Along with being both timely and timeless, the critical importance of Mark Levin’s latest, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, rests in its unique ability to empower and inform the Conservative, or activist, political junkie, and average citizen with a genuine interest in contemporary American politics.

Timely because it cuts to the heart of the political struggle playing out in 2012, timeless in that it’s a concise yet thorough primer addressing the two core philosophies that drive all American politics, the depth of understanding of both Liberalism and Conservatism and the critical struggle between them it provides represents a wealth of information and insight to empower the Conservative and political activist of today.

From government in general, to the particulars of the American experiment embodied in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Levin extensively quotes unique and important thinkers, such as Plato, More, Hobbes and Marx on behalf of the utopianist view; with thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville and others representing the individualist, or Conservative view as we know it today.

Interspersed with extensive, insightful commentary by Levin himself, one comes to understand the bedrock, theory and practice of two very different political ideologies and how they apply to contemporary American politics playing out on a day-to-day basis, as well as in every election year.

Broadly at issue is, how will man structure himself, so as to function within a society. The utopianist would hold that said society must be structured from the top down, with rules, roles, regulations and laws all purportedly designed for the common good being issued from on high. The individualist, free-thinking, or conservative view would hold that, at the core of all civil society rests the individual, with his natural rights and inclinations, both good and bad, the ideal society being represented by a governmental authority that manifests the least amount of control possible, so as to empower the freedom, happiness and productivity of the individual.

By tracing the development of these two critical schools of thinking from their earliest beginnings, in theory, practice and thought, following them right up to today, one comes to understand American society as existing within a polarity between the two competing schools, with every political decision, be it a vote, or government mandate, as impacting precisely where within said polarity an American must live out his, or her life every day.

(more…)

In the year since the Tea Party arrived in Congress, the movement has managed to change the debate on Capitol Hill, but not the way Washington works.

The Tea Party has stopped President Barack Obama and the Democrats from bailing out profligate state governments, from passing new so-called “stimulus” spending, and from raising tax rates. It has even begun to win bipartisan support for major entitlement reform.

However, the Tea Party has failed thus far to stop the overall growth in the size and cost of government. It passed over a dozen bills that would accelerate economic growth and create new jobs, only to see those bills languish in Harry Reid’s Senate.

In both the debt ceiling and the payroll tax debates, the Tea Party saw its sensible bills rejected in favor of absurd compromises–then found itself being blamed for congressional gridlock.

The key to the Tea Party’s fortunes has been its relationship with the very establishment it dislikes. Where it has found common ground–for example, with House budget chair Paul Ryan–it has been able to promote its agenda of limited government. But when the Tea Party has clashed with Republican leaders–starting with key Senate races in 2010–Democrats have won by dividing conservatives from moderates, House from Senate. (more…)

In a video shot at #Occupy Chicago, Aisha Karim, a professor from Saint Xavier University, is shown preaching the gospel of Karl Marx to a cheering crowd in a display of stunning economic and historical ignorance – but was her speech part of a wider effort to unionize St. Xavier?

The video titled Communist Manifesto Teach-In @ Occupy Chi showing a speech by Professor Aisha Karim has flown under the radar for a couple of months – it had fewer than 400 views when I found it – but it’s another clear example of the explicitly Marxist strain in the #Occupy movement, how it relates directly to unionization, and how just plain silly its ivory tower thinking actually is.

Professor Karim is molding the minds of American’s young adults through her work as a teacher at places like the University of North Carolina, Greensboro where parents have spent their hard earned money so their kids can sit through classes like English 209: The Terrible Logic of Capitalism: A Survey of Postcolonial Literature.

Currently, Professor Karim teaches at Saint Xavier University, Chicago’s oldest college. In this video of her teach-in, she begins by asking the Occupy Chicago crowd whether it’s time to reconsider whether Marx, socialism and communism aren’t actually pretty awesome after all (1:33 to 2:00):

And what we want to do at point is to wonder (unintelligible) if we are still skeptics about socialism or communism, we need to wonder if Marx was also right about socialism and the necessity for capitalism to turn into something completely different.

(Whoops and applause from audience)

Professor Karim then goes on to discuss Marx’s central concept of the exploitation of labor, and she makes an revealing choice for her example of an exploited worker: Professor Karim herself (2:30):

I’m going to take my example of what I do and how my labor is actually taken away from me–the fruits of my labor is taken away from me–but it is not just me. This is representative of every single person in this world who works for wages in this world right now.

(Audience member – “That’s right.”)

Professor Karim goes on to disclose her shocking plight:

(more…)

The good news: the hippies and freaks in Zuccotti Park were finally swept away by law enforcement a few weeks ago. The bad news: they simply took their protests to other places—homeless shelters, other public parks, bridges, and now retailers. That’s right, the clean upstanding citizens who are proudly associated with the #OccupyWallStreet movement are now occupying Abercrombie and Fitch, AT&T, Verizon, Wal-Mart, The Home Depot, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and a handful of other businesses.

Why are they doing this? By their own admission their goal is to occupy publicly owned companies and “hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits.”

What these little Marxists don’t understand is that a “publicly owned” company is a publicly traded one. Which means stocks of said company are owned by average, run of the mill moms and pops across the U.S. (either as individual stocks or in a mutual fund or in a 401K, etc.). So what these Obama-ites are really doing is not hurting Wal-Mart or AT&T as much as hurting the very hardworking Americans #OccupyWallStreet claims to represent.

But there’s a bigger problem.

Throughout this filthy, lice-ridden parade of human waste known as #OccupyWallStreet, the protesters have taken for granted First Amendment protections to act the fool and get away with it. However, the First Amendment in no way protects the kinds of things the occupiers are doing.

(more…)

When Barack Obama was seeking the Democrat nomination in early 2008, warnings of his inexperience coupled with the fact that he was an ideologue were ubiquitous. Again and again, the facts were placed before us that Obama’s only claim to significant leadership was as a community organizer in Chicago. Mark Levin, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others repeatedly said that Obama would be a reckless President who lacked governing knowledge and who was ruled only by his desire to put America in its place.

And here we are. It’s late 2011, and the Organizer-in-Chief has proven that his only strength lies in his ability to organize those who hate America—hating both the economic system embedded in her and the ideals on which she stands.

To put it bluntly, “Occupy Wall Street” is Obama’s America. He has organized it, perhaps indirectly, but has done so nonetheless via his relentless venom for “the rich” coupled with his ongoing calls for more people to sacrifice and to “pay their fair share.” Of course, he doesn’t mean the hippies and freaks in the protests should pay their share. Rather, he is fostering a feeling of betrayal in them so they will continue to “rage against the machine.”

Look at it, folks–Obama’s America. Ain’t it great? It’s a place where law is disparaged (you can defecate on police cars), capitalism is hated (“eat the rich”), and people are entitled to take money from others even if the takers played no role in earning the money they crave (especially if they played no role in earning it).

(more…)

I occasionally broker commercial loans between finance companies and small businesses.  It gives me a lot of pride when I bring together an American entrepreneur who is ready to risk all his assets on his own business, with a finance company that sees a way to help that businessman and make a profit himself.

For the past month, I’ve been working with a financier to bring funding to 30 entrepreneurs, eager and ready to start up their businesses.  Yesterday I had the most dis-spiriting conversation of my professional career with my financier, whom I’ll call “Joe”.

Joe has a credit line with a Gigantic American Bank.  The Federal Reserve has slapped the Bank, and all other banks big and small, with new regulations regarding how they loan their money, who they loan it to, and issued a mountain of compliance rules.  The Bank cannot rely on their internal compliance auditors any longer, either.  They must use independent auditors.

The Bank, in order to remain in compliance, must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever they loan money to, including Joe, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.  Joe must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever he loans money to, including these entrepreneurs, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.

The cost of all these regulations and compliance audits, at the entrepreneur level alone, is $30,000.   It costs a heck of a lot more as you move up the chain.

The entrepreneurs cannot afford this.

As a result, the entrepreneurs’ dreams of starting their own businesses die on the vine.  They now must go back into the depressed job market to (not) find a job.

(more…)

In light of today’s worldwide anti-capitalist rumbling and renewed feverish interest in leftist redistributive systems, one wonders– just how old is the collectivist idea?

I’ve been reading “Who Murdered Chaucer?” by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame).  It’s a wonderfully detailed, realistic, careful expansion of available data on a historical period, and yet because of the author’s lifelong passion for his topic it’s anything but DULL.  Jones has literally rewritten the history of the late 14th century English court of King Richard II, a time presumed fully known by historians for going on six hundred years.

While exploring how Richard was influenced by the thinkers of his age (including Chaucer), Mr. Jones chanced upon the writings of Philippe de Mezieres, a French clergyman, a proponent of the Crusades, an author and thinker who in his later years presented the young Richard with a book.  As an advocate of Christian crusader war, de Mezieres was an unlikely source of proto-communist thinking; nevertheless it is there, as Jones describes it:

“(de Mezieres) Proposed the abolition of all personal property, on the grounds that the King serves as the ‘father’ to the people and has complete responsibility for their welfare.”

Of course, without the context that the future Republican age would provide, de Mezieres is understandably unable to imagine a working government without a king, and so he weaves one into the fictional utopia he invented to educate the young English monarch.  There in the “Delectable Garden”, as de Mezieres himself puts it:

“All fruits were held in common by the inhabitants, to each according to his need, and the words ‘my own’ were never heard.  These people lived so happily together, they never seemed to grow old.  All tyranny and harsh rule was banished from the Garden, though there was a king, who stood for authority and the common good, and he was so loved and looked up to that he might have been the father of each and all.  And no wonder, for he had such concern for the welfare of his subjects, dwellers in the Garden, that neither he nor his children owned anything in person.”

Given what we know of prideful and competitive human nature, this is of course wishful thinking.  But did you see it?  “To each according to his need.”  Karl Marx would famously expand upon that phrase five centuries later with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”  It is of course highly doubtful that Marx read de Mezieres, who did not remain known after his time.

(more…)

In June we attended the Printer’s Row Literature Festival in Chicago. City blocks were closed off for tents and booths full of all types of literature. We presented a board with a selection of well known book covers and asked visitors of the event if they could choose to ban any of the books on the board, which if any, they would in fact ban. They were allowed to choose any three of the eleven choices.

The authors of the books we offered to ban were Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Ayn Rand, Michael Savage, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Participants overwhelming chose Sarah Palin who received 53 votes putting her at 36% overall, Glenn Beck at 23% and Ann Coulter at 22%.

(more…)

Rarely do I subject myself to liberal editorials, but occasionally I glance at Alan Binder’s column since he is one of the few liberals to grace the venerable opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.  The Princeton professor is the quintessential, arrogant, ruling class elite, with a venomous dislike of all things private and a blind love of all things public. Binder’s never met a redistribution program he did not endorse, nor a spending cut he did not mock.

Binder’s latest hit piece attacks the GOP for wanting to reduce government spending. In particular, he argues that the evil GOP perpetuates a false notion that government overspending is bad for jobs. First of all, Binder makes the laughably unprovable assumption that the Obama “stimulus” created “1.3 million net new jobs”.  Even if we take the professor at his word (I know that’s a stretch but bear with me), these 1.3 million fantasy jobs come at a cost of $600 billion (his figure). THAT’S $460K PER JOB. And what types of jobs did the “stimulus” net us? Brain Surgeons? Captains of industry? Think municipal workers or SEIU jobs where they get paid to protest against the GOP Governors we elect. Sounds like a good ROI to me, professor.

Binder makes no distinction between public and private sector jobs, as if the Federal Government could solve our economic ills merely by employing 20 million Americans to dig holes in their backyards and refill them. Does the professor really believe that government jobs are on par with value creating private sector jobs?  In fact, the entire notion of value creation seems missing from Binder’s repertoire. Value—or wealth—is created when production and trade take place voluntarily so both parties gain.

(more…)

When Congress created Labor Day in the late 1800s, it was to placate an increasingly hostile labor movement.  At a time when American workers needed protection from heavy-handed industrial bosses, labor unions made sense.

But with the growing effort by Big Labor to unionize public employees, it’s left its mission of worker protection from dangerous conditions and now has increasingly become a leech on the taxpayers.  Public employees hardly need protection from their employer, the government.

If there’s any segment of society that needs protection from the government it’s taxpayers, not their employees.

Big Labor’s legacy today is that of creating pension systems that are continuing to plunge deeper into the red.  Some reports indicate the collective debt, just of school employee pensions, is around $1 trillion.

Public employee unions have also created scenarios where the health benefits of their members now cost school districts nearly $24,000 in places like Milwaukee.

And they’ve instituted schemes where teachers receive raises for not dying over the summer.  With negotiated “step raises,” increases are based on years of service, not value added to the “company.”

Big Labor is bankrupting government – and we should continue honoring that?

(more…)

The power to make money, and the ability to receive a reward for assuming risk, have been cornerstones of America’s economic success.  A free-enterprise system made the U.S. the world’s only remaining superpower.

Sadly, all of the above are foreign concepts to the government-run public education system.  Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teachers Union, recently fired this shot across the administrators’ bow:

I’m giving notice to [Chicago Public Schools’ CEO] Ron Huberman and the board: you’ve met your match.  We will no longer be played.

…

We’re going to put business in its place: out of our schools.  These corporate heads and politicians seem willing to trade off our childrens’ and educators’ futures to pad their bottom line.

Her speech goes on with one-liners that would make Mao Tse-Tung (and Karl Marx) blush.  Anita Dunn, call your office!  This is the type of person we should expect to teach students an appreciation of what’s made America great?  Perhaps Ms. Lewis would fit better in the Havana Education Association than any teacher group in America.

The National Education Association recently considered a New Business Item at its annual convention which called for bouncing Education Secretary (and former CPS CEO) Arne Duncan and replace him with “a person who is aligned with the interests of the NEA, its members, and especially the students it serves.”  The reason?

The D.O.E. must be led by someone who sees all students as deserving of an excellent public school and the federal funding it requires, not just those in states that can win resources by best adopting  Sect. Duncan’s competitive philosophy.

Leaving aside my quibbles with the reform competition known as “Race to the Top,”  what has made it successful is the fact that states have had to one-up each other in terms of legislating reforms to in order to compete for the money.  I can see why that wouldn’t fly in the public schools of say, Cuba.  But apparently it’s just as unwelcome in the union halls of Chicago and elsewhere in America.

(more…)

SEIU heavy Andy Stern has often been quoted saying, “Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

According to the latest LM-2 financial report filed with the federal Department of Labor, Stern’s 2009 compensation totaled $306,388.  By comparison, the “Executive Secretary to the President,” Doris Butler, received a paltry $48,666.

Another strong proponent of Marxist principles – in fact, the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America – SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina took home a cool $242,286.  Fellow frequent White House visitor and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger? $252,724.

Perhaps SEIU’s new motto should be: “Socialism For Thee, Not Me.”

(more…)

Today, in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first published The Communist Manifesto. Sigh.

How resilient is the ghost of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who ably assisted the Castro brothers’ sadly successful mission to turn Cuba into an island hellhole? His legend survives even a lackluster, long-winded biopic released in 2008 and now just out on DVD.

More important, Che’s legend survives the facts of his own life. Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.

By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world. Despite Che’s pronounced contempt for rock music, Carlos Santana wore a Che T-shirt during a performance at the 2005 Academy Awards ceremony. Other invocations of the Che image, such as the image above from a greeting card line that features a dog as Che, suggest unconscious (or at least unknowing) parody.

(more…)

On Feb. 13, 1985, I stood in the Theaterplatz in Dresden listening to Erich Honecker give a speech.  The speech was not simply one of those standard commie stemwinders to which those of us reporting from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were accustomed.  For one thing, we were gathered outside the newly restored Semper Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper in 1841, rebuilt after a fire in 1869 and long considered one of the glories of 19^th-century musical architecture.  For another, it was bitterly cold, at least twenty below zero on the Fahrenheit scale if not colder.  For a third, all Honecker wanted to talk about – at great length – was the U.S. missile defense system, then under consideration by the Reagan Administration.

This was odd, because the occasion we – and by ‘we” I mean the western press, opera dignitaries, the local nomenklatura (party bigwigs and apparatchiks), the East German Stasi officers assigned to shadow us, and their KGB bosses – were there to witness was the celebratory re-opening of the great opera house, destroyed for the second time on the night of Feb. 12-13, 1945 “by Anglo-American bombers,” as the commemorative poster helpfully reminded us.  (I have my copy, suitably framed, on the wall of my home.)  If memory serves, Honecker, however, had very little to say about Semper or the opera house or the work we were about to hear, Weber’s Der Freischütz, which had been playing the night the city was incinerated.  Instead, the little party boss – I had run into him in the Bellevue Hotel across the river, where the westerners were staying, and was pleased to see that he was as unimpressive in person as he was on television – went on a prolonged rant about die Sternkriege, the so-called “Star Wars” program that even then was setting off protests among the “peace demonstrators” in western Europe, England and, of course, at home as well.

As we stood there, shivering and bored, my colleague and friend, John Rockwell of The New York Times (who, like me, spoke fluent German) leaned over and said: “Personally, I think Star Wars is bullshit, but it really has these guys scared.”  John was right: Star Wars pretty much was bullshit, especially at the time, but it nonetheless terrified the technologically backward Soviets and their satellite marionettes, and it set off the inexorable forces (as Marxists like to say) that just four years later would bring down the Berlin Wall.  Reagan was playing poker with a lot of chips but lousy cards, raising the rear ends off the morally, culturally and fiscally bankrupt Soviets.

(more…)