The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, was what groups they chose for extermination.
For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other “non-Aryans” were declared the enemy and unworthy of life.
For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.
Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race. The Communists on the basis of class.
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Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post–World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race.
But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, hatred of others for reason of class.
The reason for this embrace is that class hatred is as fundamental to the Left as the Trinity is to Christians, and the Left dominates the media and education.
This is dangerous because there is an ideological continuum from the democratic Left to the Communist Left. Making the “rich” scapegoats for society’s ills unites the Left. The democratic Left believes in democracy, and, before the 1970s, some of its adherents were fierce anti-Communists. But while the decent and the indecent Left differ on democracy-versus-tyranny, and on nonviolence-versus-violence, the nicest Leftists in the world agree with the indecent Left about who the enemy is.
Being on the left means that you divide the world between rich and poor much more than you divide it between good and evil. For the leftist, the existence of rich and poor — inequality — is what constitutes evil. More than tyranny, inequality disturbs the Left, including the non-Communist Left. That is why so many on the Left fell in love with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and,at other times, with every left-wing dictator. Non-leftists see these men as thugs; much of the Left sees them as fighters for equality. Yes, leftist dictators extinguish freedom and steal land and businesses from the rich — but none of this disturbs most of the Left. Left-wing dictators are seen by the Left as kindred spirits in hating inequality. In 2009, nine left-wing Democratic congressmen, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, visited Fidel Castro in Cuba and came back awestruck by the dictator. They even refused to meet with one of Cuba’s leading pro-democracy dissidents, Jorge Luis Garcia Pérez, an African Cuban.
Non-leftists who cherish the American value of liberty over the left-wing value of socioeconomic equality, and those who adhere to Judeo-Christian values, do not regard the existence of economic classes as inherently morally problematic. If the poor are treated equally before the law, are given the chance and the liberty to raise their socioeconomic status, and have their basic material needs met, the gap between rich and poor is not a major moral problem. Of course, if the rich got rich through deceitful or violent means, they must be prosecuted. But in America, where the way in which “poor” is defined renders most poor Americans materially equivalent to much of Europe’s middle class,and where the rich by and large acquired their wealth legally, through hard work and entrepreneurial enterprise, the existence of rich and poor is not a problem that demands governmental action.
So, when I see the mostly young people of Occupy Wall Street — a mixture of the bored, the nihilistic, the seekers of excitement, left-wing true believers, confused idealists, and those hoping to engage in violence — railing against the rich capitalists on Wall Street, I get worried. Because the hatred they express toward the rich is similar to that expressed against the rich by Stalin, Mao, and Pot Pot. Of course these people are not comparable to those killers. But class hatred must lead to bad things. That is why President Obama is playing with fire with his attacks on the rich.
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and a columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.
American decline has just as much to with affirmative action as it has with bad economic management and ideologically driven economic policy.
Just because blacks were oppressed does not mean that one does away with social meritocracy.
What it does mean is that in order to address this engineered inequality it must provide the basis of equal opportunity. This means increasing the amenities to enable achievement in those social sectors that were deprived of that chance by racially inspired social engineering.
Engineering for equality is just as bad as engineering for inequality. Suppressing talent for the sake of appearance means that the quality of life goes down for everyone.
It is self-defeating. The 'triumph of the will' can no more win the Fuhrer's battles than it can produce acceptable and sustainable economic outcomes.
The problem of any inequalities can only be addressed by attacking it causes not its outcomes.
Mandating there be ethnically equal numbers of doctors by proportion of population incidence is ridiculous for it must mean that the imposed standards must be relaxed which SUPPORTS the maintenance of the inequalities of educational opportunity that gave rise to the observed bias in the first place.
It means that a black person must earn their way into a profession just like anyone else, but the state will correct for the improper social engineering of the past not by mandating lower standards for black entry but by equalising the opportunity for blacks to EARN entry by diverting resources to their educational development.
Lowering professional standards to facilitate ideological dogmas is a prescription for decline, which is what has arrived in America.
Leaving things solely to markets or addressing for uniformity of ourcomes is just idiocy.
You people just can't think straight when it comes to social policy.
"Of course, if the rich got rich through deceitful or violent means, they must be prosecuted."
In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a system was developed and put in place in which a mortgage broker could make his quick half-point by shoving a mortgage application into the pipeline, a bank could make a quick point by giving the mortgage and selling it off, a bigger bank could make a couple of points by consolidating a bunch of mortgages, slicing and dicing them and selling them off in pieces to pension funds, Germans, you name them, and the rating agencies and lawyers could get nice fees by rating the pieces triple-A and doing the nuts and bolts of slicing and dicing, respectively.
The pension funds and Germans bought the pieces, as opposed to saying a big "no thanks," because they could not and/or did not evaluate the pieces and everyone was doing it anyway so why not just look at the yield. Further, those purchasers began to insure the downside risks by buying insurance from insurers who, unlike "real" insurers, didn't really have the reserves to pay claims in the event the pieces actually became worthless and became eligible for an insurance claim. The business of insuring and selling back and forth in order to mitigate risk became itself a ridiculously complicated froth of no substance in which great amounts of potential losses were supposedly covered, but weren't, because when the music stopped there wasn't just one less chair than dancers, there were way, way fewer chairs than dancers.
Only few very smart guys could figure out what was going on, bet heavily on the bubble bursting, and made bazillions.
Prosecute? How about just regulate so this crazy stuff doesn't happen again.
"How about just regulate so this crazy stuff doesn't happen again."
Talk to the government. They were the ones who demanded that the mortgage companies make loans to people who had neither the income nor the experience to own real estate. They felt the banks, with their standards of qualification, were being unfair to the poor and down trodden.
The banking system had all the regulations it needed to prevent this. What they could not prevent was the government demanding they abandon those standards in the name of 'fairness.'
Regulation per se isn't the solution. Require the lender to hold the mortgage, for starters. Lenders would then more vehemently resist pressure to loan to those less likely to repay.
Other than that, letting the lenders fail is a good step. No regulation required, just rule of law. If lenders know they will be allowed to fail, they will be more resistant to practices that most of them don't understand.
As non-bankers, we can take our money to banks that do no lending, if we can find one. We'll probably wind up paying checking account fees and the like, but the money ought to be there when we want it.
Have you considered that, the more regulations there are, the more difficult it is for anyone to figure out what is legal and reasonable? Fewer regulations makes it much easier. Not saying get rid of all regulation, but I think the burden of regulations (e.g. writing and enforcing them) has surpassed the benefit, for most of them.
"Require the lender to hold the mortgage..." Really? You're opposed to regulations, yet you propose one that's so far out that it would never be considered anywhere, even for a second.
Are you just oblivious to the fact that bankers were obligated to make these pathetic loans by the CRA? No sub-prime loans, no approval by the feds to expand your banking services because you didn't meet federal quotas.
I'm curious why it hasn't occured to people why bankers suddenly did a 180 degree about face from being reluctant to grant loans to people who might be credit risks to those who couldn't even document that they had an income? That doesn't seem strange to you?
From the image of the banker portrayed in the movie 'The Best Years of Their Lives' who wouldn't loan without collateral to 'please let me give you a loan without any proof that you can pay it back'. Why has no one brought this contradiction up?
The CRA started the problem. Banks made it worse by turning their hedge against CRA-created risk -- mortgage securitization -- into a bubble-blowing profit center. Then Fannie and Freddie came along to juice the bubble even further.
Government's fingerprints are on 2/3 of this mess, but banks weren't totally innocent either.
The derivitives market was just the opportunistic infection; it was the stupidity of the legislators in insisting on "home ownership" as a goal worthy of gubmint intervention that provided the infection with an open wound to invade.
This is the FOURTH time in a century that our legislators have become obsessed with home ownership (it's non-controversial!), have inflated the housing market, and have wreaked havoc when the bubble burst:
If there were no quota requirements regarding subprime mortgages, and if the gubmint had not guaranteed all those loans, the "predatory lending" and derivatives insanity *could not have happened.*
And yes they very much COULD see the potential consequences; they just chose to ignore them, because hey, they've got theirs.
"Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people....
"In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.
...
"Fannie Mae ... does not lend money directly to consumers. Instead, it purchases loans that banks make on what is called the secondary market. By expanding the type of loans that it will buy, Fannie Mae is hoping to spur banks to make more loans to people with less-than-stellar credit ratings.
"Fannie Mae officials stress that the new mortgages will be extended to all potential borrowers who can qualify for a mortgage. But they add that the move is intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners who tend to have worse credit ratings than non-Hispanic whites."
But it's not as if the negative consequences were unforseen. From that same article:
"In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.
"'From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,' said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 'If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.'"
And yet they went ahead with the thing. Anyone who objected to this obviously insane setup was accused of racism. Activist groups occupied bank lobbies to protest alleged "red lining," accusing banks of discrimination based on skin color rather than on assets.
And if you observed that Barney Frank was literally in bed with the head of Fannie Mae, you were called a homophobe.
Don't blame the secondary infection: blame the doctor who performed the unnecessary surgery.
My read on this is that the Clinton administration, and Barney Frank's main squeezes the GSEs, made a bank sandwich.
That is, the banks weren't without blame here. Yes, they originally turned to mortgage securitization as a hedge against the CRE's pressure on them to lower credit standards. (Bottom slice of bread.)
But they took that nifty new toy and ran with it, running up a good-sized bubble in their own right. (The salami.)
Right as that bubble was about to collapse under its own weight, in about 2003-2004, along came Fannie and Freddie, annoyed at being left out of the party, and stomped on the gas, giving the bubble another four years of expansion, and ensuring that what would have been a middling correction became a full-bore Global Financial Crisis.
As always, business will get irrationally exuberant and follow booms with busts. But to really wreck things, It Takes a Village.
"Only few very smart guys could figure out what was going on, bet heavily on the bubble bursting, and made bazillions."
Not quite "bazillions" when you don't have that much to put down on your bet, but yeah, good times. Until the bailouts juiced BofA's stock out of the basement -- should've seen that coming.
Except I'm not that smart. Just smart enough to notice that if I, with a decentish income, couldn't afford a house in my neighborhood, something fishy was going on. And so I looked into it, and saw *how* fishy.
This is not to excuse the bankers, who were paid big bucks to be smarter and more diligent than they were. But I don't think they had the remotest understanding of just how bad the moral rot in the real estate landscape was that spread from Southern California across the nation. I think there were like six mortgage applications here between 2002-2008 where the income was honestly stated.
Wall Street's stupidity and dishonesty were sympomatic of the country's as a whole. We got pretty much what we deserved.
"How about just regulate so this crazy stuff doesn't happen again."
Fair enough:
12 U.S.C. 96. No bank subject to this title shall make any mortgage loan, where the income of the mortgagor shall not be sufficient to service the highest mortgage payment that may be charged at any time under the terms of the mortgage.
"Yes, leftist dictators extinguish freedom and steal land and businesses from the rich — but none of this disturbs most of the Left."
The great irony is that the left does not care how much harm these types have done to the poor. Leftists have killed far more middle class and poor people (directly or indirectly) than rich ones.
The left is the truest example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. They plunder and murder the rich and impoverish the remainder of society but because it was for a 'good' cause then the damage is just fine. Can anyone seriously suggest that the common folk of Cuba or Venezuela are better off for having had their socialist systems?
Our own president is as much an example of this as Castro or Chavez. O said himself that even if increasing taxes on the rich will reduce the intake of revenue to the government it should be done anyway, in the name of 'fairness.' To hell with the deficit and the welfare of the people, hurt somebody in the name of 'fairness' and the damage be damned.
I once spoke to a well educated college student (is there anyone on this earth so breathtakingly stupid as a well educated college student?) who said his hero was Che, because he loved the people. I told him that Che was indisputably a murdering tyrant who sold the people into slavery to communism. He said that may be true (he admits it!) but because he did it for love of the people that should not really count against him.
Perhaps it is true that you only hurt the one you love. I would prefer that my government and these leftists stop caring about me. Their complete indifference to me would be all that I could wish.
What's really funny, is that the people who run the left are filthy rich. In many cases, much richer than the evil rich that the left wants to kill off.
The problem most on the have is not with wealth per se. It's other people having more than they do.
Know why the Koch brothers are vilified as such evil right-wing conspiracists?
It's because they're just about the only billionaires who are not staunch Democrats. (Excepting Sam Walton's heirs, who learned the hard way to stay out of politics.)
Unfortunately, for the country, the president knows well how to wage class warfare. Community organizing provided him with good training to the detriment of the country. I hope and pray our system of government can endure the massive onslought and destruction to our liberties and values by this administration.
I'm afraid it may be too late to put this genie back in the lamp. It's remarkable how many "intelligent people" are now true believers in the notion that rich americans are the enemy. Perspective is a powerful thing. Coming from a third world nation as I have, I'm quite OK with the status quo I have achieved! light years removed from being hungry as a lad, not to mention the additional perks of living in the burbs, middle class, etc. if this is what the 99% represents then I'm as happy as a pig in...
The 99% is a farce, it is not the 1% they are after and we all know this, it's likely the top 20-30% now that's a start!
This is a dangerous time for this nation and people need to be prepared... not sure I need to spell out what that means..the time is fast approaching for choosing sides..
