Gennady Zyuganov and friend

Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov sees eye to eye with Barack Obama on economic policy. How totally surprising!

Foreign Policy:

“I said that I had thoroughly studied the U.S. president’s anti-crisis program, that I liked it, as well as that it is socially oriented and primarily aimed at supporting poor people and enhancing the state’s role. I said all this to President Obama.”

A small Latin American country actually stands up to imminent dictatorship. Its Supreme Court defends the country’s Constitution and its Army enforces the law, removing from office the president who was in the process of overthrowing the Constitution and making himself into a dictator.

Splendid! Democracy and the rule of law triumphs for once in Latin America. But, how does the US Government in the Age of Obama respond?

Barack Obama joins Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Daniel Ortega in condemning the removal of the criminal from office. Evidently, democracy for Mr. Obama is a one-way street. Democracy is inviolable with respect to the election of Marxists (like himself), but once in office any winner of a democratic election on the left is perfectly free to declare that the game is over, he will now govern by decree, and no further real elections are required. In future, the democratically-elected Marxist administration will count all the votes, Chicago-style, aided by organized supporters (like ACORN) who will intimidate opponents and register hosts of imaginary voters and the deceased while driving busloads of winos and welfare scum from precinct to precinct to cast ballots early and often. That’s real democracy in action.

Reuters:

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a “terrible precedent” of transition by military force unless it was reversed.

“We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there,” Obama told reporters after an Oval Office meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Zelaya, in office since 2006, was overthrown in a dawn coup on Sunday after he angered the judiciary, Congress and the army by seeking constitutional changes that would allow presidents to seek re-election beyond a four-year term.

The Honduran Congress named an interim president, Roberto Micheletti, and the country’s Supreme Court said it had ordered the army to remove Zelaya. …

Obama said he would work with the Organization of American States and other international institutions to restore Zelaya to power and “see if we can resolve this in a peaceful way.”

Personally, I think the Honduran army made one serious mistake. They exiled the dictator, instead of hailing him before a military tribunal and executing him. Now he will be playing political games from abroad, seeking foreign intervention to restore him to power.

And who knows? Some Marxist regime, Cuba, Venezuela, or the United States, might intervene and return him forcibly to power.

Tom Suhadolnik explains how Barack Obama is simply setting aside conventional bankruptcy law in order to nationalize the automobile industry while moving simultaneously to nationalize the financial system using existing regulatory powers combined with intimidation.

How many Americans who pulled the democrat lever last November really intended to vote for Marxism?

At the end of April the Obama administration tested its ability to take direct control of the US financial system. The test was a success. There is a revolution underway which would impress Chavez or Castro. If you were like most people, you did not realize it happened.

As the details of the GM restructuring plan emerged, on Monday, April 27th, Lawrence Kudlow was one of the first to sound the alarm as secured lenders and bond holders were being given a fraction of the amount owed to them under long established bankruptcy law.

What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization. …

To understand the gravity of the events you need a basic understanding of bankruptcy laws. The pecking order of bankruptcy claims is supposed to be:

1. Debtor in Possession (DIP) financing which is loaned to the restructuring company
2. Secured Lenders – creditors whose loans are backed by assets such as real estate or equipment
3. Unsecured Lenders – creditors such as bond holders, vendors and the UAW
4. Equity Owners – shareholders

When a company files for bankruptcy the claims that are superior (represented by a lower number) in the pecking order are paid first. Claims with equal status are treated equally; those claims are almost always paid on the same pro rata basis. It is an explicit goal of our bankruptcy system is to treat all creditors equally. …

In the case of GM, the UAW and bond holders are both unsecured creditors with equal rights under bankruptcy law. As The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Monday April 27th, interim GM CEO Fritz Henderson contends a 2007 deal between GM and the UAW gives preference to unsecured claims of the UAW. The bond holders never explicitly agreed to have their claims subordinated to the union so that contention is certainly open to debate in bankruptcy court.

Considering GM owes the UAW $20 billion (Henderson says the figure is closer to $30 billion) and bond holders $27 billion, they should receive a similar ratio of shares in the restructured GM. The deal announced by Henderson gives roughly 40% of the stock in a reorganized GM to the UAW, 50% to the government and 10% to the bond holders. The math does not make sense even if you accept Henderson’s contention that the UAW is owed $30 billion. …

The Chrysler reorganization details are more bizarre. At Chrysler the institutions owed $6.9 billion by Chrysler are secured creditors. As a matter of law, the secured claims would be superior to those of the UAW in bankruptcy court.

Putting the Chrysler deal in terms of household finances, the secured creditors would be the banks holding the mortgage and car note. Instead of the car and house going back to the bank in bankruptcy, the Chrysler deal calls for the car and house to be shared with unsecured creditors like credit card companies and the cable company. That is not how the system is supposed to work.

These bedrock principles are codified in our bankruptcy laws. …

Obama has made it clear he is willing to use his political muscle on the banks as well. …

The Obama administration will be able to make a plausible argument that nationalization of the banks was forced upon the administration by capitalism run amok. Given the type of patently absurd statements made by politicians of all stripes, this rather nuanced position will pass without a second thought.

In summary, the mechanism to nationalize the US financial system is now in place. All the levers are controlled by the executive branch. Here how it works:

1. The government determines various loses have eroded a particular bank’s balance sheet and regulatory intervention is necessary.
2. The bank is ordered to raise additional capital to maintain the proper asset ratio.
3. Increasing government activism causes private capital to avoid investing in banks.
4. The government is “forced” to loan more money to the bank in exchange for more stock and control via loan conditions like those found in earlier TARP loans and legislation.
5. As government acquires more power they force the bank to accept loses to benefit key constituencies of the administration (like the UAW) or the sale of toxic assets to firms like Pimco.
6. If the government does not own the majority of the bank’s stock return to step 1and repeat.

On May 5th, Fox reported as many as 10 of the top 19 banks in the country will need to raise additional capital following the stress tests. The troubled asset auction program is expected to start within a few weeks. If the administration chooses to do so the largest banks in the country can be nationalized by the end of summer.

There is no additional legislative action required to allow the executive branch to continue on this path. The regulatory framework was reviewed and approved by the judicial branch decades ago. The public at large may not even notice what is happening. Anyone looking for strutting fascists will be disappointed; this revolutionary change will be brought about by clean cut men and women in pinstripes.

Not only can it happen here, it is happening here.

Read the whole thing.

Pravda columnist Stanislav Mishin enjoys the last laugh as the American free enterprise system is eliminated by the Obamessiah’s commissars.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. …

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish. …

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them? …

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

Read the whole thing.

Adam Kirsch, in the New Republic, warns of the rise of another philosophic defender of bad causes, one who has perfected the technique of using a soupçon of wit to disguise the real flavor of the Communism.

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror–especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes–the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values.”

In the same witty book Zizek laments that “this is how the establishment likes its ‘subversive’ theorists: harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise–God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it.” How is it, then, that Slavoj Zizek, who wants not to correct democracy but to destroy it, has been turned into one of the establishment’s pet subversives, who “tries to live” the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities?

A part of the answer has to do with Zizek’s enthusiasm for American popular culture. Despite the best attempts of critical theory to demystify American mass entertainment, to lay bare the political subtext of our movies and pulp fiction and television shows, pop culture remains for most Americans apolitical and anti-political–a frivolous zone of entertainment and distraction. So when the theory-drenched Zizek illustrates his arcane notions with examples from Nip/ Tuck and Titanic, he seems to be signaling a suspension of earnestness. The effect is quite deliberate. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, for instance, he writes that “Jurassic Park is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of the early Antonioni or Bergman.” Elsewhere he asks, “Is Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Gurnemanz?” Those are laugh lines, and they cunningly disarm the anxious or baffled reader with their playfulness. They relieve his reader with an expectation of comic hyperbole, and this expectation is then carried over to Zizek’s political proclamations, which are certainly hyperbolic but not at all comic.

When, in 1994, during the siege of Sarajevo, Zizek wrote that “there is no difference” between life in that city and life in any American or Western European city, that “it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a ‘true’ peace and the residents of Sarajevo”–well, it was only natural for readers to think that he did not really mean it, just as he did not really mean that Jurassic Park is like a Bergman movie. This intellectual promiscuity is the privilege of the licensed jester, of the man whom The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed “the Elvis of cultural theory.”

In person, too, Zizek plays the jester with practiced skill. Every journalist who sits down to interview him comes away with a smile on his face. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek “bearded, disheveled, and loud … like central casting’s pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual.” Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting philosopher order mint tea and sugar cookies: “‘Oh, I can’t drink anything stronger than herbal tea in the afternoon,’ he says meekly. ‘Caffeine makes me too nervous.'” The intellectual parallel is quite clear: in life, as in his writing, Zizek is all bark and no bite. Like a naughty child who flashes an irresistible grin, it is impossible to stay angry at him for long.

I witnessed the same deception a few weeks ago, when Zizek appeared with Bernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library. The two philosopher-celebrities came on stage to the theme music from Superman, and their personae were so perfectly opposed that they did indeed nudge each other into cartoonishness: Lévy was all the more Gallic and debonair next to Zizek, who seemed all the more wild-eyed and Slavic next to Lévy. Thus it was perfectly natural for the audience to erupt in laughter when Zizek, at one point in the generally unacrimonious evening, told Lévy: “Don’t be afraid–when we take over you will not go to the Gulag, just two years of reeducation camp.” Solzhenitsyn had died only a few weeks earlier, but it would have been a kind of betise to identify Zizek’s Gulag with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. When the audience laughed, it was playing into his hands, and hewing to the standard line on Zizek, which Rebecca Mead laid down in a profile of him in The New Yorker a few years ago: “Always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake.”

Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Zizek seriously, surely it would not be a mistake to take him seriously just once. He is, after all, a famous and influential thinker. So it might be worthwhile to consider Zizek’s work as if he means it–to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.

Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While “socialism” remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp. …

The Obama Campaign has several times punished or tried to intimidate critics in the press and even ordinary citizens like Joe the Plumber. Tapscott predicts that you’ll see a lot more of this, and worse, if Obama is elected.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave us another preview this week of how he will deal with critics if he is elected to the White House when he kicked three newspapers that endorsed John McCain off of his press plane. Merely terminating access, however,is likely to look tame compared to what Obama has in store for his critics after he takes the oath of office.

PREDICTION: Within six months of moving into the Oval Office, Obama’s multiple moves to silence critics in the media and elsewhere will lead to Washington, D.C. becoming the Caracas on the Potomac. …

Once he is sworn in, expect Obama to move on multiple fronts to intimidate or silence critics.

When Obama promises “Change,” it’s perfectly obvious that he is using change as a leftist code word for socialism. No one can predict with certainty how far in the direction of authoritarianism Obama’s “change” is intended to go.

Read the whole thing.

From the People’s Cube.

Obama thought it was a darned shame that the Warren Court didn’t address redistribution of wealth to African Americans. “It wasn’t that radical. It never broke free from the essential constraints that were placed in the Constitution by the founding fathers.”

4:17 video

Via Drudge.

Mark R. Levin, at the Corner, warns Americans against a charismatic demagogue who is also a hardened ideologue.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I’ve never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama’s past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media’s role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It’s as if the media use the Obama campaign’s talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn’t hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we’ve read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin’s qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama’s qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama’s appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the “the proletariat,” as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it’s $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he’s now officially “rich.” The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The “hope” Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

For at least three years, Verum Serum reports. Michael Klonsky was there, too.

Why did mortgage lenders start making all those high risk loans? Stanley Kurtz explains that the radical left successfully combined agitation with official federal policy to make them do exactly that.

What exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes – and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

Read the whole thing.

Michelle Malkin defined “Swiftboating” correctly

But democrats still insist on pretending that charges about John Kerry made in the course of the 2004 Presidential Campaign by Naval veterans were either inaccurate or somehow unfair, despite Kerry’s only too manifest failure to refute them.

“Swiftboating” is back in the news as a term of art today used by the Obama campaign to preemptively stigmatize as “unfair” the possibility of Republicans raising questions about Obama’s radical leftwing history and associations.

ABC News reports that one of the leaders of the Machinists’ Union is concerned:

Rick Sloan says he doesn’t want to see the Democrats get “Swift Boated” again this time. So the communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has sent a couple of dozen friends — union leaders and Democratic activists, mainly — an urgent plea to pay attention to Sen. Barack Obama’s connections with the 1960s anti-war group, the Weather Underground, and other leftist thinkers.

Democrats “can’t be an ostrich on this” with their heads buried in the sand, Sloan said in an interview.

He sent a copy of the memo to ABC News by e-mail.

Titled “What Is Rove Up To?,” Sloan writes that Rove will seek to redefine Obama’s signature slogan “Change We Can Believe In” and brand it instead as “revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”

Sloan has cause to be concerned.

Sophisticated commentators on the Right, like myself, are perfectly well aware, that just as “progressive” is a carefully chosen alternative term for “Marxist,” Barack Obama’s campaign mantra “Change” does not necessarily simply constitute a conventional campaign season bromide. “Change” is commonly used in “progressive” circles to mean “the achievement of leftist goals.”

“Change” means a lot more to members of the democrat party’s activist base than a promise to raise taxes or impose new emissions regulations. A promise of Change in the language of the Left may, indeed, imply revolutionary change.

In other words, electing someone like Barack Obama promising Change, can be interpreted as the candidate’s promise that one will not be electing another Jimmy Carter, but rather electing Hugo Chavez.

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Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff hastily responded to the left’s alarms, and are already on the job, preempting away, with a feature exculpatorily subtitled:
Seeing Ghosts: Obama’s ties to Ayers and Auchi are distant, but his foes plan to pounce.

Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won’t let himself be “Swift Boated” like John Kerry in 2004. “He’s not going to sit there and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the missiles are raining in,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come.” The move appears to be an acknowledgment that the Obama campaign may not have moved aggressively enough when questions about Ayers and Rezko first arose, and it comes amid fresh indications that conservative groups are preparing a wave of attack ads over the links.

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week’s debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago’s Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers’s house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. “Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them ‘detestable’,” says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood “but has not seen him for months.”

Obama, of course, didn’t just “attend an event” at Bill Ayers’ house. He launched his state senate campaign at an event held at Bill Ayers’ house. And he didn’t just serve on a non-profit board with Ayres. He served with Ayres on the board of the Woods foundation, where along with Ayres, he is known (so far) to have funneled money to radical Palestinian Rashid Khalidi‘s Arab American Action Network.