:Opium of the Masses :[...]A friend[...]informed me of a link on Obama=92s campaign website, :=93Public Allies=94 [where] you would find the statement, :=93Individual salvation depends on collective salvation.=94 : (alt.binaries.schematics.electronic removed from To: line) ...as opposed to the NeoCon mantra: "My end of the boat doesn't have the hole in it".
:[...]the word collective in the way and manner :that the Obama=92s use it : The guy needs to learn when to use an apostrophe.
:skirts the border of communism. Okay, I was being nice, :it doesn't skirt it or even flirt with it, it crosses the line :into full fledged Marxist territory. : As opposed to "The Law of the Jungle".
:[...]I took to the internet in search of the :Obamessiah in his own words.[...] :Out of the mouth of =93The One=94 himself we hear him tout :a philosophy of the communist platform, :=93=85My individual salvation is not going to come about :without a collective salvation for the country .=94 [...] :These words only hold power if you :begin by understanding that in a world conjured up by Karl Marx :a society where the individual must cease : That's extrapolating WAY outside the data set.
:and the pursuit must be one :where you become a productive part of the collective. : Johnson had a name for that: "The Great Society". FDR called it "The New Deal" ..and FDR's plan got us thru The Great Depression
--which the NeoCons of the 1920s brought to that generation. ...and, it appears that history is about to repeat itself:
OTOH, Reagan thought "Trickle down" was a good idea. That notion is showing more every day how bankrupt it is (though perhaps those living in gated communities haven't yet noticed).
:[...]Here are just a few of examples[...] :Obama wants to reinstate the death tax, : So, give your excess wealth to your kids while you're alive.
--or do "a Carnegie" and create a library or something.
Reasonable men will argue what is simply a birthright and what is the threshold for Continuity of an Aristocracy. By the metric of most Americans, the thresholds for these taxes are quite high.
The only area where I think there is need for continued examination is the rules WRT the passing on to your kid(s) of a working farm/business. Again: Pass it to them in percentages while you're alive??
:He is an advocate of the =93Fairness Doctrine=94 :which stands alongside Marxism to perpetuate the idea :that the free market is not an adequate way :to express political and social ideas. : OMFG. Only a NeoCon could see the (now mostly abrogated) role of the Fourth Estate with dollar signs over his eyes. Again: Gated Community Syndrome.
:He supports the attendance :of all children to a single system public school, : ...because the Branch Davidian model is lousy for a society.
:[...]In my estimation these examples should serve as a warning :to any American that an Obama administration :would usher in a new era of social consciousness : ..because (obviously) "social consciousness" is a bad thing.
:that undermines the basic principle of what America is. : A society??
:Instead of building strong individual Ameri-Cans it seeks :to define all of us as Ameri-Cant=92s, unable or unwilling to take on :personal responsibility : He obviously hasn't noticed what has happened of late to the poorly-regulated mortgage market. The Free Market, left to its own designs, turns into a snake pit where the short-term profiteers, with their gains in hand, just bail out.
:while seeking comfort within the collective :rather than the satisfaction and pride as individuals. : That's thinking straight from of the agrarian USA of the 1820s. In the 21st Century, where markets can be manipulated remotely, it's just more of the "My end of the boat doesn't have the hole in it" thing.
:This is a philosophy that has been pulled from the depths :of the ideological graveyard and is being polished :and offered as the only key salvation for this nation. : ...because the whole "pull together" thing has NEVER worked. ...because "Let those who are already wealthy skim off all the cream" is such a noble plan and gives incentive to people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's all just more moribund 19th Century thinking that ignores the deficit-spending Corporate Welfare of the current age.
:The opium of the masses, that is what Karl Marx called religion. : As much as I despise the monkey-see/monkey-do paradigm of religion, the nature of these kinds of collective activities does seem to have a useful purpose--or the meme would have died out. . . ...and, now that he's posting from Google, have you whitelisted Tim Williams so you can see his posts? news: snipped-for-privacy@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com . .
Next time you feel like bad-mouthing a Liberal,
**first** give thanks to the Liberals of the past for an 8-hour work day and a 40-hour work week. Give thanks that you weren't ground up in an industrial machine. Give thanks that when you *were* injured on the job, there was mandated insurance coverage to handle that.