Must Read Compilation: America's Road to Perdition, Not better off in fact far worse, Recap: Obama's work-FAIL, The Redistributionist - Depending on Dependency - Ect., The Cloward-Piven way and illegal actions, One Election Away from Tragedy - Of Marx and Men - O and the D's Racial Slander Strategy, A Terrifying Line in Obama's Speech, and much more...

America’s Road to Perdition

Jon N. Hall -  Although it takes a little longer than bombing, one sure way to destroy a nation is from within.  Just ruin a nation’s people, and you can walk right in and take over. …

Thomas Sowell: Barack Obama is worse than Jimmy Carter (and far worse than GW Bush)…

Obama One Year Ago: Americans Are Not Better Off (and for darn sure today, we are not better off than 4 years ago!)

by Dana Loesch8 Sep 2012 – What a difference a year makes. The President defiantly told the country before his DNC speech that we were “better off” since he’s taken office, a complete about-face from what he admitted just one year ago when he told various media outlets that Americans were not, in fact, better off than they were four years ago when he took office.

WATCH NOW: Why I changed my vote! Many Americans across the country are changing their vote in 2012.

    THE FACTS: In the last four years…

• The debt of the United States has grown to a startling $16 trillion dollars — the largest total in our nation’s history.^[1]
• As the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reported, the Obama Administration has racked up 4 straight trillion-dollar plus annual budget deficits. ^[2]
• Unemployment has remained over 8% for 43 straight months — a first since the Great Depression.^[3] The real unemployment rate — taking into account those who have stopped looking or who are working part-time and want more work — is almost 15%.^[4]

• More than 23 million Americans are out of work or underemployed.^[5]
• Because of this troubled economy, the number of Americans receiving food stamp assistance — more than 46 million in all — is at a record high, according to the government. ^[6]
• The United States has slid from 3rd in ease of starting a new business to 13^th in the world, trailing unlikely competitors like Rwanda and Macedonia.^[7]

Sources:    [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]

Recap: Obama’s work

September 21, 2012 Carol Brown

While  our embassies burned, Americans died, and violent protests against America  continue around the globe including an attack  on another Ambassador, our president jetted off to Las Vegas for a fundraiser,  and on the heels of that one, had another hosted by Beyonce and Jay-Z where, by  the way, no cameras or mics were allowed. (Apparently Obama doesn’t want to  tarnish his man-of-the-little-people image what with the floor to ceiling display of champagne bottles priced at $800  per bottle), gave interviews with entertainment magazines and posed for a photo  spread, went on the David  Letterman show, told Prime Minister Netanyahu he was too  busy to meet with him, and idiotically blamed the Middle East violence on  some two-bit “film-maker” whom he described as a “shadowy  character.”

Anyone  – anyone! – please tell me why this man-child should be allowed four more years  as President of the United States.

With  all we know about him, one needn’t make a long list to understand the gravity of  the situation. Because knowing even just one thing – his communist  upbringing, his associations with dubious characters, his Islamic sympathies,  and so on – is enough to consign him forever to his role as a community  organizer. At best.

Be  gone, Mr. President. The day cannot come soon enough when you leave the White  House and let us begin the task of picking up the shattered pieces of this  country that you have strewn across the floor.

Opulent Obama Parties with Rich and Famous
September 22, 2012  Mr. Obama definitely gets around — especially Manhattan parties, basketball courts, golf courses, fundraisers, and campaign rallies filled with the young and the dumb.  More

Profiles in cowardice: the 2012 Obama platform

A word about about 2nd amendment rights, crime, Chicago, and O…

It’s all part and parcel:

• The 9 Most Terrifying Words September 22, 2012 Ronald Reagan said the 9 most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Barack is offering 9 even more frightening words …
• Rick Perry Nailed Obama’s Strategy September 22, 2012 Governor Rick Perry may have turned out to be a disappointment as a candidate, but let’s give him credit for this …
• Dems in hock to SEIU-owned bank September 22, 2012 The union’s long reach has gotten a lot longer. …
• Rep.Sherman: 12 million illegals ‘need documents’ to be able to unionize [VIDEO] - a startling revelation huh.
• Watch That Last Step, It’s a Doozy
  Daren Jonescu -  What are the real, practical mechanisms whereby socialists have co-opted most of the Western world over the past hundred years without awakening the majority of the population? …
• Forward to What, Democrats?  By Jonah GoldbergWednesday, September 12, 2012

 

The Redistributionist

September 21, 2012 Bruce Johnson

Another  declaration of Obama’s want for redistribution of wealth  is a National Public Radio  interview conducted in 2001.  Not only does he reveal his desire for  wealth redistribution conducted by the government, he suggests the Judicial  branch be the agent.

But  the interview went further, and Obama  revealed more.  The “senior lecturer”  expressed that our current  system of government was negative in nature and that it deals more with what the  government can’t do to you rather than what the government should do for  you.

Mr.  Obama, that is the idea.  Even JFK made reference to this cornerstone of  our system when he made his famous “ask not” speech.

This  is pure unadulterated evidence, from Obama’s lips, that he diametrically opposed  to the concept of limited government coupled with individual  initiative.

Listen  to the audio of this radio interview.  His comments from 1998, now  receiving so much attention,  pale in comparison to these  revelations.  Video.

 

Flashback Video: “I actually believe in redistribution” – Obama

The Dangers of Spreading the Wealth
Brad Lips - With four years’ experience, we can see the consequences of a philosophy that prizes arbitrary notions of fairness over pragmatic concerns about what works.

Obama’s Redistribution: What Did his mentor Frank Marshall Davis Say? – Prof. Paul Kengor

Depending on Dependency

By Thomas Sowell Wednesday, September 12, 2012 (see also by Sowell: Fallacy Of Redistribution Has Grave Economic Impact )

A Tale of Two Obamas (2 videos) – Change? Obama 2008 vs. Obama 2012

2008 Obama: “I can bring change.”
2012 Obama: No I  can’t.

 

The Cloward-Piven way (and a food stamp graph for your reference)

September 18, 2012 Bruce Johnson

If  the Cloward  and Piven agenda were being implemented, would it look any  different?

In  all likelihood, they would be delighted with the massive deficits and the  “spillage” that is the lax implementation of government  entitlements.

A 1966 Article by  Columbia Professors Cloward and Piven was a hot topic for awhile, but has since  fell from attention.  But isn’t now the time to reconsider exactly how this  administration is steering people into record government program  participation?

Some  quotes from the 1966 article that reveal the mission.  Increase the  entitlement roles, redistribute wealth, guarantee income, and reduce qualifications for participating in these programs.   Use organizing, demonstrating and a “climate of militancy”.

“…a  political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed  annual income”

“Advocacy  must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of  militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many  potential recipients hold toward being “on welfare.”"  — Occupy and  ACORN

“The  ultimate aim of this strategy is a new program for direct income  distribution.”

“We  tend to overlook the force of crisis in precipitating legislative reform, partly  because we lack a theoretical framework by which to understand the impact of  major disruptions.”

“By  crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere.  Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of  tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional  disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public  attention.”

This  explains the Occupy Movement, and the tacit approval of the Obama  Administration.

This  explains the gutting of the Clinton era Welfare requirements by the Obama  administration.

This  explains the lack of diligence by administrators in determining who exactly  qualifies for Disability. Encouraging people to get on unemployment,  then when your 99 weeks are up, go to disability.  We won’t check if you  meet the requirements.

This  explains why there is a concerted effort to get as many people as possible on  Food Stamps, and the lack of oversight diligence here as well.

“The  Social Security Administration improperly awarded disability benefits in more  than 25 percent of cases examined between 2006 and 2010, according to a new Senate report — potentially costing  taxpayers millions of dollars.”  Article

“The 136-page report focuses on questionable benefits rulings made by  administrative law judges, including one in Oklahoma who was found to have  awarded more than $1.6 billion in lifetime benefits in just three years. Judge  Howard O’Bryan, in Oklahoma City, approved roughly 90 percent of more than 5,400  cases from 2007 to 2009 — most of them held “on-the-record” without hearings,  according to the minority report.”

The  “Grand Assumption” that administrators are against waste is disproven by the lax  implementation of these programs.  Spillage seems to be the intent  here.

Cloward  and Piven would be delighted with this Community Organizer.  Forward!

Media Blackout: GAO Says Obama’s Welfare Waivers Illegal

On Sept. 4, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made a startling assertion saying that Obama circumvented the law when he summarily waived the work requirements in the welfare law. Perhaps not as shocking, few news outlets seem interested in the story. by Warner Todd Huston9 Sep 2012

 

The Worldwide Consequences of Obama’s Manufactured Crisis  Strategy

September 20, 2012 By James  Simpson

The  United   States of America is the world’s marketplace.  Without the  worldwide trade generated by American demand, the international marketplace will  fail.  Today we are witnessing an undeniable demonstration of this fact as  world markets reel in response to our domestic financial crisis.  This lesson must be burnt into our collective  conscience.  Our nation is the last repository of free-market economic  principles, and a fundamental change in our government toward socialism will  spell worldwide  economic disaster from which we may never recover.

Yet  this is exactly the endgame of the American radical left — increasingly  indistinguishable from today’s Democratic Party — and offers the only  internally consistent explanation for their historic obsession with divisive  policy.  From their early  support of Hitler to their central  role in the current financial crisis, the left’s contribution to domestic  and foreign policy at federal, state, and local levels can be described only as  wantonly destructive.  Their takeover of schools and popular culture has  been equally toxic.  Their environmental radicalism has spawned the energy  crisis while offering no viable alternatives.  It defies  logic.

But  there is logic, a deadly logic, and in the ’60s, two radicals gave it a name: the  Cloward-Piven Strategy.  As explained in a prior  article, the goal was to create a groundswell of demands for public services  to overwhelm government, create crisis, and usher in a widespread call for  fundamental economic reform at the federal level, with socialism the ultimate  goal.

Democrats  embrace the rhetoric of “compassion,” but look past the rhetoric to the  results.  This country is polarized as never before because of their  relentless agitation for extremist positions on every issue and the outrageous  tactics they use to promote those positions.  But while radical Saul  Alinsky’s tactics guide today’s Democrat electoral game plan, the Cloward-Piven  Strategy describes the overarching goal of almost every left-wing  organization/movement/ideal today.

How  Do They Survive?

These  organizations rarely produce anything of value, yet they are extremely adept at  not only surviving but flourishing.  Many receive their financial backbone  from prominent  philanthropies.  They also receive subsidies and tax breaks with the  help of friends in federal, state, and local government.   This fact is unknown to most voters, who would be outraged if they fully  understood how their tax dollars are being spent.

Our  mass media is mostly to blame for the current state of affairs.  The left’s  strategies could not survive the light of day.  Radicals require a  sympathetic media to deliver their message in an acceptable fashion and actively  suppress inconvenient facts that reveal these organizations’ true character and  agenda.

It  is a tangled web of radical interconnections, with the ultimate goal being an  end to our constitutional framework, the fall of our Republic, and its  replacement with a radical vision of socialist utopia — finally removing the  last major roadblock to world socialism.

These  radical individuals are highly motivated, in many cases intelligent and  talented, and sometimes even driven by what they would describe as altruistic  motives.  Yet the impacts of socialist central planning are inarguably  destructive.

Marx  may have had some interesting insights on history, but despite his ponderous  three-volume Das Kapital, he was no economist.  Instead, Kapital provided the intellectual excuse for Marx’s anarchistic Communist Manifesto.

And  the severe verdict of history on his perverted vision is without equal: over 100  million people murdered by their own governments in times of peace,  more than all the wars of history combined.  The rest face abject poverty,  mass starvation, economic and environmental ruin, all overseen by smothering,  indescribably brutal governments — a gray, barren existence for all but the  apparatchiks.

So  why are so many Westerners infatuated with this demented  vision?

Entrepreneurial  Parasites

The  high-minded types are driven by a galling sense of superiority.  They are  addicted to their own egos.  They know better and can defy the verdict of  history because people as smart as they are weren’t around when Russia, China,  Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Congo,  Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. went Red.

Living  well in affluent, capitalist America, it is all theoretical, so they can indulge  their fantasies while promoting this destructive agenda with impunity.  For  these people, ignorance is quite the blessing, for if they soberly analyzed  their ego-driven beliefs, they would be embarrassed.

If  you examine their pasts closely, you learn that most of these people also came  from upper-class backgrounds.  Ph.D. chemistry professor George  Wiley, the black radical who led Cloward’s and Piven’s National Welfare  Rights Organization, was a well-to-do son of a Rhode Island  family.

Wade  Rathke, the NWRO veteran who started ACORN, was from a similarly well-to-do  background, although he dropped out of Williams College.

Obama’s radical friend Bill Ayers’ family was very wealthy.  Looking at his  arrest photos, and listening to his smug  self-righteousness, you really get the impression that he was little more  than an arrogant, spoiled brat, with a titanic sense of entitlement that allowed  him to rationalize mass murder.

This  is a familiar story throughout the American left and indeed with many of the  most infamous communist leaders around the world.  For example, Communist  China’s first leader, Mao  Zedong, the inspiration for Ayers and many other radicals, was the son of  the wealthiest man in his home town.

According to the incredible  biography Mao: the Unknown Story, he was lazy and arrogant, and he  refused to work, despite his father’s repeated attempts to find him suitable employment.  He finally saw an  opportunity for real advancement working for the Soviets.  During the Long March, he was carried by  porters.

As  young idealists, many of these people are initially snared into this ideology by  the exaggerated sense of self-importance that is often a characteristic of  youth.  But we all have to live, and as they grow up, they discover that  the radical profession can be a pretty lucrative racket.  Despite their  high-minded rhetoric about saving the poor and oppressed, communists and  socialists are what I call entrepreneurial parasites.

Consider  what they demand of us: sacrifice of all worldly goods to the state; penurious,  barren lifstyles; slavish observance of their dictates; and full-time commitment  to the well-being of the state, while our jobs, careers, industries, the  environment, even our lives are threatened.  But how do they  live?

Obama’s  pal Ayers, who describes himself as a “small  ‘c’ communist,” lives in a lavish home, in the upscale Hyde  Park neighborhood, with a six-figure (or more) income.  It is easy to  see how, given the open spigot of money his organizations receive from the  various non-profit funds he’s ingratiated himself to.  Bill Ayers’ father, Tom, had been CEO of  Commonwealth Edison, so Ayers fils is used to money, and later  developments in his career point to a hand up from Daddy.

Barack  moved to Hyde Park, too, within easy walking distance of Ayers.  It is  difficult to find anyone in the American Marxist elite who doesn’t fully enjoy  the fruits of capitalism in his or her personal life.  In fact, Obama’s  early career seems to have been centered on dispensing foundation money as a  means to secure his career in politics.  Here  is a perfect example.

Obama’s  work on the boards of Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge during the  1990s has been widely publicized, but during that period, Obama also  worked for four other foundations: the Joyce Foundation, the Lawyer’s  Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Leadership  for a Quality Education — run by John Ayers, Bill’s brother — and the  Chicago Public Education Fund, whose board also included failed  bank magnate Penny Pritzker, later finance director of Obama’s 2008  campaign.  During that period, Obama shared  a small office with Bill Ayers, Mike Klonsky, and Mike’s wife, Susan (both  prominent movement communists).  The mass media has never reported on any  of this.

This  taste for wealth is not limited to American socialists.  Every socialist  dictator from Stalin to Saddam has lived in opulent surroundings with multiple  estates, scores of servants, and every kind of luxury and indulgence available  to him.

Marxist  austerity is meant only for the rest of us.

See,  for example, Gorbachev’s dacha in Foros, Crimea — a testament to communist  modesty if ever there were one.  Same with all the leaders of communist  countries.  Indeed, Bulgarian defector Georgi  Markov was murdered for his extensive reporting on the opulent, decadent  lifestyles of Bulgarian Communist leaders.  It’s a good racket, if you  don’t mind blood.

While  socialist leaders live in lavish style, in every country where socialist  policies are imposed, they measurably worsen the lives of everyday citizens in  direct proportion to their scope.  Even countries with vast natural  resources, like Russia, founder because their economies are constructed on the  fatally flawed economic principles of socialism.

Despite  this, they still manage to live on, in many cases hanging by mere threads for  years.

How?

The  dirty little secret of socialism is that it cannot survive without  capitalism.  Capitalist countries provide the resources necessary for  these socialist governments to continue.  In addition to providing a market  for their goods, Western nations keep socialist countries afloat through grants  and loans from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development,  and other governmental institutions, as well as huge investments by private  companies.

Even  China, widely misunderstood as the next free market, practices market economics  only one-way, in international trade, while maintaining iron-fisted central  planning internally.  The country could not maintain its current level of  economic growth without the markets provided by the United States and other  Western countries.

Finally,  there is a vast network of American enterprises, owned covertly by foreign  dictators, whose true purpose is to provide underground income for these leaders  and their socialist governments, while offering convenient cover for industrial  and military spies.  This fact is rarely mentioned and largely  unknown.

At  its core, socialism can only be parasitic.  It cannot survive without  its capitalist host.  Therefore, if the United States becomes a socialist  country, worldwide capital will soon dry up.  Remaining market economies  around the world will succumb either to their own internal socialist movements  or to direct military threat from abroad.  Without the protective umbrella  of American military might, they will have no other choice.

Without  the markets and resources capitalist economies provide, the many socialist  countries that have survived on our largesse until now will find their income  stream shut off.  The world will plunge into an unprecedented,  cataclysmic depression.  This depression will be of indeterminate length  because the wherewithal for recovery — a large capitalist economy — will no  longer exist.  With a world controlled by parasites, the host will  die.

At  this point, even the parasites will be in danger.  The socialists’  internationalist agenda truly is a Conspiracy of the Lemmings.  It is not  merely a criminal conspiracy; it is criminally insane.

Barack  Hussein Obama has become the standard-bearer  to bring this agenda to fruition here.  The socialist economic agenda he  has publicly articulated is enough in the current financial crisis to plunge our economy into deep recession.  The disarmament agenda he  has publicly articulated is enough to strip us of the meager  defenses we currently have against a rogue missile attack, and Iran has already telegraphed  plans to launch such an attack.

What  is even more frightening is the agenda he has not shared, but is  implicit in his radical upbringing, his radical connections, and his limited  but demonstrative  experience.

We  are seeing this agenda being played out before our very eyes today.  I will  repeat what I have said many times before: 2012 will be the most important  election in U.S. history, because it will decide our fate as a nation.   Please take to heart Breitbart’s parting  words:

This  is my war cry for 2012. You need to join me in this war against the  institutional left. This is not your mother’s Democratic Party. John  Podesta, George Soros, this is not  your mother’s Democratic Party either… I don’t care who the candidate is, and  I haven’t since the beginning… Ask not what the candidate can do for you; ask  what you can do for the candidate. And that’s what the Tea Party is. We are  there to confront them on behalf of our candidate. I will march behind whoever  our candidate is because if we don’t, we lose. There are two paths… one is  America and the other one is Occupy… Anyone that’s willing to stand next to me  to fight the progressive Left, I will be in that bunker. And if you’re not in  that bunker because you’re not satisfied with this candidate, more than shame on  you, you’re on the other side!

(Editor’s note: This is an updated and expanded version of an article  originally published elsewhere in 2008, a follow-on to the September 2008 American Thinker article “Barack  Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.”)

 

 

One Election Away from Tragedy

September 17, 2012 By Monty  Pelerin

For  the last thirty-plus years, each election has been described by pundits as “the  most important election in history.”  Finally this claim is no longer  hyperbole.

Elections  can be important, but they should not be “game-changers.” For the first time in  my life, we face an election that truly lives up to its exaggerated billings.  This election likely is the most important one in American  history.

An  Inflection Point

The  United States of America is at an inflection point where this election will  determine whether we continue to veer off-course or return to a conventional  path. The issue is whether we reinvent this country in ways that have failed  everywhere else in both place and time, or return to the traditions that have  made America the envy of the world.

The  key figure in this election is one Barack Obama. What he represents and insists  on imposing is a revolution in values, markets and what has been known as the  American way of life. His opponent, Mitt Romney, hardly seems ideological enough  to combat the direct assault on liberty.

Romney  seems to be a good and decent man, one that you might admire as a competent and  fair boss.  He does not convey the same commitment and intensity as his  opponent. His apparent competency would certainly be welcome, but it is hardly  sufficient. Even some Soviet bureaucrats were competent in accomplishing  unproductive tasks. Competency in pursuit of wrong goals can be a liability  rather than an asset.

The  bases of the two parties are not equal in intensity. Many opponents of the  president believe this election to be like those of the past. There are  Obama-detesters who have come to stronger positions generally via two routes –  1) the man is incompetent and made things worse; or, 2) he is out to destroy  what was America. This anti-Obama feeling is stronger than it was four years  ago, although does not come close to matching the core of Democrat dependency  voters. These voters view each election in terms of life and death (or living  well versus living). This intense core far outnumbers the  Obama-detesters.

The  Issue

It  is difficult to adequately express the importance of this election without  sounding overly political or alarmist. David  Solway achieves such a balance in his description of what is at  stake:

The  United States of America is now something alarmingly close to what we might  describe as the rogue regime of Obamerica. The “end,” in the acceptation of  “purpose,” of this strange new nation appears to be the reversal or erasure of  its Republican heritage and its replacement by what Barry Rubin calls a stealth-leftist anti-American  substitute. The projected “end” of Obamerica would seem to be nothing less than  the material end of America as we have known it throughout its storied history.  Its free-market economy is currently in tatters, its competitive edge and  productivity blunted by a meretricious “stimulus” and by redistributionist  economics, its Triple A credit rating  downgraded amid concerns about the government’s budget deficit and rising debt  burden, and its unemployment numbers  beyond acceptable. Racial and ethnic divisions have been exacerbated by the  president’s incendiary rhetoric. Owing to Obama’s policies, America’s network of  reliable alliances is in disarray as the program of appeasement and  rapprochement with its adversaries grows ever more emphatic. At the same time  the power and authority of the erstwhile “leader of the free world” has started  demonstrably to wane. And if Obama has his way and is re-elected, he will enjoy,  as he confided to  former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, even more “flexibility” to pursue his  ends.

The  looming choice for the U.S. on November 6 of this year is stark and unforgiving.  The re-election of Barack Obama will mean the “end,” in its terminal sense, of  the America of yore, of the constitutional republic on which the West has  grudgingly depended for its defense and prosperity and whose citizens were once  the envy of an ungrateful world. An unprecedented experiment in free market  economics and individual liberty will have fallen victim to an unscrupulous  agenda that intends its demise. Only the end of Obamerica can prevent the  nation’s decline. History is about to be made – or unmade. A victory for  Obamerica can come only at the expense of America itself, and a heretofore  undefeated nation will go down to the first and greatest – and quite possibly  lasting – defeat in the chronicle of its tenure.

It  is truly frightening that one election can have such importance to a  country.

Elections  Were Never Intended To Be Life-Changing

The  Founders never intended elections to be so important. The Constitution was  designed to keep government small and unobtrusive.  The role of government  was limited in a fashion to ensure against its increasing power and importance.  Government’s primary purpose was to provide defense nationally and protect property rights domestically. These services were  public functions on the assumption that they could be provided more efficiently  jointly than privately.

The  Leviathan that government became was never intended. Its size, power and  responsibilities contradict anything intended by the Constitution. If the  Founders could see what was spawned, they likely would conclude that living  under King George was not so bad. “Taxation without representation” seems better  than the taxation with representation, at least the representation that we  evolved into.

No  election was ever intended to have the potential to change the framework of this  country. Individuality and freedom were intended to be beyond politics and  majority rule.

From  its beginning, the Constitution came under attack because it prevented political  figures from imposing their views on others. That proscription was responsible  for the enormous success of the country. Power-hungry politicians and  rent-seeking voters eventually eroded the protections contained in the  Constitution.

The  current election is a framework changer. Barack Obama’s opportunity was not  created by Mr. Obama, although he is pursuing it more aggressively and openly  than any predecessor.  Two hundred years of political meddling have  emasculated the Constitution and provided him the opportunity to do  so.

The  New Consequences of Elections

Elections,  designed to be rather meaningless events, suddenly have become the most  important things in many people’s lives. The dependency class in particular has  a vested interest in elections. For dependents, it is the means to improve their  standard of living (at the expense of others). This constituency has no “skin in  the game” so always votes itself more. Both political parties have pursued this  group, ensuring its increase in size and electoral importance. Today it  represents almost 50% of the electorate. The late Milton Friedman pointed to  this number as representing the tipping point whereby a democratic society could  not survive.

Barack  Obama represents an existential threat to the way of life of the American  people. If he gets reelected, what we know as America will be forever changed.  Electing Mitt Romney likely would delay this outcome, but even Ronald Reagan  merely slowed the decline temporarily.  Mitt Romney may be a good man but  he does not seem to be another Reagan.

If  Obama is defeated, and I expect he will be, Romney’s economic policies will have  a better chance of producing an economic recovery. Obama’s economic policy  amounted to nothing but the hot air of hope and change coupled with payoffs to  political friends. But an economic recovery (if one is even possible) does  not end the real problem facing this country.

The  underlying and seemingly unsolvable problem is the emasculation of the  Constitution. That enabled the Rule of Man to trump the Rule of Law. That is the  underlying cause of our economic problems. Government has become too large, too  powerful and too intrusive. Sadly, history shows that lawmakers never relinquish  power willingly. Indeed, today many believe government should be even more  powerful to deal with the problems of a modern society.

Fortunately  Barack Obama is an incompetent ideologue or his election would be ensured.  Hopefully he will be defeated and the close escape from what would represent the  end of the American way of life will shock people back to their senses. To  understand how close we are to the end of America, realize that this election is  too close to call, despite the most incompetent president in my lifetime. Jimmy  Carter’s domestic and foreign policy appear competent compared to The  One’s.

Ridding  the country of Barack Obama is dodging one bullet in a fierce firefight. If  elected, Mitt Romney could implement the same future envisioned by Obama. I  don’t expect him to veer off in this direction, but that misses the important  point. No man should have this power and authority. Thus, every election  from here on is potentially our last election as true  Americans.

Barack  Obama is a symptom of the problem. Ridding ourselves of Obama does not rid the  country of the problem. Elections were never intended to be life-changing  events.

Unless  government can be re-caged, we will always be one election away from  disaster. Defeating Barack Obama only pushes the problem off one election.  At some point the American people will choose incorrectly and their way of life  will be gone. At some point both parties may envision the same dismal course for  the country, leaving no choice.

Unconstrained  democracy always destroys itself.

• Socialism, by Any Other Name, Is Still Socialism (American Thinker)
• The Fall of the House of Obama (American  Thinker)
• The ‘Security Leak Administration’ and the Deaths in  Libya (American  Thinker)
  Obama’s Second Term Transformation Plans (American Thinker)

Of Marx and Men

July 20, 2012 By Bruce  A. Riggs

Election  2012 is shaping up to be the most clearly defined clash of political ideologies  since FDR’s New  Deal.  The heart of the matter is the long-overdue  awakening of a slumbering majority of constitutional traditionalists.  This  awakening has been triggered by a surge of authoritarian socialism, or more  accurately, cultural Marxism  advocated by a radical Obama administration to fashion a “fundamentally  transformed” America.

If  the 2008 election was about dumping free-market capitalism and America’s  constitutional liberties for a nascent Marxist police state, probably not too  many people understood the issue.  The 2012 election will be about  ratifying or rescinding that choice, hopefully, without ambiguity.  What’s  at stake is the preservation of America’s unique ethos of creative individual  liberty or a continuation of our accelerating descent into a coercive statist  regime derivative of Marx.

Given  Marxism’s deadly  history, it’s stunning to realize that an increasingly aggressive  constituency for such a dismally failed experiment exists, albeit traveling  lightly concealed in its various postmodernist disguises.   It’s even more astonishing when you realize what an ill-conceived piece of  nonsense the Marx-Engels Communist Manifesto actually is.

Under  the circumstances, a brief look at the Manifesto and the two men, Karl  Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), who wrote it, seems  worthwhile in the context of November’s epochal election.  As Santayana  said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat  it.“

Despite  a legacy of some two hundred million (and counting) deaths in his name, Marx  remains the godfather of the left.  Such perverse idolatry is perhaps  symptomatic of the left’s pathological lust for power to reshape the world into  a “heaven on earth.”   Mass genocides in the name of “social justice” could come only from a  seriously warped ideology.

To  know Marx is to know the contemporary left as well.  Both rest on  duplicity, hypocrisy, and nihilism.

Ostensibly,  Marx was filled with compassion for the proletariat and dedicated himself to its  liberation from bourgeois exploitation.  Tellingly, however, Marx’s  relationship with the proletariat was sterile and distant: “[Marx] was totally  and incorrigibly deskbound … and so far as we know [he] never set foot in a  mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life”  (1).

It’s  argued here that Marx’s obsession with fomenting revolution can be seen not as a  matter of compassion for the proletariat, but as a self-aggrandizing  nihilism.  Marx was fixated on revolution and the power he might inherit  from it.  The proletariat was a nascent force which could be marshaled to  avenge Marx’s personal grievances against a “world” in which he was a  misfit.

For  neither Lenin nor Marx was the revolution the answer to the question: what can  be done for the proletariat?  Rather the proletariat was the answer to the  question: what can be done for the revolution? (2)

Exiled Misfits

At  age twenty-five, German-born Marx, a recent Ph.D., was denied a coveted teaching  post at Bonn University by Prussian  authorities.  Soon after, Marx was exiled to Paris for his subsequently  seditious writings as an erstwhile journalist.  In the (1848) revolutionary  climate of the times, Prussian authorities had little patience with radicals  such as the young Marx had become during his time at  university.

In  Paris Marx met Engels, a fellow German exile, who shared Marx’s passion for  revolution.  The two soon collaborated on the writing of the now-infamous Communist Manifesto.  Engels also became Marx’s enabler, even to  the extent of financially supporting him  and his family until Marx’s death some four decades later.

Of  the two men, only Engels’ heart seems to have been in the right place insofar as  the proletariat was concerned.

Over  his entire life, Marx proved incapable of earning a living on his own.   Marx’s unwillingness to work forced his wife and six children to live in penury  despite Engels’ limited support.  Three of those children died in early  childhood, and two others committed suicide as young adults.  The  once-beautiful and aristocratic Jenny, Marx’s wife, eventually died a haggard  and broken woman.

Marx  even rejected his mother when she, at last, refused to send him more money.   He did not trouble himself to attend his father’s funeral and shunned his  adult siblings who had no material wealth to give him.  Marx likewise  refused to acknowledge paternity of a son born to him by his unpaid  servant-housemaid.  Marx persuaded his long-suffering enabler Engels to  claim paternity (3).  Such was Engels’ misplaced commitment to free Marx to  finish Capital — which a procrastinating Marx never did.  That  burden also fell to Engels after Marx’s death.

The Communist  Manifesto

Though  the writing of Capital consumed most of Marx’s adult life, its worldly  impact has been minor  compared to The Communist Manifesto, a  twelve-thousand word pamphletwritten years earlier and completed in a  matter of weeks.  Written when Marx was twenty-nine and Engels  twenty-seven, the Manifesto reflects a malign mix of idealistic fervor,  disambiguation, and implausible assumptions for which the world has paid  dearly.

The Manifesto rests on Marx’s simplistic postulate that West European  society then consisted of two mutually antagonistic classes of people: an  exploited proletariat and the bourgeoisie as a venal class of selfish  manufacturers and industrialists.  Marx’s over-simplified duality — a  hallmark of leftist ideology — was based not on his witness, but on his  arbitrary dialectic  construct, the resolution of which, according  to Marx, called for not a rational Hegelian synthesis, but violent  revolution.

Nihilistic  humors have always been present in the radical character. The revolutionary will  … involves a passion for destruction[.] But how could a responsible intellect  ignore the destructive implications of such an attitude? (4)

Marx  disingenuously asserted that a benevolent “dictatorship  of the proletariat” would coalesce from the revolutionary ruins, function as if  populated by saints for an indeterminate period, and eventually just “wither  away,” as Engels lamely offered.  Leaving what in its wake neither Marx  nor Engels ever explained.  “Marx did not go into depth in terms of what  this [dictatorship] would look like, presumably because he didn’t  know either[.]“

“This  Marxist interpretation of history, with its final utopian-apocalyptic vision,  has been criticized in the noncommunist world as historically inaccurate,  scientifically untenable and logically absurd.”  Indeed.

And  there’s no reason for anyone to expect that any dictatorship would be  benevolent.  If Marx did not bother to understand this, his disciple Lenin  certainly did:

Dictatorship  is power directly based on violence and is constrained by no law. The  revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is power acquired and kept by  means of violence … power unconstrained by any laws. (5)

Muravchik  cites anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1817-1876), one of Marx’s revolutionary  contemporaries:

With  remarkable prescience, [Bakunin] argued that only tyranny would result from the  political revolution that Marx advocated:  ‘The so-called people’s state  will be nothing other than the quite despotic administration of the masses of  the people by a new and very [restricted] aristocracy[.]‘ (6)

Marx and His Demon

Marx  was unquestionably brilliant, but that fact doesn’t certify wisdom or even  rational behavior.  Both Marx and his father Heinrich recognized a “demon”  of ambition that drove Karl.  In a March 2, 1837  letter to his son, the elder Marx wrote “And since [your] heart is obviously  animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly  or Faustian?”

One  answer came from Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), an Italian revolutionary and a  contemporary of Marx, who once described him as “a destructive spirit  whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind  … [and  whose] overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for  power[.]“

From  a contemporary perspective, it would seem that Marx’s “demon of ambition” was  the manifestation of a narcissistic personality.

Marx  was notorious for his rages at meetings attended by actual socialist  proletarians, who were “anxious to transform society but moderate about the  practical steps to this end [and they] did not share Marx’s apocalyptic visions”  (7).  Marx was contemptuous of such actual proletarians, whom he and Engels  would refer to as “ignorant curs” and “jackasses” (8).

[Men]  with actual experience of factory conditions tended to be anti-violence [and  were] skeptical about the apocalyptic revolution [Marx] claimed was not only  necessary but inevitable.  Some of Marx’s most venomous assaults were  directed against men of this type. (9)

“The aggression  resulting from thwarted narcissism is gratified when projected onto a devalued  minority[.]“

Such  insights into Marx’s character suggest that the self-obsessed Marx’s focus on  the proletariat was a matter of projection rather than compassion, which he  obviously lacked.

Today’s “Marxism”

Authoritarian  collectivism (née Marxism) endures as much as a secular religious faith as it  does as a dismally failed socio-economic system.  “Consider the millions of  people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip  service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion”  (10).  The “church” of this gnostic faith thrives embedded in our schools,  universities, news media, and the communications and entertainment industries,  which sermonize and proselytize relentlessly to mostly captive  audiences.

For  the past fifty years, collectivist  forces (“missionaries”) have been at work in America under the rubric of  Critical Theory.  America has been subversively conditioned into becoming  another USSR lacking only a slick Svengali to charm the masses into  acceptance.  We now have an Obama presidency which has begun to smell of   imperialism, if not  nascent dictatorship.

It  is imperative that the 2012 election be the start of a committed return to  rationalism and the constitutional guarantees of individual liberty on which  America was founded.  Our constitutional protections from bullying  government now are under assault.  Tyranny waits in the wings.

In  paraphrase of the closing words of Marx’s Manifesto: Conservatives of  the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but the coming chains of a  Fundamentally Transformed  America!

---

1.  Johnson, Paul, Intellectuals  ,Harper Perennial, 1990, 60

2.  Muravchik, Joshua, Heaven  on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Encounter, San Fran., 2002,  114

3.  Johnson, Ibid., 80

4.  Horowitz, David H., The  Politics of Bad Faith, The Free Press, NY, 1998,  29

5.  Revel, Jean-Francois, Last  Exit to Utopia, Encounter Books, NY, 2000,  106

6.  Muravchik, Ibid., 87

7.  Johnson, Ibid., 60

8.  Muravchik, Ibid., 76

9.  Johnson, Ibid., 61

10.  Harris, Sam, The  End of Faith, Norton, NY, 2004, 79.

 

And a dastardly means to this end:

The Obama Campaign’s Racial Slander Strategy

September 19, 2012 By J.T.  Hatter

Barack  Hussein Obama has always run his political campaigns to exploit racial,  economic, religious, and political divisions.  After nearly four years of  Obama, the nation is furiously divided, and the political scene is positively  treacherous.  Everyone expects this campaign to be the ugliest and dirtiest  in our nation’s history.  It is certainly shaping up that  way.

The  most poisonous aspect of this race is the Democratic Party political tactic of  racial slander.  The Democrats can’t campaign on Obama’s stellar  accomplishments as president, and they can’t attack Romney’s qualifications.  Most Americans agree with Romney’s  policies.  So the progressives are  playing the race card.

To  the Democrats and the mainstream media, this is war.  They now have the  political power to advance their leftist ideology and they will stop at nothing  to keep it.  The progressives aren’t merely playing the race card.   They are deploying the entire deck in a scorched-earth policy.  If you  oppose the Democrats, then you are a racist.

Republicans  and conservatives are now regularly smeared as racists.  Their history of  being the party and ideology that freed the slaves, overturned the Jim Crow  laws, and fought for racial equality is being deliberately distorted.  The progressive left is waging their race  hate campaign against the American people as a whole — not just against the  Republicans.  The Democratic Party/mainstream media narrative is that  virtually all Americans are racist, except for the enlightened ones who  make their home in the Democratic Party.

America’s  Race Card Media

The  mainstream news media are reveling in their role as race hounds for the  Democratic Party.  Chris Matthews of NBC leads the pack of race  howlers.  In a recent Morning Joe show, Matthews viciously attacked Reince Preibus  and accused candidate Romney of playing the race card.  Matthews reviled  the Republican for using the term “work requirements” when discussing welfare  reform.  That’s racist, you know.  On his Hardball show on  MSNBC, Matthews regularly accuses Romney of leading a racist campaign.  He  hears Republicans “dog-whistling” racial code words all the time — in  practically every speech or announcement.  He recently set  up Cynthia Tucker, an über-liberal Atlanta Journal-Constitution  columnist, to declare of the Romney campaign that “[t]his is the Southern  Strategy writ large. This is all about appealing to racially resentful  whites.”

I’ve  got news for Matthews and Tucker.  There aren’t enough “racially resentful  whites” to matter.  They represent the tiniest fraction of the American  population.  Then why are the Democrats and their media stooges woofing so  loudly on these racialist hate themes?  They continue to play on rapidly  disappearing “white guilt” over slavery, which ended a century and a half ago,  and racism, which will never end, according to liberals.

The  critical voting demographic for Obama is the white male professional.  They  are the target.  How many of these people will flee to the embrace of the  Democrats for fear of being labeled as racist, and to secure  the badge of racial enlightenment?  Enough to matter, perhaps.  That’s  what the Democrats are counting on.  Their underlying strategy is to  neutralize this demographic since they can’t possibly win it.

The  Racial Stink Brush

Americans  as a people are fairly free from racial prejudice.  This is certainly true  when Americans are compared to people living in the rest of the world.  But  you would never know that, and certainly wouldn’t believe it, if all your  information came from American television.

There  are few real racists in our country, relatively speaking.  They are  considered wackos, out of mainstream thought and belief.  We Americans  believe that all men are created equal.  We Christians are commanded to  love one another as brothers.  The only way we can reunite this nation is  through brotherly love.

And  that is exactly why the Democrats are raising the specter of racism in this  political race.  The only way they can gain political power is through  exploiting social division.  Right now the Democrats and the mainstream  media are vigorously conducting a broad-spectrum campaign of racial division  across America.

The  current mainstream media propaganda sound bite lineup is as  follows:

•   Voter ID and poll-watching equal suppression of minority votes.  Shades of  Jim Crow.
•   Racist code words uttered by Republicans will be regularly discovered and  interpreted by the media.
•   Racist remarks and actions by Democrats do not exist.  And those that do  will be ignored.
•   Attacking President Obama is racist by definition.
•   Supporting or voting for Romney is racist by definition.

This  list will grow as we approach November 6.  The mainstream media will repeat  these racist political attack themes over and over again.  Repeat the lie  often enough, and people will believe it.

The  media is also carefully parsing every word of every statement made by  Republicans.  The mainstream media are desperately searching for racial  slips, inferences, and “code words” they can amplify and wield.  Just ask  George Allen how this works.  Allen lost the 2000 Virginia Senate race to  Democrat political newcomer Jim Webb by only 10,000 votes — after an intense  media campaign brushing him with racist stink paint.  The racist slander  worked, and the media won the race for the Democrats.

The  mainstream media will discover racist intent even if they have to fabricate it,  as NBC did when it edited the George Zimmerman 911 recording in order to make  him appear to be the racist killer of an innocent black boy.  Think about  that.  NBC was willing to misrepresent the facts to make the Hispanic man  (initially represented as white) appear racially motivated to kill a black man.   No innocence until proven guilty.  NBC convicted Zimmerman in the  digital courtroom in which it is judge, jury, and executioner.  Why did NBC  violate Zimmerman in this way?  To stir up racial division to enhance the  leftist political paradigm.

The  media has been doing this for a long time.  Remember the Tawana Brawley  rape that never happened — the one that launched Al Shapton’s political  career?  How about the Duke lacrosse rape that also never happened?   False accusations of rape against nine white men and a charge of murder against  a Hispanic man.  What the media are doing now is not merely a “tragic  rush to accuse.”  It is a deliberate political strategy.  Think  what the mainstream media are willing to do for Obama.

The  Ethics and Morality of Race Slander

The  political racial attacks are being coordinated between the Democratic Party and  the mainstream media.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National  Committee Chair and Florida congresswoman, accused  the Republicans on television of wanting to “literally [sic] drag us all the way  back to Jim Crow laws and literally and very transparently block access to the  polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than  Republican candidates.”

This  is pure political deception.  It is an outright lie.  Wasserman  Schultz neglected to mention that it was the Democratic Party that wrote and  enforced the Jim Crow laws in the first place.  It must have slipped her  memory that it was the Republican Party that did away with those and other laws  that discriminated against black people.

At  a recent campaign rally in Danville, VA, Vice President Joe Biden said, with a  newfound Southern twang, that if Republicans won the election, “they gawn’ to  put y’all back in chains.”  The vice president of the United  States was telling black people that if the Republicans win the election,  slavery will return.  What a scurrilous remark.  How low can you  get?

According  to the Daily Caller, Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold, national campaign manager  for the liberal super-PAC CREDO, told  supporters in Aurora, CO that calling Republicans racist was a more effective  tactic than criticizing their policies.

Americans  will pay the price for the racial hatred being incited by the Democrats and  their media shills.  The price will be steep and paid in blood.  In  playing the race card, the Democrats show that they have no moral scruples  whatsoever.  To the progressive, the end always justifies the means.   It is a dishonor and a sin to bear false witness  against your neighbor.  But this is the political party that booed God out  of the DNC party platform three times before the chair ignored the majority and  allowed the Almighty to return.  And this was done cynically to avert  political fallout and a possible loss of votes in November.  Even God is a  political calculation for Democrats.

There  are no moral or ethical constraints on the Democrats or their progressive ilk in  the media.  Race-baiting is a strategy they believe will work for  them.  We can expect a hellish campaign in the run up to November 6.   If you plan to vote for Romney, be prepared.  The Democrats will call you a  racist.  And they won’t think twice about doing it.

JT  Hatter is the author of Lost  in Zombieland: The Rise of President Zero, a political  satire on the Obama administration.  JT can be reached at jt@jthatter.com.

• Why did Obama use the N-word to describe his grandfather? By Dinesh D’Souza (Producer of the now acclaimed documentary 2016) September 11, 2012 FoxNews.com – In one of the most remarkable passages in Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,  ” he uses the terms “collaborator,” “Uncle Tom,” and “House nigger” to describe someone he detests. That someone, it turns out, is his own grandfather! We have a striking phenomenon here: the first African American president using the N-word, and to refer to his own grandfather! Ordinarily this would be occasion for massive comment and analysis, but if there has been any, I am not aware of it…

 

Obama and Democrats want to conquer America, not unite it

By Michael Goodwin September 10, 2012 New York Post

The system is rigged. America is unjust. Opportunity is dead. You didn’t build that.

Dammit, where’s mine?

Oh, and Republicans are the people who rigged the system. They’re trying to take away your rights to vote, to health care, to education, to housing. They hate women, gays and immigrants. They don’t pay their fair share and they’re un-American.

Barack Obama lights candles, Mitt Romney spreads darkness, and Usama bin Laden is dead.

There, I saved you the time of watching the Democratic convention. For three grating days, demands for more government spending were coupled with sweeping character assassinations of Romney. The GOP is not just wrong; it is immoral.

Don’t agree? You’re not patriotic.

It turns out that the party that left God out of its platform has a religious zeal for its leader. “We believe in Barack Obama,” Sen. John Kerry thundered, to uproarious applause.

Something shocking is happening to the Democratic Party. Its committed adherents are whipping themselves into a frenzy of grievance that justifies seeing their fellow Americans as both evil and a free-cash machine.

Folks, we’ve entered Dear Leader territory.

The wild, outlandish claims that America is corrupt, Republicans are super-villains and Obama is a super-hero were made by every speaker over three raucous nights. A president, a first lady, a former president, a sitting vice president, top members of Congress, labor leaders, celebrities, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, blacks, whites, Latinos — all stayed on the scorched-earth message softened only by homilies to Obama.

Something shocking is happening to the Democratic Party. Its committed adherents are whipping themselves into a frenzy of grievance that justifies seeing their fellow Americans as both evil and a free-cash machine.

Obama did not singlehandedly create this mad orgy, but he lit the match and shows the way. On this, he is a true leader, a transformative one. His invocation of FDR is not unwarranted, even as his channeling of Lincoln’s pain smacked of cheesy self-reverence.

When he says voters “will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation,” he understates the fact. The two paths are a twain that shall never meet.

His rhetorical skills, uncompromising ambition and 1,000-watt smile were on full display last night, unfortunately in service to a vision that would surely bankrupt America.

Instead of a guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, our culture would be reshaped by a growing collectivist power, vested in the state, that would command ever more resources and control. The claim of “leveling the playing field” is, in reality, a plan to control the outcome.

As famously promised, the financial crisis has not been wasted. The recession lingers for many families. Unemployment remains stuck at a destructive level. The deficit soars — we borrow nearly $3 billion a day, $20 billion a week, $1 trillion a year.

These are serious problems to most mortals, but for him, they are rich opportunities to expand the reach of Washington. The soaring debt is not soaring enough, so more treasure must be thrown into the bonfire of his vanities. It is a fire consuming the future under the guise of fairness.

This is not mere class warfare. That’s just a tactic. The goal, as it always has been for his kind throughout history, is to accumulate power that the elite can wield without accountability or checks and balances.

Give the man his due. We have not seen his like in our times. His charisma and political skills are unmatched. If only they were admirably used.

Obama promised to unite the country and, his lie exposed, is now determined to win re-election by any means necessary. He may succeed.

Beware, America. The wraps have come off.

Obama is unbound and the delegates in the convention hall went home in full revolutionary spirit. They don’t want to unite America. They want to conquer it.

Barack Obama did build that.

 

Beware Obama’s Second-Term Agenda

IBD: Tue, Sep 11 2012 00:00:00 EA12_ISSUES

Election 2012: Even after President Obama’s long-winded acceptance speech, Americans still don’t know what he plans to do if he gets another term. That’s only because he doesn’t want you to know.

Speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Obama opened by saying Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan aren’t offering details because “they don’t want you to know their plan.” But he went on to tell voters nothing of his own plan for a second term other than that it will be “bold, persistent experimentation.”

The president mentioned “climate change” but didn’t say what he would do about it. He talked about reforming immigration and taxation, but breathed not a word about how he would do that.

He also vowed to stimulate the moribund economy through “investments in education.” But other than calling for more Pell grants, he was short on specifics (and never explained how spending even more on education would suddenly motivate private-sector hiring).

That left even old media types scratching their heads. During a panel discussion in Charlotte, CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer blurted out: “What is his agenda?!”

Nobody seems to know. It remains a mystery — by design. Obama won’t say because it’s twice as radical. And the Obama camp is recasting the president as a moderate raised “just like you” with middle-American values.

If it revealed the true radical nature of his personal background and his agenda for a second term — when, as Obama told the Russians, he’ll have more “flexibility” — only the most hard-core left would vote for him.

But we can give readers a good idea of what he’s got up his sleeve. His overall agenda, unspoken as it is, focuses on downsizing America. He wants to scale back the private economy, reduce oil consumption, cut U.S. nuclear weapons, roll back the military, and shrink America’s footprint in the world.

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This much we know. How he would go about accomplishing it is less clear.

But from the policies he’s already started, and from the much-overlooked agenda he laid out in his 2006 autobiography, one can flesh out the details of his promised “bold, persistent experimentation.”

Policies and programs voters can expect from a second Obama administration, which would aggressively expand executive powers, include:

• A “speculation tax” on Wall Street covering all investment transactions.

• A higher capital gains tax rate.

• A reinstated estate tax.

• Release of high-risk Taliban leaders from Gitmo, resettling them in Afghanistan.

• Amnesty for illegal immigrants.

• A single-payer health care system.

• Nationalized U.S. education system, including federal control of curriculum and federalized standards.

• Ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, so the U.S. can’t test its aging warheads.

• Unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

• A carbon tax on utilities.

• A special windfall profits tax on oil companies to subsidize renewable energy projects.

• Decriminalization of marijuana.

• Expunging criminal records of many felons.

• Socializing the private credit-scoring system used by banks, insurers and employers.

• Socializing lending to small businesses.

• Higher taxes, including a value-added tax, on the middle class for new transfer payments for the poor.

• Suing towns to force public-housing integration of the suburbs.

• Bolstering the Community Reinvestment Act.

• Packing the the Supreme Court with leftists.

• Stricter gun control.

• Minimum living wage.

• Universal 401(k) for the poor.

• Wage insurance.

With his centrist-sounding speech, Obama put politics above ideological ambition and incumbency above candor. But make no mistake: He’s still a radical with a very radical agenda left only partly accomplished.

 

The Terrifying Line in Obama’s Speech That Everyone Missed

IBD: Mon, Sep 10 2012 00:00:00 EA16_ISSUES

His Agenda: President Obama’s convention speech got rough reviews, and rightly so. He offered little but tired bromides and recycled promises. But critics overlooked one promise that will guarantee an even bleaker future.

There was plenty to dislike in Obama’s speech. The language was flat, his delivery languid. The speech was stuffed with standard Obama chestnuts about the smallness of politics, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and how cynicism is our worst enemy.

Instead of stirring rhetoric filled with hope and promise, Obama pledged that under his leadership, “our path is harder” and “our road is longer.”

Seriously? After four years of the worst economic recovery since the Depression, falling incomes, lower-paying jobs, increased hopelessness and exploding debt, all Obama has to offer is that he’ll make this nightmare last even longer?

He also told the public that they “elected me to tell you the truth” not to “tell you what you wanted to hear,” but then proceeded to hide inconvenient truths while filling the public’s ears with sweet nothings.

For example, he pledged government help for everyone who could possibly want or need it, but managed to avoid any mention of the hard truth that the national debt just topped $16 trillion and entitlements are unsustainable.

He said he’d spend money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on roads, bridges and schools. Even the liberal press wasn’t buying this one. As the AP pointed out, Obama “laid claim to a peace dividend that doesn’t exist.”

Obama promised to “take responsible steps” that would “keep the promise of Social Security.” But he failed to mention that the only options he’s left on the table are raising taxes or cutting benefits. That may not be what people want to hear, but it’s the absolute truth.

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He trotted out his supposed plan to cut deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade. But his actual plan — the budget he presented in February — would add $3.5 trillion in deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Then Obama said he’d create a million new manufacturing jobs, recruit another 100,000 math and science teachers, cut tuition growth in half, and reform the tax code. All by magic, apparently, since he’s provided no detailed plans on any of this.

But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama’s speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all. That was when Obama promised that he’d pursue “the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.”

That promise might have made liberal hearts swoon. But as Amity Shlaes explained in her outstanding history of the era — “The Forgotten Man” — it was precisely FDR’s “bold, persistent experimentation” that was largely to blame for the length, depth and severity of the Great Depression.

Convinced that the government had to do something, FDR tinkered and experimented, she said, figuring that if he didn’t “get it right the first time … maybe he’d get it right the second time.” But the very arbitrariness of FDR’s actions, she found, made it impossible for businesses to make plans. And so, as FDR’s bold experiments increased, business activity decreased and markets froze.

“From the point of view of a business,” Shlaes said in a 2009 interview, “it is annihilating to hear Washington uncertain, and that itself retards recovery because you really don’t know what to expect.”

If Obama wants to conduct experiments, he should get a job as a high school science teacher, and not use the entire nation as guinea pigs, particularly when we already know how his tests will turn out.

Rebutting Vice President Bumbler’s Biden’s Convention Speech

By Elizabeth MacDonald  Emac’s Bottom Line September 06, 2012 FOXBusiness

Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention that made numerous contentious points:

On the Auto Bailout: “The president knew if he didn’t act, there wouldn’t be any [auto] industry to save.”

Rebuttal: The fight was over the best way to restructure the auto industry so as to make it come back stronger, without government help — not to wipe it out entirely. GM has historically destroyed net shareholder capital since the ‘80s, and even lost $10.6 billion at the height of the bubble in 2005. The problem? Too many cars made that consumers didn’t want to buy.

On the Auto Bailout:“Conviction. Resolve. Barack Obama. That’s what saved the automobile industry.”

Rebuttal: And lots of taxpayer money, $80 billion to start. GM still owes U.S. taxpayers $27 billion, and taxpayers still own just under a third of GM, or 500 million shares, which remain underwater. The stock must trade at around $53 a share for taxpayers to breakeven; they currently trade at around $21. This past August, the Treasury Dept. revised higher the cost of the auto bailout by $3.4 billion, up from the prior estimate of $21.7 billion, an old estimate that had also been revised higher over the past year. GM continues to struggle, as the White House has pressured it to manufacture fuel efficient Chevy Volts, a line of cars GM has pulled the plug on.

Not mentioned in the Vice President’s speech, either, was the Administration’s pressure to pull the plug on car dealerships. The Obama Administration pressured GM and Chrysler to halt relations with about 2,200 dealers — each one with roughly 50 employees. That equals to about 110,000 jobs lost. An “auto team” backed by the White House and working at the Treasury Dept. analyzed the car dealer issue, and concluded that cutting them would increase competition, earnings and help the industry recover, according to a TARP inspector general report at the time. TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky criticized the move: “It is clear that tens of thousands of dealership jobs were immediately put in jeopardy as a result of the terminations by GM and Chrysler. Treasury should have taken special care given that the Auto Team’s determination had the potential to contribute to job losses.”

On the GOP’s Plan for Medicare: “What they didn’t tell you is what they’re proposing would cause Medicare to go bankrupt by 2016. And what they really didn’t tell you is, they’re not for preserving Medicare. They’re for a whole new plan. They’re for Vouchercare.”

Rebuttal: Not mentioned here is the new health-reform law has roughly 165 provisions hitting Medicare that seek to reduce costs, among other things, a government trustee report says. The annual report in August 2010 from the Medicare Board of Trustees shows health reform’s dramatic $1.05 trillion in cuts in Medicare over the first decade. As for the GOP plan, if the Vice President is talking about the Ryan plan, it does not get rid of Medicare. Under this plan, people now and in the future can choose to stay in it. Ryan does propose new Medicare enrollees age 65 would get to pick between private insurance plans offered in a new Medicare exchange in 2023, where Medicare would compete with private insurers for their business.

The insurance must cover a base level of benefits, must cover pre-existing conditions, can’t charge higher rates based on health condition or age, plus it must offer a minimum threshold of coverage. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would regulate the plans.

The federal government would pick up the tab for premium support, and pay that subsidy directly to the insurer of their choice, with seniors paying the difference. If the plan is cheaper than Medicare, seniors get a rebate check.

And the more ill or poor the Medicare enrollee is, the more government insurance support they get in the Ryan plan.

On America’s Debt:“Not once, not once, did they [the GOP] tell you they’ve rejected every plan put forward by us, by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission — by other respected outside groups — to reduce our national debt if it contained even one dollar — one cent — in new taxes for millionaires.”

Rebuttal: No mention of the $16 trillion federal deficit. Remember, the president added about $5 trillion in new spending to the federal budget since taking office, equivalent to adding the GDP of Germany and South Korea combined. That money went towards spending $825 billion on the president’s stimulus, Wall Street bailouts, automaker bailouts, housing bailouts, green energy bailouts, cash for clunkers, cash for white ware, cash for window sealers. And still, the country has lost an estimated net 316,000 jobs. The White House needs to raise taxes to pay interest on that debt — yields on all the bonds the Treasury Dept. sold.

And there was no mention that the White House’s tax hikes on the upper bracket would slam small businesses, which created 65% of the net new jobs in this country over the past 17 years, and employ about half of all workers, says the Small Business Administration.

The president’s tax hikes would hit these businesses very hard. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), nearly 750,000 taxpayers who report small business income would see half their earnings hit with higher taxes. The JCT says that “50% of the approximately $1 trillion of aggregate net positive business income will be reported on returns that have a marginal rate of 36 or 39.6%.”

On Mitt Romney’s new “territorial tax”: “He has a new tax proposal — the territorial tax — that experts say will create 800,000 jobs, all of them overseas.”

Rebuttal: Simpson Bowles supports Romney’s idea. And so do U.S. companies, which have said they could create more jobs if their foreign profits weren’t taxed twice, as they are now. Reforming the tax code here could help companies bring home more than $1.2 trillion they now have parked overseas due to concerns over double taxation. Under U.S. tax law, companies that earn profits overseas get taxed twice. They must pay taxes to foreign governments. Then they get tax credits for those payments to offset their taxes owed — at a high 35% corporate tax rate. So companies don’t repatriate overseas cash back home because they get double taxed. Romney wants to stop that, to bring cash back home to create jobs. Under this plan, companies would get taxed once–only in the country where it was earned.

On Americans doing their fair share: “We see a future where everyone rich or poor does their part and has a part.”

Rebuttal: Unusual, as 47% of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes.

On developing America’s energy: “A future where we depend more on clean energy from home and less on oil from abroad.”

Rebuttal: Among other things, President Obama has effectively shut off 85% of America’s offshore areas to new energy production. Plus the Administration has delayed approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would create new jobs while bringing an estimated 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian oil to U.S. consumers. China is now moving to cut deals with Canada to purchase its oil.

Obama’s Hayes Of History

Tue, Sep 11 2012 00:00:00 EA12_ISSUES

Nineteenth-century tech geek. Getty Images

History: As President Obama fumbled with an iPhone, the blogosphere recalled he had earlier falsely bad-mouthed President Rutherford B. Hayes as a technological troglodyte. It’s not his error that annoys but his arrogance.

For a man who would have Americans believe that he and his big government are smarter than anyone, it might help if the president could show some evidence of it when he lectures others.

Instead, Obama bumbled around on an iPhone at a campaign stop with no idea how to master the device, triggering a viral response on the Internet about his past pontifications on history and technology. To Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds, it called to mind Obama’s errant claims about 19th century President Rutherford B. Hayes last March:

“There always have been folks who are the naysayers and don’t believe in the future, and don’t believe in trying to do things differently,” Obama told supporters.

“One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mount Rushmore, because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forward. He’s explaining why we can’t do something, instead of why we can do something.”

In reality, Hayes never made such a statement.

Hayes in fact was precisely the opposite of what Obama claimed, installing the first telephone in the White House, being the first president to make use of a typewriter and asking Thomas Edison over to play his new phonograph. His legacy is that of the man who led the U.S. during the Second Industrial Revolution in 1877.

That revolution was real, not a chimerical and built on the crony capitalism and central planning that characterize Obama’s bid to push alternative energy to the fore in the name of “progress.”

Hayes unleashed the free market. Obama not only has done the opposite, he hasn’t even mastered today’s telephone.

 

Obama Democrats See No End to Big Government

Monday, 10 Sep 2012 09:22 PM By Rich Lowry

The Charlotte host committee knew its audience at the Democratic National Convention. “Government,” the narrator says in a video produced by the committee for the opening of the convention, “is the only thing we all belong to.”

The Obama campaign quickly disavowed the video. But it captured all that was to come. The Charlotte Democrats are of, by and for government — especially when it is guaranteeing and facilitating access to abortion.

Democrats apparently held the convention in the Time Warner Cable Arena only because the local Planned Parenthood clinic down on Albemarle Road wasn’t available.

God might have been left out of the party platform in a fit of absent-mindedness (and then acrimoniously restored), but government would never suffer such an indignity. It is the Alpha and Omega.

The maker of dreams, the giver of succor, the ultimate expression of community. When Democrats say “We’re all in it together,” what they mean is that the Office of Extramural Research, Education and Priority Populations in the Department of Health and Human Services needs twice as much funding.

For Clinton Democrats, the era of Big Government was over. For Obama Democrats, the era of Big Government is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Occasionally, anyone could nod along at the stories from the podium of old-fashioned American hardiness.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak’s pioneer relatives crossed the Great Plains on a wagon train, and his widowed mother raised three kids. San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro’s orphaned grandmother worked as maid and baby sitter to give his mom and him a chance. Michelle Obama’s dad got up and went to work every day at the city water plant, despite the debilitating pain of multiple sclerosis.

These stirring evocations of family devotion, of community, of hard work in the face of adversity all turned, in the end, inevitably into apologia for government.

After talking of how the sacrifices of others paved the way for him, Castro asked: “But the question is, How do we multiply that success? The answer is President Barack Obama.”

Oh, yes, where would we be without the Great Father?

“In tough times,” Rybak said, “we come together.”

To pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, evidently.

“Barack is thinking about folks like my dad,” Michelle Obama said, “and his grandmother.”

That’s what the nearly $800 billion stimulus and the new $2 trillion health-care entitlement were all about, according to the first lady — though neither her dad nor his grandmother was a wastrel or a spendthrift.

The Democrats’ favorite rhetorical trick is describing how we all depend on one another. We all have parents, teachers and neighbors. And then leveraging these connections to insist on increasing the size and scope of the least personal, least community-oriented institution in American life — the federal government.

Washington is not good at promoting aspiration. Democrats always talk of student loans, but the federal aid feeds the maw of an academic-industrial complex that increasingly delivers inferior educations at an ever-spiraling cost.

Neither is the federal government building great things. A posse of hard-hatted MSNBC anchors could scour the country looking for a grand, picturesque project funded by the Obama stimulus to stand in front of during a left-wing public-service announcement, and find nothing.

In reality, the American state is largely devoted to taking money from some people and giving it to others. Nicholas Eberstadt writes in an excerpt from his forthcoming book, “A Nation of Takers”: “As a day-to-day operation, the U.S. government devotes more attention and resources to the public transfers of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective.”

In other words, it is spreading the wealth around.

This is the model of government that is breaking down in Europe and wheezing here at home. But Democrats can no more criticize government than they could attack their mothers or fathers.

It is to what we all belong — and the more belonging the better.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications. Read more reports from Rich Lowry — Click Here Now.

Obama Team Struggles on Basic Question

Friday, 07 Sep 2012 10:03 AM By Rich Lowry

“Are people better off than they were four years ago?” is hardly a trick question. It’s one of the most reliable cliches in American politics.

So Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat from Maryland, should have been ready with some handy dodge when he was asked the question by Bob Schieffer of “Face the Nation.” Really, in the circumstance, any circumlocution would do.

Instead, O’Malley said “No,” igniting a firestorm and highlighting a key Democratic weakness heading into their convention with his unadorned, monosyllabic honesty. Which didn’t last. Within 24 hours, the skies had brightened, the malaise had lifted, and O’Malley was pronouncing the country “clearly better off.”

O’Malley hadn’t done the full Booker — the act of saying what you think, as Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker did when denouncing the Obama campaign’s anti-Bain Capital ads a few months ago, then recanting shamefacedly — but he’d done a half-Booker with a twist.