Pipes is describing a fantasy world inhabited by rightists of a certain stripe who are best described as creme-puffs masquerading as hard-rolls. In that world only they are alert to huge malevolencies only they are hard enough to oppose properly, and their opponents are squishy things in sandals who wear their hair like women do, so they look like girls from behind, which confuses the poor dears horribly. It takes a core of fundamental fear, great enough to overpower reason, to live in such a mental world.

Political violence pushed to the point of suicidal murder, whether by direct self-immolation or by commital in circumstances practically guaranteeing arrest, requires one of two things: either careful grooming over time by an authority figure in circumstances of some social isolation, or a degree of mental disturbance for which a received ideology provides a narrative that gives the sufferer a sense of being not maladjusted but exalted, and makes the condition bearable and even welcome. The first sort requires a good deal of organization, and is potentially very dangerous; the second gives rise to 'lone wolves' of varying degrees of competence, but mostly not particularly adept at the work.

A variety of ideologies have served the turn for the latter group. Nineteenth century Anarchism, with its 'propaganda of the deed', depended almost wholly on such types for its more spectacuar outrages in Western Europe, though in Russia, there was real organization and planning behind most incidents. 'White Power' types, and anti-abortion killers, generally arise in the 'lone wolf' style nowadays, though there are loose networks encouraging and sheltering those with the potential. Militant Islam certainly provides a narrative very suitable for this form of escape from mental disturbance, that a number of disturbed individuals latch onto. But such instances are distinct from organized attacks carried out by networks and criminal conspiracy, and in many such instances, were that particular narrative frame-work absent, some other readily available one would be found to serve the turn, because the impulsion to the act comes from within the personality, not from any external source.

The problem with policing such persons is that for every one who actually does cook off into serious violence, there are thousands who show some of the incipient signs. All who display this potential in some degree cannot, as a practical matter, be swept up off the street, whether for incarceration or treatment, it is not possible even to keep close watch on them all. Police effort is, properly, directed mostly at detecting the pug-marks of organized efforts, which, if their plans come to fruition, can do serious harm.

The first comes from Virginia, and is that running as a Republican is fatal for a Democrat. Mr. Deeds strove to distance himself from President Obama, concentrated on older white voters, and announced he would if elected opt-out of any public option. The result was a depressed turn out of Democrats, particularly younger and minority voters, who saw little reason to support the man, and understandably. 'Blue Dogs', or rather 'Bush Dogs', in our Party had best take note. If they do not run as Democrats next year, they are for the chop, and no mistake.

The second comes from New York, and is that the civil war in the Republican party is only begun, and will be exceedingly vicious. The result, a slim majority victory for Rep. Owens, is the best outcome possible from our point of view. The 'tea-bagger' movement will not take from this the lesson that they are a decided minority even in Republican distrcts; the belief they are the true and rightful majority in the whole country is too deeply ingrained in their self image. They will take the view that their defeat owed to the treacherous behavior of 'establishment' Republicans, and will re-double their efforts into next year's Republican primaries to over-throw these internal enemies. On the other hand, 'establishment' Republicans will take the lesson that the influence of the 'tea-baggers' in primaries is a disaster waiting to happen, and will redouble their efforts, at the local level, to oppose and contain this mob in primary contests. But without the 'tea-baggers', they cannot muster the votes to prevail in general elections either. The marquee leadership of the 'tea-baggers' being composed of political figures who are out of office, and have no chance of regaining it, will behave with even greater irresponsibility, whipping up the mob to new heights of frenzy against Republican officials and their prefered candidates. This could reach 'perfect storm' levels for a full fracture into a third party 'true conservative' splinter in the enemy camp next year.

And deserve some commendation for being the first among the 'anti' faction to do so. While it steers us into murky waters all around, it warrants consideration.

It is quite likely, given the circumstances of some of the neighborhoods which A.C.O.R.N. services, that some genuine clients do derive income from illegal activities. In neighborhoods where unemployment ranges towards forty percent, and most of those employed are receiving minimal wages, it would be hard for it to be otherwise. How this should be handled is an interesting question.

My first engagement in this controversy was to point out advice on circumventing tax laws, and means of concealing the source of illegal income in order to make large credit purchases, is readily available to more prosperous criminals, and that what the people in the initial videos were depicted as doing is fairly common in professional suites. It is still illegal there, certainly, but it is part of the ordinary operation of things, and mostly goes unremarked and unpunished. Persons who display great umbrage at such behavior by an A.C.O.R.N. employee without displaying a similar umbrage at corruption of far greater reach and scale nearer the top of the criminal and social order do not deserve to be taken seriously as opponents of corruption and criminality, and persons who claim that action against A.C.O.R.N. strikes a great blow against corruption and criminality in our country are, to put it bluntly, either blind fools or lying allies of grand scale corruption. This would certainly take in the whole of the right wing attack machine promoting and pumping up this trivial occurrence.

If, in advising people on the purchase of homes, A.C.O.R.N. did nothing but what was routinely done by ordinary mortgage brokers over the last half dozen years, they would certainly have been engaged in some practices that were fraudulent by any reasonable standards. Mortgage brokers advised a great many clients to mis-state their incomes on applications, for example. To the best of my knowledge, this wide-spread practice has not resulted in prosecutions for fraud, though one would think it ought to have violated statutes in plenty. Even if one puts the worst possible construction on what these videos seem to show, it is difficult to make the case the behavior shown is something exceptional, and so it is hard to regard it as something worth especial effort at outrage.

When a society so structures its affairs that large numbers of its people are effectively cut off from legal income, illegal activity among those people cannot be regarded strictly as a question of personal moral worth or responsibility. It may still be necessary to police such behavior, as it can indeed do real harm to others, and in so policing it, it will be convenient to pretend the individuals in question are solely responsible for what they choose to do, and moral failures and bad people accordingly, but this is a fiction obscuring the fact that the real harm is done by those who maintain and benefit from unjust structures of economic life, and that the great moral failure is the grasping and covetousness of those at the top of the social pyramid. Without corruption and criminality at the top, there is none at the bottom; the one creates the other, and indeed, enjoins it on many.

What a service organization like A.C.O.R.N. ought to do if approached by a client who does derive income from illegal activities admits, in my view, of several answers. Certainly, on one level, it would be well advised to hew strictly to the law, which will bar advising a person how to launder money and make fraudulent representations. There would certainly exist strong temptation to do as is often done for more prosperous criminals, however, and try to walk up to the line, as professionals do, in imparting information indirectly on the wink and nod. Most anyone working for such an organization, after all, will likely share the view outlined above concerning roots of, and ultimate culpability for, much of criminality in society. In some instances, establishing oneself as a property owner, gaining a respectable face, is an essential step to getting out of the criminal life, and getting a footing in legal society for one's children and family. The old saw that at the root of every great fortune is a great crime is not an idle one. To have something to lose tends to tame a person.

In speaking of a 'corporate state', Mussolini was employing an older definition of corporate, the root meaning of grouped in a single body, a whole, meaning by it the fascist state was a unitary thing, in which no separate elements existed: he was saying fascist Italy was a single body, without classes, interests, or any faction save his Party.

Indeed, the influence and control of large business interests on the right totalitarians on the early mid twentieth century is much over-rated. Businessmen did not create these movements, and certainly did not dictate policy to them. They destroyed enemies of big business in their countries, but did so for their own purposes, and of their own volition. Businessmen profited from their rule, at least in heavy industry, but this was a by-product of the movements' extreme and popular nationalism. It was as dangerous for a tycoon to defy these movements as it was for anyone else, once they had the reins firmly in hand.

The problem with corporate person-hood taken as equal to a citizen in public and political life is, as someone once said, 'they have neither souls to be damned nor bodies to be kicked". The corporation is a legal device for pooling capital and limiting the personal liability of people who devote capital to the corporation for its debts and actions. That is all, and that is hardly a sound footing for participation in political life. Taken as a 'person', a corporation is pretty much a sociopath, since it is chartered to have no responsibility save its own self-aggrandizement, whatever that may cost others. What actually happens when a corporation is treated as a citizen in political life is that it simply amplifies the political views of those persons in a position to control its expenditures, and make them in effect a nobility, worth in political terms thousands, even millions, of citizens, by virtue of the capital they control. This certainly is a breeding ground for oligarchic rule, and antithetical to democracy. Given that the business and managerial class in our society tends to rightist views on economic matters, it is clear that here, the threat posed by this enhancement of their political power through regarding corporations as persons with rights of free speech is one of a rightist stranglehold on political life.

Note that nothing which would flow from removing the rights of a political person would have the slightest impact on the rights of persons who own in some proportion, or are employed at some level in, a corporation. Shareholders and employees could make any donations, or publish and circulate, anything they afford, either individually or in personal association. All they would be restricted from doing would be directly employing fund sof the corporation itself to do this.

Our total of sixty votes today includes a number of 'moderates' and 'centerists' from red or reddish states. Democratic Senators from these places are going to have to stand up and put their seats at risk, and if they do not, will deserve every calumny of cowardice and corruption and petty self-serving that has traditionally been directed at them here from the left. It has been my practice to defend such people here on occasion from such charges, arguing that it is necessary to preserve their seats for a future battle on decent odds. Well, the time of that battle is now. No fight was ever won without casualties.

"The art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defense, followed by audacious attack."

It is not a question of 'throwing anyone under the bus', it is a question of being willing to take a hit for the team, defined as the people of the country and the Party. Democratic Senators from 'red states' are going to have to stand up and put their seats at risk, and if they do not, will deserve every calumny of cowardice and corruption and petty self-serving that has traditionally been directed at them here from the left. It has been my practice to defend such people here on occasion from such charges, arguing that is necessary to preserve their seats for a future battle on decent odds. Well, the time of that battle is now. No fight was ever won without casualties.

"The art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defense, followed by audacious attack."

What is necessary is to restore usury laws, capping interest rates, and to prohibit increases of interest rates on debt already incurred at one rate.

In the largest view, it is necessary to raise wage levels. Credit at usurious rates has served as a means of propping up consumption at levels that cannot be sustained by people's actual incomes, which have not risen even though the productivity of labor has increased greatly by all standard measures. If these productivity increases were expressed by increased wages rather than increased profits, we would have a healthy economy, and very few credit cards in circulation.

If the public option is 'of a decent quality and more affordable', why should the company not switch to it, and what could be wrong with that? Insurance company opposition to this course is based on their cold knowledge the product they offer is necessarily inferior to a public plan, since their business model requires them to pay out in benefits an ever decreasing portion of the money they take in in premiums. They can only manage this by denying claims, canceling policies when customers actually need them, and raising premiums. Health insurance companies pay out only four fifths of their revenue in benefits. A public plan would pay out all but a trifling percentage of its premium payments in benefits, since it needs neither profit nor the administrative staff required for denying claims and canceling policies. This built in advantage guarantees a public plan will provide better service at lower cost.

The problem is the refusal of the far right in this country to abide by the outcome of elections, and its resolve to do all in its power to render the country ungovernable when it does not itself control the government.

Amazing how you present disagreement with your views, and pointing out their sparse foundation, as 'disrupting and shutting down discussion'. You will not find me complaining that persons expressing views contrary to mine are engaged in silencing me, or disrupting a discussion. Statements like that proceed from two things, and two things only: persons who call disagreement with themselves disruption mistake the word 'discussion' for the phrase 'echo-chamber'; persons who call disagreement with themselves 'shutting down discussion' are openly confessing themselves incapable of sustaining their views against reasoned and informed argument.

That the events under discussion were evil in themselves, and certainly deplorable considered in isolation, is beyond argument.

Unfortunately, that is not always a sufficient consideration in prosecuting war. The over-riding ethical imperative in war is to attempt to inflict the minimum degree of cruelty necessary to bring the thing to a victorious conclusion. One has no business engaging in the enterprise at all if one is not convinced the end signified by victory is an improvement of the situation from what it was when the war commenced. On this, obviously, there can be a great deal of debate, and necessarily considerable disagreement on the part of the combatant powers, and one can only be guided by one's own values. In the instance of the Second World War, it is impossible for me to see the war aims of the Axis powers as good, or indeed as anything but evil in the extreme.

There are two elements to this discussion, one of which has been gone into at some length, while the other has not been touched on at all. The former is the fact that the atrocious conduct of Imperial Japan commenced the war in the Pacific, and so brought with some inevitability, considering the actual balance of material forces, ghastly horrors down on the populace of the Home Islands. The latter, unremarked so far, is consideration of what is needed to break the power of an aggressor state, and what was available to the military art of the time.

It is an unfortunate fact that there is no way to assail a government in the era of total war without doing great harm to the population it governs. The capability to manufacture and distribute weapons, and to fuel the machines of war and transport, and to feed soldiers and workers engaged in war manufacture, are the keys to the business. In our present day, these things can be done with some degree of precision, but in the period of the Second World War, only very blunt instruments were available. Blockade which cuts off importation of food and fuel and raw materials imposes malnutrition on the civilian populace, which leads to disease outbreaks and a great increase in death rate. Aerial bombardment did well to hit a target the size of a city; effective bombing of factories proved to be largely a mirage. Ruining of rail networks, and harrying of road transport, conducted by fighter bombers when these could be brought in range, swept up many civilians and imposed a sort of 'internal blockade', with the same effects as the external form. It became quickly apparent to those directing the war effort against the Axis that there simply was no way to weaken the enemy save measures that killed a tremendous number of civilians, and of all ages and conditions. A peculiar twist of horror layers onto this with the understanding that the leadership of totalitarian regimes above all others is most impervious to the suffering inflicted on its civilian population, and so this will be slower to effect the councils of such a regime than it might others differently constituted.

But it remains the case that without the aggression of those regimes, which put on others the necessity of breaking them, and the atrocious conduct of that aggression, which steeled political will to see the thing through no matter what, none of the various sufferings endured by civilian populations in Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany would ever have occurred. It is also the case that what was inflicted on these civilian populations did materially shorten the war. Some of this suffering was directly attendant on actions against strictly defined military objectives, much of it was occasioned by more general measures intended to break the will to fight of both the populace and the leadership, both political and military. In the case of Imperial Japan, the best assessment of the results of the campaign as a whole is that it crippled military power outside the Home Islands, reduced popular fighting spirit, weakened the will to fight of the political leadership, but did not diminish the will to fight of the military leadership in any appreciable degree. The will of the population, in the Japanese system, was the most negligible factor, at least until some putative future collapse under immediate strain to wholesale desertion of soldiers and defections of civilians to an invading force. The military leadership believed it had in hand sufficient fighting power in the Home Islands to bloody an invasion badly, and was resolved to hold on till that crisis materialized: whether it was right or wrong in this assessment is immaterial to the effect it had on their actions.

The story of the last months of the Pacific War is the story of interplay between the weakening will to fight of the political leadership of Imperial Japan, and the resolve to continue fighting of the military leadership of Imperial Japan. In the Japanese system, the military leadership held control of the government, unless directly ordered to some course by the Emperor. In the wake of the catastrophic fire raid on Tokyo early in 1945, the will of the key figure, the Emperor, to continue the war began to weaken, but not sufficiently for him to command the military leadership to surrender. His attitude was sufficient to empower civilian political leadership to commence halting peace feelers, but these were opposed by the military leadership, and worthless without their support. The only peace terms the military leadership was willing to consider were wholly unacceptable to Imperial Japan's enemies, and rightly so, as they would have simply ratified much of Imperial Japan's conquests, and left the same military dominated political structures in place. The Emperor was not moved to directly order the military leadership to surrender until after the atomic bombs, and the Soviet invasion of Manchukuo. It is a dicey debate which of these was the dominant factor, but in any case, the Soviets did not move until August 9, after the atomic attacks.

And it clearly illustrates the a-historical quality of your position.

While it is not my intention to engage the German element at any length, it is worth pointing out one very large fact you are over-looking. The Nazi war aim was exterminationist; the purpose of victory was to commence the slaughter of peoples in the east excess to the requirements of chattel slavery to create of the German population as a whole a leisure class of masters. This was not only stated openly, but put into practice in appreciable degree in occupied areas populated by Slavic peoples. This is not a justification of military necessity, which is to maintain some ghastly act is needed for military advantage that will bring victory closer, and thus be held to have the effect in the long run of lessening the totality of suffering. While there was a good deal of exterminationist rhetoric in the United States regarding the Japanese during World War Two, and there can be no doubt racial feelings played a role in our conduct of that war, this ceased on victory, and the occupation of Japan was not marked by wholesale killings and enslavement. There is thus a significant difference in kind in the war aims, and the sort of blurring you are attempting can only be done extracting the events from history, and disregarding actual factors in the situation.

Your statement of the Japanese war aim is similarly inaccurate. Imperial Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century pursued a policy of establishing Japanese dominion over East Asia, which it considered to be inhabited by inferior native races who ought to be put under a Japanese yoke. Western Imperialists were a stumbling block to this, but were considered similarly inferior as human material, and not a threat to Japan's existence, merely an obstacle to be over-come. The level of atrocity with which this pursued is, as others have stated here, not widely appreciated to this day outside Asia, any more than is its duration. A pattern of atrocity was clearly apparent from 1932 in Manchuria, in the conquest of that region and creation of the Manchukuo regime. Actions ranging from bayonetting wounded Chinese soldiers (uniformed regulars, not guerrillas) to reprisals for guerrilla activity against villagers deemed friendly to them ranging from burying a few persons alive to herding hundreds into corrals and opening fire on the mass with machine-guns are well attested in contemporary eye-witness reports. The first large-scale use of incendiaries against an urban population domiciled in wood and paper construction occurred early in 1932 in Shanghai, with raids from Japanese carrier planes on the 'Little Chapie' district, carried out at dawn when there would be the greatest assistance from hearth fires for breakfast, and produced a rolling sheet of flames reportedly a hundred feet high sweeping through the district, incinerating thousands. This established pattern escalated over intervening years in the occupation of parts of Inner Mongolia and northern China, and simply expanded in scope and scale with the onset of full-bore war with Nationalist China from the summer of 1937. Western opposition to this, particularly that of the U.S., may well have had self-interested elements, focusing on a disinclination to allow themselves to be frozen out of the economic pickings of the China market by any single power, and certainly not by an Oriental one, but it cannot rightly be classed either as aggression against Japan, or a threat to its existence. In practical fact, it was opposition, however mild, to a policy of atrocity and conquest on the part of Japan, which was by any honest reading of the situation an imperialist aggressor of the highest water.

This is the sort of thing one expects left and progressive people to be opposed to, and to denounce in strenuous terms, and to agitate for the defeat of when it is on-going. The problem which emerges is that generally there is no way to effectively oppose and bring to an end such a course of action by a state save military force applied through the medium of war. Persons who oppose war as a general thing are thus unable ever to bring effective opposition to this sort of behavior, since they recoil from the necessary implement. Once the necessary implement is wielded, they immediately begin to focus on what the society to which they belong does, and to view it as morally equivalent to the enemy, since both are employing the detested course of war. It is a position which, as a matter of practical fact, ranges the person alongside the aggressor, and assists the aggressor in his atrocious course.

Despite the Biblical injunction, much of life consists in doing evil in the hope good may come of it, and war employed against atrocious aggression, and in self-defense, is an extreme example of this. What it tends to do is shift the suffering from one set of shoulders to another. For some years in the Orient, it was only Chinese who were being burned alive in wholesale lots by aerial bombardment; by 1944 or so, it was Japanese who suffered this instead. Ruin and death in Japan spared great numbers of Chinese, Indonesians, Burmese, and various others in Japanese power. Forcing a surrender by Japan certainly saved a good many Japanese lives, as well as the lives of Allied soldiers. There is little doubt an invasion of Japan, fought to conclusion, would have taken on an exterminationist character.

First, there is large group of political reactionaries attempting to move people to act against their own best economic and social interests by persuading them their problems are owing to the moral imperfections, mostly sexual behavior, of other people, and not to the systematic extraction of money from their pockets into those of the wealthy. In doing this, they brandish the standard of Christian faith. They proclaim it a religious duty to engage in hate speech and restrict the civil rights of many citizens by law, and protest that opposition to this, disagreement with it, any social or legal restriction on it, is interfering with their free exercise of religion, and flows only from bigotry against their religion.

Second, there is the question of genuine critique of a set of religious beliefs. People are entitled to form and hold their own beliefs on religious questions, and are under no obligation to agree with any particular body of beliefs, or to refrain from commenting on what seem to them the flaws in any body of religious beliefs. Persons who do give credit and adherence to a particular body of religious beliefs can have no reasonable expectation, and certainly have no right, to never meet with any expression of disagreement with that body of beliefs, even if that disagreement is so total as to constitute complete disrespect for their beliefs. Nor do such persons have the right to be taken seriously when they cry such expressions of disagreement with or distaste for their beliefs is simply an expression of bigotry. In the overwhelming proportion of instances, such expressions are far from bigotry: in my experience the most vigorous disdain for religious beliefs is found among people who are more familiar with the doctrines and practices they assail than the average person in the Sunday pews.

Where I live, more people vote for a county commissioner in his district race than have ever voted for this bought out shit-heel. He has no legitimate claim to be a national leader; there is no reason he should have the slightest impact on any part of the country where the population density exceeds ten persons per square mile. I am sick to death of rural rule; I do not care what his isolated and largely ignorant constituents want or think. If our system of government genuinely represented the will of the majority of the people, no one would have ever heard of this man's name, and what he is paid by corrupt special interests to prevent would be the law of the land. The man is a pustule disfiguring the business of the nation and its people. These non-entities from vast and windy empty spaces have got to go....

To call the present financial markets 'the greatest price discovery and wealth creation mechanism ever devised' is a joke in extremely poor taste. What they in fact are is a system of side bets, the sort engaged in by spectators around a craps table on whether or not the shooter will make his point. They produce nothing; they siphon off capital from productive enterprise. The pyramids of speculative wagering erected over the actual production of useful goods and provision of valuable services dwarf the amounts of money involved in real economic activity, and must sooner or later crush real economic activity, destroying enterprises and livelihoods of real use. The only thing this system does efficiently is to concentrate wealth in the hands of sharpsters, and impoverish the people as a whole.

The entire concept of the 'capital gains' tax is rooted in two egregious notions: first, that income from investment should be taxed at a lower rate than income from work, and second, that without such favoritism, people would not try and make more money than they already have. The latter notion is nonesense, as people always want to make more money than they have, and not only will attempt to do it without favoritism, but in thee face of considerable obstacle and risk. The former notion is simply a carrying forward of the notion that those who labor are lesser creatures than those who do not that is at the root of all systems of aristocracy and exploitation.

A tax on the sale of financial instruments, levied as a percentage of purchase price just as a tax on the purchase of goods is, would have several useful benefits. It would certainly enable a reduction in the taxes levied on wages and sale of goods and services falling chiefly on working people. It would make available for social use a portion of the wealth generated by productive enterprise. It would doubtless serve as some break on speculation and the rapid churning of financial instruments which does great harm to the stability of markets, and to the economy and society they serve.

It is a bad, a damnable mistake, to set up the market as supreme, to make it the ruler all serve rather than the servant of the economy and society which supports it. Like fire, markets are good servants but poor masters.