|
Socialism is socialism
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Items on this page are archived in
order of discovery . . . |
| Obama Is Really A Revolutionary |
Dr. Richard L. Rubinstein, Yale fellow, "Distinguished Professor
of the Year", and Harvard Phd, states that Obama's intention
is to "correct the historical mistake of the creation of the state of
Israel." Dr. Rubenstein states that Obama due to his family
heritage is extremely pro Muslim -- to the point of "wanting to see the
destruction of Israel." |
| Types Of Socialism |
|
Lenin -- Class-based International Socialism
Hitler -- Race-based National Socialism
Obama -- Class- and
Race-based Post-National Socialism
|
| America’s Bolshevik |
Obama denies being an ideologue or a Bolshevik, why? Is he
ashamed of his heritage and convictions, just intent on keeping his
motivations covert until the right time to spring his true nature upon
us, or is there a technicality that we need to grasp?
Perhaps we
should analyze the term Bolshevik. Historically, the Bolsheviks
were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
(RSDLP), founded by Vladimir Lenin. They split from the Menshevik
faction in 1903, during the Second Party Congress. They eventually
gained control during the October phase of the Revolution in 1917.
Bolshevik means "majority" or "large" and the nickname resulted from
having the majority rule in a crucial vote. Later on after gaining
complete control, Lenin maintained that since there was no opposition,
there was no longer the need to call themselves the majority party or
Bolsheviks, thus they named themselves the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.
Eventually, Lenin died and Stalin gained control of the
party. Trotsky was exiled and wrote extensively condemning
Stalin’s "incorrect" version of Communism by referring to it as
Bolshevism, a derivative of Bolshevik, in apposition to Leninism.
Consequently the term Bolshevik developed negative connotations for the
"pure" Communist; perhaps this explains Obama’s displeasure at being
called a Bolshevik. He like many others must feel the sting of
those who are critical of Stalin’s regime.
The term, Ideologue,
evolved in the highly contested political and philosophical debates of
the French Revolution; coined by Destutt de Tracy, initially, it
referred to the study of the science of ideas or the study of ideas and
the means and logic of those ideas.
Later, Napoleon used the
term as a pejorative toward his political opponents, since that time it
has been used as a term of derision in political discussion to point out
an opposing politician’s inability to grasp ideas that are different
than those of his party line, thus reflecting a pettiness and lack of
cognitive ability.
Obama's taking exception to being considered
an Ideologue becomes a matter of conjecture when examining the platform
of America’s Communist Party. Although Obama denies any
association with the Communist Party of the United States, (CPUSA) they
are in express agreement with all of his policies. They could not have
had a better representative if they had won the election.
The
CPUSA’s stated goals are to achieve a free, prosperous, and peaceful
society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, and exploitation, in which
all people have the opportunity to develop to their full potential. These same goals were espoused by Obama during his campaign, the same
goals of the Social Democrats and of the Progressive Democrats. The
Communists above all maintain that they advocate a peaceful Socialist
Revolution and a peaceful transition to Socialism. Obviously if they
didn’t, the Communist Party would be outlawed; therefore the claim is
probably one of expediency and is purely academic.
All things
considered, I understand why a true Marxist in the Russian tradition
balks at being labeled a Bolshevik. It is an insult from the days of
Trotsky’s bitter writing over his ouster and banishment. Being upset at
being labeled an Ideologue is a matter of history. In the context of the
early days of the French Revolution, Obama should consider it
a compliment to be called an ideologue. If his frame of reference is
from the Napoleonic perspective, he is indeed an Ideologue, after all
Karl Marx frequently implied that it was essential to be an Ideologue. Obviously Obama is confused over these issues as he seems to
be over many issues. It would probably be a much easier if he
would just be honest with the American People and admit that he is a
Communist Ideologue, with his reelection chances diminishing daily, he
has reached the point where honesty can only improve his ratings. Of
course if he had been honest in the beginning, he would have never been
elected.
Posted by
Skookum on the
Flopping Aces blog.
There can be little argument
that the agendas of Obama, the Democrat Party, and the CPUSA are
strikingly similar -- cursor down on the Flopping Aces link to review a condensed
version of the CPUSA platform. |
| Young Obama's Marxist
Socialist Perspective |
NewZeal blog has a 45-minute
interview with former student Marxist John C. Drew, on his
meeting at Occidental College with fellow Marxist Barack Obama that
Loudon says is very credible.
|
|
Endorsed By The New Party |
In 1995, Obama, as part of his first run for the
Illinois State Senate, began seeking the endorsement of the
New Party.
The New Party's objective was to push forth the socialist principles of
the
Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA), that
claimed Obama as a member, by focusing on winnable elections at a
local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards.
Obama had been running in a four way primary against his former boss,
Senator
Alice Palmer, an executive board member of the
U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front
group, and an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front
group.
The New Party required candidates who received the endorsement sign a
pledge of support for the party. Obama signed that pledge,
choosing to support a party that was, in effect, a front group for
communists. The July issue of the New Ground noted that 15% of the
New Party consisted of
DSA members and a good number of members of the
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a democratic
socialist group in the United States which originated in 1991 as the
Committees of Correspondence, a moderate, dissenting wing of the
Communist Party USA.
When allegations surfaced early this summer of the New Party's
endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the
New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was
never a member of either organization. The DSA and New Party then
systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the
Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was
indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA's New Party.
On Tuesday, John Hinderaker of the PowerLine blog
discovered a web page that had been scrubbed from the New Party's
website. The web page which was published in October 1996, was an
internet newsletter update on that years congressional races.
Although the web page was deleted from the New Party's website, the
non-profit Internet Archive Organization had archived the page.
So the New Party claimed Obama as a member as of 1996. Progressive
Populist magazine agreed in this
editorial:
New Party members and supported candidates won 16 of 23 races, including
an at-large race for the Little Rock, Ark., City Council, a seat on the
county board for Little Rock and the school board for Prince George's
County, Md. Chicago is sending the first New Party member to Congress,
as Danny Davis, who ran as a Democrat, won an overwhelming 85% victory.
New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate
seat from Chicago.
Barack Obama chose to affiliate himself with this band of
quasi-communists. As the nation moves closer to the election,
it is clear that Obama chose to affiliate with assorted anti-American
radicals. Machiavelli once noted that we can know a leader by the
people he surrounds himself with. What does it say about Barack
Obama, that he chooses to surround himself with people committed to
overthrowing the United States and capitalism?
|
| Obama's Our Guy |
|
The
Democratic Socialist Party of America was slightly more modest in
claiming Senator Obama as an adherent:
Still, it appears clear that as of 1996, the New Party and its parent
organization the Democratic Socialists of America considered Barack
Obama to be their guy--one of a handful of avowed socialists running for
office at any level in the United States. It strikes me that Obama
has some explaining to do.
|
|
The Socialist New Party |
During his run
for the Illinois state senate seat, Obama received the endorsement of
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Obama was an associate of the Chicago branch of
the DSA, and a member of the "New Party," and signed documents seeking their
support.
Obama actively
sought and received the stamp of approval of a Marxist third party
that operated briefly in Chicago between 1992 and 1998. The group
was called the "New Party" and was started in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a
former staffer for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel
Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison).
The New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to
endorse and elect leftist public officials -- most often Democrats.
The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party
leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist
third party.
Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America
(Obama was an associate of the Chicago branch), and the militant
organization ACORN. The party’s Chicago chapter also included a
large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist
coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA
members. |
|
Endorsed By The Democratic Socialists Of America |
In 1996, Obama received the endorsement of the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for the Illinois state senate
seat. Obama is an associate of the Chicago branch of the DSA.
Here is a video
of Obama enthusiastically campaigning for openly socialist Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders, who won his seat in 2006,
called Obama "one of the great leaders of the United States Senate,"
even though Obama had only been in the body for less than two years.
On
November 1st,
2007, Obama made this startling comment, "We've got to make
sure that people who have more money help the people who have less
money."
His "solutions"
will sound familiar to those who listened to Lyndon Johnson's poverty
gurus and their fellow travelers under Jimmy Carter who promised massive
government assistance:
"When I'm President, I will raise the minimum wage and make it a
living wage by making sure that it rises every time the cost of living
does. I'll start letting our unions do what they do best again --
organize our workers and lift up our middle-class. And I'll finally make
sure every American has affordable health care that stays with you no
matter what happens by passing my plan to provide universal coverage and
cut the cost of health care by up to $2500 per family."
"The philosophy behind the project is simple -- if poverty is a disease
that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and
violence; failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat
those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And
we have to focus on what actually works."
|
| Stealth Socialism |
Before friendly audiences, Barack Obama speaks passionately about
something called "economic
justice." He uses the term obliquely, though, speaking in code --
socialist code.
During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term
at least four times. "I've been working my entire adult life to
help build an America where economic justice is being served," he said
at the group's 99th annual convention in Cincinnati.
And as president, "we'll ensure that economic justice is served," he
asserted. "That's what this election is about." Obama never
spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn't have to. His
audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval.
It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're
launching this special educational series.
"Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and
redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism
for socialism.
He's disguising the wealth transfers as "investments" -- "to make
America more competitive," he says, or "that give us a fighting chance,"
whatever that means.
Among his proposed "investments":
• "Universal," "guaranteed" health care.
• "Free" college tuition.
• "Universal national service" (a la Havana).
• "Free" job training (even for criminals).
• "Wage insurance" (to supplement dislocated union workers' old income
levels).
• "Free" child care and "universal" preschool.
• More subsidized public housing.
• A fatter earned income tax credit for "working poor."
• And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the
Third World, first and foremost Africa.
• "Universal 401(k)s" (in which the government would match contributions
made by "low- and moderate-income families").
His new New Deal also guarantees a "living wage," with a $10 minimum
wage indexed to inflation; and "fair trade" and "fair labor practices,"
with breaks for "patriot employers" who cow-tow to unions, and sticks
for "nonpatriot" companies that don't.
That's just for starters -- first-term stuff.
Read more here . . . |
| "Change" |
Most Americans revile socialism, yet Obama's poll
numbers remain competitive. One explanation: He's a longtime
disciple of a man whose mission was to teach radicals to disguise their
ideology.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's choice of the word
"change" as his campaign's central slogan is not the product of
focus-group studies, or the brainstorming sessions of his political
consultants.
One of Obama's main inspirations was a man dedicated to revolutionary
change that he was convinced "must be preceded by a passive,
affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of
our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so
futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of
the past and change the future."
Saul Alinsky had no time for liberalism or liberals, declaring that "a
liberal is (someone) who puts his foot down firmly on thin air."
He wanted nothing less than transformational radicalism. "America
was begun by its radicals," he wrote. "America was built by its
radicals. The hope and future of America lies with its radicals."
And so, "This is the job for today's radical -- to fan the embers of
hopelessness into a flame to fight. To say, '. . . let us change
it together!' "
Obama called his years as an Alinskyesque community organizer in Chicago
"the best education I ever had."
Alinsky believed in sacrificing ethics and morals for the great cause.
"Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times," Alinsky
wrote in his last book, "Rules for Radicals," adding that "all values
are relative in a world of political relativity."
Published a year before Alinsky's death in 1972, "Rules for Radicals"
includes a dedication in which he gives "an over-the-shoulder
acknowledgment to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the
establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own
kingdom -- Lucifer."
More . . . |
| "Change" -- A Metaphor For
Socialism |
Following his election, Obama set up a new
website, Change.gov, that featured his
socialist policy proposals on everything from tax, the war, gun control,
education and health care, seemingly cut and past from his campaign
website, BarackObama.com.
Over the weekend, the webpage disappeared.
The list was replaced by a single paragraph committing Obama and
Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden to "...a plan to revive the economy, to
fix our health care, education, and social security systems, to define a
clear path to energy independence, to end the war in Iraq responsibly
and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and to work with our allies to
prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic
and foreign policy objectives".
Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said: "We are currently retooling the web
site."
Well, nothing gets deleted from the web, and
here is the page. Lots of
reparations by another name, lots of free money, lots of "inner city"
and "urban" programs, no racial profiling and bring back the gun bans.
The federal government spent trillions on Lyndon Johnson's "The Great
Society" -- to no avail. Now, Obama plans on bringing us "The
Great Society -- Part Deux," which is nothing more than the biggest
redistribution of wealth in the nations' history.
Mo' money -- that's what this woman heard --
"I won't have to worry about
putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.
You know, if I help him, he's gonna help me." (video) |
| Change For The Greater Good |
ABC's George Stephanopoulos
wrote
on his blog:
"I asked the president-elect, 'At the end of the
day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some
kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare
reform, entitlement reform including Social Security
and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to
sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?'
"'Yes,' Obama said. |
| Nationalizing America's Industries |
After the election, when Barack Obama talked about
realigning the American automobile industry he was quick to offer a
caution, lest he sound more like the incoming leader of France, or
perhaps Japan. He wants to nationalizing America's industries.
"We don't want government to run companies," Obama told Tom Brokaw on
"Meet the Press." "Generally, government historically hasn't done that
very well."
But, what Obama went on to describe was a long-term government
bailout that would be conditioned on government oversight. It
could mean that the government would mandate, or at least heavily
influence, what kind of cars companies make, what mileage and
environmental standards they must meet and what large investments they
are permitted to make -- to recreate an industry that Obama said
"actually works, that actually functions."
It all sounds perilously close to a word that no one in Obama's camp
wants to be caught uttering: nationalization. |
|
Obama, Officials, Democrats Support Global Socialism |
|
But at a "Global
Progress Conference" in October, Barack
Obama's pollster, Joel Benenson, acknowledged that socialized medicine
in the U.S. faces a serious obstacle. He said that while Europeans
are receptive to the expansion of government in their lives, in America
there is an anti-government culture which prevents people from
"expecting the State to solve their problems."
"This explains why Obama will find it
difficult to implement the social coverage plans such as a broader
health service,"
Benenson reportedly said.
The conference was held in Madrid,
Spain under the patronage of Spain's socialist Prime Minister José Luis
Rodríguez Zapatero, whose pro-homosexual and pro-abortion policies have
led to
street protests
by thousands of
supporters of traditional values. Zapatero is also under fire for
a jobless rate of nearly 18 percent.
Former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean said on
December 8 that "cooperation" between European socialists and the
Democratic Party has "intensified significantly" over the last several
years and involves "regular contact" at "Congress, Senate, party and
foundation levels." He added that "efforts have been remarkable
from both sides."
Dean's comments came in
a video address
in which he joked that his failure to personally attend the Party of
European Socialists (PES) convention, which was advertised as a "carbon
neutral congress," was actually a smart move because he avoided flying
and contributing to global warming. "We've saved a lot of carbon,"
Dean said.
In his comments, Dean called for a
"long-term global vision" for the transformation of the global economy
and mentioned that disgraced Democratic President Bill Clinton had
previously spoken at a meeting of the PES-sponsored Global Progressive
Forum. The
April 2-3 Global Progressive Forum
also featured Robert Borosage of the left-wing group that calls itself
the Campaign for America's Future.
The
Global Progressive Forum
is
also sponsored by the Socialist International, whose U.S. affiliate, the
Democratic Socialists of America, includes long-time backers of Barack
Obama.
"Free-market
globalization alone cannot achieve social justice," Dean told the PES
convention. "What the world needs is a global New Deal."
Continue reading how this will happen
here . . .
|
| The British Get It |
You have to
pinch yourself -- a Marxist radical who all his life has been
mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed
the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted
and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists,
Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and
Chicago mobsters, has become President of the United
States.
And apparently it's considered impolite to say so. |
| Two Faced |
Ron Russell
says
we've all heard the expression, "a mirror image." Most think the
image and the reflection are the same when in reality -- they are
opposites.
What we saw and heard from Obama on the campaign
trail was one thing (the mirror image), and what we are getting now is
the true Obama. A far left politician with an almost alien agenda.
He simply wants to change American into his personal vision of what he
thinks America should be. His ideals come from years of influence
by people who believe that capitalism is an evil and corrupt system.
He is using the economic downturn, which is a normal part of a free
market system, to advance his agenda. An agenda not of the
European socialist kind, but one far more radical and foreign to the
traditional American system. This is a power grab that puts the
efforts of Hugo Chavez to shame. Its beginning to take shape and
some see the looming danger it presents while others stand in awe
waiting for the next words of the great orator. |
|
Obama Begins His Assault On Your Life Savings |
Terry Jeffrey
says the welfare state and your life savings are two cars heading
down a one-lane road in opposite directions. One must yield, or
there will be a crash.
For Americans who believe in the
old-fashioned virtues of hard work, self reliance and respect for
private property, the solution is obvious. The welfare state must
yield. For politicians who believe in the welfare state and
redistributing wealth, the solution is equally obvious. Your savings
must yield.
Barack Obama is of the latter group. In the
new health care proposal he outlined this week, he suggested a series of
unprecedented tax increases that would extend the greedy hands of
government into the life savings of hard-working Americans. These
new taxes would essentially construct a new fiscal pipeline capable of
carrying money out of the savings of private citizens and dumping it
into government coffers specifically for subsidizing Medicare under the
new health care system Obama envisions. The White House summary of
Obama's proposal presents this would-be pipeline as a facilitator of
economic justice.
"Under current law, workers who earn a salary
pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the
Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have
substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,"
says the summary. "The Act will include an additional 0.9
percentage point Hospital Insurance tax for households with incomes
exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples
filing jointly. In addition, it would add a 2.9 percent tax
for such high-income households to unearned income including
interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents (excluding
income from active participation in S corporations)."
There are, of course, multiple unanswered questions
here. For starters, wouldn't increasing the Medicare payroll tax
on "households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000
for married couples filing jointly" violate Obama's pledge that, as his
campaign literature put it, he would "not raise any tax rate on families
making less than $250,000 per year, period." Plenty of single
Americans, who are raising children or taking care of other dependents,
file their taxes claiming "head of household" status. Aren't they
"families" covered by Obama's tax pledge?
Secondly, wouldn't
slapping these households with a new 2.9 percent tax on interest,
dividends, annuities, royalties and rents also violate Obama's tax
pledge?
But the most important question is this: Would allowing
the government to tap into the savings of one group of Americans to pay
entitlement benefits to another group create a system of taxation that
could swiftly destroy the American dream? Yes, it would. Here's
how:
When Obama took office, the federal government confronted a
massive long-term fiscal problem. The nonpartisan Peter G.
Peterson Foundation estimated that revenues expected under the current
tax system would fall $56.4 trillion short of covering the current
federal debt and the long-term costs of promised entitlement benefits.
That $56.4 trillion equaled $184,000 for every living American and
$435,000 for every full-time worker. Given the fiscal trajectory
at the end of 2008, the government was headed toward spending 18 percent
of gross domestic product by 2028 just to cover the annual costs of
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt.
To
put that in perspective, the entire federal government cost only 18.2
percent of GDP in 2001 and only 19.6 percent as late as 2007. By
2028, if overall government expenditures were held at the 2001 level as
a share of GDP, welfare-state entitlements would squeeze out all other
federal spending -- including maintaining an Army and a Navy.
The Mack truck of the welfare state was speeding down the one-lane road
straight at the little compact car of your life savings.
How did
Obama respond? He massively ramped up short-term spending,
submitting a budget that will spend an average of 24.13 percent of GDP
over the next four years -- more than the average of 19.13 percent FDR
spent during the Depression and World War II. For the long run,
Obama is trying to establish a national health care system in which the
federal government will subsidize health insurance not only for the
elderly and the poor but also for the middle-aged and the middle class.
Redistributionist politicians like Obama see their core
constituents as the net recipients of government benefits, not the net
payers. Increasing the number of net recipients serves their
ideology and political interests.
The new taxes Obama wants to
impose on interest, dividends, annuities and rents to pay for his health
care plan are in fact taxes on the life savings of the net payers -- on
their 401(k)s, savings accounts, paid-off mortgages and life insurance
policies -- to cover benefits for the net recipients. The
redistributionists would ultimately need $435,000 from every full-time
worker to cover the welfare state's unfunded liabilities -- even if
Obama's health care plan were never enacted.
Obama is pointing
them down the road where they will find it. |
| Obama Rejects Cries of Socialism |
Reuters is reporting
that Barack Obama launched a vigorous defense of his economic agenda
Wednesday, rejecting critics who call his policies "socialism" and
insisting he aims to boost U.S. competitiveness abroad. Speaking
to the Business Roundtable, Obama said, "Contrary to the claims of some
of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market."
Obama
said his efforts to enact sweeping legislation to overhaul financial
regulations and set caps on carbon emissions to fight climate change
were not aimed at thwarting businesses.
"We have arrived at a
juncture in our politics where reasonable efforts to update our
regulations, or make basic investments in our future, are too often
greeted with cries of 'government takeover' or even 'socialism'," Obama
said.
"Getting this balance right has less to do with big
government or small government than it does smart government. It's
not about being anti-business or pro-government; it's about being
pro-growth and pro-jobs," he said.
Despite Obama's
protestations, our cousin's in England have his number.
Adam
Shaw, a Brit,
says those of us across the pond who analyze American politics know
exactly who it is you have in the White House. Obama is not some
new post-political entity. Nor is he some form of Stalinist that
will set up a USSA. He is a normal, well-spoken, charismatic
socialist who in Britain would sit quite happily towards the left of the
Labour Party alongside figures such as Tony Benn, Aneurin Bevan, Harold
Wilson, and Ed Balls. To call someone a socialist is not
conspiratorial, and it is not fear-mongering; it is simply the truth,
and it is time for some in the media to take a deep breath and admit it
-- America has a socialist leading the country.
Welcome to the
club. It stinks!
Obama
lies, and lies, and lies, and lies...
Lately, Obama has been
telling the American People that he's not a socialist -- because it
suits his purposes.
In the 1990s, Obama told
these people that he
WAS a socialist -- because it suited his purposes.
A little over a year ago, ABC's
George Stephanopoulos
wrote
on his blog:
"I asked the president-elect, 'At the end of the
day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some
kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform,
entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where
everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept
change for the greater good?'
"'Yes,' Obama said.
Obama can deny all he wants. AT BEST, he's a socialist, and in
ObamaWorld, the end ALWAYS justifies the means, and lying is just part
of the job -- "for the greater good." |
| Obama's Unprecedented Attack Against The American People |
Sher Zieve
says
that for the first time since the loyalists to King George III and the
British army moved against the American colonists and patriots, the
government is moving en masse to both stop and silence any opposition
from the American people to Obama and any and all of his and his
Marxist-Democrats.
While watching Thursday's faux
Obama-organized Health Care Summit (planned as a day of photo-ops and
sound-bites for Obama's 2012 campaign), it became clear to me and others
that the Democrat leadership had and have no intention of listening to
sound arguments against the ObamaCare Death Plan, Cap & Trade or any of
the other ulterior-motive clandestine procedures they have planned
against We-the-People.
Instead, Harry Reid had already announced
the day before -- Wednesday -- that he and the Dems would affect
reconciliation (the "ramming and shoving" process), probably next week,
in the Senate in order to force the despotic ObamaCare Death Plan onto
us. Note: Reconciliation -- incorporating a simple and not a super
majority -- is supposed to be used for budgetary items.
In fact,
this Obama "summit" quickly degraded and devolved into Obama shutting
down any Republican who offered alternate proposals and opposing
comments, while Democrats engaged in ongoing "kiss the tyrant" moments.
In fact, Obama told Republicans that he could speak as long as he wanted
because…"I'm the president!" Apparently, the rest of the Democrat
leadership believed the same about their own self-inflated
self-importance as comment-time from the far-left was twice as long as
comments from the right. Note: That's also "right" as in
"correct."
During Thursday's Health Care Summit, I viewed the
patently totalitarian Marxist-Democrat Party telling We-the-People that
we no longer matter to them. Our voices are -- once and for all per the
Democrats -- of no further importance. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV),
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Dictator-in-Chief Obama
made it crystal clear that the American people WILL accept whatever
draconian plans they force upon them -- and like it -- or else.
Each and every time the questioning and contradictions from the right to
false statements made by the dictator-in-chief became too uncomfortable
for his fragile ego' or simply presented the truth in too bright a
light, Obama shut down the questioner with reprimands similar to "you're
off of the subject" or "stop your talking points" or "the campaign is
over and I won."
During much of the time Representative Eric
Cantor (R-VA) was quoting directly from one of the voluminous Democrat
ObamaCare plans, Obama refused to make eye contact with him and, with
increasingly tightly-pursed lips, started shuffling through some of the
papers in front of him. Note: This was a Judge Judy moment.
Whenever this happens on her television show, Judge Judy Sheindlin says
sternly to the offender: "Put down your papers and look at me!"
Wish she'd been there.
As long as any of the Marxist-Democrat
Party members are in power, their abuses of said power will continue to
escalate. This is what despots do. When asked at the
ObamaSummit if the Democrat leadership was even listening to the
American people, the response was either silence or a quick change of
the subject.
Not since the first American Revolution War
officially began in 1775 has the oppression against We-the-People from
the government been so intense and so relentless. Now, for the
first time in our history, the majority leadership within the US
Government is moving against its own people with increasing alacrity,
force and determination. They have told us and continue to shout
to us in myriad ways that they will refuse to listen to anything we say
unless it is to thank them (our new "masters") for placing us into
bondage and slavery.
Despite increasingly overwhelming opposition
from the American people to Obama's and the Democrats' Orwellian plans
for us, they are moving even faster and harder to oppress us and shut us
up. This is how tyrannies are formed, folks. And we are now
firmly smack-dab-in-the-middle of our own. |
| Obama Just Getting
Started On Expanding Government |
David A. Patten writes that former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the
chairman of the conservative FreedomWorks organization, is warning that
an "emboldened" Obama, fresh off a big healthcare victory, will redouble
his efforts to transform America by escalating the size and reach of
government.
In an exclusive interview conducted Tuesday with
Newsmax.TV, Armey says Obama won liberal Democrats' votes by pledging to
promote their top issues. Now, he says, those liberals will be
looking for him to deliver.
"When he went to get his last few
votes," Armey tells Newsmax, "he went to the liberals who said they
won't vote for it because it's not enough. He said, 'give us your
votes; we'll get our foot in the door, we'll make that first step, and
we'll give you single payer [healthcare system] down the road.'"
"So he's not done with this; don't kid yourself," Armey says. "But
now he's emboldened."
Obama's apparent triumph in altering the
one-sixth of the U.S. economy represented by healthcare, Armey says,
increases "immeasurably the likelihood of him saying, 'All right, now
it's time to go for climate change.'"
Those committed to fighting
further federal expansion must prepare for the next battle, says Armey.
"We're going to have to go after that front now, and fight this
fight for liberty on the front of the politics of greed wrapped in the
language of love for the environment," he says.
According to
Armey, the common theme of Democrats' initiatives, from near-universal
healthcare to environmental legislation to card check rules limiting a
worker's right to a private ballot on unionization, is the establishment
of new categories of government-dependent citizens who are more likely
to cast ballots for Democrats.
"I've been stunned with their
arrogance," Armey says of Democratic leaders. "They have boldly
said to America, We want to complete this job because we believe five
years from now when we have more Americans dependent on the government
for their healthcare, that it will mean the Democrats will retain their
majority for a longer period of time.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Chicago Does Socialism |
Victor Davis Hanson says, "Connect the dots of Obama’s first year in
office, and an ugly picture emerges."
We can have a rational
debate on any one item on Obama’s vast progressive agenda, arguing
whether adjectives like "statist" or "socialist" fairly describe his
legislative intent. But connect all the dots and lines of the past
year, and an unambiguous image starts to materialize.
The problem
is not individual legislation, whether passed or proposed, involving the
gamut of issues: health care, bailouts, stimuli, education loans,
amnesty, cap and trade. Rather, the rub is these acts in the
aggregate.
Obama promises a state fix for health care; then
student loans; and next energy. There are to be subsidies,
credits, and always new entitlements for every problem, all requiring
hordes of fresh technocrats and Civil Service employees. Like a
perpetual teenager, who wants and buys but never produces, Obama is
focused on the acquisitive and consumptive urges, never on the
productive -- as in how all his magnanimous largesse is to be paid for
by someone else.
That Medicare and Social Security are near
insolvency, or soon will be; that the Postal Service and Amtrak are
running in the red; that a day at the DMV, county-hospital emergency
room, or zoning department doesn’t inspire confidence in the matrix of
unionized government workers and large unaccountable bureaucracies --
all this is lost on the Obama administration.
Utility means
nothing. So long as the next proposed program enlarges a dependent
constituency and is financed by the "rich" through higher taxes and more
debt, it is, de facto, necessary and good. Equality of result is
to be achieved both by giving more to some and by taking even more from
others.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Birthers and People Who Think Obama's A
Socialist |
Yid with a Lid blog
reports that Today Show Co-Host Matt Lauer, sporting his brand new
tattoo, interviewed Obama on his show yesterday morning. Typical
of Obama he blamed much of the disagreement over his programs on cable
news, the blogs, and Republicans for not telling the entire truth about
the benefits of his plans.
Obama reserved his harshest
passive/aggressive criticism for the American People in the form of the
grass-roots Tea Party movement. While he said many of the people
in the Tea Party movement had legitimate concerns, he said over and over
at its core the Tea Party is built around a "core group" of people who
question whether he is a U.S. citizen and believe he is a socialist.
In the interview, Obama said he feels "there's still going to be a
group at their core that question my legitimacy." After painting
the activists with his passive/aggressive "broad brushes," he said he
didn't want to paint Tea Party activists "in broad brushes," and he
hopes to win over members who have "mainstream, legitimate concerns."
Watch this video to see the disdain Obama has for the American
People:
Obama's contention that the Tea Party existed before he was elected is
complete nonsense. It was CNBC's Rick Santelli who
gave birth to the Tea Party movement on the floor of the Chicago
Board of Trade.
And note how he dissimulates, framing the
"natural born" issue as "not being born in the United States," when in
fact it is Obama's citizenship in two or three countries that is the
issue. |
| 52% Say Obama Moving America Towards
Socialism |
CNSNews.com
focuses on a New
York Times/CBS News poll found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent,
think Obama's policies are moving the United States toward socialism
Published April 14, the poll surveyed the political, racial, and
social opinions of both the general pubic and self-described members of
the Tea Party movement. It found that while Tea Party participants
are generally more conservative than the broader population, they are
also better educated and slightly more successful.
The poll
found that almost the entirety of the Tea Party movement -- 92 percent
-- shared the views of most Americans that Obama was turning the United
States into a socialist country.
The poll asked respondents
specifically whether Obama’s policies "are moving the country more
toward socialism." Fifty-two percent answered "toward socialism"
while only 38 percent answered "not toward socialism."
A mere six
percent of self-described Tea Party Americans answered "not toward
socialism."
The poll also found that while Tea Party members
generally shared the economic concerns of the broader population, this
did not motivate their strong opposition to Obama. That opposition
was based on his policies, not on the poor economy or on other factors,
such as his race.
In fact, the racial attitudes of Tea Party
members fell in line with those of the rest of the country, with 73
percent of Tea Party members saying that blacks and whites had an equal
chance of success -- a view held by 60 percent of Americans.
Tea
party activists are strongly motivated by traditional conservative
issues, such as the size of government and federal spending, according
to the poll. Ninety-two percent of Tea Party members said they
would prefer a smaller, less intrusive federal government to a larger
one -- a view they shared with 52 percent of Americans.
Eighty-nine percent of Tea Partiers thought that Obama has expanded
government too much in trying to deal with the recession, an opinion
which fell in line with the views of 50 percent of the country.
Tea party activists also agreed with the rest of the country – though in
higher proportions – on the issue of federal bank bailouts. Seventy-four
percent of Tea Partiers said the economy would have improved without the
bailouts -- a view shared by 51 percent of Americans generally.
When it came to questions of who are Tea Party members, the poll found
that 50 percent described themselves as "middle class" and 26 percent
described themselves as "working class." Only 29 percent of Tea
Partiers do not have at least some college education, a figure that far
outpaces the rest of the country, of which 47 percent have no college
education.
Perhaps the most important statistic in this election
year found that Tea Party activists were more likely than other
Americans to favor the current two-party electoral system 52-48 percent.
The finding that should most worry incumbents who do not share
Tea Party members’ views was that 97 percent of the activists are
registered voters. |
| Obama's Stealth Attack On Our Legal
Foundations |
Walt Elgin
says bowing to foreign power was not just a matter of misplaced
etiquette. As its creeping socialism morphs into a quirky gallop,
Obama's State Department is supporting an International Criminal Court
(ICC) with jurisdiction over what has always been sovereign U.S. powers:
..."Pragmatic cooperation" with the ICC-for
example, helping it with investigations and sitting in on court
bodies, [proponents argue] would give the U.S. a voice on decisions
that affect its interests, such as helping the ICC define the "crime
of aggression." U.S. officials were stunned that a recent
draft defining aggression was so wide-reaching that NATO would have
been criminally liable in the 1999 Kosovo war...
...The ICC's
indictments have so far targeted nasty characters in Africa, but the
court has always resisted outside oversight, especially from the
U.S. What's more, no amount of reform of the founding treaty
will change the ICC's inherent flaw. The ICC is a child of the
doctrine of "universal jurisdiction," which holds that courts can
adjudicate crimes [by their definition] committed anywhere in the
world.
And other Obama acolytes support a constitutional
overhaul to allow more direct control to those in power, without the
messiness of congressional action -- as originally stipulated in the
Constitution. Stephen Markman, Michigan Supreme Court Justice, has
warned about Obama's "living constitution" views:
...the important decisions would increasingly be
undertaken by courts, especially by federal courts. It will be
the California referendum process writ national, a process by which
the decisions of millions of voters on matters such as racial
quotas, social services funding, and immigration policy have been
routinely overturned by single judges acting in the name of the
Constitution -- not the Framers' Constitution, but a "constitution
for our times," a "living constitution," resembling, sadly, the
constitutions of failed and despotic nations across the globe.
As various advocates of a 21st century constitution have urged,
[the constitution should] be interpreted to allow the invention of a
host of new "rights," and thus be construed to guarantee social or
economic equality. However pleasing this might sound to some
people, there should be no mistake: adopting this interpretation
will supplant representative decision-making with the
decision-making of unelected, unaccountable, and life-tenured
judges.
|
| Obama-Style Socialism |
|
Jonah Goldberg has written
an important article in Commentary on what he calls the
"neo-socialism" of the
Obama administration. David Horowitz likes this label.
He
says is both accurate and more palatable than the term
"neo-communism" which I have applied to the hard left. But
given the twenty-year political partnership between
a neo-Communist like
Billy Ayers and Obama, and Obama’s coterie of
Communist Party mentors and allies, it is at bottom a distinction
without a difference.
Neo-socialists are fellow travelers of neo-Communists and
vice-versa. The real division in the modern world is between
totalitarians and
libertarians, and pivot of this division is the inherent conflict
between liberty and equality. Since people are born unequal (in
talent, capability, brain power and physical beauty and prowess) and
since they develop unequally through circumstance, the only way to make
them equal is
to take away everyone’s liberty. And of course this will not
make them equal because those who get to decide who is made equal and at
what pace constitute a new and oppressing ruling class.
This truth is
the focus of Federalist Paper #10 and is enshrined in the Constitution
which is why every leftist is at war with it and is dedicated to
rewriting it. So-called progressives are the 21st Century’s true
reactionaries who have failed to learn the lessons of the most horrific
social experiment ever inflicted on the human race which murdered 100
million people and destroyed the lives of billions. The term
"neo-socialism" attaches them to that awful legacy and serves as a
warning to present and future generations of the price that will be paid
to achieve
"social justice" and also of the fact that the pursuit "social
justice" is an evil fantasy which can never be realized.
Horowitz has two quibbles with Jonah’s excellent piece. First,
it was Rousseau (in The Social Contract), not Babeuf who
identified private property as the root of all evil. Second,
"social justice" is not a milder socialist impulse -- it is in fact a
code for communism in the hardest sense. Hayek wrote a brilliant
book called
The Mirage of Social Justice which argued that
1) there is no such entity as "society" which distributes wealth.
Hence the call for social justice is simply a mask -- a fake rationale
-- for distributing wealth politically and thus arrogating to one
political faction totalitarian control of everyone else.
|
| Pro-Obama Group Demands Socialist Media |
Cliff Kincaid says a socialist-oriented "media
reform" group with ties to the Obama Administration is calling for new
federal programs and the spending of tens of billions of dollars to keep
journalists employed at liberal media outlets and to put them to work in
new "public media."
The group, which calls itself Free Press, is
urging "an alternative media infrastructure, one that is insulated from
the commercial pressures that brought us to our current crisis."
However, Free Press didn’t say one word about the well-documented
liberal bias that has contributed to the decline in readers and viewers
for traditional media outlets and has enabled the rise of the Fox News
Channel, conservative talk radio, and the Internet. Instead, Josh
Silver of the Free Press attacked the "bellowing ideologues" on the air
and declared that "The entire dial is empty of local news in many
communities."
This was a tip-off that, in order to take
conservative radio hosts off the air, the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) will be flooded with complaints that "local news" has
been shortchanged by stations airing conservative personalities with
national programs such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and
Michael Savage.
Free Press, whose June 2008 "media reform"
conference in Minneapolis turned into a virtual Obama for President
campaign rally, is in a position to provide those complaints to the FCC.
It claims nearly half-a-million supporters and a staff of 30, mostly in
Washington, D.C.
As part of the proposed new "media
infrastructure," Free Press is calling for a $50 billion "Public Media
Trust Fund" to underwrite the creation of new jobs for journalists and
the use of the existing federal AmeriCorps program "to include
journalistic activities as part of its mission" in the form of
"journalism positions" and "journalism projects." AmeriCorps is a
federally-funded national and community service agency.
The group
is also urging a direct federal bailout of liberal media institutions,
declaring that "The Department of Labor could design a program aimed at
keeping reporters employed at existing news organizations or at new
outlets." Free Press explains, "If the government were to
subsidize 5,000 reporters at $50,000 per year, the cost would be $250
million annually, a relatively modest sum given the billions coming out
of Washington."
In addition to the $50-billion "Public Media
Trust Fund," another one of the proposals from the Free Press group is a
$50-million "government-seeded innovation fund for journalism,"
described by Craig Aaron of Free Press as "a taxpayer-supported venture
capital firm that invests in new journalism models."
Continue
reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Socialist Agenda Threatens The
United States |
NewsMax.com is
reporting that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Obama’s socialist agenda threatens our way of life.
"We have two mortal
threats," he told FT.com in a video interview. "First is radical
Islam. The other is a secular socialist model of government
dominating and defining life that would be fundamentally alien to
historical American experience."
In the last 10-15 years secular
socialism has strengthened in universities, courts, the bureaucracy and
the media, says Gingrich, author of the new book, "To Save America:
Stopping Obama's Secular Socialist Machine."
Obama’s commitment
to a combination of Chicago machine politics and radicalism presents
grave danger, Gingrich says -- "comparable" to Hitler and Stalin.
"Had the Nazis won, the American system would have died," Gingrich
said. "If the Soviet Union had won, the American system would have
died."
This is another moment of existential crisis in our
country, he says.
"What is it we have to do for this very unique,
freedom oriented system of entrepreneurship -- the work ethic, the
belief that our rights come from God not from the state -- what do we
have to do for that system to survive?"
The God versus state
issue is crucial, Gingrich says.
"We are a country that
historically said rights come from God to you as a person. You
loan power to the state. The state doesn’t loan power to you."
But Obama doesn’t abide by that rule, Gingrich says.
"Obama
represents a very European model. This is much more of European
socialism and secularism. He’s very comfortable to Europeans
because he’s a much more European personality." |
| Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny? |
Thomas Sowell
says when Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the
1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately
sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to
politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political
base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and
had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.
"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to
describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the
Soviet Union.
Put differently, a democracy needs informed
citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.
In our
times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before
our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few
people seem to be concerned about it. Obama's poll numbers are
going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular
policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure
of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.
Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that
Obama has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private
enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy
of compensation? Nowhere.
And yet that is precisely what is
happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate
people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many
among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply
whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be
compensated, but our government is supposed to be "a government of laws
and not of men."
If our laws and our institutions determine that
BP ought to pay $20 billion -- or $50 billion or $100 billion -- then so
be it, but the Constitution says that private property is not to be
confiscated by the government without "due process of law."
Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a
distinction without a difference.
With vastly expanded powers of
government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats,
private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the
imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the
Constitution.
If you believe that the end justifies the means,
then you don't believe in constitutional government. |
| No Undue Edge For Nations |
MSN News is
reporting that, on Sunday, Barack Obama said that countries must not
have any "undue advantage" if the world is to build a strong and durable
economic recovery.
"A strong and durable recovery also requires
countries not having an undue advantage," Obama told journalists at the
end of G20 talks in Canada.
"So we also discussed the need for
currencies that are market-driven," he added, welcoming China's decision
to let its yuan float more freely against the dollar.
Obama means the United States.
This is why he keeps shafting the US economically.
Obama is
a Marxist ideologue. As such, his political agenda is Marxist in
orientation, not American. The worldwide Marxist ideological
vision demands that the U.S. position in the world be knocked down a few
pegs, so that the U.S. and it’s current leadership role cannot threaten
their world government agenda.
Related: Obama said about his profligate spending:
"Somehow people say, why are you doing that, I'm not sure that's good
politics. I'm doing it because I said I was going to do it and I
think it's the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson
about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult
choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering
about deficits and debt step-up because I'm calling their bluff.
We'll see how much of that, how much of the political arguments that
they're making right now are real and how much of it was just politics."
And that statement about
"next year." How ominous is that? |
| Majority Agree, Socialist Accurately
Describes Obama |
Fox News is
reporting that a majority of likely
voters think "socialist" is a fair description for Barack Obama,
according to a new poll that looks at how well Obama's critics have been
able to tag him with that buzzword and its often negative connotations.
The poll by Democracy Corps, the firm of James Carville and Stan
Greenberg, estimates that 55 percent of likely voters believe
"socialist" is a somewhat accurate description of Obama. Poll
respondents were asked about a list of words and how well they related
to Obama.
When asked about "a socialist," 33 percent of likely
voters said it described Obama "very well," 22 percent said "well," 15
percent said "not too well," and 25 percent said "not well at all."
A majority of likely voters, 56 percent, also found that Obama is
too liberal -- 35 percent saying it describes him as "very well," 21
percent saying "well," another 21 percent saying "not too well" and 17
percent saying "not well at all. |
| It's Official: Obama Is A Socialist |
Fox Business News is
reporting that Obama is a socialist. That's the view of 55% of
American voters, according to a new poll. And this isn't coming
from a Republican pollster.
It comes from Democracy Corps, a
polling group started by life-long Democratic operative James Carville
and his partner Stan Greenberg. When the group asked 1,000 voters
in mid-June how well the term "socialist" fits Obama, 55% said "well" or
"very well."
This must scare the hell of the elites in the media
and academe, who think such talk is just the province of Glenn Beck, not
the majority of voters. But, yes, and yes again. It is Glenn
Beck and it is the American people who think that. And when you
look at the evidence, it's hard to dispute.
Nationalizing
companies and whole industries and big-footing time-honored laws
regarding property rights are socialist policies. It's fair to
assume that the man directing socialist policies is a socialist.
And Americans have always been fair.
They were fair to give Obama
the benefit of the doubt and elect him. And after seeing him in
action, they're fair to think of him as a socialist.
His recess
appointment of the new health czar, Donald Berwick, helps confirm that
impression. Remember, he's the guy who says that the only way to
improve health care in America is to force the redistribution of wealth
in this country. That's the kind of socialist nonsense that you
hear in academic circles all the time.
And in academic circles,
this talk usually goes unchallenged. These people believe that
folks are poor because other people are rich. They even extend
that belief to the whole world, believing that the only reason poor
countries are poor is because they're exploited by rich countries.
That's called "dependency theory," but it's really just warmed over
socialism. And it's got the same emotional core as socialism,
drawing its energy from guilt, envy and jealousy. When these ideas
are isolated in academic circles, they're just another theory to argue
about late at night, over coffee and cigarettes.
But when
they're played out in reality, they can cause devastation.
The
world has buried in it far more corpses resulting from the envy of
socialism than it does from the greed of capitalism. And the
affluence of America’s middle class has nothing to do with socialism or
redistribution of wealth -- it has to do with the creation of wealth.
Now, thankfully most Americans, even inside the Beltway, understand
that income redistribution is not the key to our social problems.
They understand that the ultimate outcome of that belief is to make
everyone poorer. Americans don't want a society that pushes people
down, but one that brings everyone up -- or at least provides the
opportunity for everyone to succeed as high as they can go. |
| Obama's Backwardness |
Greg Reese says Barack Obama is leading our
nation backwards into chaos parallel to the early years of 20th-century
Russia. In the early 20th century, Bolshevik revolutionaries led
by Vladimir Lenin pieced together a bureaucratic authority that quickly
developed into a totalitarian government.
Barack Obama is laying
the foundation step by step for a superstructure not unlike the
apparatus by which the Soviet Union functioned. The
bureaucratization of America is an attack on capitalism, the free
market, the private sector, and ultimately private property ownership.
Obama, like Lenin, imposed government on the people and will
systematically dismantle personal freedom. As more and more of the
private sector is regulated and controlled by big government, all
categories of society will fall under the umbrella of one central
authority.
Lenin imposed upon Russia a Decree on the Suppression
of Hostile Newspapers justifying a series of measures to stop all of the
press that spoke out against the revolution.
Obama, once
inaugurated into office, commenced a campaign to silence opposition
opinion. White House staff and the president singled out private
citizens, groups, and news agencies as illegitimate.
Vladimir
Lenin, in establishing the young USSR, assigned a Control Commission to
oversee the government departments for the sake of imposing authority
and policing rumors or insinuations that are critical of the party.
Parallel to Lenin's actions, Obama categorically assigned czars
throughout the many departments of government. Many of these czars
wield managing power and are not bound by constitutional checks and
balances or congressional oversight.
Obama is replacing every
facet of our society with bureaucracy. Once our system of private
sector and individual freedom is subverted, then we will find ourselves
dominated by a dictating government from of which we cannot break free.
Marxism did not collapse with the fall of the USSR. Obama
shares the same philosophical dream as Vladimir Lenin. Marxism is
the faith and religion of the ultra-left. Barack Obama is an
evangelical Marxist. The American people have not recognized
Obama's Marxism because Marxism has changed its vocabulary.
In
his trademark chameleon-speak, Obama deliberately articulates his
language, delivering rhetoric open to interpretation -- he speaks in
code.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Agenda Founded On Anti-Capitalism |
Ronald Kessler
says, that by words and deeds, Obama has cast a pall on American
business, jeopardizing the economic recovery. From the healthcare
industry to Wall Street, Obama never misses a chance to demonize
business. From taxation to regulation to healthcare, he has
undercut incentives for businesses to thrive and hire more employees.
As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said this week, Obama has neglected
job creation and has sown economic uncertainty with burdensome tax and
regulatory policies.
Behind it all is the fact that Obama abhors
capitalism. If you doubt that, look at his own words -- and the
words of his wife.
At the NAACP convention this week, Michelle
Obama referred to "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist -- in
education and health, in income and wealth."
By its very nature,
capitalism produces inequality in income and wealth. By and large,
those who strive to achieve do better under capitalism than those who do
not. Thus, the Obamas made $5.5 million last year, largely on
royalties from Obama’s best-selling books. We have yet to hear
Obama or his wife complain about the inequality in income that suggests.
When talking about financial regulatory reform, Obama said in
April, "I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money."
During the campaign, Obama famously said that he thinks the economy
works best when "we spread the wealth around." In a Sept. 6, 2001,
radio interview, Obama expressed regret that the Supreme Court hadn’t
engaged in wealth redistribution.
If you doubt that Obama is
pursuing that goal, look at Democratic Sen. Max Baucus’ description of
the healthcare legislation as "an income shift." Baucus explained
that, in recent years, "the maldistribution of income in America has
gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and
the middle income class is left behind." The new healthcare
legislation, Baucus promised, "will have the effect of addressing that
maldistribution of income in America." It will, he said, achieve a
"shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans."
Obama’s views are not dissimilar to those of Karl Marx, who said,
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
The Soviet Union was founded on that premise and eventually
disintegrated because citizens had no incentive to work hard, innovate,
or be efficient. In the meantime, Communist Party leaders helped
themselves to riches that they claimed no one should have.
Based
on the fact that Obama spent 7 years being mentored by a communist,
being introduced to politics by a communist, and listening to the
anti-capitalist ravings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, no one
should be surprised at Obama’s leanings. What is surprising is
that America elected a man who so totally rejects a fundamental reason
this country has been so successful.
It's not surprising at all.
Obama's allies in the ObamaMedia just kept their leftist mouths shut. |
| Obama IS A Socialist |
David Asman
says that's the view of 55% of American voters, according to a new
poll, and this isn't coming from a Republican pollster.
It comes
from Democracy Corps, a polling group started by life-long Democratic
operative James Carville and his partner Stan Greenberg. When the
group asked one thousand voters in mid June how well the term
"socialist" fits President Obama, 55% said "well" or "very well."
This must scare the hell of the elites in the media and Academia,
who think such talk is just the province of Glenn Beck, not the majority
of voters. But, yes, and yes again. It is Glenn Beck and it
is the American people who think that.
And when you look at the
evidence, it's hard to dispute it. Nationalizing companies and
whole industries and overriding Constitutional laws regarding property
rights are socialist policies. It's fair to assume that the man
directing socialist policies is a socialist -- and Americans have always
been fair.
They were fair to give Obama the benefit of the doubt
and elect him, and after seeing him in action, they're fair to think of
him as a socialist.
His recess appointment of the new health
czar Donald Berwick helps confirm that impression. Remember, he's
the guy who says that the only way to improve health care in America is
to force the redistribution of wealth in this country. That's the
kind of socialist nonsense that you hear in academic circles all the
time.
And in academic circles, this talk usually goes
unchallenged. These people believe that folks are poor because
other people are rich. They even extend that belief to the whole
world, believing that the only reason poor countries are poor is because
they're exploited by rich countries. That's called "dependency
theory," but it's really just warmed over socialism, and it's got the
same emotional core as socialism, drawing its energy from guilt, envy
and jealousy. When these ideas are isolated in academic circles,
they're just another theory to argue about late at night, over coffee
and cigarettes, but when they're played out in reality they can cause
devastation.
The world has buried in it far more corpses
resulting from the envy of socialism than it does from the greed of
capitalism.
Now, thankfully most Americans, even inside the
Beltway, understand that income redistribution is not the key to our
social problems. They understand that the ultimate outcome of that
belief is to make everyone poorer. Americans don't want a society
that pushes people down, but one that brings everyone up, or at least
provides the opportunity for everyone to succeed as high as they can go.
Related: Of course Obama's a socialist. |
| Obama's Socialist Takeover Must Be Stopped |
Jeffrey Kuhner says Obama has engaged in
numerous high crimes and misdemeanors. The Democratic majority in
Congress is in peril as Americans reject his agenda. Yet more must be
done: Obama should be impeached.
He is slowly -- piece by
painful piece -- erecting a socialist dictatorship. We are not there
--
yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining
our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic
procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster
regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism. Like
Venezuela's leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Obama is bent on
imposing a revolution from above -- one that is polarizing America along
racial, political and ideological lines. Obama is the most divisive
president since Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country.
It's time for him to go.
He has abused his office and violated
his oath to uphold the Constitution. His health care overhaul was rammed
through Congress. It was -- and remains -- opposed by a majority of the
people. It could only be passed through bribery and political
intimidation. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the $5
billion Medicaid set-aside for Florida Sen. Bill Nelson -- taxpayer money
was used as a virtual slush fund to buy swing votes. Moreover, the law
is blatantly unconstitutional: The federal government does not have the
right to coerce every citizen to purchase a good or service. This is not
in the Constitution, and it represents an unprecedented expansion of
power.
Yet ObamaCare's most pernicious aspect is its federal
funding of abortion. Pro-lifers are now compelled to have their tax
dollars used to subsidize insurance plans that allow for the murder of
unborn children. This is more than state-sanctioned infanticide. It
violates the conscience rights of religious citizens. Traditionalists --
evangelicals, Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Orthodox Jews -- have been
made complicit in an abomination that goes against their deepest
religious values. As the law is implemented (as in Pennsylvania) the
consequences of the abortion provisions will become increasingly
apparent. The result will be a cultural civil war. Pro-lifers will
become deeply alienated from society; among many, a secession of the
heart is taking place.
Obama is waging a frontal assault on
property rights. The BP oil spill is a case in point. BP clearly is
responsible for the spill and its massive economic and environmental
damage to the Gulf. There is a legal process for claims to be
adjudicated, but Obama has behaved more like Chavez or Russia's
Vladimir Putin: He has bullied BP into setting up a $20 billion
compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In other words,
the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a political
agenda. Billions will be dispensed arbitrarily in compensation to
oil-spill victims -- much of it to Democratic constituents. This is
cronyism and creeping authoritarianism.
Obama's multicultural
socialism seeks to eradicate traditional America. He has created a
command-and-control health care system. He has essentially nationalized
the big banks, the financial sector, the automakers and the student loan
industry. He next wants to pass "cap-and-trade," which would bring
industry and manufacturing under the heel of big government. The state
is intervening in every aspect of American life -- beyond its
constitutionally delegated bounds. Under Obama, the Constitution has
become a meaningless scrap of paper.
To provide the shock troops
for his socialist takeover, Obama calls for "comprehensive
immigration reform" -- granting amnesty to 20 million
illegal aliens. This would forge a permanent Democratic electoral
majority. It would sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior; it signifies the
surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion. It means the death of American nationhood. We will no longer be a
country, but the colony of a global socialist empire.
Rather than
defending our homeland, Obama's Justice Department has sued Arizona
for its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his fellow
Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to protect U.S.
citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is thus encouraging more
illegal immigration as Washington refuses to protect our borders.
Obama's decision on this case is treasonous.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Soft-Core Socialism |
Steve Forbes says a comedian or satirist could
not have come up with the recent scenario of Treasury Chief Timothy
Geithner and other Administration officials suddenly trying to reassure
corporate chieftains that the Obama Administration is pro business and
loves free enterprise. A close and powerful Obama aide,
Valerie Jarrett, sent
Verizon CEO (and Business Roundtable chairman) Ivan Seidenberg a letter
declaring: "While we may disagree on some issues, we have an open door
and are always willing to consider input and ideas from everyone,
including the business community." That's like Dracula saying he
prefers bottled water to blood.
Consider the letter's
condescending tone regarding the Administration's open door extending
even to the "business community." The business community employs
110 million workers. Companies and the people who work for them
pay most of Uncle Sam's taxes. They are the font of the
innovations that enable us to enjoy an ever improving standard of
living. Now the Administration deigns to entertain input from the
business community! How wonderfully nice and tolerant of the Obots
to do so.
No sooner had the charm offensive been launched than
the government showed its true colors by defiantly reimposing a ban,
which had been overturned by a federal court, on deepwater drilling in
the Gulf of Mexico and by straight-facedly proclaiming that all the
stimulus spending has saved or created upwards of 3.6 million jobs and
is a huge success.
The truth is that not even the Franklin
Roosevelt Administration was as hostile to and ignorant about free
enterprise as this Administration is. Almost every action Obama
officials take underscores their belief in the stereotype that
businesspeople are mostly amoral, corner-cutting, consumer-shafting,
pollution-loving menaces. The economy itself needs to be tightly
controlled and rigidly guided by Washington mandarins because free
markets are inherently and destructively unstable.
One hesitates
to bring up the economics of Benito Mussolini and his ilk because
fascism means ugly nationalism and racism, as well as mass murder and
aggressive war. So let's label the economic part of that ideology
as neosocialist, corporatist, statist or -- to be sophisticated and use
a French word --
dirigiste.
Under the corporatist state, private companies
exist but take their direction from government. Competition is
seen as wasteful and destructive and therefore must be "managed."
There is a basic hostility toward small businesses precisely because
there are so many of them, making them harder to regulate and more apt
to do things without government permission.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| How Socialist Kickstarted Obama Propaganda Machine |
Trevor Loudon has contended for some time that
Barack Obama owes his political career by three Marxist organizations,
Communist Party USA, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism and Democratic Socialists of America. Of the three, Obama's
decades old ties to Democratic Socialists of America are most easily
documentable.
Part of this support has come in the form of
favorable media stories about Obama and in orchestrated attacks against
his opponents. It is no coincidence that several members of the recently
exposed, pro Obama JournoList had close ties to D.S.A.
Harold
Meyerson is both a leading U.S. journalist and a vice chair of
Democratic Socialists of America. Meyerson is an op-ed columnist for the
Washington Post and is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect.
While not an identified member of JournoList, Meyerson is professionally
and politically associated with several:
• Washington Post "JournoListas" so far
identified include -- Alec McGillis, Greg Sargent, Dave Weigel
• The American Prospect "Journolistas"
include -- Spencer Ackerman, Dean Baker, Sam Boyd, Tim Fernholz,
John Judis, Ezra Klein (JournoList founder), Mark Schmitt, Adam
Serwer, Robert Kuttner (author of two books on the Obama
Administration) and Paul Waldman
• Democratic Socialists of America
affiliated "JournoListas" include -- Joel Bleifuss, Todd Gitlin, a
Progressives for Obama supporter), John Judis, Michael Kazin, Scott
McLemee, Rick Perlstein, Katha Pollitt (Feminists for Peace and
Barack Obama) endorser and Robert Kuttner
On April 6, 2010, a seminar "Labor, the Left, and
Progressives in the Obama Era" was held at Georgetown University --
further evidence of D.S.A. -- JournoList collusion in favor of Obama.
After the success of health care reform, what’s next on labor’s
agenda? How can the labor movement grow and engage with a
progressive movement that speaks to the Obama era? What is the
role of younger workers, workers of color, and women? Is there a
new "New Deal" on the horizon?
Speakers included:
• Barbara Ehrenreich -- D.S.A. leader,
Progressives for Obama founder
• Christopher Hayes -- Washington
editor of The Nation, JournoList member, affiliate of D.S.A. linked
publication In These Times
• Gerry Hudson -- D.S.A. member ,
executive vice-president of the very pro Obama SEIU
• Michael Kazin -- co-editor of
Dissent, JournoList member, close to D.S.A.
• Harold Meyerson
One of the speakers above, Gerry Hudson has written
how the late founder of D.S.A., Michael Harrington would view the
election of Barack Obama.
It’s tragic for so many reasons that Michael
died too young; his voice and his wisdom are sorely needed.
How he would marvel at the election of Barack Obama and the promise
that this victory affords all of us on the democratic left! He
is sorely missed. But were he alive, I would hope -- and
expect, that he and others who are informed by this vision of
democratic socialism would join with us in SEIU as we seek to take
advantage of a moment most of us have spent our lifetimes only
dreaming of.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Harold
Meyerson was the one of the first, if not THE FIRST, journalist to
promote Barack Obama outside his his adopted state of Illinois.
Continue reading
here -- there's more, and and he's got links to all the people named
. . . |
| On Obama’s Socialism |
Jonah Goldberg
says Harold Meyerson, who
actually calls himself a socialist, wanted it both ways. In a March 4,
2009, Washington Post column, he argued that anyone calling Obama a
socialist didn’t know what he was talking about: "Take it from a
democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be
supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism.
And the reason isn’t that the woods are full of secret socialists who
are only now outing themselves."
But after the Rasmussen data
came out the following month, Meyerson changed his tune. In a column
titled "Rush Builds a Revolution," he argued that conservative attempts
to demonize Obama as a socialist had backfired and were leading
Americans, particularly young Americans, to embrace the label. "Rush
[Limbaugh] and his boys are doing what Gene Debs and his comrades never
really could," Meyerson wrote. "In tandem with Wall Street, they are
building socialism in America." Moreover, whereas a more "viable,
regulated capitalism" at first distinguished Obamunism from socialism,
it now defined Obama’s brand of socialism. "Today," Meyerson observed,
"the world’s socialist and social democratic parties basically champion
a more social form of capitalism, with tighter regulations on capital,
more power for labor and an expanded public sector to do what the
private sector cannot (such as providing universal access to health
care)."
Surely if fans of Obama’s program feel free to call it
socialist, critics may be permitted to do likewise. |
| Economic Crisis, Healthcare Disaster,
Define Obama Legacy |
Lev Navrozov says Karl Marx was born in 1818.
After having graduated from school, he was sent by his father to a
university to become a lawyer. Later he made a discovery owing to
which the word "Marxism" became one of the most common words of his
century and the next.
In his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts (1844), the 26-year-old Marx drew the following conclusion:
"The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces -- the
more his production increases in power and range."
In Vol.1 of
his Capital (published in 1867), Marx explained that the "deficient
money" was paid by capitalists, who thus profited more and more from the
whole process of production and sale at the expense of their victim: the
worker.
Today most citizens of Western Europe recall Karl Marx as
an idiot, fortunately long forgotten by many West Europeans. When
Karl Marx was fashionable in Western Europe, some West Europeans
considered him the greatest thinker on earth.
His utopian
socialist theory was tried (e.g., in Soviet Russia) and proved to be
destructive and deadly to the country. It led to the destruction
of the country’s economic structure, loss of free enterprise, loss of
personal freedoms, impoverishment of the people, political repressions,
and eventually ended up in usurpation of power by dictatorship.
What about the United States?
Obama, we gather, espouses Marxist
ideology. He was elected on the basis of his seemingly bold, new
ideas, actually rooted in those old-fashioned, hackneyed, long
discredited Marxist socialist platitudes.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| The Naiveté of the American Public |
Andrew Mellon says that suddenly the American
public is shocked. Perhaps there is no economic recovery.
Perhaps the One really does favor Islam.
Democrats and
Republicans shake their heads and wonder, how could Obama pursue such
divisive and unpopular policies? What is the rationale for his
decisions? Is he incompetent? Is he naive?
The answer
is none of the above.
I have said before and I will say again,
Barack Obama does not share the values of Americans. His vision is
completely anathema to an America based on individualism, private
property rights and Judeo-Christian morality.
When one argues
that Barack Obama is merely mistaken in his economic program, they
completely discount the notion that he knows exactly what he is doing
and that he has been 100% successful in achieving his policies and their
intended ends, means and ends that any objective viewer would realize
were insane. After all, an economy is nothing more than the
collection of mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges of labor and the
fruits of labor. Anything that impedes one's labor, or the trading
of its fruits is necessarily bad for the economy. Hence, almost
everything a government does to try to stimulate an economy, impeding
the natural spontaneous harmony of such a system necessarily postpones
any recovery.
We were in major trouble with unsustainable public
and private debt prior to Obama, coupled with a completely insolvent
financial system, a destined to fail monetary system and numerous
stagnant businesses sucking up economic resources. A real
financial restructuring would have taken significant time, and even the
most "fiscally conservative" Executive and Congress would not have been
able to move enough roadblocks out of the way to make this recovery
painless or quick. I question whether or not anything could change
the direction of the economy in the long run, save for a collapse that
would force us to let the free market work and liquidate the welfare
state. But Obama ensures that there will not even be a chance for
recovery for many many years, regardless of who the next president is.
And it is all by design.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Socialist Takeover Must Be Stopped |
Jeffrey Kuhner
says Obama has engaged in numerous high crimes and misdemeanors.
The Democrat majority in Congress is in peril as Americans reject his
agenda. Yet more must be done: Obama should be impeached.
He is slowly -- piece by painful piece -- erecting a socialist
dictatorship. We are not there -- yet. But he is putting
America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our
constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic
procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster
regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism.
Like Venezuela's leftist strongman, Hugo Chavez, Obama is bent on
imposing a revolution from above -- one that is polarizing America along
racial, political and ideological lines. Obama is more divisive
than Richard Nixon. His policies are Balkanizing the country.
It's time for him to go.
He has abused his office and violated
his oath to uphold the Constitution. His health care overhaul was
rammed through Congress. It was -- and remains -- opposed by a
majority of the people. It could only be passed through bribery
and political intimidation. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker
Kickback, the $5 billion Medicaid set-aside for Florida Sen. Bill Nelson
-- taxpayer money was used as a virtual slush fund to buy swing votes.
Moreover, the law is blatantly unconstitutional: the federal government
does not have the right to coerce every citizen to purchase goods or
services. This is not in the Constitution, and it represents an
unprecedented expansion of power.
Obama is waging a frontal
assault on property rights. The BP oil spill is a case in point.
BP clearly is responsible for the spill and its massive economic and
environmental damage to the Gulf. There is a legal process for
claims to be adjudicated, but Obama has behaved more like Chavez or
Russia's Vladimir Putin. He has bullied BP into setting up a $20
billion compensation fund administered by an Obama appointee. In
other words, the assets of a private company are to be raided to serve a
political agenda. Billions will be dispensed arbitrarily in
compensation to oil-spill victims -- much of it to Democrat
constituents. This is cronyism and creeping authoritarianism.
Obama's multicultural socialism seeks to eradicate traditional
America. He has created a command-and-control health care system.
He has essentially nationalized the big banks, the financial sector, the
automakers and the student loan industry. He next wants to pass
"cap-and-trade," which would bring industry and manufacturing under the
heel of big government. The state is intervening in every aspect
of American life -- beyond its constitutionally delegated bounds.
Under Obama, the Constitution has become a meaningless scrap of paper.
To provide the shock troops for his socialist takeover, Obama calls
for "comprehensive immigration reform" -- granting amnesty to
23 million illegal aliens.
This would forge a permanent Democrat electoral majority. It would
sound the death knell for our national sovereignty. Amnesty
rewards lawlessness and criminal behavior. It signifies the
surrender of our porous southern border to a massive illegal invasion.
It means the death of American nationhood. We will no longer be a
country, but the colony of a global socialist empire.
Rather than
defending our homeland, Obama's Justice Department has sued Arizona for
its immigration law. He is siding with criminals against his
fellow Americans. His actions desecrate his constitutional oath to
protect U.S. citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. He is
thus encouraging more illegal immigration as Washington refuses to
protect our borders. Obama's decision on this case is treasonous.
Obama is sworn to defend the Constitution and is supposed to respect
the rule of law. Instead, his administration has dropped charges
of voter intimidation against members of the New Black Panther Party.
This was done even though their menacing behavior was caught on tape:
men in military garb brandishing clubs and threatening whites at a
polling site. A Justice Department lawyer intimately involved in
the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. Adams says that
under Obama, there is a new policy: Cases involving black defendants and
white victims -- no matter how much they cry for justice -- are not to
be prosecuted. This is more than institutionalized racism.
It is an abrogation of civil rights laws. The Justice Department's
behavior is illegal. It poses a direct threat to the integrity of
our democracy and the sanctity of our electoral process. |
| Yo! Obama! Pay Attention |
Jim Hoft says this will upset a whole lot of
leftists -- and Hollywood sure won’t like the news.
First, Cuba's
Fidel Castro
admitted that the communist revolution in Cuba has been a failure,
saying in an interview, "the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us
anymore."
Now, the Castro Regime
announced it will fire at least half a million workers by the middle
of next year.
Cuba says it will fire at least half a million
state workers by mid-2011 and will free up private enterprise to help
them find new work -- radically remaking employment on the communist
island.
The layoffs will start immediately and run through the
first half of next year, according to an announcement Monday by the
nearly 3 million-strong Cuban Workers Confederation -- the only labor
union the government tolerates.
To soften the blow, it said the
government would authorize simultaneous increases in job opportunities
in the non-state sector, allowing more Cubans to become self-employed,
to form cooperatives run by employees rather than government bureaucrats
and to increase private control of state land and infrastructure through
long-term leases.
Somebody
ought to make sure that Obama gets the memo.
Socialism and communism have failed everywhere they've been tried, but
don't expect our glorious leader to get the message. He's arrogant
enough to believe he'll get it right. |
| Castro Disses Socialism -- Somebody Tell
Obama |
"Our state cannot and should not continue
maintaining companies productive entities, services and budgeted
sectors with bloated payrolls (and) losses that hurt our economy.
Job options will be increased and broadened with new forms of
non-state employment, among them leasing land, cooperatives and
self-employment, absorbing hundreds of thousands of workers in the
coming years."
Did the Obama administration and our
Democratically-controlled Congress suddenly come to their senses?
Did Republicans finally come up with a concrete agenda for the upcoming
November election? Did some Tea Party candidate burnish his
conservative credentials?
Arnold Ahlert
says
no, no, and no. Unbelievable as it may seem, the above statement
was released by the official labor federation–of Cuba. The
Communist regime has announced plans to "downsize" their public sector
workforce by more than 500,000 employees, and then attempt to reemploy
those workers into the private sector. And that’s just the
beginning. Cuba announced that more than one million government
jobs would eventually be cut, and that there will be fewer state-sector
openings in the future.
The reason cited for such massive cuts?
To "increase efficiency in the state sector." In other words, the
most steadfast Communist nation in the western hemisphere has embraced
one of the most decidedly un-Communist philosophies of all: limited
government.
Such a development in and of itself is stunning
enough. But in August, Cuban leader Raul Castro pushed the stake
even deeper into the heart of progressive thinking. Speaking
before the Cuban National Assembly, he revealed an attitude remarkably
similar to the one held by a substantial number of Americans regarding
our own welfare state:
"We have to erase forever the notion that
Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live
without working."
Raul Castro has very little to worry about in that
regard. Ninety miles to his north, there is a country where
millions of people can live without working. It is a country where
"efficiency in the public sector" is an oxymoron. It is a country
which, despite a nagging recession, has increased public sector payrolls
at every level of government, even as its private sector has hemorrhaged
millions of jobs. It is a country being pushed to the brink of
insolvency by the very same ideological bankruptcy that Cuba is now
rejecting.
The latest announcement follows a curious remark made
by the former leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro. At a recent lunch with
Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent with Atlantic magazine,
Goldberg asked the 84-year-old ex-president if he still thought Cuba’s
economic system was worth exporting. "The Cuban model doesn’t even
work for us any more," said the former Maximum Leader. |
| Marxism, Socialism, Communism, And Obama |
Mike McDaniel traces Obama's behavior and
opinions back to the source.
"I don’t get it," my friend said,
shaking his head. "Obama is supposed to be so smart and such a brilliant
politician … "
"Right," I said. "So?"
"So everything he
has done or wants to do is a disaster! It’s all opposed by the
majority of the American people. Even Democrats are running away
from him as fast as they can. If he’s such a great politician, why
does he keep doing things most people hate? And that’s not the
worst part. When people complain, he calls them too dumb to
appreciate what he’s doing for them!"
Why indeed. The
answer is deceptively simple: Barack Obama, the alleged president of the
United States, is a committed, doctrinaire socialist, and because
Marxist philosophy is the foundation of socialism and communism, a
Marxist. Many Americans are reluctant to accept this idea, despite
overwhelming evidence, for two primary reasons: they don’t want to
accept that they helped to elect him, and they’re not really sure what
socialism and communism are, or what all the fuss about communism was
about. After all, the Swedes are socialists -- aren’t they all
blondes in bikinis with charming accents?
To begin, as a public
service, a Marxist primer: Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German, was the
originator of Marxist theory, which was adapted by the leaders of the
now defunct Soviet Union as Marxist-Leninist thought. Marxism is
essentially a method of analyzing history through the vehicle of
economics. In Marxist thinking, there are two classes of people
who will always be engaged in what Marx termed the "class struggle":
The Bourgeoisie: The rich, those who own land, the owners of
factories, the capitalists who only get richer by exploiting the labor
of the workers. In capitalist societies, they are the owners of
the "means of production."
The Proletariat: The workers who
are always helpless and exploited.
The Marxist view of history
contends that man has no "natural" rights or tendencies. He is
self-making. He is constantly changing due to his need to develop
new technologies (new means of production). There is accordingly
no "natural" political order, only that created as a consequence of the
constantly evolving means of production. To that end, Marx saw the
following historical chronology, which communists believed (and believe)
to be inevitable:
Step One -- Violent Revolution:
Capitalism is better, according to Marx, than feudalism, but both are
hopelessly corrupt because of the exploitation of the workers by the
bourgeoisie. As the gap between the very rich and the very poor
widens (Marx did not foresee the dramatic rise of the middle class), the
workers will be forced to revolt and seize the means of production.
This revolt must be bloody, brutal, and total, with the noble final goal
being the seizure of all power for the workers who will then labor to
establish the next step on the historic path. This will take place
on a country-by-country or region-by-region basis, but Marx believed
that this historic "class struggle" would absolutely overwhelm the
world.
Step Two -- The Dictatorship of the Proletariat:
This was the perpetual state of the Soviet Union. Having seized
the means of production, the workers will purge society of all traces of
capitalism. They will reeducate -- or kill -- all capitalists.
Because it is impossible to secure the ultimate blessings of communism
in this phase of the historic process, the workers must be "guided" (in
actual practice, ruled) by an elite group of "scientific communists" who
alone know how to keep the revolution moving steadily on the historic
path. While these scientific communists are purportedly part of
the proletariat, in actual practice, they resemble the capitalists they
deposed. Marx recognized this as an evil necessary to achieve the
final goal. Many communists were -- and are -- quite fond of this
particular part of the doctrine, as they get all the goodies while the
workers exist in misery and despair.
Step Three -- True
Communism: Before true communism can be achieved, all democracies
(which tend to be capitalistic) must be wiped from the face of the
planet. This is historical destiny; it must occur.
Therefore, any means are justifiable to make it happen.
(Communists often have been called "socialists in a hurry," in that
they’re more than happy to kill anyone who even looks like they might be
thinking about standing in their way. Historically, this has
translated to the deaths of tens of millions of their own citizens.
Many communists were very fond of this part of the doctrine, too).
It was only the existence of Western democracies which kept the Soviet
Union interminably in the second phase. When true communism was
attained, a "worker’s paradise" would exist around the Earth, and there
would be no need for government of any kind. The maxim "from each
according to his ability; to each according to his need" would apply.
The people would own and operate all of the means of production and
absolute social justice would prevail.
Any failures along the
path to the manifest destiny of true communism are always attributable
to the idea that true communism has not yet been achieved, therefore
Marxist theory cannot be falsified. It can never be proved wrong.
There can never be, by definition, enough communism, and the remedy to
the problems caused by insufficient communism is always more and more
fervent communism.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Don't Lose Faith In The Vision |
Beth Fouhy
reports Michelle Obama asked women on Monday to support Democrats in
next month's midterm elections, urging them not to lose faith in her
husband's vision for the country even if they are frustrated by the poor
economy and slow pace of change he promised.
"I know that a lot
of folks are still hurting. And I know for so many people, change
has not come fast enough. Believe me, it hasn't come fast enough
for Barack, either," the first lady told supporters at a fundraiser in
New York for the Democratic National Committee and an affiliated group,
the Women's Leadership Forum.
Mrs. Obama's appearance at that
event, along with a private gathering hosted by fashion designer Donna
Karan, helped raked in about $1 million for the DNC.
Earlier,
Mrs. Obama campaigned in Connecticut for Democratic Senate candidate
Richard Blumenthal, who's in a tight race with Republican former
wrestling executive Linda McMahon to succeed the retiring Sen. Chris
Dodd. She told a crowd of 800 supporters in Stamford that Obama
needed Democrats like Blumenthal in the Senate to help him fight for
reform.
"Our campaign was never just about putting one man in
the White House," Obama said of her husband's 2008 run for president.
"It was always about building a movement for change millions of voices
strong and a movement that lasts beyond one year and beyond one
campaign."
There it is
right there -- there's the Obama agenda -- " a movement for change
millions of voices strong..." -- they're talking about a permanent
"socialist" party --
with Obama as its leader. |
| Obama Vs. America |
Nancy Pearcey says as we approach the November
elections after two years of Obama, oddly enough, a burning question is
still, "Who Is Barack Obama?"
That question was the title of a
Richard Cohen column, but practically since Obama’s first day in office,
the public has been asking -- Is he a socialist? A Marxist?
Anti-American? Anti-colonialist? But there is one category
that encompasses all of the above -- and reveals how serious the
diagnosis is.
The category Obama fits best is what scholars call
the "adversary culture." Coined by literary critic Lionel
Trilling, the term describes intellectuals and artists who feel
alienated from Western society and hostile to its fundamental features.
The adversary culture took root in the 19th century when an
avant-garde began to define themselves by defiance of established norms.
They castigated the bourgeoisie as philistines caring only about
material profit. They denounced the growing capitalist class as
vulgar money-grubbers.
They latched onto philosophies like
Marxism that gave them a platform of moral superiority from which to
castigate the West. And Christianity -- well, whatever was popular
among the uncultivated masses warranted only contempt.
These
attitudes soon congealed into a class consciousness. Sidney Hook,
in the foreword to The Survival of the Adversary Culture, describes many
intellectuals' "hostility to American institutional values and
practices." Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes that "the cultural elite
have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger
society."
There’s little doubt that Obama considers himself part
of that intellectual elite. The current New York Times Magazine
quotes a prominent Democratic lawmaker saying that Obama "always
believes he is the smartest person in any room."
Many seem to
agree. When Obama was elected, Newsweek trumpeted, "Brains Are
Back." The New Scientist hailed him as "the intellectual
president," "a former academic who is deeply familiar with the world of
thought." New York Times columnist David Brooks marveled that
Obama’s cabinet consists of Ivy League grads "twice as smart as the poor
reporters who have to cover them."
In short, the adversary class
is now in power. Todd Gitlin, former president of the radical
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) famously said that after the
1960s student protests, the Left began "marching on the English
Department while the Right took the White House." We now know
which was the more effective strategy.
The Left made their way
up through the universities, became professors, and inculcated their
radical ideas into the minds of generations of young people. As a
result, those who marched on the English department are now in the White
House, bringing with them the adversary stance they imbibed in the
classroom. They disdain ordinary Americans as racists,
chauvinists, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, religious bigots, and
fanatical "clingers."
Continue reading
here . . . |
| I Am Glad To Meet An Indian Communist |
The Left may have staged protests during his
visit, but Barack Obama
said that he was "glad" to meet an Indian communist leader.
At the official residence of the Indian head of state banquet, Obama and
Communist Party of India (CPM) Politburo member Sitaram Yechury were
introduced. Obama said, while the two shook hands:
"I am glad to meet an Indian communist.
I am told that communists have been part of the (Indian) political
mainstream."
Yechury told Obama that the Indian communists have
been in the political mainstream "throughout".
The night before
this exchange, at a private dinner hosted by Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, Obama
asked Pranab Mukherjee, India's finance minister, about the entry of
communists into the Indian parliamentary system. Mukherjee is
understood to have pointed out that Indian communists were part of the
mainstream and likened them to social democrats. |
| Man Up, Media And Open Your Eyes |
Ron Futrell
says if Obama does not get it after
this election, he never will. If the media does not get it after this
election, it never will.
Now, you could easily argue that Obama
absolutely gets it and he is doing exactly what he wants done in this
country. He is a cold-hearted social engineer and he thrives only by
forcing others to obey him by fiat. I would be in that camp, have been
for a long time. How could the most brilliant leader in the history of
the world not know exactly what he is doing?
Change? He has never
explained what he means by the word change. The media has never asked
him, the media has never pinned him down on this, so, I will take it
that they do not want to pin him down on this. They worship his
Vagueness.
Watch this video of a conversation Dear Leader had
with Moveon.com the day after getting smacked silly in the mid-terms.
Change? He never explains it to the Moveon.com crowd because he
doesn’t have to. They know that change means turn America socialist. Government takeover of car companies, healthcare and whatever else is
next on their hit-list, maybe the food system in this country. Shouldn’t
every American have the right to three squares a day?
Where is
the media in all of this? Man up, media! Pin this guy down on what
change really means to this guy. Get specific with him, demand he
answer, follow up with him for as long as it takes. Dear Leader has done
hundreds of one-on-one interviews since he started preaching the
Religion of Change and not a single media person has asked him for
chapter and verse.
My guess is he will avoid the question like
the plague. He did give the answer to Joe the Plumber when he told Joe
that his goal was to "spread the wealth." But the activist old media
destroyed Joe for daring to ask Obama the question that they still will
not ask. What does change mean?
"We need to keep working hard to
give Americans the change they want." Dear Leader said that. Did he
already forget the election returns the day after America rejected his
"change?" Obama himself said that his agenda was on the ballot for the
election and we all saw that America could not be more clear in its
rejection of that agenda.
Which brings me full circle to why the
libs and the media seem so intertwined. They have a nearly identical
mindset. Every time Dear Leader does a one-on-one interview and talks
about "changing America," real Americans sit there and yell at their TV
sets and say, "ya, we know what you mean about change, you said it to
Joe the Plumber," the reporter nods and acts delusionary and moves on to
the question about what Michelle is planning to wear during their next
vacation. Blind leading the blind. Reporter and subject cannot see
themselves for who they are.
Perhaps it’s much easier for both of
them that way -- of course, it’s nearly destroyed our country in the
meantime. Nearly. The Conservative Wave is building and the beautiful
thing is -- neither the liberals or the media can see it.
Change is Obama's often-used euphemism
for socialism. When Obama says "change," you should hear
"socialism," and you will understand him.
When
Obama talks about "progress," he is referring to the implementation of
socialism in the United States.
Talk about him moving to the
middle is wishful thinking. Obama is an ideologue, a true
believer, and an Alinskyite. He will never, ever move to the
middle -- he may feint such a move -- but it will be a dishonest tactic.
He will use whatever time he has left to advance his socialist,
redistributive agenda until the end. |
| Is Barack Obama A Socialist? Part Two |
Paul Mirengoff
says
this is the second in series of posts that, inspired by Stanley Kurtz's
compelling book
Radical-In-Chief, considers whether Barack Obama is a socialist.
In
Part One, I suggested two ways to analyze the question --
biographically and doctrinally -- and then proceeded to examine Obama's
ideological biography from his time in college until 1996 when he first
ran for elected public office.
I found that Obama unquestionably
was a socialist as a college student; pursued the career path --
community organizer -- recommended by socialists as the best means of
advancing their agenda; and did in fact advance such an agenda as a
community organizer. As a result of his successes in this
enterprise, he ran for the Illinois State Senate as the handpicked
successor to an avowed socialist, Alice Palmer [Palmer was
actually a
communist]. He launched that campaign at the home of a communist (and
former terrorist), his political collaborator
Bill Ayers.
Now
let's turn to the ideological content of Obama's career as an office
holder.
In the Illinois State Senate, Obama won high marks for
his legislative skills and his ability at times to work with
Republicans. But the substantive thrust of his work in Springfield was
quite consistent with the contemporary socialist agenda.
Obama
ardently pushed for redistributionist social welfare legislation. Two
political scientists who graphed the legislation Obama sponsored as a
state senator found that the bar for social welfare legislation towered
over every other category. The result was similar for legislation that
Obama co-sponsored. The two professors concluded that other than social
welfare and a sprinkling of government regulation, Obama devoted very
little effort to most policy areas. This is how we would expect a
socialist state legislator to behave.
Not surprisingly, Obama was
focused on health care. Working with a socialist colleague,
Quentin
Young, Obama repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment
mandating universal health care. And he openly favored a single payer
system. Again, his conduct is entirely consistent with the hypothesis
that, during this period, Obama was a socialist. Coupled with the
evidence that he came to the state Senate as a socialist, there is
little basis for concluding that he was other than a socialist during
the state Senate years.
As a state Senator, Obama probably was
best known for his effort to combat racial profiling by the Chicago
police. The Republicans thwarted his anti-profiling legislation when
they held the majority, but when the Democrats took control in 2003, the
bill passed.
Anti-profiling legislation is not distinctively
socialist, of course. But Obama's pursued such legislation in a way that
dovetailed with the hard left's long-time goal -- the goal of his allies
Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father
Michael Pfleger -- of promoting
"liberationist" black churches. Thus, in 2001, the Hyde Park Herald
praised Obama for organizing a "grassroots lobbying effort" on racial
profiling that featured, among others, Pfleger and the associate pastor
of Wright's church. This effort was straight from the
socialist-community organizer playbook by which a mainstream liberal
grievance becomes the vehicle for organizing discontent around a
hard-left, incendiary narrative promulgated by radicals.
Perhaps
the most telling ideological judgment of Obama the State Senator comes
from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its stance in 2000,
when Obama ran for Congress against Bobby Rush. Rush, a former
Black Panther, had received a 90 percent rating from the liberal ADA in
2000 and a 100 percent the year before. His American Conservative
Union (ACU) rating was zero.
Obama was a long shot in his race against Rush, and the Chicago
branch of the DSA wisely remained formally neutral. However, it tilted
towards Obama, speaking of him in glowing terms while describing Rush as
a disappointment to the left. It's doubtful that there is any
non-socialist space to the left of Bobby Rush.
Four years after
his failed bid for Congress, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. It's
well known that Obama was rated by one prominent index as the most
liberal member of the Senate. Sometimes overlooked is the fact that the
U.S. Senate contains an avowed socialist member -- Bernie Sanders of
Vermont. To the left of Sanders there plainly is no non-socialist space.
Thus, Obama's biography strongly suggests that, when elected, he was, and had long been, a socialist. In my next post on
the subject, I'll consider whether his presidency is consistent with the
thesis that he is a socialist. |
| Obama Gives Nation's Highest Honor To
Socialist |
Aaron Klein says Obama announced this week that
he will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the nation's highest
civilian honor -- to John Sweeney, president emeritus of the country's
biggest union, the AFL-CIO.
Sweeney is a socialist activist and
a card-carrying member of the
Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, the principal American
affiliate of the Socialist International. The DSA has demonstrated
a close relationship with Obama over the years.
Sweeney is a
member of the DSA's Boston chapter. He served as president of AFL-CIO
from 1995 until his retirement last September.
He previously
served for four terms as president of the controversial
Service Employees International
Union, or SEIU. During
his administration, Sweeney famously aligned the SEIU with
ACORN and other leftist groups.
Activist and author Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Progressive Policy
Institute, observed how Sweeney brought communists into his union
leadership.
"The public-sector unions have pushed the entire
labor movement to the left," he said. "The [SEIU] has embraced
organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland's Nine
to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. ...
The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU's boss, John
Sweeney, to head of the labor federation.
"No George Meaney-style
bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style
democratic socialism," said Kotkin. "He has opened the AFL-CIO to
participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which
enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party [CPUSA]
says it is now 'in complete accord' with the AFL-CIO's program.
'The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive,
even historic change,' wrote CPUSA National Chairman
Gus Hall in 1996
after the AFL-CIO convention."
Upon assuming the office of the
AFL-CIO in 1995, Sweeney was quick to rescind one of the union's
founding rules that banned Communist Party members and loyalists from
leadership positions within the federation and its unions. Sweeney
welcomed Communist Party delegates to positions of power in his
federation.
Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray, in their book
"Betrayal: How union bosses shake down their bosses and corporate
America," state Sweeney placed a number of DSA allies in his union
office.
The DSA's official website carries an endorsement from
Sweeney: "I'm proud to a member of a movement for change that puts the
cause of working people at the heart of the matter."
Continue
reading
here . . . |
| Case Closed |
David Swindle says Barack Obama is a Socialist
working to destroy America.
"I don’t know how much I buy this
whole 'ex-leftist' thing," one of my old professors wrote to me earlier
this year as he was trying to wrap his head around how one of his
"progressive" poetry students could somehow devolve into an aggressive,
unapologetic, Evil Neo-Con Warmonger working for the demonic David
Horowitz.
"From what I remember you always struck me as a pretty
moderate dude in your columns," he said.
Why of course I did.
Looking "moderate" and "reasonable" and "liberal" was the objective when
in reality in my heart I was a radical and a socialist. Back in
2004-2006 when I was taking my professor’s courses the public face I
wore was one of a "progressive" Democrat. In my weekly op/ed
columns for the Ball State Daily News I argued on behalf of John Kerry
and critiqued the Bush administration and the Conservative Movement.
I may have been dumb enough to identify with the Left, but I was
smart enough to know that if I told the truth about my political
convictions then few people would be persuaded. So while I might
have had six books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn on my shelf at the
time, their names never showed up in my columns. How could I
persuade anyone if I came out and actually said that racist, genocidal
AmeriKKKa was the world’s greatest terrorist state, its clawed fingers
dripping with the blood of poor brown people all over the world?
What good would it do to support Ralph Nader in 2004 and point out that
Kerry was also an elite member of the Ruling Class -- also part of
Yale’s Skull and Bones Society -- and was only a baby step’s improvement
over the malevolent George W. Bush? No, New Left-style honesty in
"speaking truth to power" and brutally confronting the American Empire
was a road to nowhere. It made infinitely more sense to just
become a Democrat, and yank the established party leftward until the day
came when a true leftist could be elevated to the White House to reform
a corrupt system.
This is the nature of the majority of the Left
today from the most inconsequential, amateur blogger to the
Commander-In-Chief: radical Che wolves in liberal Democrat donkey
costumes.
So why is it then that it’s taken so many conservatives
so long to finally begin to accept that Barack Obama is actually a
radical seeking to destroy America from within? Simple:
conservatives follow the evidence. And up until now, while various
pieces have certainly been available, there just has not been enough to
prove conclusively that Obama is a socialist. Billy Ayers,
Jeremiah Wright, "spread the wealth around," etc. etc. -- were we in a
court of law all these data points could legitimately be tabled as
merely "circumstantial evidence." Associations, off-the-cuff
remarks, and friends don’t prove Obama’s core intellectual and political
convictions and intents.
Just a few months ago the Freedom Center
prepared the production of a new pamphlet, Breaking the System: Obama’s
Strategy for Change. The point of the pamphlet was to show how the
Obama administration was utilizing the infamous
Cloward-Piven Strategy to
intentionally try to bankrupt the government.
When we started the
project I was skeptical of the premise. Was Obama really employing
Cloward-Piven? Short of getting Obama on film admitting it how
could we actually prove it?
As the early drafts of the manuscript
came in, though, the weight of the evidence was overwhelming. I
was convinced. There was no way that Obama and his administration
could be doing what they were doing by accident. There was no way
they could have no idea what the effects of their policies would be.
Was it more likely that the administration was stupid or malevolent?
If they were idiots then how could they have been so competent as to
accomplish their objectives?
And now that we have Stanley
Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism
we can know conclusively that the negative economic
consequences of the Obama administration’s policies are no accident.
It is the single most important political book released in the last
three years.
What makes Kurtz’s book so unique and vital among
all the other anti-Obama tomes to come out? Simple: Kurtz did
original research, digging through obscure archives of socialist groups
and piecing together the history of socialism in America in the ’70s,
’80s, and ’90s -- and Obama’s extensive, overwhelming, intricate
connections with it. It’s a challenging book to try and summarize
adequately. (The whole point is to just try and take in all the evidence
that Kurtz has assembled.)
For his entire political career Obama
has been an unassembled jigsaw puzzle, allowing others to project onto
him their own readings of his political philosophy based off of the few
available pieces.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| |
©
Copyright Beckwith 2010
All right reserved
|
