Barack Obama will go down in history as The Great Spelunker. No other president has done more caving.

I don't usually run a "what he said" blog, but when one comes across something like this, what more can one say than...what he said.

Boehner has stated publicly that he wants to get spending cuts passed with Republican votes alone. When he was asked by reporters if he would try and put together a coalition with Democrats to pass legislation to keep the government from shutting down, Boehner said, "not very interested".

The BBC also reported that Boehner had said that "Republicans would not be forced into accepting options they did not want to endorse".

Contrast that with the capitulating and spine caving sell out by Barrack Obama to the small Republican minority on the country's most important legislation even though Obama had the biggest congressional majority of any president in 60 years. Contrast that with Obama's scrounging for one Republican vote on the public option when the Democrats didn't need Republican votes at all, and then, not getting it, throwing the policy under the bus along with hundreds of millions of Americans who wanted real healthcare reform. Contrast Boehner refusal to compromise on principles with Obama caving in to Republicans on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 5% of Americans, something Obama publicly stated since 2007 he would never do.

Obamacare was rotten policy -- a sell-out to the insurance industry. It had one major benefit: Getting rid of "pre-existing condition" requirements. One may easily scoff at the inadequacies of that achievement -- unless one has a pre-existing condition.

The right kept portraying Obamacare as socialism, even though it was anything but. It mandated purchases from private insurers, who have no reason to exist.

Now the Republicans will be able to claim that they stopped "socialism" in its tracks, just in the nick of time. Had the program gone into effect, the public might have learned, belatedly, that it was not socialistic at all.

And so myth becomes history.

The health care debate had one virtue: It forced the Republicans to admit that libertarian theology is a sham. They came right out and admitted that private industry could not offer the citizenry a better deal than the (soon-discarded) public option. Why would they say such a thing? Why did they fear competition from the gummint, if the gummint always does everything wrong? Didn't Milton Friedman tell us that private industry is always more efficient?

Gosh -- could it be that the Friedmanites lied?

You think maybe that's why your credit card bills are sent to you via the post office, and not via Federal Express?

It's never too late to show some backbone, but if the Democrats couldn't show it with the biggest congressional majority in 60 years there is not a lot of hope they will show it now. They need new leadership and need a new collection of paid strategists and communicators who know how to frame an argument and a message and have at least some powers of persuasion. The Democrats have always had policy and ideas on their side. Just not enough backbone in leadership and probably the worst collection of political strategists and communicators in history.

As for Obama, he is missing the part of the male anatomy that James Carville pointed to, and had no real convictions, principles or integrity to begin with so there is nothing about Obama that is going to change. He is purely a politician and a gutless one at that with a 13 year political history of standing for nothing and fighting for nothing. Which is why Cornell West, the African American historian at Princeton recently said of Obama, "if you stand for nothing you fall for anything".

If an editor gave those last two paragraphs a mild scrubbing for grammar and punctuation, those words could stand for the next hundred years as an excellent summary of everything that has gone wrong since January, 2009.

What does it say about Obama that nobody -- nobody at all, across the political spectrum -- thinks that he'll stand up to the Republicans?

This presidency is like a revision of Blazing Saddles -- except in this version, Lili von Shtupp doesn't shout "It's twue! It's twue!" Instead, she cries: "Mein gott, vat happen to your Hoden? I neffer see anyzink zo teensy!" Permalink

The government will shut down, and will stay shut down until Obama agrees to end Obamacare.

Perhaps even until he agrees to the complete Paul Ryan plan, including the gutting of Medicare and 25% top tax. The appalling degree of media praise heaped on Ryan tells me that the fix is in.

On the other hand: Perhaps if the Republicans get what they want now -- if they inflict genuine pain, if they measurably worsen the quality of American life, if the people understand that a bad plan bears their signature -- we may have the political basis for the candidacy of a real Democrat in 2012. The Bush years proved that conservative propaganda can triumph over anything -- anything except for the inevitable failure of conservatism in power.

On another topic: I was utterly shocked by the college campus shooting in Alabama. There's a college in Alabama? Permalink

Corrente has run into some $$$ troubles, as bloggers are wont to do from time to time. Lambert was kind enough to put in a good word for me during my "Chalice" fundraising effort (and I will be working on that project again, as soon as life calms down a bit more (I still don't even have Maryland reg tags on the vehicle)) -- so it certainly behooves me to return the favor.

In his case, he seems to have glommed onto a new service called Shop Left. It sounds genuinely interesting, and it may help keep folks alive during the upcoming time of crises. Check it out.

Although I'm sorry to hear that lambert is a Mac kind of guy. Build-yer-own-'puter is the only way to go. Permalink

I suppose I should say something about Obama's re-election bid, but I haven't the heart. Obviously, he deserves no support. I predicted that he would deliver terrible governance, and he has fulfilled the prophecy.

Yet the Republican alternatives are so vile as to be unthinkable.

Is there any hope?

The folks at Hillary is 44 think so. They believe that this situation offers Hillary Clinton a golden opportunity to step back onto the stage and salvage the production. Sorry. She says she's out, and I think she means it.

Her husband convinced her to run in 2008. Judging from this interview, he now seems pessimistic about the future of the Democratic brand. Of course, Bill also predicted that the public would rally in favor of Obamacare -- because he under-estimated the power of Republican propaganda. If the economy turns around, polls indicate that the public will credit the Republicans in congress, not Obama and not the Democrats.

Most troubling of all is this Gallup polling data, published in the Atlantic. Forget all other poll numbers. It ain't about individuals; it's about the weltanschauung.

America is an increasingly conservative nation, by ideology and by political affiliation, according to polling results from the Gallup Organization...

Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America's least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind. The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold on America's states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal.

How do we change a ludicrously misguided national ideology? How do we convince the turkeys to stop voting for Thanksgiving?

Everywhere you travel around the internet -- unless you stick to a few resolutely Democratic blogs -- you'll see examples of hallucinated history taking hold in the popular imagination: Hitler was a left-winger. Joe McCarthy was a hero. Evolution is just a theory. Global warming is a hoax. Over-regulation of the banks caused the crisis of 2008. Obamacare is socialized medicine. Anything that isn't 100% Ayn Rand approved laissez faire constitutes Bolshevism. I swear, I've actually seen teabagger sites resurrect the old Angletonian line that the Sino-Soviet split was a fraud.

We can't win the future. We can't even win the past.

Let me cite one particularly bizarre example of what I'm talking about. Thousands and thousands of sites have published Cleon Skousen's inane "Communist Goals" from 1958. Skousen, you may recall, was the kook who influenced Glenn Beck. The dolts who have plastered this thing all over the internet believe that it is an actual document written by actual commies. This text must be genuine (they argue) because it was published in the Congressional Record in 1963. As though that settles that -- and never mind the fact that all sorts of hogwash has gotten into the Record.

Not only that. The commentary on those websites indicates that many Americans believe that this plan remains in effect. In their imagination, there still exists a Commie Central somewhere in Russia, where the malefactors rub their hands with glee while muttering: "Ah yes, it all goes according to plan. Comrade Obama has done his task well..."

A staggering number of your fellow citizens actually believe this fantasy.

Is there any hope?

Paul Ryan's budget bill would not only kill Medicare and Medicaid, it would lower the top tax rate to 25%. If the rate were increased to what it was under Ronald Reagan, and if the Pentagon experienced modest cuts, we'd have no deficit problem. But you can't get the American people to understand this.

Is there any hope?

I agree with what Dakinkat said yesterday (though not with her belief in the efficacy of protest):

Huge corporations and rich people gobble up tons of public resources via subsidies, tax breaks, and use of infrastructure. Many governors have literally given away their states treasury and resources courting businesses that cost them more than they bring to that state in jobs or revenues. The big lie is that corporations are overtaxed and receive no benefits from state, local or federal government.

Paul Ryan’s budget Anthem is just the latest in a line of assaults on reason and common sense. It is the very definition of pennywise and pound foolish and it’s insulting. It hypes unnecessary tax cuts and increases in pentagon spending while removing funding for public health, public education, and public information programs. It continues the effort to redistribute the incomes and the resources of the country to the very few at the cost of the very many.

That's the truth. Yet many of your fellow citizens think that the real problem is Karl Marx.

Is there any hope? Permalink

As you know, 'baggers in Oklahoma and elsewhere love to spread scare stories about the alleged threat posed by Sharia law, which the evil Muslims have supposedly conspired to foist on America. In Oklahoma, this scarecrow so frightened the citizenry that 70% of them voted for a ballot measure preventing any judge or court from making a decision based on Sharia law.

Yes, that measure (which came afoul of the First Amendment) was pure madness -- and pure theater. It's like passing a law to ban Godzilla, the Hulk or some other imaginary threat.

Nevertheless, Sharia paranoia may have beneficial side-effects. A new law has been proposed.

It bans on "any law, rule, legal code or system" not rooted in the Constitution of Oklahoma or the United States.

Seems to me that this measure could provide protection against Dominionists and other theocrats who want to force Christ into our courts. Now that threat is far less imaginary. Permalink

During the Obamacare battle, we saw easily-bamboozled teabagger seniors who held up signs that read: "Keep government away from Medicare!" The Republicans gave that absurd sentiment tons of publicity. Now, the Republicans have shown their true colors: They want to get rid of Medicare altogether.

First, the Republicans ruined the economy with their wars, their pork, their outsourcing and their Wall Street deregulation. And now they say that we're too broke to pay for Social Security and Medicare.

My prediction: Obama will make "fighting for Medicare" a campaign pledge. Then, if he should get into office again... Permalink

Today, Riverdaughter (after a too-long absence) posted a piece about the state of research science in the United States today:

Meanwhile, the applied scientists will become commodities who do tedious, boring stuff because they’ll all be forced to work for contracting companies that specialize in doing one thing and one thing only. No more collaboration, no more crowdsourcing. Just a bunch of bitter researchers who wonder for the 82nd time if this is the payment they can expect for studying P-chem, three years of calculus and molecular biology. I hear this is how they do things in India where CROs hire PhDs in synthetic chemistry to do the hands on stuff in the lab that used to be relegated to the BS chemists here. That’s what we are looking forward to in the US. The academic scientists will look like complete suckers and the applied scientists who spent most of their adult years studying for challenging careers now reduced to technicians.

Yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts. I give it less than a decade before future scientists all over the world become plumbers, electricians and morticians.

Back in the '60s, it was understood that a massive investment in science and "pure" research was fundamental to the future of America. Today, that investment stinks too much of socialism. As a result, this country soon shall be no longer a first-world nation.

The people running the show seem fine with that. Moreover, they have used all of the propaganda apparat at their disposal to convince Americans to root for their own undoing. The turkeys keep voting for Thanksgiving.

A couple of quotes from Matt Taibi's Griftopia deserve your attention:

The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachmann has a few dumb ideas doesn't mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that this belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders. Getting ordinary Americans to emotionally identify in this way with the political wishes of their bankers and credit card lenders and mortgagers is no small feat, but it happens—with a little help.

The same giant military-industrial complex that once dotted the horizon of the American states with smokestacks and telephone poles as far as the eye could see has now been expertly and painstakingly refitted for a monstrous new mission: sucking up whatever savings remains in the pockets of the actual people still living between the coasts, the little hidden nest eggs of the men and women who built the country and fought its wars, plus whatever pennies and nickels their aimless and doomed Gen-X offspring might have managed to accumulate in preparation for the gleaming future implicitly promised them, but already abandoned and rejected as unfeasible in reality by the people who run this country.

Which leaves us with these questions:

1. Has there indeed been a conscious decision by the owners of America to strip the property of all its remaining assets and then move elsewhere?

2. Where would they go? (Probably Switzerland or Monaco or some other place most teabaggers would consider "socialist" hell-holes.)

3. What happens to America the day after it all goes to hell? The situation would be revolutionary. But, as I've said many times, after decades of propaganda demonizing any and all New Deal solutions (and a new New Deal is the only thing that can save us), the only revolution likely to succeed in this country is a fascist revolution.

Which brings us to...

Conspiracy theory. I've argued elsewhere, on numerous occasions, that conspiracy paranoia is ruining this country. That paranoia is the gasoline that fuels the teabaggers' propaganda engines.

Matt Taibbi has also decried that phenomenon. His previous book, The Great Derangement, has a lot of fun at the expense of the conspira-loons, especially the Jesusmaniacs and the "controlled demolition" cranks.

On this humble blog, I recently had it out with an especially obnoxious variety of 9/11 conspiracy kook. I speak here of the "no planes, no victims" sub-subculture, a form of insanity previously unfamiliar to me. These wackos actually believe that no jets hit the twin towers, that all the video evidence was doctored, that all the witnesses were actors, and all the "victims" were never killed because the whole event was a massive insurance scam. The next logical step, I suppose, would be to argue that the twin towers are, in fact, still standing. (These toons are so alienated and so socially maladroit that they can't even comprehend how nutty their theory sounds to normal people.)

Conspiracy-crazed clowns are ruining this nation.

And yet...and yet...

In the passages quoted above, Taibbi decries the "military-industrial complex" in a fashion that would get a thumbs-up from any first-generation JFK assassination researcher. It's impossible to interpret those paragraphs from Griftopia in any way that would allow Taibbi to escape the "conspiracy theorist" label.

We've been trained, I think, to frame the issue incorrectly: "Conspiracy" versus "no conspiracy." Wrong.

As I've said on previous occasions, it's really a question of left-wing conspiracy research versus right-wing conspiracy lunacy. Sorry, but after a couple of decades of trying to figure this shit out, I've found that the political test is the only one that works. (And even that test doesn't always work.)

With guys like Alex Jones, the final equations always come down to this: New Deal = socialism, socialism = evil; Ayn Rand = salvation. That's why the right-wing conspiracy loons are so dangerous. Jones pretends to hate the Bush clan, but his world-view differs little from Dubya's.

In the end, the "radical" right-wing conspiracists -- the 9/11 clowns, the birthers, the Illuminati-spotters, the teabaggers, the George Noory aficionados, the kooks who study dollar bills for secret messages -- always end up doing the work of America's owners. They consider themselves outsiders. Radicals. Rebels. Yet they are nothing more than toadies for what George Carlin called the "big club," the club that neither you nor I will ever be allowed to join.

I oppose most of the popular conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, I think that a conspiracy (of sorts) does exist. It controls both the mainstream news and the samizdat. It controls the Republican party, far too much of the Democratic party, and those haughty pseudo-hipsters who claim that they've transcended conventional politics because both parties are full of shit.

Do you think you've found a radically different path? Don't fool yourself. All of the alternate routes still head in the same direction. The main highways, the side streets, the back alleys, the lonely country lanes, the fire roads, the scary shortcuts and the disused dirt trails all take you to a dark and hellish place called Ayn-ville.

The end of the road is the end of America. Permalink

There's a recurrent meme pushed by the various tea party sites which holds that Barack Obama, during his time at Occidental College, had joined something called the Marxist Student Association. (For example, see here.)

This allegation didn't jibe with me -- for one thing, I doubted that there was an organization by that name at Oxy at that time. There certainly was no such group (to my knowledge) at UCLA, which I attended during roughly the same period.

This piece in the American Thinker claims that Obama had actually joined something called the Democratic Student Socialist Alliance. Actually, I vaguely recall a group with a similar name at UCLA (which also sported a Spartacus Youth League and the ever-popular Revolutionary Communist Party, run by Chairman Bob).

So I decided to make polite inquiries. And by "polite," I mean I wrote to a few teabagger-friendly blogs demanding that someone back up the bullshit. My inquiries had lots of capital letters. Lots of exclamation points. Lots of four-letter words. Hey, it's me.

Well, one thing led to another, and eventually I was put in touch with someone I will here call only Diana V., who makes two startling claims: 1. There really was an inner core group that called itself the Marxist Student Association, and 2. Barack Obama (with whom she would occasionally "have a sandwich," as they say on How I Met Your Mother) was a leading member of that organization.

To repeat: Don't that beat all.

Not only that. She could prove what she had to say. She still had in her files, after all these years, a document that Obama wrote to other student Marxists.

I present the document here, as is. Obviously, I can make no claims regarding authenticity, since I do not possess the originals. These rather small scans are all we have to go on right now. In this post, we'll present the first and second pages in the original, plus a transcription of the entire letter. (Boy, was that a tedious job! That's the trouble with documents from 1981: You can't cut and paste.)

So, caveat lector and make of this what you will. I daresay that there is a pretty good argument to be made in favor of its authenticity. Diana V. doesn't seem like a nutjob -- but then again, I've "met" her only through email.

The words below the asterisks are (putatively) Obama's. I'll return at the end.


Rules for revolution: Revisions in light of current events

Marxist Student Association
Occidental College
February 26, 1981


Dear brothers and sisters in struggle,

The document popularly (and mistakenly) titled Rules for Revolution was issued to selected officers during early years of the Bolshevik movement. These directives were inadvertently made available to a wide and psychologically unprepared public in 1919, when an early and imperfect copy was made available to Edgar Sisson. Soon thereafter, the document fell into the hands of counterrevolutionary sources in the United States, who promulgated the false story that the text was acquired from a fallen soldier during the first World War. The original author is presumed to be Alexander Gumberg, an agent stationed in Sweden.

It is useful to review these directives at this historical stage, especially given recent events, both tragic and inspiring, in Central America, as well as the continuing revolutionary struggles in South Africa and Afghanistan. We shall examine the degree to which these rules have met with success, and to what degree they require reformulation in order to best serve the class struggle in the present epoch.


Rule 1. Corrupt the young: get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.

To a large degree, this has been accomplished. We have inculcated the young with the idea that no philosophical, intellectual or spiritual goal could possibly be of greater importance than an idealized and ultimately unrealizable sexual experience. The stultifying superficiality of American culture should be evident from even the most cursory survey of popular television programming.


Rule 2. Get control of all means of publicity. Get peoples’ minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books, plays and other trivialities.

In essence, this rule is an outgrowth of the first. The hypersexualization of American society became possible only after infiltration and control of the major media was established. Given the declining interest in theater, reference should be made to film and television in future versions of this document. The advent of such pastimes as Pac-Man and Space Invaders, with their well-understood narcotizing effects, should exponentially increase the trivialization of western youth culture, with a corresponding decrease in national I.Q. The ubiquity of pornography has, as predicted, led to an unprecedented culture-wide antipathy for socio-religious norms and reactionary forms of nationalism.


Rule 3. Divide people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.

This directive has proven to be a double-edged sword. Divisions have indeed occurred. But the greatest divisions now seem to be manifesting on the proto-revolutionary American left, where class consciousness has been overwhelmed by the politics of identity based on race, gender and sexual preference. At this time, these divisions can be made to serve our interest, since they alienate many segments of the youth population from the recently installed ultra-reactionary administration of Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless, at the correct historical moment, leadership within the movement should call for unity, not division, and should emphasize the paramount importance of income redistribution over individualized goals.


Rule 4. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.

At this time, Ronald Reagan is not just the elected leader but the self-appointed moral exemplar for the United States. It is imperative that our agents work tirelessly to diminish his stature. To a large degree, this is already being accomplished: Even at this early stage of his presidency, editorial cartoonists and television commentators routinely emphasize Reagan’s age, unimpressive film career and presumed intellectual inferiority. We must continually focus public attention on the rise in unemployment (currently more than 8 percent); conversely, we should do everything in our power to keep the unemployment figures high by arguing against promising free market solutions, which can, at best, offer only a temporary fix. It must be admitted that Reagan’s cross-generational appeal is genuine, and that his ability to manipulate his own image is, in certain respects, worthy of emulation.


Rule 5. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

At present, this injunction is unworkable, and revision is strongly urged. Traditional revolution from without constitutes, in the American context, a romanticized form of quasi-military action which is doomed to failure due to the insufficiently developed revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. It is therefore imperative to adopt the stratagems of synarchy, albeit suitably modified for our overall purposes. We must henceforward devote our energies to the tactic of burrowing within the electoral system, thereby to inject one of our movement leaders (under deep cover) into the strongholds of power. It is not inconceivable that we could, once again, have a figure sympathetic to a Marxist analysis of history in a position to subvert the American presidency itself. On that previous occasion, an unforeseen outbreak of individualistic deviationism resulted in a loss of control, necessitating the implementation of an emergency solution. Of course, a deep cover leader sympathetic to the proletarian cause could only manifest his true revolutionary potential after re-election; therefore, it is of paramount importance for such an agent to maintain a veneer of friendliness to monopolistic capital during his first administration.


Rule 6. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit; produce fear of inflation, rising prices and general discontent.

To a partial extent, this has been accomplished through the establishment of such programs as Social Security, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency and other governmental organizations designed to minimize what Gumberg has called the ruggedness of the citizenry. National debt, however, remains at a level considered manageable within the capitalistic system. It is thought that an increase in the Soviet military posture throughout the world, especially in Afghanistan, Africa and Central America, could force a corresponding increase in American defense spending. This, in turn, would result in increased government debt which must be met either by burdensome taxation or an inflationary increase in the money supply.


Rule 7. Foment strikes in vital industries; encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward these disorders.

It is felt that, in order to re-assert union dominance (and thereby promote a corresponding rise in proletarian consciousness), an excellent first step would be the initiation of a strike of the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association/American Teachers’ Association, and/or the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association.


Rule 8. By special argument cause a breakdown of the old moral virtues; honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.

This has been largely accomplished throughout American society. The preceding decade has properly been called the Me Decade, due to the replacement of so-called conventional morality with a new paradigm based on solipsism and self-absorption. The pro-Marxist intellectual class has, through the use of casuistry and an appeal to narrow self-interest, promoted situational ethics and secular humanism as the new sine qua non. Virtue itself is now seen as a transient and dangerously amorphous concept. The prevalence of relatively inexpensive narcotics (cocaine, marijuana, etc.) and the widely advertised growth of Eastern forms of religious expression has immeasurably aided the culture-wide tendency toward narcissism. The call to revolution must therefore be couched in terms of narrow self-interest, at least until the inculcation of proletarian class consciousness. (See below.)


Rule 9. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext with a view of confiscation of them and leaving the population helpless.

At present, this goal seems impossibly distant and unrealizable. However, a catastrophic event (assassination, a mass public shooting spree or some similar act of terror) could lead to the enactment of laws designed to impede access to firearms.


Conclusion: The precepts outlined in this early revolutionary document are in some respects adaptable to the current political environment. In other respects, revision is necessary. The following proposed additional precepts are worthy of consideration:

Proposal 1. Increased demonization of any academic, intellectual or public opinion shaper who casts doubt on the Sino-Soviet split.

Proposal 2. Abandon a traditional revolutionary strategy within the United States, replacing it with a synarchic strategy of overthrow from within, via election. Although the Democratic party represents the natural vehicle for overthrow, it is not the only possibility.

Proposal 3. Increase the perception of a culture of scandal and corruption in Washington. It works to our benefit if corruption is seen as a bipartisan problem. Alienation from the political leadership increases the workers’ frustration with the false sense democracy provided by the capitalist-controlled electoral system.

Proposal 4. Alienate the American worker from the corporate leadership, and thus from capitalism itself. In films and television programming, the capitalist should always be portrayed as callous and murderous.

Proposal 5. Subtly increase public tolerance for socialism by providing economic aid to ailing American industries. In this way, the capitalists themselves will be trained to demand socialist protectionism.

Proposal 6. Alienate the proletariat from traditional forms of Judeo-Christian worship. Promote such non-traditional concepts as the depersonalization of God and the transcendental nature of the Self. Our cultural opinion-shapers should emphasize polytheism, pantheism, nature-worship (environmentalism) and perhaps even what we may term neo-gnosticism. Each of these modalities can be made to serve the overall goal of non-individuation, which in turn should increase public acceptance of collective solutions to quotidian problems.

Additional proposals from other committee members are welcome. Greetings in solidarity with all the brothers and sisters engaged in our international crusade for economic justice and proletarian freedom.

Yours in struggle,

Barack H. Obama


* * *

Cannon here again. Obviously, I would counsel the readers to be very cautious in accepting this document at face value. Of course, it has often been said that a man who isn't a Marxist at the age of 20 has no heart, and a man who isn't an anti-Marxist at age 40 has no head. Or something like that. The point is, young people do go in for the extremes, and they often espouse positions that look silly in later years.

(For example, I kind of liked Heaven's Gate on first viewing. Go figure.)

The references to "synarchy" puzzled me. I wrote to Diana V. about Obama's use of this phrase. Her reply was, to say the least, quite startling.

Synarchy refers to rule by an interior elite. It is a system which by definition transcends normal categories of left and right. It is also a system that cannot translate into a mass movement. Instead, synarchists use infiltration as their modus operandi.

Barry often told me that this was the methodology espoused by his father. I asked him what he meant by this, since I was under the impression that his father was some sort of minor official in Kenya. Barry explained that Barack Obama Sr. was not his true father, even though he had been led to so believe from childhood until about the age of 16. He showed me pictures of his mother Ann and Barack Obama Sr and I had to admit that Barry, the man puffing away on a Winston not five feet away from me, resembled neither one.

His true father, he said, was a former high official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration named Alger Hiss. He asked if I had heard the name and I said of course, everyone had, he was the guy railroaded by Nixon, and that's when Barry smiled that enigmatic smile of his. He went on to explain that when his father had divorced his wife in the late 1950s, he had an affair with a black woman named Grace Ford, supposedly the estranged daughter of Wallace Ford. When the child was born out of wedlock, Alger was mortified since at the time he was trying to re-establish his good name and he even had dreams of returning to government work. In 1961, having an illegitimate child with a black woman would not have endeared him to Middle America.

He still had contacts in the State Department who were able to locate a suitable couple to raise the child. "All the documents and such were taken care of," Barry told me, and I think those were he exact words. He says that he went through the rest of his life with a guardian angel, only it wasn't revealed to him until the age of 16.

Can I confirm any of this? No. But it seems worthy of further research. Permalink