In the trailer for that upcoming Obama conspiracy theory movie, I spotted the cover for this book, Teachings of Marx for Girls and Boys and immediately set out to ABE Books online to find a copy. I didn’t score—how many of these puppies would have been printed in the first place, I wonder—but I did find POSTERS!

Yes, posters of this marvelous image are for sale at the Georgetown Bookstore’s website. Click here to order online.

The author of Teachings of Marx for Girls and Boys, William Montgomery Brown (1855 – 1937) or as he was also known, “Bad Bishop Brown,” was an Anglican clergyman from Ohio is remembered as the first Anglican Bishop to be tried for heresy since the Reformation. Additionally Brown, who evolved in his lifetime from being a missionary and the Bishop of Arkansas to a committed Marxist, was the first member of the clergy in America to be deposed (of any denomination) for being a heretic.

Brown felt that his real ministry began at age 71 when he started lecturing to the working class about Karl Marx and Socialism.

 
In The Objectivist Newsletter: Vol. 4, No. 12, December, 1965, Ayn Rand published an essay titled “Check Your Premises: What Is Capitalism?” 

In part 2 of the two-part article, Rand asked her followers:

“Why should Elvis Presley make more money than Einstein?” The answer is: Because men work in order to support and enjoy their own lives-and if many men find value in Elvis Presley, they are entitled to spend their money on their own pleasure. Presley’s fortune is not taken from those who do not care for his work (I am one of them) nor from Einstein—nor does he stand in Einstein’s way—nor does Einstein lack proper recognition and support in a free society, on an appropriate intellectual level.

Fair point, zealous defender of Capitalism crazy lady!

But how to square that argument against one of the single most egregious examples of corporate greed-headism that I have perhaps ever heard of in my entire life?

I don’t think it can be done.

In the past few days, articles relating to the outrageous compensation package paid to one John H. Hammergren, the CEO of the McKesson Corp., a giant medical-supply wholesaler based in San Francisco, have been popping up in different places around the Internet.

The Daily Beast’s Gary Rivlin referred to Hammergren as “...one of the nation’s highest-paid CEOs—and you’ve never heard of him.” That was true for me, too, at least until yesterday, but apparently he’s been hiding right in the open. Hammergren ranked 14th on Forbes’s 2011 executive-pay list and 22nd the year before.

I think at this point, though, Hammergren’s cover has been definitively blown:

Since taking over as the CEO of McKesson—which is the main pharmaceutical supplier to large retail chains like Wal-Mart and Rite Aid, hospitals and nursing homes—in 1999, when the previous management was ousted in an accounting scandal, Hammergren has made $500 million dollars.

That’s even more than the $442 million McKesson has set aside to settle a class-action lawsuit that was brought against it, charging that McKesson conspired to drive up the price of prescription drugs!

Read those last two paragraphs again, won’t you? How DO they set the wholesale costs of drugs, anyway?!?!? Not that these two matters have anything to do with it…!

From The Daily Beast:

For a moment, [New York-based compensation consultant, James] Reda is silent. “$40 million, $50 million a year is excessive, no matter what the yardstick,” he says. The average pay package for a CEO running a top 100 company these days, Reda says, is around $12 million. That includes everything, from salary to stock awards to contributions to a retirement account. Yet last year McKesson contributed more than $13 million just to Hammergren’s pension, according to company documents. Among the other perks he enjoys: a chauffeur to drive his company car, free use of the corporate jet for personal travel, and an extra $17,000 a year to pay for a financial planner because handling all those hundreds of millions is no doubt complicated stuff.

“He doesn’t leave anything on the table, does he?” Reda asks.

Ya, think?

Now if you’ve ever gotten a medical bill for a $4 Q-tip or a $3 cotton ball, or you pay out-of-pocket each month for expensive pharmaceuticals to keep you alive, it might make you puke to realize that, well, considering the simple rules of mathematics (no higher authority is required here) there is a very high likelihood that you personally might be paying some small part of this fat cat’s income each and every month, because he’s quite literally making a killing—FROM SICK PEOPLE!

Perhaps buried in the price of each and every pill or injection that you yourself might take, is a contribution to the upkeep of the cushy lifestyle of this great and powerful MAN-GOD, the great John H. Hammergren.

How fucked up is that? Talk about getting your cut, right?

Welcome to free-market healthcare in America the Great! This farce is advanced capitalism as the lowest rung of a Dantean Hell:  I picture a hive of SICK worker bees chained to their honeycomb to produce royal jelly for the queen bee, or king bee in this instance, so they can live on to do it yet another day.

How much more visceral of an example would you require to convince you that the system is completely rigged for the wealthy?

Hell, this goes so far beyond that, it’s the fucking MATRIX, here and now!
.
Ever wonder why the costs of American health care are the highest in the world? I don’t, I’d just like to know how many more capitalist parasites like Hammergren there are taking their own cuts off the top of prescription medicine sales in this country, wouldn’t you? Makes you wonder HOW MANY OTHER PIGS ARE FEEDING AT THE BIG PHARMA TROUGH in a similar manner, doesn’t it?

Poking around, I saw that Hammergren’s compensation package has been questioned before, as Patrick McGeehan wrote in “Suits: The Pension’s In the Bag” published in the The New York Times on June 17, 2007:

John H. Hammergren has plenty of incentives to stay on as chairman and chief executive of the McKesson Corporation, the health care services giant based in San Francisco. But to pad his pension is not one of them.

Mr. Hammergren, who after six years as the chief executive is only 48, could quit tomorrow and immediately collect full pension benefits as if he had worked until retirement. How large would that lump sum be? Almost $76 million. McKesson disclosed that obligation in its latest proxy statement, though it said it had accounted for only about $35 million of it.

So if Mr. Hammergren resigns abruptly, shareholders will have 40 million more reasons to miss him.

But it keeps getting more and more absurd. Via The Daily Beast again:

“As far as I’m concerned, a board that keeps loading up its chief executive with more stock and options each year is, from a shareholder perspective, basically committing theft,” says Albert Meyer, a former accounting professor who runs a money-management firm called Bastiat Capital. It’s all legal, of course, but to Meyer you can tell if an enterprise exists for the benefit of shareholders or insiders by the number of options it awards its top executives. Options aren’t free; they dilute the worth of everyone’s shares. And the practice hurts more than the privileged few. Anyone who owns an index fund of the country’s 500 largest companies owns shares in McKesson, a Fortune 500 company. “It’s nothing short of a massive wealth transfer from the retirement accounts of middle-class Americans to a privileged few,” hidden in the guise of stock-option programs like McKesson’s, Meyer argues.

—snip—

The party won’t stop once the 52-year-old Hammergren retires. Among his lifetime benefits: a personal assistant and office, which the company figures will cost more than $200,000 a year, and the services of a financial counselor—a perk that will eat up $350,000 in profits, according to company estimates. The goodies keep coming even after he dies. If his wife survives him, she will continue receiving his base salary for six months and will also get $2 million in cash. That cash bonus would actually cost the company nearly twice that amount, as it’s promised to cover the widow’s cost of paying taxes on that money.

Okay, I’m sure that you must have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here by now. But do you really want to feel the love?

If Hammergren loses his gig because the company gets sold or there’s a stock takeover, he would get a $469 million payout. If you were him, wouldn’t you work like hell to make sure that happened? What kind of crazy, fucked up performance incentive is THAT?

And this means, of course, that FUTURE sick people will be able to pay that windfall down on McKesson’s behalf, with each and every month’s pharmacy bills!

It’s obscene, isn’t it?

Fox News and the Republican party would call this guy a “job creator.” I call him a parasitic greed-head, growing rich off sick people.

But for all of you Fox News watchers who also read DM, I’ll put it to you another way:

HOW is a compensation package like this NOT A HIDDEN TAX on people’s very lives? It’s free-market tax just on staying alive, paid “freely”(!) to the top executive of this corporation! How could this be seen otherwise, even by the very thickest people out there???

What has THIS GUY, this MAN-GOD John H. Hammergren done that is so great that he deserves some micropayment on your illness? Why is something like this allowed to happen?

It’s positively feudal!

Am I exaggerating here for comic effect?

Replace “arable land” with “pharmaceuticals.”

“Serfdom” with “a hospital stay” or “managing a chronic disease.”

The king’s men come around for a micropayment every time you pop a pill, bucko. How’s this any different? How much choice do you have in the matter? What, you’ll show the king and stop taking the meds that keep you going?

Here’s the thing, like Ayn Rand, I have no trouble with guys like Larry Ellison or Bill Gates or Larry Page (who all started their companies) or even the bloody Kardashians getting rich selling stuff that people want. No one forces any of us to buy any of their products, of course [How much they should be taxed on these vast fortunes is not a subject for now, but in brief, I think “a hell of a lot” should cover it]. But why the fuck should MAN-GOD John H. Hammergren get a micro-payment “tribute” each and ever time someone in the customer, um, “food chain” of the McKesson Corp. has to take a pill?

That’s “freedom” ain’t it?

It’s quite incredible to consider that this ONE MAN’S SALARY could literally raise the price of prescription drugs in this country.

And gosh darn it, why aren’t the major stockholders getting a cut like this, too? OR ARE THEY?

This is what happens when the profit motive is introduced into places where it should not be. Like healthcare. It’s a moral affront, nothing less.

I leave you with this: Guess who approves his own compensation package? Hammergren is the chairman of the board, too!

The board votes on it when he’s out of the room, sure, but guess who is setting their salaries, suckers?

The system is rigged… not for your benefit.

 
How I wish this was in my own home… Or maybe a smaller version? No, one this big!

Sculpture in steel wool by Ukrainian artist Nataliya Slinko. Now on display at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, along with the “Baby Marx” exhibit I blogged about recently.

Via Neatorama

 
“Baby Marx” is an ongoing TV pilot project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes currently on exhibit at the prestigious Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from August 11 to November 27.

Reporting on the advent of the Second French Empire in 1851, Marx famously repeated an insight he had read in a letter from Engels, itself a variation on Hegel: if all great world-historical facts and personages occur twice, the first time they do so as “grand tragedy,” the second as “rotten farce.” A century and a half ago, Marx and Engels regarded this repetition with despair, brandishing the category of farce as a denunciation of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s dictatorship.

In the context of advanced capitalism, however, Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) asks us, with Baby Marx, to re-evaluate the political inheritance of both repetition and farce.

Taking up a recent trend in the production of Hollywood blockbusters, Reyes proposes to “reboot” the nineteenth century debate between socialism and capitalism. Media moguls such as Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica) and J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) have similarly resurrected dystopian, Cold War-era visions of the future to great commercial success. Repetition recommends itself in these latter contexts principally as a means of streamlining the production process itself: brand recognition has been subsidized in advance, capitalizing on consumers’ prior emotional investments in the franchise’s narrative.

Reyes and his team are actually shooting new scenes for “Baby Marx” at the Walker Art Center. The behind the scenes process is what the exhibit is all about. I think this is a funny idea, but I don’t think it’s funny enough. I’ve read that Reyes hired two writers from an Adult Swim show to help punch it up a bit in that department. “Baby Marx” has been pitched to HBO and Japanese TV execs, who both apparently turned it down. In the age of The Daily Show, South Park and Bill Maher, something like this would require an absolutely savage satirical wit to make it come alive and so far this project lacks that, in my never so humble opinion. It’s cool, but it could be a lot better.

The first installment of “Baby Marx,” produced for Japan’s Yokohama Triennial in 2008:
 

 
More “Baby Marx” (and Monty Python’s “Communist Quiz Show” sketch) after the jump…

The Ouroboros eats its own tail.

“We thought the markets work. They’re not working.”—Dr. Nouriel Roubini

I have always maintained that the global future will ultimately be a socialist one, but it was not easy to “keep the faith” after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the (seemingly) robust (dot)economy of the Clinton years. However, these days Marx’s predictions for voracious end-stage capitalism seem well-vindicated by what we’re seeing take place in Greece, Israel, Iceland and especially in England. The system hollowed itself out from the inside far faster than I ever would have thought possible in 1999.

So as someone whose politics have been more or less wildly out of step with American mainstream opinion for my entire life, I have watched with great bemusement at the surprisingly Marxist-tinged rhetoric that is now being espoused in places like TIME, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. It doesn’t get much more “establishment” than these venerable publications, I think you’ll agree, which is why they’ve always been such credible markers of where the cultural conversation is headed.

Try this one for size. Joel Kotkin writing at Forbes, “The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War”:

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

The hardening of class divisions   has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

All these factors can be seen in the British riots. Race and police relations played a role, but the rioters included far more than minorities or gangsters. As British historian James Heartfield has suggested, the rioters reflected a broader breakdown in “the British social system,” particularly in “the system of work and reward.”

In the earlier decades of the 20th century working class youths could look forward to jobs in Britain’s vibrant industrial economy and, later, in the growing public sector largely financed by both the earnings of the City of London and credit. Today the industrial sector has shrunk beyond recognition. The global financial crisis has undermined credit and the government’s ability to pay for the welfare state.

With meaningful and worthwhile work harder to come by — particularly in the private sector — the prospects for success among Britain working classes have been reduced to largely fantastical careers in entertainment, sport or all too often crime. Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s supporters in the City of London may have benefited from financial bailouts arranged by the Bank of England, but opportunities for even modest social uplift for most other people have faded.

Forbes. That’s right, that was from Forbes.

On the Project-Syndicate website, and widely covered and quoted elsewhere (including TIME), Nouriel Roubini (aka “Dr. Doom”), the NYU economist who became a high-profile “big brain” pontificator after he accurately predicted the global economic meltdown a few years before everybody else, asked “Is Capitalism Doomed?”

Usually, when such thing is posed as a query, the answer in the text tends toward the affirmative. Roubini writes:

So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.

Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the UK, and rising popular anger in China – and soon enough in other advanced economies and emerging markets – are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.

To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.

The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.

Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

Below, Roubini interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:
 

 
Imagine the conversation amongst these gentlemen during a leisurely trek in nature!

These Mao, Marx, Lenin, and Thoreau figures come in a set of four and retail for £145. Check ‘em out here. 

Each mountain figure is dressed in hiking outfits with rucksacks and hiking boots. They come carefully packaged in printed Mountain Research box.

(via Super Punch)

Why are these people smiling? Fom left, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner at the 2011 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., Monday, May 9.

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog:

In a classic Marxist set-up, Capital is free to exploit labor because labor is in surplus.

The fundamental dynamics of the U.S.-China trade partnership—certainly the biggest economic story of this generation—boil down to “capital exploits labor.” I am well aware that this sort of quasi-Marxist analysis is supposed to be passe in the era where young nerds can start billion-dollar enterprises in a garage or dorm room. Capitalism is a priori “win-win,” as all those workers in China are getting ahead while our youth launch $50 million IPOs of social networking Web 2.0 companies.

But if you scrape away the high-gloss propaganda and myth-making, then the fundamental dynamic is definitely Marxist: American capital jettisoned American labor as a costly hassle in favor of cheap, no-hassle Chinese labor.

Since Capital’s best buddy in the whole world is the Central State and its proxies, i.e. the Federal Reserve, then the Central State and the central bank (the Fed) smoothed over the exploitation and furthered the consumer economy by inflating a credit-housing bubble. Since 60% of American households own a home, this enabled the increasingly impoverished “middle class” to borrow trillions of dollars in “free” money that could be spent—surprise!—on the new imports from China that filled the shelves of big box global retailers everywhere.

Allow me to illustrate this dynamic by deconstructing two recent stories in the Mainstream Financial Media: ‘Superjobs’: Why You Work More, Enjoy It Less Businesses expect a lot more out of their employees these days…

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru: Operational innovations at restaurants like Taco Bell rival those at any factory in the world.

The first piece describes in clinical fashion how U.S. capital is ruthlessly exploiting labor, demanding more work for little to no additional pay. The underlying dynamic here is purely Marxist: capital encourages over-supply of labor, which then drives the value of labor down. Competition for the few jobs available makes desperate wage-earners willing to put up with exploitation and insecurity because the options of escaping the cycle of centralized Corporate value extraction are insecure and risky.

Global Corporate America fosters a surplus of labor in the U.S. via three mechanisms:

1. Vast illegal immigration which keeps labor costs down in low-skill corporate workhouses such as slaughterhouses, fast-food outlets, etc.

2. H1-B visas for high-tech workers (now falling out of favor as those positions are better filled directly in India and China).

3. Ship production, software coding and back-office functions to China, and to a lesser degree, to India and elsewhere in east Asia.

The unemployment rate among PhDs is roughly 50%. So much for “winning” by becoming ever more educated. The number of slots in academia is shrinking, and the total number of research positions is relatively inelastic. For more on academia’s “plantation economy,” please read Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education (The Nation).

With labor in surplus, capital is free to demand whatever it needs to boost all-important profits. The propaganda machines in HR (human resources) spray-paint slogans everywhere (“you’re really really valuable to us, Super-Duper Team Member!”) but everyone knows the reality: everybody is dispensible, and everyone but the CIO at a hot startup a few months from an IPO is a corporate serf a paycheck away from being booted out of the castle into abject poverty.

As a result of this exploitation—known as “wage abritrage”—corporate profits (which boost the wealth of the top 10% who owns the vast majority of stocks and mutual funds) are extremely plump and juicy:
 

 
In the second piece, BusinessWeek breathlessly assures us that we have thousands of highly efficient factories running 24/7 in the U.S.—fast food outlets. Yes, all 6,000 Taco Bells are miniature factories pumping out “product” in vast quantities. The fast food “industry” revenues are $168 billion a year, and the workers, we’re told, are paid $1.25 above minimum wage—woo-hoo, love you, Corporate America!—which means that the full-time employee makes $16,500 a year.

$16K a year doesn’t go very far in urban America, but there is no pressure on Corporate America to raise wages.

I realize that I am an outsider, and biased against global corporate power regardless of the nominal country of origin (down with Canal+!), but I still found it noteworthy that BusinessWeek could run thousands of words of glowing praise for the profitable efficiency of the fast food “industry” without noting that it isn’t an industry at all—it’s just a consumerist fantasy (fast and cheap meals that require no effort or discipline) that produces “food” of low value that pushes the consumer into ill-health with overloads of salt, sugar, and low-grade fat.

70% of the fast “food” served is via the drive-through window, which suggests that an overworked, stressed out, focused on getting through the next two hours American is opting to shut the kids up and stave off hunger by pulling into the drive-through lane and loading up on a “meal” that they know is bad for them but they have no time to make a real meal at home (or so they’ve been brainwashed by thousands of hours of adverts).

If Taco Bell is the “manufacturer/factory of the New America,” then I think we need a peaceful revolution, and soon. The toadies and sycophants of the financial media are pleased to worship 1) CEOs 2) profits 3) efficiencies 4) globalized “growth” as long as its owned by global corporations and of course, everyone’s favorite, 5) innovation, because “innovation” drives profits!

Elsewhere in the latest issue, BusinessWeek breathlessly cooed over digital game company Electronic Arts latest “innovation,” which was selling a digital parrot for $10 a pop that sits on your digital warrior’s shoulder.

Excuse me while I raise my glass to American “innovation.” If pumping out fast food garbage (hello, 60% obesity rates, is there any connection?) is the new American “factory” and “innovation” is selling kids with access to Mom’s credit card a $10 digital parrot (and what does the parrot say? “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, brawk!”) for their hyper-violent fantasy wargame, then this nation is well and truly doomed.

To reap a fat profit, you need to sell the stuff being imported from the American-owned factories in China. Since wages have been flat for decades, that posed a problem, as consumers were tapped out. Never fear, capital’s best buddy rode to the rescue, inflating a stupendous credit-housing bubble that enabled the working stiff to speculate “like the big boys” with free money and limitless leverage, all supported by lies (liar loans) and the misrepresentation of risk.

Wall Street reaped tens of billions in profits originating and packaging the debt loaded onto the middle class debt donkeys—not just mortgages, but auto loans, student loans and even credit card debt.

But now, at long last, capital’s doting partner, the Federal Reserve, has run into a spot of bother: the only way to keep profits rising is to crash the dollar, and doing that has squeezed the purchasing power of the debt donkeys. By exporting inflation to China and the rest of the world, the Fed has engineered massive profits for U.S. corporations (when profits earned overseas are stated in dollars, presto, a 10% increase) but it has also forced China into raising prices and fueled an oil and import-driven inflation in the U.S. which has caused millions of insolvent households living paycheck to paycheck to cut back on their consumption.

China has its own problems, namely runaway domestic inflation (thanks, Federal Reserve) and finding places to dump its excess dollars. It was a wonderfully beneficial trade for awhile: we print paper money, and you give us tangible goods for the paper. Thank you very much, and we can offer you some terrific low-yield Treasuries to recycle your growing stash of dollars.

The Fed’s inflation games are sinking the value of the dollar, and the Chinese are not amused. They are trying to buy tangible resources with their ocean of depreciating dollars, and even sinking to buying Spanish debt.

They have another problem: as capital’s return in China slips, it will exit China just as fast as it exited the U.S.

There is a grand irony in that dynamic: a supposedly Communist country trying to run a central-command quasi-capitalist economy will find that Marx had a point after all. Not that the leadership is at risk themselves; the ChiCom offspring already have homes in Vancouver B.C. and Los Angeles and citizenship/green cards, and the family fortune is safely invested in Switzerland and North America.

The “story” is that the Chinese consumer is about to step up spending, and as a result, “you gotta be in China to profit from all the trillions in new consumer spending.” The reality is that the Chinese middle class is already spending like drunken sailors and their 900 million rural compatriots already own TVs and other cheap consumer goods.

The reality is that Capital has already skimmed the big, fat easy profits, and it’s looking elsewhere as labor costs and pesky regulations rise in China. The truth is American and European corporations have already earned out their investments in China, and shipping the factories from China to Vietnam is not much different than crating the factory up in the U.S. and shipping it to China.

There is a theory that the Fed’s “master plan” is to sink the dollar to the point that the low-income states in the U.S. will be the lowest-cost manufacturing base in the world.

At $16,500 a year for full-time workers pushed to maximum production, they might be getting close.

The above essay was written by Charles Hugh Smith and is cross-posted from Of Two Minds

 
Karl Marx, the 19th century social philosopher and historian who is regarded as one of the most influential intellectual figures in human history—Marx was voted the “thinker of the millennium” by people from around the world in a 1999 BBC poll—was born on this day in 1818.

Below, Marx for Beginners (look for a cameo from R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural”):
 

 
Monty Python’s classic “Communist Quiz” sketch from Live from the Hollywood Bowl featuring Marx, Lenin, Che, and Mao.
 

 
Image by Savanna Snow

 
The great Kurt Vonnegut compares and contrasts Christianity with Socialism in this pointed excerpt from the audio book of his A Man Without A Country collection of non-fiction essays.
 

 
Katy Perry really should record this.

Via Planet Paul

The New Republic’s always brilliant John B. Judis wrote an excellent short essay in last month’s Foreign Policy that everyone should read. I could not agree more with the sentiments here:

In 1995, a magazine published by a conservative Washington think tank brought together a group of writers and scholars to debate a question that seemed to have a foregone conclusion: ?