Funny Jews!

AJC

http://www.ajc.com/news/legislature-considers-new-mortgage-281590.html

Gotta love the AJC ..And old hippe Carrie Teegargin.

This is just another gem from last Sunday's trainwreck. I recently cancelled my day sub and now only receive the Sunday edition. It's all I can take.


This story is full of douchebags: the writer, and the people she writes about.

First, take the opener:

"In his years as a mortgage broker, Bill Enfinger didn’t consider it his job to assure a home loan made sense. The banks decided who qualified and who didn’t. He simply brought borrower and lender together.

In fact, Enfinger marveled at the deals banks approved for some of his clients during the heyday of subprime lending. “I knew it was risky,” he said.

With the results of foolish lending apparent in Georgia’s foreclosure rate and tumbling property values, the Georgia General Assembly will debate whether to require brokers and bankers to carefully evaluate whether a loan is likely to get repaid and whether it’s a good deal for the borrower."

First, these whores have about as much chance of getting this done as I have becoming a jockey. But that is not the point: first we have a broker that knowingly opened loans he knew would not be honored, even though he got his $$$ off the top. Then, it's banks that did not do the proper underwriting. When I bought my first house in East Atlanta in 1997-98 I was required to provide ALL our statements and paychecks, and I had to pay 2 years PMI because I did not have 20% down. But, sometime in the new millennium, all those rules went away!

Enter the 'victim', one Johnnie M Perkins..Here's what the AJC says about this poor unfortunate 'have not':

"In 2007, Perkins refinanced the mortgage on the split-level DeKalb County house she bought in 1994. A former nursing assistant, Perkins is 63 and has been disabled since suffering a back injury in a 1992 car accident. She lives on her Social Security disability check.

She looked into a refinance loan because she was desperate to pay off thousands of dollars in credit card debt. She called a broker in Bill Enfinger’s Columbus-based company for help.

Enfinger said Perkins’ debts kept her from qualifying for a traditional prime loan. But Enfinger said lenders in 2007 permitted loans without income documentation if a borrower had decent credit and some equity in the house. “They were called liar loans, basically,” he said.

That’s what Perkins ended up with. Even though Perkins said she provided her income information, her application showed no income whatsoever.

At the time, her monthly gross income was $1,168. Her new payment, including taxes and insurance: $971.50.

Perkins said she was told the payment would be $767 and would wipe out her other debts. That would have put her in a better financial position. She said she found out right before the closing that the actual payment, including escrow charges she didn’t expect, would be more than $200 higher and still wouldn’t pay off all her credit cards. She said she also did not realize the company did not report her income on the application.

“I was just desperate to get out of credit card debt,” she said. She reluctantly signed the papers, a decision she now regrets.

The loan, made by now defunct NetBank, has actually become a much bigger threat to Perkins’ financial stability than the credit card bills ever were.

Perkins’ loan clearly would have failed the sort of affordability test required by the proposed legislation.

Because the mortgage payment eats so much of her income, she’s resorted to credit cards again to cover living expenses. “It was just a bad, bad business deal I made, thinking I was doing something to set myself free,” Perkins said.

Jennifer Staack, an Atlanta Legal Aid attorney trying to help Perkins negotiate with Fannie Mae, the current owner of the loan, said Perkins’ ability to repay was never considered.

“If the mortgage companies had to actually look at affordability, that would stop a lot of these loans,” she said."

Where to get started. First, this woman was injured in 1992 yet managed to buy a house in Ellenwood in 1994. How much you wanna bet if we look at that first mortage, there was an incentive by Clayton County for 'empowerment zones' and homesteading? How does a woman working not as a nurse, but a nurse assistant, with a crippling back injury, come up with the 20% to move into the house, plus all the added strength and time involved? Did she save up all her 52 years to but this house? Did Teegardin do a little research and find out if this woman had owned a house previously? I mean, did she live in apartments until she was 52? If not, where's the record of her first house ( or marriage?)

Then, she admits she signed paperwork she didn't understand to get out of debt she ran up already. That's a genius move, lady. How much you wanna bet she heard an ad on the urban radio station she listened to saying 'refinance now and clear your debts'! I mean, she hasn't worked since 1992, the hurt back and all, You know, the one that keeps her in the brace or the wheelchair we can see in the picture. The picture of the house with fancy furniture, and applicances and late model car in the driveway...




So now, we need a slimy politician to pass laws requiring the scummy mortgage broker to do more of the bank's legwork, all in the name of 'protecting' some idiot that has proven she can't handle credit, brought to you by a concerned old hippie without a grasp of who is truly at fault here.

Maybe Perkins shouldn't have run up all that debt, or having done so: do the Ramsey method. Sell the fancy house and car and move into a cheap apt in 2007 when the market was still okay and she was refinancing. Pay off your debts and then look for a bargain in today's obliterated market. She could probably rebuy her oringinal house now for 25% below the market value in 2007!!

And slimy broker and bank guys need to better 'splain to thier marks what's goin on.

But instead, we get a tearjerker story about how this poor fool was taken advantage of by the rich, evil white guys.

WTG, AJC

So Goes Lula

In 2003 I travelled for the first time to Brazil, and our 'guide' gushed about this new president of thiers, Lula. He was 'hope and change embodied'. The first POB that came from a blue collar, working class background. Surely, he wouldn't turn into a corporatist, right?

In 2005, they were booing him in the soccer stadiums. "Greeted like a rock star in Porto Alegre in 2003 just after becoming Brazil's first working-class president, Silva was booed in 2005 by some who felt he turned into too much of a pro-business centrist once in office, despite instituting popular social welfare programs that aim to help tens of millions out of poverty in Latin America's largest nation.

Galeano said activists must try to convince Silva that "he can't abandon the path toward socialism."

But others said it's too late, because Silva has less than a year left in office before he must leave after serving two terms. And Silva himself will head to Davos for the World Economic Forum later this week, where he is to receive a special award.

Gustavo de Biase, a 22-year-old Brazilian wearing a shirt proclaiming "Socialism is Liberty," accused Lula — as Silva is commonly known — of betraying leftists by embracing capitalist economic policies as president.

"Lula held out promise for Brazil, but he didn't do what he said he'd do," de Biase said.


Here he is getting dissed in 2007:

A sad day indeed.

Well, Err Amerika finally went belly up.

What a shocker. That was a screwed pooch from the get-go. I actually had some naive fellow recommend to me that I should go and try to get in 'on the ground floor' at the Atlanta affiliate in 2003! Then, when that affiliate got bought by a rich Jewish baker and he turned it into 'The Voice of the Arts' here (and gave precious airwave time to local bands and voices), the usual suspects all claimed it was a 'conspiracy' to shut down the new Progressive Voice of Atlanta.

What was apparent and remains so is the simple fact that progressives like NPR over manufactured imitations of right wing talk. Not very hard to see, unless you have blinders on.

In the same vein, I hate to defend Glenn Beck but he is getting much flak from these remarks:




I didn't hear the speech live, but my wife did and thought Brown was drunk. She did not consider his remarks 'cute'. Creepy was the exact word she used. And she knows creepy. She married it after meeting my Dad. This is exactly something my Father would have said. That's why he shouldn't have been an elected official.

When I heard it on Becks program on the drive home, I thought it sounded creepy to.

I read today that the net and all the talkers are upset, including Scott Brown himself. There is talk these two mental giants may do an interview together today. Perhaps there will be more fireworks!

WTG, Obama.

I would be lying if I stated that watching the recent Mass race didn't get a chuckle or two.. First, all the good election stuff ALWAYS happens when I'm on vacation. Still, I got to catch MSNBC @ Disney because they do not air anything other then ABC,NBC and ESPN at the resorts, no CBS or, of course, Fox News.

Watching Maddow and Matthews decontruct the loss was downright hilarious. They air ALL of Croakley's concession speech, but not all of Brown's vitory speech. Which is doubly funny, becuase he immediately stepped into it pimping out his daughter. Creepy.

So as I got home, I searched out all the loons that were convinced that W 'stole' the election in 2000 AND 2004. Of course, they never fail to amuse:

"I think you have a right to know that Coakley won the hand counts there.

That's right.

According to preliminary media results by municipality, Democrat Martha Coakley won Massachusetts overall in its hand counted locations,* with 51.12% of the vote (32,247 hand counted votes) to Brown's 30,136, which garnered him 47.77% of hand counted votes. Margin: 3.35% lead for Coakley."


BlackBox voting. Remember them? Right from the start, they were crying foul. Well, eventually even they had to admit ( although how this is an 'admission' is beyond me, it's very similar to the non apology apology....


"GET OVER IT, SCOTT BROWN WON

Actually, I think any intellectually honest person will see that Brown garnered financing and executed brilliantly, and that's just politics.

He probably DID win. In 71 Massachusetts locations we could watch the counting (woops, he lost those, overall). But in 277 locations, the counting was on computerized voting machines and concealed from the public.

So we can never really know who won, and that is unfair to both Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. But it's most unfair to the citizens of Massachusetts, who have an inalienable right to choose their own governance. You can't hold sovereignty over the choosing process if you can't see it. "

Good grief. So the next election cycle, when HBO airs it's 'Hacking Democracy' special, remember this broad! Bev Harris...Ahhh, good times.

oops

In the face of rising unemployment and record-breaking deficits, policy experts at the National Center for Public Policy Research are criticizing the Obama Administration for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State Professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.

"It's outrageous that economic stimulus money is being used to support research conducted by Michael Mann at the very time he’s under investigation by Penn State and is one of the key figures in the international Climategate scandal. Penn State should immediately return these funds to the U.S. Treasury," said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project.

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind's activities are causing global warming.

"It's no wonder that Obama's stimulus plan is failing to produce jobs. Taxpayer dollars aren't being used in the ways most likely to spur job creation. The stimulus was not sold to the public as a way to reward a loyalist in the climate change debate. Nor was the stimulus sold as a way to promote the Obama Administration's position on the global warming theory. This misuse of stimulus money illustrates why tax cuts are a better way to stimulate the economy than letting the government decide where to spend taxpayer dollars. As is often the case, political considerations corrupt the distribution of government funds," said Deneen Borelli, a fellow with the National Center's Project 21 black leadership network.

"Mann's credentials as a climate change alarmist seems to fit the political criteria for stimulus funds sometimes known as 'Obama money'," added Deneen Borelli.

Mann is a central and controversial figure in climate change research. Mann's so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting temperature changes over a 1000 year period was used as evidence in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 report to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from industrial activity is causing global warming. Mimicking the shape of a hockey stick, the graph showed a long time period of stable temperatures (the shaft) followed by a rapid rise in temperatures (the blade) during the last hundred years.

Critics of the hockey stick claim Mann manipulated data to eliminate periods of time such as the medieval warming period and the little ice age to eradicate the visual impact of natural global temperature variation. The emails from Climategate reveal that the inner circle of climate scientists were troubled by the methods Mann used to produce the graph.

"It's shocking that taxpayer money is being used to support a researcher who seemingly showed little regard to the basic tenes of science - a dispassionate search for the truth," said Tom Borelli.

The $541,184 grant is for three years and was initiated in June 2009.

blast from the past

Toldyaso

http://theevanlee.blogspot.com/2009/12/hopin-for-some-change.html

Hate to say I called this last year:

CONGRESSIONAL SPENDING WASTE IN COPENHAGEN; 21 MEMBERS, ALL-EXPENSES PAID
Mon Jan 11 2010 15:08:56 ET

An exclusive report that will air tonight on CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC reveals the alarmingly high number of members of Congress who got an all-expense paid trip to Denmark -- on your dime!

An embargoed script from Sharyl Attkisson's report:

Few would argue with the US having a presence at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

NATS OBAMA I'M ALWAYS HOPEFUL

(VO: Denmark beauty shot)

But wait until you hear what we found about how many in Congress got all-expense paid trips to Denmark... on your dime.

(VO)

Our camera spotted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the summit. She called the shots on who got to go.

That's House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

And there's the embattled Chairman of the Tax Committee Charles Rangel.

"NATS: YOU TAKIN' CARE OF MR. RANGEL? HE SURE IS!"

(VO)

They were joined by 17 colleagues from both parties: Democrats: Waxman, Miller, Markey, Gordon, Levin, Blumenauer, DeGette, Inslee, Ryan, Butterfield, Cleaver, Giffords, and Republicans: Barton, Upton, Moore Capito, Sullivan, Blackburn.

(ATTKISSON STANDUP)

And that's not the half of it. But finding out more was a bit like trying to get the keys to Ft. Knox. Many referred us to Speaker Pelosi who wouldn't agree to an interview, give cost estimates or even tell us where they all stayed. Her office said it "will comply with disclosure requirements."

(VO)

Senator Inhofe is one of the few who provided us any detail. He attended the summit on his own for just a few hours, to give an "opposing view."

(SOT-INHOFE)

They're going because it's the biggest party of the year. The worst thing that happened there is they ran out of caviar.

(VO: JETS)

(MOVED) Our investigation found that the House delegation was so large, it needed three military jets: two 737's and a Gulfstream Five. Up to 64 passengers -- travelling in luxurious comfort.

(VO)

Add Senators and staff, most of whom flew commercial, and we counted at least 101 Congress-related attendees. All for a summit that failed to deliver a global climate deal.

(VO)

As a perk, some took spouses, since they could snag an open seat on a military jet or share a room at no extra cost to taxpayers.

(FLASH THRU VIDEO AT COPENHAGEN)

That's Congresswoman Giffords holding her husband's hand.

Moore Capito and her husband.

Markey took his wife - shown wearing red - (Susan Blumenthal) as did Sensenbrenner (Cheryl).

Congressman Barton-- a climate change skeptic-- even brought along his daughter, not shown here.

(VO)

Until required filings are made in the coming weeks, we can only figure bits and pieces of the cost to you.

(GRAPHIC 1)

Three military jets at $57-hundred dollars an hour. ($5,740) Dozens flew commercial at up to two thousand dollars each.

More than 300 (321) hotel nights booked - the bulk at Copenhagen's five-star Marriott.

Meals add tens of thousands more.

(VO)

Watchdog Steve Ellis wasn't against some sort of US presence but...considering the record deficit...

(SOT-STEVE ELLIS, TAXPAYERS FOR COMMON SENSE check)

7:22:48 EVERY PENNY COUNTS. CONGRESS SHOULD BE SHAKIN' THE COUCH CUSHIONS LOOKING FOR CHANGE, RATHER THAN SPENDING CASH FOR EVERYBODY TO GO TO COPENHAGEN. 23:00

(ATTKISSON STANDUP)

Nobody we asked would defend the super-sized Congressional presence on camera. One Democrat said it showed the world the US is serious about climate change.

(GRAPHIC: MILITARY JET WITH SMOKE AND FIGURES) And all those attendees who went to the summit rather than hooking up by teleconference? They produced enough climate-stunting carbon dioxide to fill 10,000 Olympic swimming pools. (40,500 tonnes/source: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)

(VO: US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations/US Senators and Staff Only) Which means even if Congress didn't get a global agreement...

00:03:01 "EXCUSE ME" CRASH! (SLAMS DOOR on CAMERA)

... they left an indelible footprint all the same. Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News, Washington.

This cant be for real...

I am going to try out just to see if this is for real or not!


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Paz

“Lenin continues to have imperishable value,” wrote Ivan Frolov, an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev. I quoted this pearl of wisdom in 1990 and added the comment: “Mr. Frolov should know that statements like this can only sound farcical in the West today.”[i] But I would hardly venture to make the same comment now in 2000, for the rehabilitation of Marxism-Leninism has been proceeding apace, inspiring books and articles that advise us—that command us—to return to the True Marx. Some of Mr. Frolov’s oratorical flights, preaching “a transition toward a qualitatively new condition, toward a renewed, human socialism,” sounded like pathetic gibberish even when he pronounced them. But today such phrases pop up frequently in the musings of Western writers, many of whom would not hesitate to endorse another priceless example of Frolov’s claptrap: “We are in the process of re-evaluating the dialectical unity of the scientific, revolutionary and humanistic aspects of Marxism.”

After the collapse of Soviet Communism, politicians and intellectuals of the Old Left began a vigorous counteroffensive, aiming to erase or invert the obvious conclusions to be drawn from that event and, more generally, from the manifest failures of socialist ideology. What prompted these elites to believe they could extract lessons from history that blatantly contradict what history so plainly says? What arguments have they deployed to shore up their defense of totalitarian delusions and crimes, or at least the motives behind them? How persuasive have these arguments been? Do they have a wide following, or is their influence limited to a powerful but small clientele that regards itself in a flattering mirror, the better to deny its errors and chase away the pangs of remorse?

In short, is this grande parade of the left accomplishing its agenda? Or is it merely the final spasm of a criminal aberration, one which later generations that took no part in it will be able finally to reject freely and completely, without duplicity or regret?

The primary meaning of the French word parade is shared by the English word “parade”: a procession or an attention-grabbing display. The term is also used by fencers to mean the parrying of an attack. Accordingly, the leftists’ performance has served a dual purpose, allowing them, on the one hand, to deflect the sword of history that was threatening to cut down their doctrine for good; and on the other, to remain players in the pageant of culture and politics, still marching at the head of the procession. In nautical terms, their parade was preliminary to a tacking maneuver, a way of changing course without being too obvious about it. To bring in yet another metaphor, it was a matter of “dressing” (in French, parer) Communism in the way a chef prepares meat or fish before cooking a dish, removing the unusable parts while saving as much of the original as possible. Which leads to the question: Is the left just serving up the same old ideological hash, but now relabeled as nouvelle cuisine?

These are far from idle questions, for even in the midst of a global information explosion it may turn out that we understand little or nothing about totalitarianism. If this is the case, then information per se may be of limited value, and those responsible for providing us with information may prove to be useless or even harmful. At a time when “the meaning of history” (le sens de l’histoire) is still venerated, to have so poorly understood history’s lessons would testify to a crippling cultural failure, or worse, to a troubled relationship with facts—a permanent legacy, perhaps, of ideological indoctrination.

For a while, sensible things were said. Reviewing the journalism of the early 1990s, I am struck to see in the majority of periodicals, even those of the left, how frequently two ideas keep cropping up, presented as empirically derived certainties. The first of these is that we must write off Communism and everything associated with it once and for all—the logical conclusion to be drawn from the pitiless evidence of history. The corollary is that after the Marxist catastrophe, the classical liberal formula has emerged as the only solution. Whatever its imperfections, this option alone is economically and politically viable, and it will persist.[2] Indeed, for something to be imperfect, it must first exist, a condition that command economies do not fulfill.

By now, however, a striking reversal has occurred: these reasonable conclusions are being spurned almost everywhere—in theory at least, for action often flies in the face of theory. Although Communism is no longer put into practice, it is mentioned with growing approval; while the practice of liberalism, though almost universally denounced, is increasingly evident in the realm of action. Thus, the internal antithesis between the ideal and the actual that is a fundamental characteristic of the totalitarian mentality is reconstituted in another vocabulary and, as it were, in a void, since “actual Communism” has all but vanished.

A revival of liberalism began prior to the collapse of Communism, preceding it by a good ten years with the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and then Ronald Reagan in the United States. But these electoral victories were not inevitable. It is erroneous to think that classical liberalism—something to which the French genius finds itself miraculously immune—belongs exclusively to “Anglo-Saxon” culture, as through some congenital defect. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, America had steadily pushed Big Government further into almost every part of economic and social life; while doggedly following the tax-and-spend gospel. But any awareness of such historical realities was brushed aside, either deliberately or unconsciously, in Europe and especially in France.

Likewise, there was widespread ignorance of conditions in the United Kingdom: of how, since 1945, the Labor Party ideology had created the most statist, bureaucratic, highly taxed, unionized and regulated society in democratic Europe. Although the Conservative Party had won several elections during this period, no Conservative government before Margaret Thatcher’s had won a sufficiently strong and clear electoral mandate to permit tampering with the fundamental props of the Labor edifice. Economic decline had set in, bringing widespread impoverishment, failure of public services, administrative paralysis—festering sores that had become critically infected by 1977–1978 and threatened to plunge Britain into chaos. And so the electorate chose, not another routine party rotation, but a razing of the very foundations laid down in 1945: it voted for a draconian liberal revolution. Since this turnabout, the British people have not changed their minds; in 1997, Labor could not be sure of victory at the polling booths without disavowing their socialist agenda. Politically, Tony Blair is less the successor of James Callaghan, the last Labor prime minister before the free-market revolution, than of Margaret Thatcher—with all due deference to fabulists of “the left’s triumph in Europe” at the century’s end.

More astounding still was the tide of liberalism that rushed across continental Europe during the Thatcher and Reagan years. In Italy, Socialists and Communists were professing to be less and less dirigiste; in Spain, the Socialist Party let it be known that it had never been dirigiste; and in Portugal—where, since the Revolution of the Carnations in 1974, the Socialist leader Mario Soares had been an invincible rampart against all coups d’états on the part of the Communists—the electorate twice, in 1980 and 1985, swept reprivatizing liberals into power.

But it was mainly the abrupt economic and financial crackup of France, after two years of Mitterrand’s Socialist regime, that impressed people’s imaginations and turned public opinion. Virtually overnight, we began to hear effusions of praise for “enterprise”—private enterprise, that is—from every side. Adolescents went so far (and I was witness to one such semicomical scene) as to reproach their civil-servant fathers for “never having established a business.” Overnight, the French became fierce critics of nationalization schemes, which they had long mostly favored. Their change of attitude can be tracked through opinion polls, such as the one published by Paris Match (April 1, 1983) showing that 59 percent of French people were in favor of more entrepreneurial policies, while only 25 percent wanted more state control of the economy.

The French left, already a national minority since the municipal elections of 1983, became all but marginal when the European elections took place in 1984. Moreover, studies of voters’ wishes, analyzed at the time by various polling organizations, show that they were ready to reject not merely this or that governmental team but the left as such and its ideological principles, the first of which is reverence for the state. Thus the Communist Party was reduced to 11 percent support among voters and was destined to sink even lower. It had lost half its supporters in five years and would never find them again. Moreover, it refused to form part of the government of Laurent Fabius, which followed and turned its back on that of Pierre Mauroy. So Mitterrand, with a Socialist Party that slipped from 38 percent of the legislative vote in 1981 to 21 percent in the 1984 European elections, led a government that represented barely one-fifth of French citizens until the elections of 1986.

Perhaps still more humbling for the left than its political and economic failures was its philosophical and cultural shipwreck. It was not only the economic program of the left that began to take a farcical turn—its slogan “rupture avec le capitalisme!” sounding risible when all the world’s noncapitalist regimes were sinking beneath the waves—but also its other projects for social redemption, each of which seemed leakier than the last as they all crashed in turn on the shoals of public exasperation.

In July 1984, Mitterrand had to withdraw his education plan, a model of socialist anachronism if ever there was one. The protests against Mitterrand’s draft bill, aimed at suppressing private instruction, owed something to traditional religious convictions; but that was only part of the explanation. In fact, the majority of the millions who demonstrated all over the country for more than a year, religious believers or not, were mainly protesting against a totalitarian scheme to unify elementary, secondary and university education under the aegis of the state and the Marxist-dominated teachers’ unions. The public well understood what was afoot with the bill: the establishment of another hegemony, an ideological monopoly, by the Socialists and Communists. In this matter, as in many others, we witnessed a popular repudiation of the state.

The government had seriously misread the wishes of the society over which it presided. Other examples of its tone-deafness included its law on the press, its exploitation of state television, and its notion that governmental success is primarily a matter of propaganda. Socialists in power had thus unleashed against themselves not only the people but also most of the country’s intellectuals.

* *

*

This, then, was the picture midway between 1980 and 1990: Communism had been discredited well before the Berlin Wall came crumbling down and at a time when the approaching disaster was not yet foreseen. Socialism, too, had run into hard times, not just in practice but as an ideal. The setback in France was paralleled by a lengthy exclusion from power of the Labor Party in Britain and of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in Germany. The finishing touch to a dismal scene was the condition of Sweden’s economy: even this Sacred Grotto of Miracles—for forty years a realistically managed social-democratic welfare state—was moribund.

An assault had to be launched against this tentative resurgence of classical liberalism. The incipient success of free-market themes, along with the manifest contradictions of socialist ideology and Communist regimes, filled the sectarians with fresh ardor to beat back the dissidents—employing, naturally, the time-honored weapons of leftist “debate.”

Thus, when the celebrated Mexican writer Octavio Paz, in a 1987 speech delivered in Frankfurt, compared the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime to Castro’s tyranny and dared to mention that Moscow was financing and equipping it—an obvious and proven fact by now—he found himself greeted with the fine courtesy that characterizes left-wing discourse. Among Mexican intellectuals, the Marxist left, a veritable museum of mummified political thought, exploded with rage. For a week, newspapers and magazines vented their anger with articles and cartoons and polls, culminating with a manifesto signed by 228 professors of “every scientific and cultural discipline, from thirteen countries and five institutions.” These pro-Communist shamans were exemplary manifestations of the classic personality type that has been dubbed “the perfect Latin American idiot.”[ii]

Octavio Paz’s name was summarily erased from the program of a choral concert featuring his poems; and an actor slated to introduce the performance with a reading of the poems, backed out. The Frankfurt speech was unanimously condemned despite the fact that no one in Mexico could possibly have read it, for the simple reason that, with the exception of a few words quoted in the German press, it had not yet been published. In his speech, Paz dealt with many topics other than Nicaragua, and his overall account of the political landscape seems quite self-evident today. Nevertheless, elements of the heroic left (typically informed and tolerant, and bursting with antifascist zeal) went so far as to demonstrate before the United States embassy in Mexico, where Octavio Paz—that “traitor to Mexico”—was burned in effigy to the accompaniment of chants by the student crowd: “Rapacious Reagan, your friend is Octavio Paz!”[iii]

Let’s never forget that in Europe as in Latin America you can be a card-carrying member of the left with one simple qualification, well within the reach of anyone, however slow of mind: to be reflexively anti-American, at all costs and in all circumstances, whatever the event or the issue.

It is quite possible, indeed not unusual, for a person to be politically obtuse while being brilliant in other respects. Examples abound, but Harold Pinter is typical. The English dramatist explains NATO’s intervention against Serbia in April 1999 with the assertion that the United States follows but one principle in international politics: “Kiss my ass or I’ll beat you up.”[iv] Evidently, talent for theater does not inoculate one against profound idiocy and vulgarity when it comes to venting political opinions. One of the mysteries of politics is its power to induce such befuddling in otherwise intelligent people. How would Harold Pinter react if drama critics allowed themselves to fall so low in abusive imbecility while critiquing his plays?

When the French, of both the right and the left, awoke to the reality that the United States had emerged triumphant from the Cold War, they began to focus their animosity on the economic arrangements of the one remaining superpower, their anti-American animus rising to a peak of frenzy in the last decade of the century. The antiliberal crusade was launched with the Socialists’ two-year struggle against Jacques Chirac’s government, in 1986–1988. Although the privatizations actually carried out by this government concerned only a few nationalized enterprises, and although none of its reforms made any substantial reduction in public expenditures or in the tax burden, the left did not relent in its bombardment of Chirac’s team, routinely stigmatizing it with the charge of “ultra-liberalism”—the shameful prefix having become de rigueur—and accusing it of antisocial perfidy.

But to get an idea of how far the “liberal” reformers, throughout continental Europe but above all in France, were from being real free-market reformers, and how deeply they were stuck in the old mold of centralized planning, consider how much of Europe’s economy continues to be state-dominated ten years after the so-called “liberal wave” began and despite substantial privatizations. The state-owned proportion of the national product in European countries went, on average, from 15.4 percent in 1920, to 27.9 percent in 1960, and to 45.9 percent in 1996. And in France, ever eager to tax and to regulate, the public-sector share in 1997 rose to a staggering 54.5 percent.[v] Despite the half-heartedness of liberal reforms, the campaign against the free-market idea was marvelously successful, since Mitterrand, who in 1984 had been the most unpopular head of state in the entire history of the Fifth Republic, managed to get re-elected four years later.

To pad their propaganda, the socialists set up Reagan’s United States and Thatcher’s United Kingdom as cautionary tales of “savage capitalism.” Here was the origin of that prolific tradition in which these advanced nations are castigated as vast camps for the indigent, where weary hordes of diseased and hungry homeless people fill the streets. A literary genre like this had no basis in reality, of course; it was a fruit of fantasy, inspired not by liberalism’s failures but by socialism’s need to conceal its own shortcomings. The campaign was nevertheless effective because the mass media and a large part of the so-called quality press, mostly but not only of the left, bought into the credo. The political leaders of the French right came to be branded as doctrinal allies of the demonic Reagan and Thatcher. The left’s winning strategy was to make classical liberals fear the consequences of their own devotion to their philosophy, and to pressure them eventually to abjure it altogether. The battle was decided in those years.

Meanwhile, the European left put its condemnation of the anticommunists on the back burner, feigning indifference to attacks on Marxist regimes. The reason was that it had invested its emotional capital in Mikhail Gorbachev, convinced that he at last was constructing a Communism compatible with liberty—that rare bird awaited in vain for seventy years. Why get irritated with the stale vociferations of the anticommunists when the messiah of “socialism with a human face” was coming soon to shut the mouths of the crypto-fascists permanently?

After the failed (or apparently failed?) Moscow putsch of August 19, 1991, and despite the brief return of Gorbachev to the Kremlin as a lame duck, the international left correctly intuited that Communism this time around was well and truly finished. The last lifeboat had capsized.

Outwardly, the edifice still stood. The abortive coup against the misconceived policy of perestroika had apparently left the citadel of Communist power intact. But it was a mere façade, behind which lay a mass of rubble. The left immediately got the picture, months before the official crackup of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. It was thus fully prepared to launch an ideological counteroffensive by summer of the next year, with a torrent of articles—signed for the most part by authors who were not actually Communists and hence were in a better position to rev up the engines of postmortem justification. Their undertaking grew in scope and intensity over the following years, and although theirs was necessarily a defensive operation, they went on the attack straightaway. An event that should have tolled the hour of repentance for those who had indulged Communism mutated into a brief against those who had descried in Communism’s crimes and failures proof of its toxicity. The refrain went: Communism is finished, but what wonderful people it inspired to action! And how can we get by without that ideal? In any case, liberalism is obviously worse. And do we really have to sacrifice the sublime vistas of revolutionary hope and resign ourselves to the grim pragmatism of managerial politics?

We have to admire the agility with which the left uprooted the debate from down-to-earth realities and ensconced it in that empyrean of pure ideas where well-intentioned ideologues can never be wrong. They were making a U‑turn back to the emergency exit: to the early days of Marxism-Leninism, that pristine age before the Fall when the doctrine still shone with every perfection, for the simple reason that it had not yet been put into practice.

Here is a tasty paradox: The ferocity of the Marxist legions redoubled in the very same year when history had finally put paid to the object of their sacred cult. Marx’s disciples, betraying the master’s analysis, refused to bow down before the criterion of praxis, choosing instead to retreat into the impregnable fortress of the ideal. As long as they had been obliged to drag around the ball and chain of actually existing socialism, they could not avoid facing up to criticism. Their solution to the imperfections of socialism in practice had always been to tout the infinite perfectibility of the as yet unachieved revolution. But once the Soviet system had disappeared, the mirage of a reformable Communism vanished along with the object to be reformed, and so too did the painful servitude of having to argue the cause in terms of tangible successes and failures. Released from importunate reality—which they would henceforth blithely dismiss as inconsequential—the faithful could return to the roots of their fanaticism. They felt free at last to restore socialism to its primordial state: Utopia.

After all, socialism incarnate was always vulnerable to criticism. Utopia, on the other hand, lies by definition beyond criticism. Hence the rage of Utopia’s haughty champions could again become boundless, since there was no longer, anywhere, any embodiment of their vision.



To fill in the details: The hysteria directed at Octavio Paz was mostly precipitated by two speeches. The first was given at Frankfurt in October 1984 on the occasion of the writer’s being awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by the president of West Germany; it was a very general discussion on the topics of war and peace, on international affairs and the Cold War. The words that provoked the rage of the ideologues were the following: “It is clear that the United States supports armed groups that are opposed to the Managua regime. It is equally certain that the USSR and Cuba are sending military advisors and weapons to the Sandinistas. And it is also true that the roots of the conflict are deeply buried in Central American history.” These remarks are unobjectionable—a moderate statement of the obvious. But the hatred for Paz had a more unforgivable cause: his longstanding refusal to be a fellow traveler of Communism.

In the second speech, delivered in Valencia on June 15, 1987, Paz was commemorating the congress of antifascist intellectuals held in that city in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. He made the mistake of recalling the role of Stalin and his henchmen in the defeat of the Republican side, a role that has since been abundantly documented by all serious historians.

Frozen Gore!

Benster Lives

We pulled up to the clearing at dusk without saying a word. I turned off the radio, picked up my drink and turned the key off. Taking a long drink and savoring it for what seemed like forever, I knew I was just delaying the inevitable.

"It's time."

I glanced at him, but he looked away, too distraught to even look into my eyes. As painful as it was for me, I knew it was devastating for him.

"OK..."

We got out of my Jeep and walked a few feet into the cold before stopping. "It looks nice here. Cold out tonight, though. You gonna be OK?"

"Yeah. We've been doing this forever - I've just never had to..."

"I know..." I said. "I just... I just don't know how to..."

He stopped me with a smile. "Don't worry. I'll be OK. Promise..."

I forced a smile and gave him what he needed to feel OK with all of this. Though I knew I'd never look at things the same, I was more embarrassed that I was taking so much pleasure in this. I didn't want him to know just how much I had been wanting this - craving this day. We knew it had to happen someday - even if by accident. But year after year, things got in the way. Things seemed to just want to stay the way they were - their fate left up to lesser men. Men who didn't care a bit about what others wanted - what they needed.

"It sounds a little trite, man... but there's a big part of me that's going to miss you."

"You don't have to say that... I know it's been..."

I stopped him with a stern look. "I mean that. It's been a long time. Since I've been born. Since I can even remember anything, you've been there. In the exact same place. I'm just... used to it. It'll be difficult. You'll move on to other people, I know. There are plenty of them out there. But you were ours for so long that it just... well, it just mattered."

He smiled wistfully as he turned and looked away, the decades of memories glistening in his eyes. "That means a lot. But it's time."

I put my arm around him and hugged him, unashamed. I started to feel it all slip away. "Take care. I mean that."

"I know. You, too."

And with that, the monkey slipped down off my shoulders and begin to walk slowly toward the jungle. After 44 years, it was over. With a simple victory - not unlike many they had experienced before - it was finally over. I took one last look at him and prepared to walk away as I closed my eyes for a moment, reflecting on what had just happened.

"Hey!"

My eyes shot open. "What?"

"Marion Campbell? Aundrey Bruce? The kennels? Everything? It was all me. All of it. Don't blame yourself. I had the Smiths' house bugged and their shrink was in my pocket. I had them make every bad decision I could think of so I could stick around. I had to - I loved it here."

A knowing grin came over my face as I realized what he'd just told me. Sheepishly he said, "I'd say I was sorry... if I was. Bye, man. Tell Thomas to get another OL early this year - they still need some upgrading. And you've got to go DE, too. That Owens kid is gonna be good - find someone to play on the other side and keep Grimes in the slot - he'll be out of this world there. It's all in place now. Trust me - you guys are going to be great for a long time. Championship great."

"OK. Thanks. You know, the Panthers haven't had winning seasons back to back either. It's just down the road from here - I think you'd like it there."

"Where do you think I'm heading now?", he said over his shoulder as he turned and started walking toward the trees.

I watched him until he disappeared into the underbrush. Then I stood there for a while, blinking back a tear or two, while trying to make sense of what had occurred here today. I knew it would take some time to come to grips with it. Real leadership. A good coaching staff. Blank finding a new shrink. It took all of that coming together to send the monkey on his way. But he was gone now and we would never see him again. I finally got into my Jeep, turned the key and headed back to town. The sun had set and all I could think of was the dawn to come. The dawn on a new landscape for all of us. Where the weight of the world seemed to have shifted - seemed to have just vanished into thin air.

And I couldn't be happier...