"We Are ALL Redistributionists" Shouts Clarence Page ! Well, Two for Sure; Meet Jesse and Willard -The Marx Brother

"In fact, whether we Americans face up to it or not, we're all redistributionists now . . ." Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune 

A real Spartacus moment there Clarence! You know, when Kirk Douglas stands up to take his lumps from Sir Larry at the end of movie and Tony Curtis springs vertical with " I'm Spartacus!"  Then, John Ireland and then all the other extras, "I'm Spartacus!"  We are ALL Redistributionists!  Yes, yes, yes! I'm IN! Forward!

I am Willard!  I am Jesse!  Those are the two scamps who pinched hundreds of Benjamins from Campaign Forward - Obama 2012.  Clarence is a scamp his own bad self!

Clarence Page was recently under the 'hot lights' of Tribune editorial board over wetting his beak in an ethically challenged cash snatch from a terrorist bundling group:

Page’s crime? A breach of editorial policy. He failed to get advanced approval for a $peaking gig, and the group he $poke for, MEK, makes the Tribune nervous. MEK is an organization of Iranian exiles opposed to the current government and is currently on the State Department’s list of international terrorist groups.WBEZ July 3, 2012

WBEZ - a government funded news organ of record for everything Progressive parsed a bully narrative for Clarence.  He was doing only what any red-blooded American 1%er should do -grab some dough!  Clarence Page is getting checks from  The Chicago Tribune, syndication deals, Bruce Dold approved speaking gigs and of course Public Television not only brought to you in part with grants from Exon Mobile, the Joyce, MacArthur and assorted boarded and looted foundations, but also tax payer dollars. Redistribution of wealth!  Clarence gets mine. Yet, I get none of his.  Redistribution of wealth is a nice way of saying 'its okay, take someone else's money.'

Without going back to the roots of socialism in 1827 England sparked by Malthus and later Jeremy Bentham,Utilitarians, Philosophical Radicals, Marx and Engels, Hegel, Dewey, and all them folks, Redistribution is the key to votes and it costs money.  

Irony is best served up with white cheddar cheese popcorn, or reading the morning's edition of the Sunday Tribune.  Not only is there a serving Clarence Page's work for the Obama Campaign in the opinion section, but also a news item that graphically presents redistribution of wealth.

Bail was set at $100,000 and $75,000 today for two men charged with depositing two checks stolen from President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters into bank accounts they fraudulently opened.
A judge Saturday set bail at $100,000 for Jessie Adams, who allegedly instructed Willard Elam and another unnamed man who remains at large to open up bank accounts at separate TCF bank branches in the south suburbs. Adams is charged with one count of organizing a financial criminal enterprise.

Bail for Willard Elam, who is charged with continuing a financial crime enterprise, was set at $75,000 Cook County prosecutors said Elam and the unnamed man were accompanied by Adams and pretended to be business owners of actual companies that work with Obama's presidential campaign.

They opened up the accounts on Sept. 12 and Sept. 13 at TCF Bank locations in two different grocery stores and presented fake documents to open the bank accounts before depositing the checks, one valued at $24,857 and the other at $23,839, prosecutors said. 

A comptroller with Obama's reelection campaign caught on to the scheme when two companies complained they had not been paid. It was not immediately clear how the three men obtained the checks, prosecutors said.

Adams, 36, of the 1100 block of Spencer Road in Joliet, works for a general contracting company, and Elam, 48, of the 15500 block of South Drexel Avenue in Dolton, is a laborer, authorities said.

Police said Adams allegedly recruited Elam for the alleged crime.

Allow me to point out the number of uses of said (3)by the Tribune scribe as a paragraphic close -  well, said is the word well-said. Allegedly, of course.


It appears that the vetting process in the Obama Campaign takes a page from the mind of Clarence Page - It appears that our two cuffed and processed miscreant Marxists passed themselves off as business men.  They do have that Romneyesque quality of corporate person-hood, don't you think?  Real country club ( no, not Malt Liqour, you racist!) types, who wear straw boaters and white linen sack suits with collarless white cotton shirts as they croquet their way over the backs of workers.

Yep, Clarence says "If Romney really wants to give those low-income voters away, I'm sure Obama would be delighted to take them."

Now, these two 'pretended to be businesses men'' which begs the question - " Have Willard and Jesse paid taxes in recent years and are they in fact numbered among the 47% disdained by Romney and therefore embraced by Obama?  Hmmmm?

Were Willard and Jesse merely going home?  Finding the pantry stuffed and heaping board over-flowing with bounty to be taken by all within the warmth of the Obama 2012 hearth?

Home, Lads! Home.

If Clarence Page can find it within his heart to forgive himself for snatching a fee, but failing to cash it before Bruce Dold found out about it, I am quite sure that WBEZ can and will find a narrative to parse the motives and the actions of Willard and Jesse, the Obama 2012 Marx Brothers.

Redistribution - it's what's keeping you from dinner!
 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-two-suburban-men-charged-with-stealing-checks-from-obama-campaign-20120922,0,7185084.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-were-all-redistributionists-including-romney-20120922,0,2597111.column

http://www.wbez.org/blogs/achy-obejas/2012-07/why-tribune-scapegoating-clarence-page-100625

Be Our Guests! 1%ers March Through Back of the Yards, Canaryville and Bridgeport

 Occupy anti-NATO Commandos in Bridgeport - skin that never met a day's work, God Bless Them.

A band of several dozen protesters marched up Halsted Street this evening from the South Side through Bridgeport, where some engaged in a shouting match with residents.
The marchers, some of whom covered their faces with hoods or bandanas(sic), began their protest at about 51st Street and Halsted, chanting obscenities about police and police brutality.

A few dozen well-heeled, college educated, really sincere and snappily dressed masque-ers sporting button-festooned North Face head wear, American Eagle T-shirts and bandannas marched with a police escort up through the 11th Ward.  From Back of the Yards ( 51st Street) through Canaryville (47th-39th Streets) and Bridgeport up Halsted and past Jackie Schaller's landmark Chicago dining venue Schaller's Pump, America's young  spark-plugs of change paraded their V masks, Ninja costumes, and Indie fashion apparel along with the naughty words of the truly edgy. Like Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey in 1904, the Occupy Commandos were protected and served by the Chicago Police Department.

Halsted Street became the  Occupy/Dissident/Anarchist/ Hipster Runway.  We were given a preview of the accessory conscious young, armed with Dad-funded Visa Debit cards and Rage Against the Machine.

I'd bet a shiny new Sacagawea gold dollar that not one of these later-day Mother . . .Joneses could identify the significance of these neighborhoods in the real struggle of working people*. Below are the residents of Canaryville and Bridgeport who fought the real fight on Halsted Street the site of  yesterday's Che fashion stroll

The Residents of Canaryville circa 1904- meat cutters in Armour's & Swift's Packinghouses - one their great grandchildren attends Leo High School - a young man from St. Gabriel's parish in Canaryville.

This is where American Labor, real Labor and not the phony Reds of SEIU, won its spurs by being betrayed by Progressives and buried by Progressive History.  This is where the Jungle happened Cupcakes.  Bridgeport was the home of the real Lithuanian workmen portrayed by Upton Sinclair, another armchair recvolutionary opportunist, as protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his co-workers. Upton watched the 1904 Amalgamated Meatcutters Strike that shut down the American Meat Packing Industry from July to September in 1904 from the front porch of a previously Packingtown blacklisted Knight of Labor John Joyce and scribbled notes.
Jane Addams, like most Progressives is affluent, imperious and a very well protected species

Dr. Cornelia  De Bey and Jane Addams and her partner at the time Mary Rozet Smith were members of the Chicago Public School Board. Doc Cornelia had another partner.

The March of the Real Workers began at the Meatcutters Hall at 47th & Ashland. Michael Donnelly the President of the Amalgamated Meatcutters held out against the Strikebreakers, Meat Packers and the phony   Out And Proud Progressives Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey**.  Read the Chicago Tribune account of the end of the 1904 Strike - you will be required to purchase the articles in true Medill fashion; however the NYT covered the strike very well and praised the work of Father Maurice Dorney of St. Gabriel Parish in Canaryville, giving short shrift to the short-haired women and long-haired Progressives. The New York Times accounts are free.  Ask me nicely, and I might link my privately owned collection of contemporary accounts.

Father Maurice Dorney was a figure of National renown ( NYT reported on his Spanish American War Service and his heroic fight for workers in three national strikes) -try and find any mention of Father Dorney in the much ballyhooed Chicago Encyclopedia.

Too many Americans subsist on a diet of redacted historical bullshit.  Progressive revisionists have erased all traces of genuine social justice fighters.like Father Dorney, John Joyce, the Knights of Labor and actual strikers and given praise and homage to the likes of Jane Addams who sold out the strikers.

Hull House and other Settlement Houses in Hyde Park flourished immediately after the strike was broken.  Michael Donnelly, who called and led the strike, disappeared from Chicago and from history.  Upton Sinclair wrote a swell book.  Teddy Roosevelt got Progressive street cred.  The Strikers got bupkis.

*Packinghouse workers, experiencing horrible working conditions and insufficient wages, sought to secure union recognition as the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Two long and bloody strikes (1904 and 1921) were defeated by the companies. During both strikes, many African-American workers were temporarily employed to break the strikes. Since Black workers suffered from economic circumstances as desperate as those faced by the striking White workers, and since they were excluded generally from unions and consequently the benefits they would gain from unionization, these so-called "scab" workers felt no loyalty to the strikers or the union. In the aftermath of the two defeats, hostility towards Black workers rose, and Black resentment of Whites increased as well. For years, remembrances of racism and scabbing impaired any effort to create a common front against the packers. 

**When Jane Addams's travels took her away from her close companion Mary Rozet Smith, she sometimes took along a painting of Smith, even though the portrait was a rather bulky piece of luggage. Addams, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning social activist who founded Chicago's Hull-House in 1889, clearly felt a strong emotional attachment to the aristocratic, gracious woman in that picture, which now hangs at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum—with a question mark for a caption.
For the past year, the museum has been seeking suggestions on how to label the portrait, which Addams commissioned from Alice Kellogg Tyler. Should the caption suggest Addams and Smith were companions? Lesbian lovers? Or simply focus on Smith's role as one of Hull-House's most generous financial supporters? This summer, as the museum gets ready to decide, a new WTTW documentary is stepping into the fray and staking out the position that Addams and Smith were lesbians. The producers of Out & Proud in Chicago, Alexandra Silets and Dan Andries, say their film on the history of gays and lesbians in the city wouldn't be complete without Addams. "In not revealing this part of Jane Addams's life, you're denying the rest of us a role model," says Silets, a lesbian.

 http://www.politicalaffairs.net/class-and-race-in-the-us-labor-movement-the-case-of-the-packinghouse-workers/

http://books.google.com/books?id=DW4TAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA425&lpg=PA425&dq=Jane+Addams+and+Cornelia+De+Bey&source=bl&ots=dQjc7A18Xg&sig=89nzLwjY4pN7hC4BQE098u4Aws0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hpuzT5bbOabS2QWO6cnpCA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Jane%20Addams%20and%20Cornelia%20De%20Bey&f=false
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2008/Friends-With-Benefits/

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/tc/xtf/servlet/org.cdlib.xtf.crossQuery.CrossQuery?text=dorney&text-join=or

Michael Moriarty & Dennis Byrne -On Public Intellectuals and Marriage: Defense of 1st Principles

"I have concluded that to be an intellectual is to reach for an entirely different planet than the one most of us live on. Certainly to be an intellectual is to create another language of sorts.I understand the impulse, having been a lifelong, shameless dreamer." Michael Moriarty, Ottawa Life Magazine

"Few if any supporters of gay marriage demand as a matter of central concern that each gay partner be automatically recognized as the parent of any child generated by the other."  Dennis Byrne Chicago Tribune


God, in his Eternal sense of humor, has seen fit to allow me to breath and also to connect,, converse and commiserate with intellectuals fired with fierce fortitude. Fortitude is moral strength founded in a belief or faith beyond one's self that defines all subsequent actions and intellectual positions regardless of outcomes.

Murder and killing are very different.  One is an act of desperation and the other an act of necessity.  A woman and a man are very different, in most cases.  That difference is a necessity to human generation.  President Obama is not only America's First Abortionist, but also America's First Gay, because public intellectuals have said so.  I am sure that Barack Obama would wildly object to either claim made on his behalf, by the people who fund, support, worship and obey his every waking thought, as a matter of Pragmatism - saying anything, at anytime, for different reasons.  Pragmatism is the core, but very moveable, doctrine of  the American Intellectual.  Pragmatism denies 1st Principles - faith in God is the very First of 1st Principles*.  God is Inconvenient Truth.

I was told by a Jesuit of sound and sensible orthodoxy, Father Al, that any Catholic could never be admitted membership in the American Intellectual fraternity, based upon our demand for First Principles ( Ethics and Pseudo-Ethics).  Father Al let us working-stiffs know that we should swell with pride in the knowledge of this bar to the country club of parsers.

Progressives can not admit to eternal truths, because those truths block their end-runs around logic and rigor. Michael Moriarty, Chicago rooted actor, musician, composer and writer,nicely unmasks the clever masker in his recent article for Ottawa Life Magazine.

Mr. Moriarty reacts to an article by Professor Louis Menand of New York University, in The New Yorker.  This piece concerns the state of American higher education.  Prof. Menand's hobby-horse is the American public intellectual - the citizen-scholar who 'purifies' culture - Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Norman Mailer, and Pauline Kael to Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Joan Walsh, and Alec Baldwin. 

"They (NY Intellectuals) played the role of purveying intellectual culture to a wider audience, and spoke to people outside their own fields.”

THEY made 1st Principles ( God and all of His Works) obscure enough for Ad Men and Ambulance Chasers, one step out of the cow shit in Wisconsin, want to be little Andre Malrauxs and feel the WILL to be proletarian.  Make six to seven figures selling Ban Roll-on Deodorant and write checks to the Black Panthers, SDS, and John Lindsey.  Our capitalist economy made them gentry, and the New Republic allowed them to play Atticus Finch - One Man's Murder of an Unborn Child is Another's Woman's Health Care, Scout. Who's to say? - with a self-satisfied snap of the store-bought galluses. 

Michael Moriarty picks the parsing Pragmatist's bones clean, because like most Catholic educated folks, he remembers what he has read before and applies scrutiny accordingly:

I first encountered Prof. Menand, . . . , as somewhat of an authority on the American literary and social critic Edmund Wilson, the rather intense-looking face to the left.
Louis Menand’s preface for Wilson’s To the Finland Station had the refreshing wisdom to include a very Russian warning about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Vladimir Nabokov’s remark that Lenin was “a glass of the milk of human kindness at the bottom of which was a dead rat.”
One assumes, however, that the publisher of To the Finland Station must have considered Menand a Wilson authority or at least an admirer of some sort.
In typically mystifying fashion, Menand says about his college dissertation on Edmund Wilson.
“I didn’t write about Wilson because he was an important figure for me, but because he was part of that phenomenon.”He means the “Modernist” phenomenon… or is it the “Post-Modernist” phenomenon?As a further glimpse into his dissertation, he says,

Prof. Louis Menand

“The writers who influenced me the most were Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Norman Mailer, and Pauline Kael. It wasn’t Edmund Wilson and it wasn’t Lionel Trilling, even though I certainly read them. When I was a graduate student, I thought about them as possible models, but when I look at what I have done since, they have not been particularly influential. The reason I like the writers I named is because they seem very sophisticated in seeing through issues about culture and ideas that actually is very like contemporary academic thinking. The thing about Wilson—that in the end is frustrating about him—is that he had no ability to think theoretically. In the few cases where he does, it is his least satisfactory work.”“The reason I like the writers I named is because they seem very sophisticated…“ “Sophisticated” is the seminal code word, I believe. All five of the writers achieved success, literary American triumph actually, without being necessarily branded as Communist.

Seeming is believing in Pragmatic Progressivism

In 1971, I was taught by a Jesuit priest and philosophy professor of sound and sensible orthodoxy, Father Al, that any Catholic could never be admitted membership in the American Intellectual fraternity, based upon our demand for First Principles ( Ethics and Pseudo-Ethics).  Father Al let us working-stiffs paying Loyola tuition know that we should swell with pride in the knowledge of this particular bar to the country club of Pragmatic parsers. 'Sometimes it is a gift to be refused admission,'  said the Missionary with a cold sore to boiling aboriginal stew pot. 

Progressives can not admit to eternal truths, because those truths block their end-runs around logic and rigor.

Around the time that Father Al was teaching Ethics to me and Mike Miller, Jim Molloy, Mike Stankewicz, Jack McNamara, Mary Kay Harvey and Stanley Jurich, the Temptaions were singing Just My Imagination, Running Away With Me.

Each day through my window I watch her as she passes by
I say to myself you're such a lucky guy,
To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true
out of all the fellows in the world she belongs to me.
But it was Just my imagination,
once again runnin' away with me.
It was just my imagination runnin' away with me. Oo
Soon we'll be married and raise a family (Oh yeah)
A cozy little home out in the country with two children maybe three.
I tell you I can visualize it all
this couldn't be a dream for too real it all seems;
But it was Just my imagination once again runnin' way with me.
Tell you it was just my imagination runnin' away with me.

Rigor.  Michael Moriarty is a dreamer in the mold of Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, Billy of Occam, Moses Maimonides, and John Scotus Erigenna.  Those medieval gents were the Temptin' T's of scholastic thought - four Brits and a Jew. Like them, the Temptations - African American scholastics - cut the veil between imagination and reality to happy conclusion - marriage is between a Man and Woman.  Celebrate that diversity in Holy Wedlock!

Dennis Byrne, another Jesuit educated writer, has heroically challenged the parsing pragmatists over Marriage.  The outcome of his position will be a cavalcade of idiotically molded screeching from peanut gallery in the comment page.  I'd wager that the five star estimate by robo-writers will assess Mr. Byrne's defense of Marriage between a Man and Woman at two stars by day's end and here's why:

Research and common sense indisputably validate that heterosexual marriage is uniquely good in itself, better for the children and essential for the common good.
That's why government has seen fit to regulate this singular institution. Government doesn't regulate all human relationships; you don't need a license to form a friendship or a court decree to dump a friend. If marriage didn't serve a unique public good, government protections of all of its parties wouldn't be required; it would be regarded as little more than two people living together.
This is not to say that every marriage must produce children or that children raised in different circumstances, e.g. adoption, in separated families or by gay partners, can't do as well as or better. Nor does it deny that a same-sex partnership can't bond into a permanent, caring relationship, as good as or better than can heterosexual couples. Traditional marriage is an ideal, and like all other ideals, in practice it can fall short of its lofty goals. That doesn't negate the importance of preserving the ideal.

The ideal is not pragmatic.  Never was, no how.  Seeming is all the believing Bruce Dold and Chicago Tribune editorial board require, Mr. Byrne.  It is easier to be Eric Zorn, Carol Marin, Mary Schmich, Neil Steinberg, and Steve Chapman in this cracker-chested burg these days, because they all write the exact same thing in every column - like the citizen-scholars Michael Moriarty unmasks in his recent article - these lightweights  purvey what passes for  intellectual culture to a wider audience.

Holding to First Principles and all that goes with them requires virtue- "Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature. "

Michael Moriarty and Dennis Byrne offer excellent examples of intellectual discernment and courage; not

Just my Imagination, running away with me.

  

* In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements. It is clear, then, that in the science of nature as elsewhere, we should try first to determine questions about the first principles. The naturally proper direction of our road is from things better known and clearer to us, to things that are clearer and better known by nature; for the things known to us are not the same as the things known unconditionally (haplôs). Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature. (Phys. 184a10–21) Aristotle

 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0515-byrne-20120515,0,6394836.column
http://www.ottawalife.com/2012/05/moriartys-musings-new-yorks-public-intellectuals/