on ninety-nine victories

Success, friends, success. Huzzah. By liberating the neo-serfs of today's lowest and groveling classes, the 99% has brought to a close a process that began in the late 1840s. Victory's proof: starting on 13 April 2012, in enlightened and far-thinking nations across the globe, all debts shall be wiped away, all crimes shall be forgiven, decent and well-paying jobs shall appear as if magically from thin air, and housing, food, health-care, and clothing shall be provided to anyone in need. Truly, it shall be, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (this being our motto). Marx and Engels would be proud of our stalwart revolutionary zeal and steadfast, unflinching dedication to the task at hand.

Seriously, we have won, and by winning, I mean that, across the board, we have eliminated corruption, money-lust, environmental degradation, and self-enslavement to entertainment and consumer products. My congressman promised it on the news this morning – I swear I heard him say something to that effect. Huzzah. So, let's all go home and have a nice cup of tea, since our overwhelming anger and simmering hostility have compelled the people in power, whom we call the compassionate and honor-bound bourgeoisie, to relinquish their lofty posts and to leave on the first corporate jet for sunnier shores as yet untouched by our righteous fury. History shows that all previous ruling classes have readily relinquished their power when faced with persistent popular protests. We've got this thing sewn up: our gains are assured, the power is back in the hands of people other than millionaire, re-election obsessed politicians, and our rapacious, trickle-up national financial policy is a thing of the past. Besides – those pleasant-looking riot cops keep inching closer this way, my iPad is almost out of juice, and this mocha-frappuccino is not even close to being cold, so, seriously, come on, guys, let's get going. And again, Huzzah.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

not here nor there

Every single American president since World War Two has sent our country's military forces into battle. Not since 1941, however, has an American president actually declared war. An unchecked power-grab has allowed for the circumvention of the people's representatives (if one can still call them that) in Congress, so that our boys and girls can bleed and die overseas without any input from the citizenry other than massive, sustained, self-organized, and ultimately demoralizing demonstrations on their part. Instead of following a more democratic method and allowing such momentous decisions to be ratified or refused by those individuals who bear at least a modicum of obligation to the will of the American people (as intended by this nation's founders when they proclaimed that only Congress has the ability to declare war), we now allow one person and his or her close circle of advisors to make this decision. Vietnam was a police action, as is the Iraq conflict. We are not officially at war. This increase in the power of the executive branch of our government is threatening the stability of the tripartite system (executive, legislative, and judicial branches) our country's forefathers set in place, and will, unless it already has, bring our country to its knees.
    It has become a rite of passage for a president to go to war, to grandstand and to self-promote and, ultimately, to try to solve problems that exist in other countries rather than tackling the issues we face here at home. (Compared to the complex social issues that, among other things, make Americans poor and that have filled our prisons beyond capacity, military action is satisfyingly efficient, brutal, and final.) Roughly three millions of Americans live in poverty, with nearly one million American children, yes, children, starving every day. The richest four percent of our countrymen control over half of this fine nation's entire wealth, and tens of millions of our fellow citizens work themselves to exhaustion in order to barely scrape by.
    We have elevated the lure of money, the ever-damaging and ever-corrupting influence of cold hard cash, to the status of a deity, for which we sacrifice our time, our health, and our tears. Similar to the non-porcine animals in Orwell's book Animal Farm, we slave away by the millions under the impression that we are making our nation a better place for all, when we are only feeding the greedy, selfish, and bloated few at the top. This aggression will not stand.
    As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto, "Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion." Americans, awake! We have fallen into an Orwellian trap from which the only clear escape is an early death. We are wage-slaves, base and pitiful creatures kept quiet by old tricks the Romans pioneered, by bread and circuses, by fast food and television, deadly to the body and to individual creativity alike, soft and fat and unfulfilled we live, shelling out billions every year to trick ourselves into thinking we are happy while wallowing in a system (our brand of top-few-capitalism) that is specifically designed to separate us from the hard-won fruits of our most precious commodity, our labor. This aggression cannot stand, just as it did not for the Romans, who soon realized that the people are smarter than they appear, and whose empire eroded soon after the people had had enough of the panem et circenses.
    The Declaration of Independence says that government will bring our Happiness (and our Safety) into being, that it is there to make us happy and safe. Dear Washington, you must do better. You must change the system from its current configuration that funnels billions to the Few and alter it to benefit everyone equally.
    This is the obligation set forth in the Declaration. Waiting for the people, the masses, to act, to demonstrate, to tear down the walls and institutions we have all worked so long to build can only end in heartbreak, terror, and death.
    Dial back the executive powers. Realign our system of government to the promise of the Declaration, to the tender balance of the Constitution. It is not too late, but there is no time to waste.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
John Paul Roggenkamp

in defense of socialism in America

A war of words rages in the national press. Ill-defined and ill-used, the terms of this war are more often ill-understood. The two most lofty ideas thrust down the throats of those among us who gain their news solely from television, are communism and capitalism.
With fear in their voices and portending overtones, the talking heads hold aloft the specter of communism as the great reborn evil of our time, wholly ignorant of the actual aim of the socialist drive. They equate communism with some dim childhood memory of backwoods Soviet failure, conjuring images of dusty children in rags playing in muddy streets in the shadows of endless concrete housing blocks, a breadline forming on the corner in the wan morning sun.
Media pundits and politically conservative affluent white males (i.e. Tea-Baggers) fear communism through no real fault of their own; they are only reacting to what they saw and heard during the Cold War, to the dire pictures painted by propaganda-mongers and censors.

Communism, just like capitalism, or democracy, is an Utopian fantasy envisioned to improve intra-human relations and to bring peace and prosperity to one and all. But, as fantasies go, they are all flawed, in that in their attempted execution they all fail to account for the worst of humanity's traits: greed. All attempts at communism in the last century failed to a large extent due to the greed of certain individuals high up within the system who exploited the toiling masses to gain power, wealth, or prestige. Capitalism, and its bastard underling, the corporation, is failing for the exact same reason: Those individuals with the proper drive and access to power amass vast fortunes (in the U.S., less than two percent of the population owns over half of all wealth) while millions of American children live in poverty and suffering. Our quasi-democratic system is failing to a large extent due to the greed-fueled efforts of lobbyists, who siphon government capacity away from efforts aimed at promoting the general Welfare, diverting them instead into schemes and systems designed solely to feed the money-hunger of the richest corporations.

We as a nation have devised and implemented socialist endeavors in the past, endeavors that have vastly improved the nation as a whole. Our highway system (an idea pioneered by the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s) brings us together while tearing us apart. Our public libraries enrich the minds of young and old alike, giving us access to an unimaginable volume of data. Our public lands, located on mountain, hill,  or plain, provide relief from our busy lives and allow us to retire to natural settings without paying exorbitant fees.
None of these three features of modern life would exist without the far-reaching gaze of the socialist. Under a purely capitalist regime, freeways would be tollways, libraries would be pay-by-the-page, and pristine mountain ranges would fall before the miner's pick.

In the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence alike, references are made to the people as We, to the defense as common, and to the Welfare as general, not specifically this person or that, one ethnic group or another, but to the citizenry as a whole. On the back of every dollar bill stands a bald eagle, his talons gripping the symbols of war and peace, his beak holding a banner that claims, E PLURIBUS UNUM. Translated, this Latin phrase means, Out of many, one.
Out of many people, one nation. Out of many dreams, one shining goal. (I would at this point like to depart on a tangent about the lack of freedom the American citizen has to do to himself as he sees best fit without harming others in the privacy of his own home, but that must wait for another time.)
If there has ever been a better slogan for a nation seeking the most noble aspirations of the fantasy of communism, I would like to hear it.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels a hundred and sixty odd years ago, is a simple document and a short read. In paperback form, the document runs to no longer than 25 pages. The objectives of socialism are very neatly and succinctly enumerated; they are explained in reasonable and understandable form. This is what makes them deadly, for it makes them accessible to the middling classes, to those with little education, to those toiling away their whole lives in honest labor only to see their ability to retire evaporate when the stock market wobbles.
We need socialism in America; it is our common destiny. The systems of commerce and government, as they have developed over the past century, have failed to provide the utmost for the common defense and to the fullest extent promote the general Welfare. Capitalism is not geared towards the betterment of the many, but toward the elevation of a few over all others. A more perfect Union will not be formed on television and cheap food, i.e. the new bread and circuses, alone.

We must reconsider the focus of our political leadership, and judge as a nation whether our government has become destructive of our Rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Considering the monumental improvements to our collective wellbeing achieved by those brave leaders forging a socialist path in the peaceful period between the Great Wars, what unthinkable things could we accomplish together, as citizens united, a single nation of many millions of parts?

Remember - the socialist Utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels only arises from the ashes of full-blown capitalism. Perhaps we don't have to wait much longer.

If you are not convinced, at least debate. If you are still in the dark, read the Manifesto.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
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