become weak-willed —

RUSH: I’m not backing down, Geno, and I haven’t —

CALLER: — thinks that you gonna (unintelligible) and escape from these problems. I want to save America, if you don’t step aside and I’ll do it for you.

RUSH: You have drawn a whole lot of conclusions here that are nowhere near true. I have not backed down from anything. I’ve never backed down from anything. I’m not advocating that you back down. I’m not telling you to stop talking about them the way you want to talk about them. I’m not telling you not to get in their face and if you think they’re a bunch of reprobate rats, tell ’em so. That’s all. I’m just talking about the label. I’m not telling you to not be conservative, Geno.

CALLER: But you said we shouldn’t admit to it. That’s an act of cowardice —

RUSH: No, I did not say you shouldn’t admit to it! I did not say —

CALLER: (shouting)

RUSH: I did not —

CALLER: (shouting)

RUSH: Don’t change anything. Don’t change your behavior, don’t change your technique in persuading. None of that.

CALLER: Bolsheviks will get in your face. You should get in their face and stand up to them. Otherwise they take over, we all lose, and America falls by the wayside like it did for my ancient ancestors 1,500 years ago.

RUSH: What do you think I do here every day?

CALLER: Well, you tell me. You tell me that why we shouldn’t be calling ourselves conservatives anymore. To me it’s an act of cowardice.

RUSH: I’m simply talking about the label. I’m putting it out there as an idea. I’m not talking about strategy. I am talking about strategy. I’m not talking about the actual ideologue belief system. I’m not saying you should abandon anything.

CALLER: Sorry, Rush, you’re not buying me on this one. I hate to say this, but after 30 years my loyalty now for you is gone and that chicken parmesan dinner that I was supposed to cook for you and your wife you identify, you can forget that deal, Mr. Snerdley will get it before you do. You’ll have to pay for that dinner.

RUSH: I wasn’t aware that you were gonna fix me a chicken parmesan.

CALLER: Well, that was three years ago when I last called in when you gave the speech about Hildebeast and why we should vote for the Trumpster. Remember?

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: Apparently you forgot because, again you know, you’re too fat and happy now —

RUSH: You think I was for the Hildebeast? You think I spent the last two years ago advocating for the Hildebeast?

CALLER: You have… You’re basically what you’re doing is telling us we should surrender our title as conservatives.

RUSH: I am not telling you anything of the sort.

CALLER: — beat the evil empire. That’s what you’re backing down on.

RUSH: No, I’m not backing down at all. I’m not backing down —

CALLER: If you lived here in the Bronx, trust me, you would feal —

RUSH: Geno, I am surrounded by a bunch of left-wing liberals here that are brain-dead, judgmental, mean-spirited, superiorist little butts. I’m surrounded by ’em. You can’t avoid ’em everywhere you go.

CALLER: But then you’re telling us that we shouldn’t even identify as conservatives. Why, because some schmuck on CNN is gonna give us a hard time?

RUSH: No!

CALLER: We give them a hard time! We take Jim Acosta, take him out and giving us a beating if we have to. We do everything that you used to tell us 30 years ago but apparently now you’ve gotten a little too soft Rush. It’s time for you to step aside. Let me take the microphone from you for a few days. And I’ll straighten out your audience.

RUSH: I’ll tell you what, Geno. Why don’t we do that. You can have this microphone starting tomorrow. I haven’t taken a vacation this year. You can come down here tomorrow, you can take the microphone and you can deal with it however you want.

CALLER: More than happy to do that, and then I’ll reinstate your chicken parmesan with you and your wife.

RUSH: Okay. Well, I don’t like chicken parm.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: That’s what happens when the Red Sox beat the Yankees. It’s tough out there. We’re all surrounded by these “commie bastards” out there, Geno.

A grandmother of Bolshevism over at The American Conservative is upset with her children

Hey, we are the chosen immanentizers of the eschaton, not you!

Kelly Marcum, here:

The left, which continues to decry the social faux pas of cultural appropriation with ever-increasing vehemence, is itself guilty of the very same crime. They, the proponents of a predominantly liberal post-Christian culture, have undertaken a great project of appropriating and reinventing orthodox Christian values. ...

The left has made it its mission to culturally appropriate Christianity and use it for its own ends; in too many cases, it has been allowed to do so and even aided in its efforts by Christians themselves. ...

If orthodox Christianity is to survive in an evermore hostile culture, its practitioners and leaders will need not only to withstand the pressure to accommodate and self-censor, but to repossess their own language and tenets that have been exploited by the left.

Democrats lost last week simply because voters tired of waiting for full-time jobs to recover

Examine the record here of full-time job losses in recessions since 1969 and you will see that full-time jobs recovered to their previous peaks in 2 years after 1969, 2 years after 1974, about 3 years after 1981, 3 years after 1990 and about 3 years after 2000.

But after 2007? Full-time jobs have yet to recover, over 7 years since peaking in July 2007 at 123.2 million.

It's true that total nonfarm employment recovered to the November 2007 high this June, after 6.5 long years, but full-time is still 3 million below the 2007 peak.

The voting public has been very patient with President Obama and the Democrats. They know this was the biggest jobs debacle in the post-war. From peak to trough between July 2007 and January 2010 14.442 million full-time jobs were lost, beating the 8.1 million lost from 1981 under Reagan by a wide margin, a 9.3% loss. The percentage lost from the peak was also highest in the post-war, down 11.7% in the recent catastrophe vs. the 9.6% loss of full-time jobs from August 1974, the previous most recent top episode for full-time job destruction in percentage terms.

So it's understandable that voters might have re-elected Obama and the Democrat Senate in 2012 on the presumption that such a serious episode would take longer to fix. But even so it was still a relatively close election.

Last Tuesday's nationwide blow-out of Democrats, however, from the US Senate on down through the US House, governorships and state legislative chambers shows that the patience of the country has run out. While full-time jobs have roared back in the last 12 months it is likely that the trend has peaked for the year and that it will be next summer before we see full-time recover fully.

That will be 8 years . . . 5 years too many for many of the millions who lost their jobs to put their lives back together and rejoin the middle class. Five years too many for those who lived in the 5+million homes lost to foreclosure. For them there remains the hope only of minimum and low wage work, food stamps, government disability assistance, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare and early death.

Obama will be remembered for attempting this hollowing out of the middle class, and some will correctly conclude it was intentional on the part of the country's first Bolshevik president.

"[T]he mass of middle class parasites which lived on the back of the old order is now, equally ready to live on the back of the proletarian State."   

CHRONICLES' Roman Catholic Tom Fleming Goes All-In For Obedience To The Tyranny

When you hitch your wagon to the grandmothers of Bolshevism, you always end up in the ditch:

Not content with telling wives to obey husbands, slave to obey masters, subjects to obey the rulers, Paul makes obedience a general rule: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God: the powers that are ordained of God.  Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive unto themselves damnation."  So much for the right of revolution, civil disobedience, and, I might add, the myth of the Underground Railroad. ... In everyday political terms, then, we have to perform our duties as subjects or citizens.  "Render therefore to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due; [TAX RESISTERS NEED NOT APPLY], custom to whom custom [SORRY, PAUL IS NO FREE-TRADER], fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.  By the way, the word for honor is good old Greek word time, that implies that different men have a worth or price that must be paid in terms of respect.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

None of that good ole' Protestant "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God" stuff for Tom Fleming, no siree.

It's nice to see that after all these years our disagreements about politics always end up being theological at their root.

Conservatives take note. The Roman Catholics now in control of most of the conservative movement are the reason America grows less and less free than it used to be. They will do nothing but continue to bow, but patriots will stand with the father of their country and refuse to kneel. 

The Real Fascist Threat To America Comes From The Left, But Only Because It Won

 

Dennis Prager, here:

[I]f there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right. ... First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal. ... Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

------------------------------------------------

I beg to differ in most of the particulars while seconding the main point.

The advent of fascist elements in American life specifically as a phenomenon of the left has gone hand in glove with the advance of liberalism under Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the fact that the left won World War II, not the "right", whatever that is. One can hardly explain the growth of the state to its current proportions nor its growing oppressive reach without that liberalism and its spokesmen's early admiration for people like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Nor can one explain our alliance with left socialism in joining the war on the side of Stalin apart from a natural affinity for that form of it as opposed to the other. "Fear of the right" is an artifact of the victory of Stalin and FDR over Hitler and Mussolini, but should more correctly be styled "fear of right socialism". 

Nor is it conceivable to imagine the rise of liberalism in America without the revolution in theology which immanentized the eschaton in the social gospel movement. For Marx religion may have been the opiate of the people, but to Spengler it was the very grandmother of Bolshevism. Russia and Germany went to war as developed rival socialisms while the majority of Americans resisted becoming involved in a fight where they had not yet a dog. They were still children in the classroom of The State. But now that we have grown up we routinely invade in the name of "freedom" because we have come to believe it is our destiny to impose it everywhere we can while ensuring cradle to grave security for one and all at home.

That's not to say America hasn't been fertile ground for fascism from the beginning, quite apart from the dominating influence of a psychology derived from Christianity and its tendency toward totalitarian-like moral conformity. But that involves the economic history, which Prager doesn't address. The contemporary corporatist model lauded by Wall Street has its roots planted comfortably deep in our origins in English colonialism, going all the way back to the crown's banking operations on behalf of the sea-trading companies. Many of the original American colonial charters were patterned on this model of state sponsorship and were first and foremost state-capitalist business ventures. So it should come as no surprise that American capitalism after independence has become more crony than capitalist as it has gotten so very long in the tooth. You can take the Tory out of England, but you can't take the England out of the Tory. Jeffrey Immelt of GE in his admiration for the Chicoms is no different than Henry Ford in his for Hitler.

Lastly, it is troubling to me that a person such as Dennis Prager, who is a student of communism, doesn't mention the fundamental bloodthirstiness inherent in all socialisms, whether communist or fascist. The "unique" evil of Nazism shouldn't blind us to Stalin's anti-German crimes anymore than it should blind us to Stalin's crimes against Ukraine and the millions "disappeared" during his purges. And where is the serious reflection on left socialism's responsibility for the many millions of Chinese who perished at the hands of Mao, who specifically imitated Stalin? And perhaps more to the point for us, the fact that as fascist socialism advances in America millions of unborn children have paid and continue to pay everyday the price for it, all in the name of "freedom"?

Rules For Radical Republicans: Bush Tax Cuts Edition

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

The enemy knows the Congress is a coequal branch of the government. The problem is the Republicans and the Speaker of the House do not. You actually have more power even than that. You have 30 Republican governors. Start using them.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

"New revenues from the rich" is the enemy's idea, not Republicans'.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Bush is ancient history. Time to make your own and repudiate the past. Pass something in the House which goes farther than Bush ever dreamed, and send it to the Senate to enrage the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

The enemy is funding gold-plated union jobs and pensions for federal and state workers at the expense of middle class Americans in the private sector who enjoy neither. It's time you reminded the middle class about that.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Use surrogates saying: Moochelle. Crony capitalist. Ideologue. Bolshevik. Dictator. Muslim sympathizer. Race baiter. Panetta flies cross country too much at taxpayer expense. The vice president thinks FDR talked to a television camera.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Republicans can campaign, too. Go frequently to friendly territory and bring 2016 hopefuls with you.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

The idea of compromise became a drag a long time ago. Stop waiting for it. Go on the offensive instead.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

The enemy is trying to combine everything into one event, "the fiscal cliff", which tells you they perceive they are at a disadvantage. They are. You need to keep the events separate and do things piecemeal. Raising the debt ceiling should come later, crossing the tax rates fiscal cliff should come first. Fight for spending cuts later with the debt ceiling, not now. Sequestration already gave you some spending cuts, which you should embrace.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

The greatest fear of the Democrats is a debt ceiling fueled government shutdown over spending cuts, but it wasn't the end of the world under Bill Clinton, and it won't be the end of the world if it happens in 2013. You actually won that in 2011. Do it again, except bigger, to satisfy the ratings agencies. Besides, it's red meat for the base.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

No more appearances with the enemy, especially on the golf course. You are third in line for the presidency. Start acting like it. Visit Afghanistan to encourage the troops.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

The place you need to get to is the same place you were at two times when the president extended the Bush tax rates, so you should know the way. An uncompromising new insistence on tax reform and much lower tax rates might get you there. It changes the subject and focuses the argument on relieving the taxpayers. The president upped the ante. You need to see him and raise him. Aim for the moon, and you might get into orbit.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

You might not get the radical tax reform, about which you must be deadly serious, but settling for making the Bush tax cuts permanent is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

Focus your attention on answering the partisanship of individuals in the pundit class. Don't fire Tea Party men. Enlist them in attacking the enemy. They are good at it, and they will repay you with support later.

The Ignorant Statement Of The Day Comes From Jeff Immelt, Chairman Of GE

The ignorant statement of the day comes from Jeff Immelt, chairman of GE, here:

"The one thing that actually works, state run communism a bit– may not be your cup of tea, but their [Chinese] government works."

Communism is nothing if not "state-run", as in, run by the Communist Party. As it stands, the statement is meaningless.

Actually China's Communist Party practices a form of state capitalism, just like we do, which in the good old days was called fascism. And it only works until it doesn't, at the price of human repression, which goes unreported in the west. You know, like how many abortions were performed this week in Peoria or Shanghai. Still, I don't see a lot of people flocking to China. I see Chinese who have gotten rich trying to get out.

And whereas we build things that actually get used, using fiat currency, China builds things using fiat currency which don't get used, including massive numbers of buildings and highways. Of course, the grandmothers of Bolshevism in our country do the same thing as the Chinese. They build massive numbers of churches which are for the most part vacant all week.

You say socialism, I say national socialism, but let's call the whole thing off.

CA Governor Jerry Brown Invokes Bible To Justify Higher Taxes On Rich

Quoted here:

To further promote Prop 30 and appeal to religious voters, Brown cited the bible. "Luke 12:48 says: 'For those of whom much has been given, much is required.' Those at the high end can brace themselves for seven years and lend school kids a helping hand. I appeal to their sense of loyalty and fairness," he told the FT.

Christian theology is convenient to liberals only when it plays the grandmother of Bolshevism. At that point suddenly the wall separating church and state disappears.

The problem for such interpretation is that it is completely one-sided and ahistorical. Luke's Gospel goes on to state that whether much or little is given to this one or that one, it is all required from each regardless:

"So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." -- Luke 14:33

The liberals never tell the poor they want all of what little the poor have, too. That would be fine, perhaps, if the world were really coming to an end and the kingdom of God were about to appear, as Jesus once thought. It's the kind of thinking, injected into temporal affairs, which goes a long way to explain the alarums of liberalism, the latest of which has been that global warming will be the end of us all.

Yeah right.

If we could just agree that Christianity taught that the cost of discipleship is the same outrageous demand on everybody, we could dispense with the class warfare once and for all, and with such unseemly appeals to theocratic reasoning.

Roman Catholics Avoid Abortion Hypocrisy Of Republicans, Slam Libertarianism Instead

Most of the commentary I'm reading from Catholic critiques of the Republicans is avoiding the manifest hypocrisy of the "life of the mother" and "cases of rape" excuses for abortion advocated by many Catholic Republicans and the Romney campaign.

Those excuses are contrary to Catholic teaching, yet there they are, so-called Catholics, so-called conservatives, hounding out of the Republican Party a man whose point was that pregnancies resulting from rape are rare, which they manifestly are, and that allowing them to come to full term and enjoy life isn't an "option" in some policy world. It's a moral imperative. In this Rep. Todd Akin, a conservative Presbyterian from Missouri, is a better Catholic than the Catholics.

Instead, the critiques are focusing on the libertarianism of Rep. Paul Ryan.

This makes excellent sense, after some reflection, for the simple reason that Catholicism sees in libertarianism a rival ideology, not unlike what Bolshevism saw in National Socialism. The point says more about Catholicism than it does about libertarianism. Catholicism fell victim to the ideological habit of mind long enough ago that Spengler in the 1930s could say:

"[A]ll Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought . . . Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism."

This observation makes the history of political economy necessarily a topic under the study of the history of religion. The concept of the church, which was totally foreign to Jesus, took the place of the failed imminent coming of the kingdom of God in his teaching, and immanentizes the eschaton he expected before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel. That false kingdom is now administered by popes, cardinals, bishops and priests. As such the church has been responsible for spinning off rival, "heretical", ideologies ever since. And if not the ideologies themselves, at a minimum the ideological habit of mind.

The conservative response to this is most certainly not to keep thinking ideologically. A dead Catholic named Russell Kirk also tried hard to tell us these things before he died.

Like Spengler's, his remains a voice crying in an impoverished wilderness of idealisms.

Methodism Remains A Grandmother Of Bolshevism

Jewish Lutheran Atheist

Mark Tooley says as much here for The American Spectator:

Methodism, rather than stepping back to reflect on its 30 year initially successful but ultimately failed Prohibition crusade, instead accelerated its political activism. The Methodism Building became the headquarters of America's Religious Left in Washington, D.C., housing radicals of every cause especially from the 1960s onward. It still clung to an uncompromising perfectionism that insisted evil could be banished, and the New Jerusalem established, with the passage of just a few more laws.

Of course, presidents and congressmen no longer "tremble and gobble" before Methodism and its lobbyists, who are largely ignored. Banning handguns, even after 40 years of endorsement by Methodism, will never happen. But maybe other uncompromising idealists and utopians, who believe human nature can be transformed at the stroke of a pen, will heed the lessons of Methodism and Prohibition. 

Heritage Foundation Director Responsible for Healthcare Mandate Idea in 1989

It's one of three dirty little secrets about the Republicans that they are intellectually responsible for the healthcare mandate idea which we have so vehemently opposed but which now stares us in the face in ObamaCare. If ObamaCare were in fact a Bolshevik plot, that must mean the commies own also the Republican Party, not just the Democrat.

A Heritage Foundation director named Stuart Butler presented a paper in 1989 which contains the idea of the healthcare mandate, backed up by some of the absurd reasoning many of us had been attacking in the debate over the Senate healthcare bill, for example, the analogy between car insurance and health insurance.

The link to the full paper is here.

And here's an excerpt on the mandate:

This paragraph sounds like a Newt Gingrich talking point.

Boobs like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity incessantly promote the Heritage Foundation to their audiences, while claiming the mantle of conservatism. But as we all come to learn sooner or later, saying doesn't make it so.

Government compulsion continues to be the nexus of political conflict in America. Unfortunately for us, the Republican establishment is for it as much as our enemies on the left.

For more, regrettably, see here:

It wouldn't have been at all odd for any of these Republicans to support the individual mandate in the past, because it was a Republican idea, hatched by Stuart Butler and some others at the Heritage Foundation. (Documentation here.) Heritage has desperately tried to disavow it, but to no avail. Even James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, apparently present at the creation, concedes the point. You sometimes hear conservatives defend their past support for the individual mandate by saying that something was needed to head off more ambitious health insurance schemes like Hillarycare, but that's another way of saying that whenever a conservative proposes any solution to the health care crisis he or she does so in bad faith. Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all. Not even Romney would. You might even say especially Romney, since the issue has brought him nothing but grief since the 2012 cycle began.

Spengler on the Christian Origins of Communism

From The Hour of Decision, 1933:

"But since the end of the World War the church - in Germany above all, where, being an ancient power of rigid traditions, it had to pay heavily in prestige with its own adherents by descending to street level - has sunk to class wars and association with Marxism. There is in Germany a Catholic Bolshevism which is more dangerous than the anti-Christian because it hides behind the mask of a religion.

"Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow.

"But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort. But the other, the "worldly" type with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion.

"Marxism is indeed a religion, not in the sense of its founder, but in that which his revolutionary following has imparted to it. Like any church it has its saints, apostles, martyrs, fathers, bible and mission. Like any church it has dogmas, heresy-tribunals, an orthodoxy and a scholasticism, and, above all, a popular moral - or rather two, for believers and unbelievers. And does it make any difference that its doctrine is materialistic through and through? Are those priests who agitate on economic questions any less so?"

'There Is No Contradiction Between Economic Liberalism and Socialism'

Spengler:

'Labour-Socialism in every form, on the other hand, is, as I have already shown, definitely English in origin. It arose, about 1840, simultaneously with the victory of the joint-stock company and the rootless "financial" form of capital. Both were the expression of Free Trade Manchesterism: this "white" Bolshevism is capitalism from below, wage-capitalism, just as speculative finance-capital in respect of its method is Socialism from above, from the stock exchange. Both grew out of the same intellectual root: thinking in money, trading in money on the pavements of the world's capitals, whether as wage-levels or profits on exchange rates makes no odds. There is no contradiction between economic Liberalism and Socialism. The Labour market is the stock exchange of the organized proletariat. The trade unions are trusts for forcing up wages on the lines followed by oil, steel, and bank trusts of the Anglo-American type, whose finance-Socialism penetrates, dominates, sucks, and controls them to the point of systematic expropriation. The devastating dispossessing effect of bundles of shares and bonds, the separation of mere "credit" from the responsible directive work of the entrepreneur, who no longer knows to whom his work actually belongs, has not received anything like adequate consideration. Productive economy is in the last resort nothing but the will-less object of stock-exchange manoeuvres. It was only the rise of the share system to domination that enabled the stock exchange (formerly a mere aid to economy) to assume the decisive control of economic life. Finance-Socialists and trust magnates like Morgan and Kreuger correspond absolutely to the mass-leaders of Labour parties and the Russian economic commissars: dealer-natures with the same parvenu tastes. From both sides, today as in the days of the Gracchi, the conservative forces of the State - army, property, peasant, and manager - are being attacked.'

Social Spending on 'The Worker' Ruined Germany Before 1933, Not War Reparations

So Oswald Spengler:

"For this part of the political wage also - insurance of every kind against fate, the building of workers' dwellings (no one thinks of demanding these for farm labourers), the construction of playgrounds, convalescent homes, libraries, and the special terms for food, railway journeys, and amusements - is all paid for directly or indirectly by taxation of "the rest" for the working man. This in fact is an essential part of the political wage, and it receives very little thought. At the same time the national wealth of which we are given the amount in figures is an economic fiction. It is calculated - as "capital" - from the yield of economic undertakings or from the market prices of interest-bearing shares, and it falls with these when the value of the working factories is threatened by the burden of high wages. A factory that is thus made to close down is, however, of no more value except for the scrap-heap. Under the dictatorship of the trade unions, Germany's economic system had in the four years 1925-29 to meet an extra load of 18,225,000,000 marks annually in respect of increased wages, taxes, and grants for social purposes. This means one-third of the national income spent one-sidedly. One year later the sum had grown to far beyond twenty milliard marks. What are two milliards for reparations compared with this? It endangered the financial position of the Reich and the currency. Its drag on the economic system was not even taken into account when the effects of wage-Bolshevism were in question. It was the expropriation of the whole economic system in the interests of one class."

Of Course It's Class Warfare!

And of course he's an ideologue, and of course Obamacare is a Bolshevik plot.

And of course whatever he says is not something, is that, and of course whatever he says something is, is not that.

Here's the video.

YOU LIE!

Obamacare Waivers Climb 311 Since Jan. 26 to 1,040, New Website Obscures Data

From the new reporting site here:

As of the end of February 2011, a total of 1040 one-year waivers have been granted.  This update includes 126 new approvals.  Key facts about annual limits waivers:

Of all the waivers granted to date, the vast majority – more than 95 percent of all waivers – were granted to health plans that are employment-related.  These include self-insured employer health plans, health reimbursement arrangements, collectively-bargained multi-employer plans, and health plans sold by issuers to fully-insured employers.  The links below contain descriptions of these and other types of entities receiving waivers.

The number of waivers processed each month continues to decline.  After granting over 500 waivers in December (an increase related to the fact that December 1 was the final day to apply for a waiver for a plan or policy year that begins on January 1, as many plans do), HHS granted less than 200 waivers in January, and 126 in February.

The number of enrollees in plans with annual limits waivers is 2.62 million, representing less than 2 percent of all Americans who have private health insurance today.

The old site listed the waivers sequentially (here), with the cumulative total of persons affected clearly shown. Now you have to cull the data from no less than 7 separate links.

In less than three months we've gone from 222 waivers in December 2010 to 1,040 waivers in early March 2011, and from 1.5 million affected to 2.6 million.

So we're told the number of waivers processed is declining even though the total waivers granted continues to climb dramatically, and the new website makes the data more difficult to retrieve and entitles it "promoting transparency."

Up is down, wrong is right, night is day. Obama isn't a Bolshevik. He is not an ideologue.