Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.
Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:
1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.
In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?
Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.
Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.
To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.
Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.
How does any of this improve our lot?
Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?
You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.
Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.
I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]
America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.
Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors – Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.
Yet, no one to my knowledge has connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.
But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis
In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It animates their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.
The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:
“Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one. (Courtesy of Discover the Networks.org)
Newsmax rounds out the picture:
Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth.
In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of “crisis” they were trying to create:
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.
No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:
• The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.
• The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.
• The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.
Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their “rights.” According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, “one person was on the welfare rolls… for every two working in the city’s private economy.”
According to another City Journal article titled “Compassion Gone Mad”:
The movement’s impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay’s first two years; spending doubled… The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.
The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO’s Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for “an effort at economic sabotage.” He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.
Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals’ threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:
Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.
The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven’s thrill that “…the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.”
ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear
In 1970, one of George Wiley’s protégés, Wade Rathke – like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn’t accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke’s group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income “rights.” Shortly thereafter they changed “Arkansas” to “Association of” and ACORN went nationwide.
Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN’s website: “ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country,” It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.
Voting
On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.
ACORN’s voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:
1. Register as many democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.
In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.
ACORN’s website brags:
“Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote.”
Project Vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them had a pulse. For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.
Barack Obama ran ACORN’s Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven’s aspirations for ACORN’s voter registration efforts:
By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation’s wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.
Illegal Immigration
As I have written elsewhere, the Radical Left’s offensive to promote illegal immigration is “Cloward-Piven on steroids.” ACORN is at the forefront of this movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.
The burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels. The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little border control, terrorists can also filter in.
Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.
His fears were warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: “After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote…”
ACORN’s dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.
Mortgage Crisis
And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter’s answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: “a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks.”
ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:
In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of “redlining”—claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.
In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications—but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.
ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively. Barack Obama represented ACORN in this effort.
As a New York Post article describes it:
A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.
Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.
Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with “100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don’t report it on your tax returns.” Credit counseling is required, of course.
Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.
The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide – rescued by Bank of America in July – which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.
Investor’s Business Daily added:
The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)
Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit.”
And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN’s negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an “Affordable Housing Trust Fund,” granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.
Even now, unbelievably – on the brink of national disaster – Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported Thursday night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!
This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN’s efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.
Enter Barack Obama.
In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama’s Radical Left connections and his connection to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.
The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who’s who of the American Radical Left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.
Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.
Saul Alinsky
Most people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in “community organizing” from Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as that of a radical activist. One really need go no further. But we have.
Bill Ayers
Obama objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is being smeared with “guilt by association.” But they worked together at the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal has added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama’s work over five years with Ayers on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a non-profit Ayers designed to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states: “…the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.”
Also included in the mix is John and Theresa Heinz Kerry’s favorite charity, the Tides Foundation. A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU, ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies (KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically every other radical group there is. ACORN’s Wade Rathke runs a Tides subsidiary, the Tides Center. No wonder Kerry, Kennedy et al love Obama. Just one big happy family.
Carl Davidson and the New Party
We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago’s New Party, a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party’s endorsement, and they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: “Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate.”
George Soros
The chart also suggests one reason for George Soros’ fervent support of Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier, founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh Neier would have heard of the promising new politician from his former colleagues. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain back their favored candidate, Barack Obama. Soros is a natural suspect in this fiasco as he has made all his ill-gotten gains short-selling on national disaster. The extent of his dirty dealings is worthy of its own book.
ACORN
Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz’s excellent National Review article, “Inside Obama’s Acorn.” also describes Obama’s ACORN connection in detail. But I can’t improve on Obama’s own words:
I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. — Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)
In another excellent article on Obama’s ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:
It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
I will put it more bluntly: Barack Obama is fully aware of the Cloward-Piven strategy and has actively worked to achieve its goals for most of his adult life.
I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for???
As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN’s Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN’s successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN’s representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns – both with money and campaign workers; it is inconceivable that he was unaware of ACORN’s true goals. It is inconceivable he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Hussein Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus “our family” and “the conscience of Fannie Mae.”
In 2005, Republicans sought to reign in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.
In his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the $165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?
His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.
Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama’s V.P. search after this gem came out:
An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report[1] from September 2004 found that, during Johnson’s tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses in 1998.[2] A 2006 OFHEO report[3] found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson’s compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually received approximately $21 million.
Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of “Obama’s political circle.” Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books. To add insult to injury, the $3 million fine was paid with Fannie Mae’s insurance fund.
Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama’s presidential campaign, helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as owner and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in life savings of the bank’s approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn’t seem to have come out of it too badly.
As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.
Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did.
Barack Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself, has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!
God grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.
And God save us from Barack Obama.
Introduction
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 Democrat 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 only be described 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 1960s, two radicals gave it a name — the Cloward-Piven Strategy. As explained in my 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.
Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, voting, housing and immigration “rights.” But leftist positions on any issue, whether championing “equal rights,” “abortion rights,” “education rights,” rights to health care, rights to housing, legal protections of antisocial or even criminal behavior, to the point of absurdity, are intentionally divisive. They add new fiscal and regulatory burdens on government, and set new precedents that undermine the limited government concepts embedded in our Constitution, while conferring discriminatory special benefits on legally defined groups the rest of us are forced to pay for. They deliberately put our society at war with itself. And as Cloward and Piven made clear, the true purpose is not even to help those groups, but rather to duplicitously enlist them as part of an offensive to collapse our society from within!
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 them. 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 leftwing organization/movement/ideal today.
How do they Survive?
These organizations rarely produce anything of value, yet 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 were being spent. For example, the radical group, ACORN, responsible for widespread voter fraud this year, gets about 40 percent of its revenues from federal, state and local government.
The Left’s strategies could not survive the light of day. Our mass media is mostly to blame for this. 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. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is perhaps the most poignant current example of this. Without mass media’s shamelessly biased support, he would still be community organizing, or perhaps in jail.
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 grey, 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.
But 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 literally a 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. PhD Chemistry Professor George Wiley, the black radical who led Cloward and Piven’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), 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, arrogant, and 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 of Chicago, 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 he’s used to money, and later developments in his career point to a hand up from Daddy.
Barack lives in Hyde Park too. 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 are two perfect examples
• Obama donor received a state grant
• Obama helped ex-boss get $1 mil. from charity
But much more about this later.
Marxist austerity is only meant for the rest of us.
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 them.
See, for example, Gorbachev’s dacha in Foros, Crimea; a testament to communist modesty if ever there was 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,” only practices market economics one-way in international trade while maintaining iron fist central planning internally, and 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 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 been chosen as standard bearer to bring this agenda to fruition here. If he is elected we can expect a sea change in Washington. But it will not be for the better. 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.
Obama’s Radical Roots
Are we beating this subject to death? Sorry, we have to. And there’s much more, if you still need convincing. Obama hates being “associated” with radical individuals and organizations. But the truth is he hasn’t been associated with them at all, he has been immersed in them. He is one of them. And it goes back to his youth.
There is no doubt that “Frank” in Obama’s Dreams from My Father is longtime communist Frank Marshall Davis. It is probable that Davis convinced Obama to initiate his career in radical-friendly Chicago — birthplace of the American Communist Party — where Davis was a very active communist party member before moving to Hawaii.
Obama was inspired by Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, even writing for a job in his administration. Washington’s successful campaign relied on a coalition of the American Communist Party, Democratic Socialists of America and other radicals. Washington may have been a secret communist party member himself.
Finally the riddle of Obama’s forged birth certificate may be solved. There is reason to believe that Davis is in fact Obama’s father. If so, it explains a lot about Obama’s very radical political orientation. But it is not necessary in order to make the connections.
From Obama’s earliest days as a community organizer and throughout his political career, he has been involved with and supported by a broad network of radical groups. It is likely that he was similarly influenced in college, but since he won’t release any information about classes, grades, teachers, clubs or affiliations — no information whatsoever — we don’t have a complete picture. More about this later.
Who Sent You?
There is an old story about getting into Chicago politics that ends with the quote: “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” According to this article, the person who “sent” Obama was former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers. The reasons are many and compelling.
Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) — Ayers chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative which was responsible for recruiting Barack Obama to chair the board of CAC in 1995. Barack remained chairman until 1999 and stayed with the board until CAC folded in 2001. Obama and Ayers shared the same 50 X 50 3rd floor office for three years when Obama chaired the CAC. How is it they didn’t know each other?
In addition to his work on CAC, Ayers ran the Small Schools Workshop out of the same address. Another former SDSer, Mike Klonsky, co-chaired the Workshop and shared that office as well. Remember that name. Despite Chicago’s failing schools, this project was intended to create charter schools focused not on basic skills, but developing young anti-capitalist partisans.
As chairman of CAC, working from the same office, Obama gave over $1 million to the Small Schools Workshop run by Ayers and Klonsky. Oh yes, Klonksy’s wife Susan worked there too. She was also a former SDS member. Just one big happy family. Obama apparently also managed to show his appreciation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s causes with CAC largesse.
But Obama’s relationship with Ayers may go back much further than that. According to NationMaster.com encyclopedia:
The [Chicago School Reform] Collaborative was the operative on the ground body of the Challenge. It was made up of representatives of various constituencies in the Chicago school reform movement. That reform movement had begun in 1987 in the wake of an unpopular strike by Chicago teachers. Bill Ayers was active in that reform effort through a group called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs. ABCs was an alliance of various activists and reform groups that included the Developing Communities Project which Barack Obama headed up at the time as well as Chicago United, a business sector group, that was headed up by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers. (Emphases mine.)
Thomas Ayers was the liberal former CEO of the Consolidated Edison (ConEd) power utility and was very active in Chicago education issues. ConEd was a client of Sidley & Austin, a prestigious Chicago law firm, and senior partner Howard Trienens was chief counsel to ConEd. Trienens also worked with Tom Ayers on the Board of Northwestern University. Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley until 1988, despite no law license or experience and was hired, according to Trienens, as a favor to “friends.” She subsequently got a teaching job at Northwestern. Another favor?
Obama left for Harvard in 1988 but returned the next summer to intern with Sidley. How did he get that job? Michelle Robinson (Obama) also worked for Sidley at the time and was Obama’s supervisor. They were married in 1992. Given the time they spent at the same firm, Michelle probably knew Bernardine as well.
Barack later became chairman of the board of the Woods Fund (1999-2002). In this position he funneled millions to ACORN and other radical groups. The Woods family ran the fund until 1990, when it was taken over by George Kelm, who moved it politically to the left. Frank Woods Jr., the Fund administrator until 1980 also headed an Illinois coal company, Sahara Coal, which supplied ConEd, so it is likely the Ayers family was already familiar with the Fund and its principals.
Obama also served on the Board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994-2001. This organization funds a large number of gun control groups and did so during Obama’s tenure. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law was also one of Joyce’s grant recipients. Obama worked for them too. During Obama’s time at Woods and Joyce, those funds gave another $900 thousand to Small Schools. They also funded Bill Ayers’ brother John’s organization, Leadership for Quality Education, to the tune of $761,000. Obama worked on that board too! One very happy family.
Despite receiving almost $2 million in funding, the Small Schools Workshop and all of the other CAC initiatives were failures. Now, you could argue that Obama was only one Board member. But on the Woods board at least he was one of six. Bill Ayers was another. To suggest he didn’t know about Ayers ideology and aspirations would be to accuse him of abandoning his fiduciary responsibility. Would you expect that kind of incompetence from a Presidential candidate?
Just for perspective, watch and hear what a former FBI assistant director has to say about Ayers. Or watch this hilarious video where Ayers calls the police to avoid an O’Reilly Factor reporter. As Bill O’Reilly observed, given that Ayers tried to bomb the police years ago, that is indeed ironic.
But the most chilling of all is the testimony given by FBI informant Larry Grathwohl. See it here in this clip from a 1982 documentary. The Weather Underground planned to build re-education camps in the American Southwest. Those who wouldn’t submit to the program would be murdered. The Underground estimated they would have to kill about 25 million Americans. Grathwohl was assigned to Bill Ayers. Following is a summary of his impressions:
Grathwohl found Ayers hard to love; he seemed self-important, a controller of subordinates, the type who loved to give orders. Ayers was a key leader. Grathwohl, a government informant, wrote that Ayers had helped direct a pair of attempted police building bombings in Detroit in February 1970. After doing his assigned job in reconnaissance, Grathwohl disagreed with Mr. Ayers over the placement of one bomb, which could easily kill black patrons who favored an adjacent restaurant, but that Ayers dismissed such sentimentality as unrevolutionary. The informant was glad to be dismissed from the operation by Ayers. Forty-four sticks of dynamite were then formed into two bombs and put into place, before Grathwohl’s information allowed police to dismantle both. Ayers’ memoir — which freely admits to incompleteness — says nothing of this episode, or Detroit, or the month of February 1970.
A big question about Obama’s early life is who paid for it? Who paid for his Columbia and Harvard educations? Who were his patrons? One was Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour. Mansour, who’s name in an earlier life was Don Warden, is a virulently racist black nationalist with ties to the Saudi royal family, specifically Prince Alaweed. After 9-11 Alaweed offered $10 million to New York City but was turned down by Mayor Giuliani when Alaweed suggested we were to blame for 9-11. See a video about Mansour here. For someone who never heard Rev. Wright’s hateful speeches, Obama sure knows how to pick ‘em. Newsmax has a good backgrounder, here.
Another patron is Tony Rezko. His relationship with Obama seems to have been a fairly straight forward you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours scenario. Obama’s law firm worked on Rezko projects and Obama helped Rezko businesses with legislation and Woods Fund grants. There’s more to this story, but I’d have to write a book.
Obama’s Radical Support Network
Obama has been groomed and supported by such a large number of radical groups it is difficult to chart it all. But the following list represents the best known and significant groups that have provided the intellectual grounding for his ideology and the material support for his political campaigns:
Democratic Socialists of America — The DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the U.S. and principle U.S. affiliate of the socialist international” which traces its roots to Marx’s first organization. DSA has endorsed Obama and provided an army of on-the-ground campaign workers. Their members are even boasting credit for the success of his ground game. This organization is probably the largest base of Obama’s support.
Here is what the DSA has to say in their endorsement of Obama for President:
While recognizing the critical limitations of the Obama candidacy and the American political system, DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda. (Emphasis added.)
WorldNetDaily did an expose on the DSA in 1999, revealing their direct link with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, of which Nancy Pelosi was a prominent member. Following this revelation, DSA edited its website, removing the links between the two organizations and some other damaging information. As WND relates:
Prior to the cleanup of its website in 1999, the DSA included a song list featuring “The Internationale,” the worldwide anthem of communism and socialism. Another song on the site was “Red Revolution” sung to the tune of “Red Robin.” The lyrics went: “When the Red Revolution brings its solution along, along, there’ll be no more lootin’ when we start shootin’ that Wall Street throng. …” Another song removed after WorldNetDaily’s expose was “Are You Sleeping, Bourgeoisie?” The lyrics went: “Are you sleeping? Are you sleeping? Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie. And when the revolution comes, We’ll kill you all with knives and guns, Bourgeoisie, Bourgeoisie.” (Emphasis mine.)
Newsflash to you “middle class” families that Obama is trying to woo with tax cut promises, you are the bourgeoisie!
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) — Started in Chicago in 1919, the American Communist Party was under the control of the Soviet KGB until 1989, and perhaps after. While the CPUSA provides fertile recruiting ground for espionage agents in government and business, its main purpose was to provide the Soviets or “Russians” if you prefer, a back door entrance into our political system. The Communist Party supports a political platform virtually identical to Obama’s in many aspects. See the chart below. There is, of course, no doubt about who they support, and their endorsement largely parrots what DSA has to say.
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) — This group needs no introduction. In addition to being at the heart of the mortgage meltdown, ACORN is being cited once again for widespread voter fraud in 15 states. Given ACORN’s boast of registering 1.5 million new voters this year, it is possible this election could be decided by fraudulent votes. In the meantime, it has been revealed that the Obama Campaign has paid at least $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary for get-out-the-vote efforts. That the media has overlooked this glaring conflict of interest is astounding. Meanwhile, Obama has lied through his teeth about his longstanding ties to the group.
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) — Another CPUSA splinter group with many Communist Party members and a hodgepodge of others. Prominent Obama patron Carl Davidson was a member, who went on to rise in prominence in the New Party, which Obama joined.
New Party — A political party that promoted electoral fusion, formed of DSA, ACORN, CCDS and CPUSA members. Barack joined the New Party early in his political career and according to the DSA “encouraged NPers to join his task forces on Voter Education and Voter Registration.” So not only was he a member of an avowedly socialist organization, he encouraged its members to work with him. Cloward Piven Strategy co-author Frances Fox Piven was also a New Party member. Carl Davidson was also a prominent member and early supporter of Obama. The New Party folded when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling against electoral fusion, but many members were instrumental in creating the umbrella group, Progressives for Obama.
Students for a Democratic Society (recently revived) — This newly reformed SDS has 130 or more chapters in the U.S. as of this writing and was designed to attract young radicals into the fold. This SDS was behind much of the violence at the Republican Party convention in Minnesota.
Movement for a Democratic Society — Yet another new party, this time created for the SDS old-timers. MDS and SDS are mutually supportive, with MDS supplying the brains and SDS supplying the brawn. This organization includes the old SDS members we are getting to know: Ayers, Dohrn, Davidson, Klonsky, and many others. Most of the radicals closely associated with Obama have an SDS past. This group founded Progressives for Obama.
Black Radical Congress — Founded in 1998 in Chicago by some New Party leaders and other black radicals. Endorsed by prominent CPUSA members and has many ties to that group. Member Bill Fletcher was a co-founder of Progressives for Obama.
Progressives for Obama — Founded by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich and Danny Glover. Carl Davidson is webmaster. All but Glover are MDS members. Glover is considered a socialist although he is not a listed DSA member.
New Black Panther Party — A friendly bunch as you can see from their website. All you need to do is watch this video. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Interestingly, the endorsement formerly posted on Obama’s website, visible in the video and here, has been removed. The Panthers explain this embarrassment here. These people are real losers.
Radical Individuals Who Shaped Obama’s Agenda
Frank Marshall Davis — Communist Party member who was investigated by the FBI for 19 years. He had perhaps the most profound effect on Obama and probably pointed him toward Chicago.
Carl Davidson — SDS, MDS, CPUSA, CCDS, leadership position in New Party, supported Obama early on. Davidson’s recently declassified FBI file reveals that he traveled to Cuba and worked with the Cubans during the Vietnam War to sabotage our war effort. He was a traitor.
Mike Klonsky — SDS, led the Maoist Communist Party (Marxist/Leninist). Klonsky’s FBI file shows the same activity.
Tom Hayden — SDS, MDS, Founder of Progressives for Obama. He was also the subject of FBI surveillance.
Bill Ayers & Bernardine Dohrn — Need we say more about them? Read about their treasonous interaction with Cuban intelligence here.
A report has come out summarizing everything these people did. You can read it here: Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection.
Frances Fox Piven, longtime DSA member, who also served on the boards of the ACLU and the DSA, was the co-author of the Cloward-Piven Strategy. She was one of the original signatories of Progressives for Obama. She was also a New Party member. Her husband, Richard Cloward, died in 2001, so fortunately he can do no more damage than he already has.
Obama’s Policy Positions Indistinguishable from Communists and Socialists
Obama’s website offers a much more “nuanced” explanation of his policies, but on the critical issues listed below, there is remarkable similarity to the Communist and Socialist positions on almost every issue. In fact, one might easily conclude he was inspired by them, since they were there first and their positions almost never change.
Obama has openly admitted that he wants to raise top marginal tax rates back to “Reagan Era” levels, although his most recent campaign literature says “Clinton Era” levels.
As this video makes startlingly clear, Obama promises to make deep cuts in defense spending and gut our defense posture, regardless of the more “nuanced” tone of his website. Obama is unequivocal in his call for universal health insurance, although once again, his website muddies this fact with promises of tax credits for private insurance. His preference for the UN and other international bodies not particularly friendly to the U.S. is well known.
Obama fully supports the very deceptively named “Employee Free Choice Act,” which abolishes the secret ballot and forces employees to reveal how they vote on union issues. A setup for union intimidation, this unprecedented legislation is truly Orwellian. If you want some shocking perspective, even Nixon-era, far left former presidential candidate George McGovern has gone on the warpath against this very anti-democratic legislation, with an article, a commercial and multiple TV interviews.
Radical Help Waiting in the Wings
There is a ready pool of radicals waiting to push Obama’s agenda in Congress.
Congressional Progressive Caucus — As the largest partisan caucus in the House of Representatives, with 71 members it comprises about 1/3 of all House Democrats. Avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) retains his membership. The Caucus maintained a formal relationship with the DSA until 1999, when an article by WorldNetDaily exposed the links between the two.
Congressional Black Caucus — At the center of the mortgage crisis, the congressional black caucus welcomed the newly minted Senator Obama in 2005 with a sickeningly toadying speech by the CEO of Fannie Mae. As we all know by now, Obama received more money from Fannie Mae in his three short years as Senator than anyone other than Finance Chairman Chris Dodd. Why? No one has asked!
Some have conjectured that Obama may not really be all that radical himself. Maybe somehow he has just played along with these groups to get their support. I doubt it, but even were it true, so what? It should be painfully apparent to anyone reading this that Obama has committed himself too deeply and owes too much to too many to abandon the radical path he has taken. Isn’t that why they supported him in the first place?
What did Biden Mean?
Last week, Joe Biden made some astounding comments on the campaign trail, not once, but twice, on two different occasions. Following are Biden’s words, as quoted by Amanda Carpenter. There were two separate statements, of equal import as far as I am concerned, and I will try to interpret each in turn:
1. “Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy,” Biden said. “I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”
2. “Gird your loins,” Biden warned. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.“
Regarding the first statement, moronic as it was of him to say so, Biden is right. Our enemies will certainly see vulnerability with Obama as President. Now, as to his remark that “…it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right,” I believe that what he means is that Obama will back down from any confrontation. Here’s why.
Both Barack and Biden are anti-war. But to truly understand the anti-war movement you have to go back to the beginning and get correct working definitions.
If you recall during the Vietnam War, America’s peace activists never had a problem with the North Vietnamese’ flagrant violations of peace agreements, their double-dealing in negotiations, their torture of U.S. POWs, their mass murder of South Vietnamese after we pulled out, or their genocidal holocaust against the indigenous tribes that is ongoing to this day. The silence is deafening.
Our enemies seemingly can do no wrong. Even when al Zarkawi began beheading Americans in Iraq, who did the “peace activists” blame? They certainly weren’t calling for his head!
It seems inconsistent that a “peace” movement’s “anti-war” stance would be so overtly pro-war when it comes to our enemies. But there is a rational, logical explanation, believe it or not.
From their earliest days, Soviet communists always professed an ardent desire for “peace.” They have been relentless in making that claim. However, they have a unique definition of peace. Lenin said:
“As long as capitalism and Socialism exist, we cannot live in peace… In the end, one or the other will triumph.”
William E. Odom explains:
“The Soviet definition of Peace is unique and incompatible with Western definitions. Defense, in this peculiar Soviet sense, means offense. Peace means the destruction of all non-socialist states… peaceful coexistence was a strategy for irreconcilable struggle, political and military, with capitalism. Peaceful coexistence remains Soviet strategy today.”
To the Soviets, “peace” is defined as that point in history when all Soviet enemies, real or potential, are utterly destroyed. This definition does not only refer to external enemies. It includes all enemies. Thus, while maintaining an offensive posture to the world, in Soviet Russia, Lenin and Stalin murdered 40 million of their own. In China, Mao and his monsters murdered 70 million; Vietnam, 2 million; Cambodia, 2 million; Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, 1 million; Saddam’s Iraq, at least 300,000; and so on. All other communist countries do the same. It is communist doctrine to obliterate any and all enemies, real or imagined — within, and when possible, without.
Western “peace” activists fully understand the Soviet definition, and therefore believe that “world peace” can only be achieved when all the enemies of socialism are destroyed — in other words, when the entire world becomes socialist. Since peace activists are almost all socialists themselves, by working for socialism, they are automatically working for world peace.
Finally, many of the so-called “peace” activists were overtly pro-war. Bill Ayers’ 1974 diatribe “Prairie Fire” specifically stated that they were not anti-war at all, but in favor of Communist victory in the Vietnam War.
But even if you take the most benign view of “peace activism,” properly understood, it means that peace activists will seek capitulation to the communist juggernaut, if only to avoid the war that is otherwise certain to come.
Now, I know what you are saying, that communism is supposedly dead. The Soviet juggernaut was defeated by Reagan, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), etc. Ignoring for a moment the Chinese Communist elephant in the tent, Cuba, North Korea, Syria and all the other unrepentant communist countries, or the fact that communism has been enjoying a worldwide resurgence lately and the mounting fear that Russia never really abandoned it, regardless, socialists in this country and elsewhere remain determined to see capitalism fall — it is their raison d’etre — and America is the last bastion of capitalism.
Remember, this is the ultimate goal of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and it matters little how they get there.
So Socialist Obama, believing as he does that the answer to everything is socialism, will do everything possible to undermine our defense posture, as he has already promised. And because he is interested in replacing our capitalist society with a socialist one, if we are attacked he will not fight. As he has promised, he will prefer to “negotiate without preconditions.” Hence Biden’s statement that “…it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”
If the aggressor is one of the large communist countries, he will capitulate. But what happens if the aggressor is Iran? For some reason he is unafraid of a Muslim Caliphate. Perhaps that is because he knows, like some of the rest of us, that the Muslims and Leftists are working together to destroy this country.
Biden’s second comment, ending with the line, “This is a systemic problem (emphasis mine) we have with this economy,” is also chilling. It suggests he believes the capitalist system is the problem — not a big surprise if you accept my argument that this ticket believes in socialism. And you cannot conclude differently if you acknowledge that Obama’s economic policies are socialist to the core. It reaffirms what we have been predicting for a while now: a President Obama will quickly begin moving this country into the socialist camp with his socialist economic policies.
Both statements reinforce the impression that we are in for bad times if Obama is elected — bad times most Americans cannot begin to imagine. Thanks for the heads up, Joe.
This election may well be the most important in our nation’s history. An Obama presidency could not come at a worse time. The world economy stands on the edge of an abyss. If enacted, Obama’s socialist class warfare economic policies will push it right over the edge and we could see the nightmare scenario outlined above come to fruition.
And now I’ll tell you why I think they have pulled out all the stops. From eye-popping, unprecedented bias in the media to biased opinion polls, from unprecedented levels of questionable donations, including illegal foreign money flowing into Obama’s campaign coffers, to astronomical levels of voter registration fraud, there has never been an election season like this. They are going for broke because they believe that this is the last time they will ever have to do it. With majorities in both houses of Congress and a leftist in the White House, they will finally own the store completely. They are hoping to never have to give it up again.
When Obama said, “We are the ones We have been waiting for,” he was talking about “we the communists.”
I can only hope and pray that it is not too late for our great country.
Do not vote for Barack Obama!
An extension of the Hate Crimes law recently passed the House of Representatives which will essentially codify into national law the speech codes that are smothering academic freedom on college campuses today. This law is the back door method Obama and his fellow socialists will use to stifle free speech in this country, as explained in an informative article by Jerry Kane.
To heck with the Fairness Doctrine. Who needs to limit censorship to the airwaves? This legislation will silence anyone who disagrees with them.
Hate crimes legislation has its roots in the communist-inspired, so-called Frankfurt School founded in Frankfurt, Germany by Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Its goal was to implement communism in the West quietly by gradually subverting popular culture — a movement known as Cultural Marxism. One of its leading lights, Herbert Marcuse, opined that the prevailing Western social order is repressive by definition and discriminates against minorities simply by existing.
This creates a phenomenon he called “repressive tolerance” because even though other views are allowed within Western culture — you know, by that insignificant little old thing called the First Amendment — the Capitalist view is still permitted. It goes without saying that Marcuse considered that to be unacceptable.
Instead, he proposed what he called “partisan tolerance,” i.e. only tolerating the views of those “repressed minorities” — who Marcuse assumes share his partisan hatred for everything noncommunist — while actively muzzling the views of the majority. So now we have a word for Democrats’ eye-popping hypocrisy when they wrap themselves in the mantle of free speech while simultaneously attempting to suppress non-Leftist ideas. We have a word for the Left’s double standard in championing “repressed minorities” only when those minorities share their politics, while savaging principled, accomplished minorities like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell or Janice Rogers Brown. We have an explanation for why so many college campuses, supposedly the society’s heart of open-minded intellectual inquiry, actively, even violently intimidate conservative speakers — when they let them onto campus at all.
They have been practicing “partisan tolerance.” That is, tolerance of the extreme Left and virulent intolerance of anything else. Marcuse, among other Frankfurt School advocates, was brought to the U.S. in the 1930s by Edward R. Murrow who at the time headed a program to resettle intellectuals facing Nazi repression. According to Wikipedia, Marcuse worked at the OSS, the State Department and taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis. Now doesn’t that tell you something? He has been called the “Father of the New Left” and inspired many of the 1960s’ young radicals, who now have tenured teaching positions at colleges throughout the U.S. It is easy to see his Frankfurt School influence in university speech codes — indeed it is largely the reason they exist.
In fact the New School, currently run by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, counts the Frankfurt School as one of its main influences. Barack Obama has an indirect connection to the school, in that his father was offered a scholarship there. According to Wikipedia:
In the early 1960s, the New School offered the father of the US President, Barack Obama, a generous scholarship package that would have paid for his immediate family (including wife Ann Dunham and son, the future President; then residents of Hawaii) to join him in New York City, where he would complete his PhD. He declined and instead abandoned his family and departed for Harvard University, where he had a less-generous scholarship with no family allowance.
The Frankfurt School was dedicated to the destruction of the West. One of its founders, Willi Munzenberg, stated explicitly that its goal was to:
…organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink [sic]. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.
According to an article by Timothy Matthews in Catholic Insight, key strategies to achieve this goal were:
1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.
Munzenberg stated flatly, “We will make the West so corrupt it stinks.”
Today, his mission appears to have been largely accomplished. Assisted by American public education advocates, Frankfurt School proponents aggressively worked their way into our public education system to the point that today their priorities virtually define it. Their influence explains most of today’s sick popular culture. So this is the last piece in the Manufactured Crisis puzzle. It seems apparent that “Hate Crimes” legislation is the vehicle by which free speech will be permanently silenced in America. And after that, the thugs will be firmly in charge.
You need look no further for proof that Marcuse’s “cultural Marxists” are in charge in Washington now. Since it is their intention to destroy this country, intellectual appeals to them will fall on deaf ears. The only recourse is to lobby Senate Republicans and those few remaining Democrats with a shred of integrity, if indeed there are any.
We are witnessing the death of our country.
Barack Obama was supposed to be America's answer to the suave, European head of state. A debonair gentleman of the world, he would charm even the most sophisticated foreign leaders and prove, finally, that the United States is developed culturally, not just economically.
Then he gave some DVDs.
Ian Drury of London's Daily Mail wrote on March 8, "As he headed back home from Washington, Gordon Brown must have rummaged through his party bag with disappointment.
"Because all he got was a set of DVDs. Barack Obama, a box set of 25 classic American films -- a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks."
Brown had given Obama a set of pens made from part of the HMS Gannet, a Victorian-era anti-slave ship. A desk that has sat in the Oval Office since 1880 was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, the Gannet's sister ship. It was a stunningly thoughtful and unique gift left unreciprocated.
But even worse, Obama refused to hold a joint press conference with Brown or invite him for an official White House dinner. And to top it all off, he sent back a bust of Churchill that was lent to the White House after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Russia Today wrote that week, "Despite Barack Obama's eloquent elocution, ivy school credentials and electric charisma, there is talk that he lacks the most crucial element of any great leader: judgment."
Since March, Obama's social gaffes have continued. In April he bowed to the Saudi king; in July he was photographed staring at the rear end of a 16-year-old girl and suggested that Cambridge Police Officer James Crowley was stupid; in October he refused to meet with the Dalai Lama; in September he refused five requests from Gordon Brown for a one-on-one meeting but found time to fly to Copenhagen to promote Chicago's Olympic bid; and this month he sent Hillary Clinton to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, then topped it all with an obsequious bow to the emperor of Japan.
Obama cannot even blame the Japan bow on proper protocol. It was anything but proper. It was so inappropriate that it even offended the Japanese.
President Bush supposedly offended the rest of the world with his cowboy chauvinism, but at least he followed proper etiquette while telling the leaders of other countries that America was going to go its own way. Obama doesn't even know to invite the Prime Minister of Great Britain to a state dinner. He doesn't even bother to learn the proper way to greet kings and emperors.
For all of George W. Bush's swagger, it is Barack Obama who has systematically offended three major allies -- Britain, Germany and Japan -- in the span of nine months, needlessly straining important relationships and making his country look simultaneously backward and arrogant.
The reason for this is simple and obvious: Obama's singular arrogance. Only arrogance can explain the way Obama has treated Gordon Brown. Only arrogance can explain the president's snubbing of Germany and repeated refusal to learn the proper protocol for greeting other world leaders.
Obama might be cultivating world opinion by insulting his own country in speech after speech and undermining its interests with his foreign policy, but the joke is on him. For his transparent disdain for other world leaders and customs is making him every bit the image of the buffoonish American president he tries so hard to convince the world he is not.
For decades, Western intellectuals have judged him the Good Marxist. His assassination by Joseph Stalin's agents was further proof -- if further proofs were needed -- of his honorable intentions. If only Leon Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had emerged as Vladimir Lenin's successor, how differently the history of the Soviet Union, indeed, the whole history of communism, might have read.
Trotsky's estrangement and exile from Stalin's Soviet Union has been the stuff of romantic legend, a myth largely fashioned by Trotsky himself. In his many volumes of autobiography, and in works like The Stalin School of Falsification, Trotsky used his considerable rhetorical skills to disguise his political closeness to Stalin and thereby retain the admiration of thinkers in the West, including some on the right. When H.L. Mencken heard Trotsky's library had burned, he wrote offering to send the exile some books. (Trotsky rudely declined.) Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson and Saul Bellow admired Trotsky both as a man of ideas and a man of action, one who, with the great surrealist AndréBreton, could write A Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art, when not leading the Red Army into battle against the White Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Poles.
Trotsky's latest biographer, Robert Service (author of acclaimed biographies of Lenin and Stalin), suggests it is foolish to take Trotsky at his word. If there is one overarching theme in Service's study, it is that there was very little difference in philosophy between Trotsky and his nemesis Stalin. "The basic agenda of the two men was much more similar than it was dissimilar," he says.
Lebya Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born in 1879, to a well-to-do Jewish farm family in the Pale of Settlement in what is now central Ukraine. Trotsky's father, like many Jewish parents, sent his children off to Lutheran schools to be educated. Unable to break into the professions because of his race, Trotsky takes up one of the few vocations open to young Jewish intellectuals: he becomes a revolutionary. Due largely to his extraordinary literary talents, he quickly moves up the ranks of the budding revolutionary movement, eventually becoming a leader of the October Revolution, and subsequently, commander of the Red Army.
Then, in 1924, Lenin died, and there erupted a battle of succession over who was to succeed as head of state. Lenin at first chose Stalin, a man he considered a safe, steady, plodding bureaucrat, the opposite of a flamboyant, charismatic Napoleonic character like Trotsky. Too late, however, Lenin realized his mistake. Trotsky, however, was not one to admit defeat or go quietly. He charged Stalin with (among other things) making too many compromises with the revolutionary spirit. Trotsky likewise argued that Stalin was uninterested in spreading communism to Germany and China, which was necessary for communism's survival. Service calls Trotsky out on this, saying none of the revolution's leaders believed communism could survive in an isolated state, but that Stalin, following his so-called "Socialism in One Country" thesis, first wanted to consolidate the gains within Russia before trying to export the Revolution. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky blamed his loss in the succession battle on Stalin's greater ruthlessness, and, by 1929, Trotsky found himself expelled from the Soviet Union. "He lost to a man with a superior understanding of Soviet public life," says Service.
Today, Trotsky's defenders whitewash his own ruthless character, preferring to dwell on his extraordinary literary talents, and his prescience with regard to the growing menace of Nazism. Irving Howe describes his writings against Hitlerism as the greatest political polemic written in the 20th century. What's more, they maintain that Trotsky would have murdered far fewer political opponents than Stalin, remembering that Stalin murdered more communists than Hitler.
HOW MIGHT HISTORY have looked had Trotsky succeeded Lenin? "If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased," writes Service, for the simple reason that Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution, would have taken more risks than Stalin in encouraging revolution in Germany and elsewhere. (While we are playing What If, former Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens has pointed out that Trotsky's German revolution would have preempted the Nazis coming to power, and thus not only World War II, but the Holocaust as well.)
Judging from his past deeds, Trotsky would have continued to act with savage ruthlessness, that meant forcing peasants onto collectivized farms -- as he vowed to do -- or ordering the execution of dissidents, crushing the Kronstadt worker and sailor rebellion in 1921 (they demanded, among other rights, freedom of speech and the press), or creating a system of hostage taking during the civil war -- all of which he did do.
The reason so many Western intellectuals, right and left, fell -- and continue to fall -- for Trotsky is they were charmed by his charisma, his intellect, and his literary skills ("His autobiography is magical to read," Service admits), as well as fooled by his obscurantism. What's more, they were desperate for any Soviet alternative to Stalin.
The idea that a humane communism could have come out of Trotskyism is pure romanticism, Service says. Yet, Trotskyites maintain even today that the tragedy of Soviet history lay in Trotsky's failure to win the battle of succession for leadership of the Soviet Union. Service's biography will not convince them otherwise. But for those with an open mind, Trotsky: A Biography shows that in the end, Stalin and Trotsky were blood brothers. Blood being the operative word.
These are the giant brand names that have contacted CONGRESS
to push for more cheap slave like labor.
The Cheesecake Factory, Inc. CVS Caremark Corporation Hallmark Cards, Inc. McDonald's Corporation The Wendy's Company The Walt Disney Company The Coca-Cola Company Johnson & Johnson American Express Company 21st Century Fox Darden Restaurants, Inc (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and others) Liberty Mutual Group, Inc. Allstate Insurance Company Western Union Northwestern Mutual American Airlines Inc. Motorola Solutions, Inc. The Procter Gamble Company (wide range of well-known home and beauty brands) Newell Rubbermaid Inc. AT&T Inc. T-Mobile USA, Inc. Caterpillar Inc. The ADT Corporation Pfizer Inc. Hewlett-Packard Company HP United Parcel Service, Inc. UPS General Electric Company GE Verizon Communications Inc. Pay your phone bill (one dollar short) Marriott International, Inc. Stay somewhere else Hilton Worldwide Find another room Hyatt Hotels Corporation Say no to Hyatt McCormick & Company, Inc. Salt and Pepper Cisco Systems, Inc. A billionaire doesn't need you anymore, let him sail off Quest Diagnostics Incorporated Eaton E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company BNSF Railway Company Shell Oil Company General Mills, Inc. (many well-known food brands) Ingram Industries Inc. Kronos Incorporated Ingersoll Rand Company General Parts Inc. Merck & Co., Inc. United Technologies Corporation Harris Corporation Illinois Tool Works Inc. Sears Holdings Corporation There is a reason that Sears and K-Mart is going broke USG Corporation Archer Daniels Midland Company Destroy people that control your food Johnson Controls, Inc. Lots of people make their stuff Ally Financial Inc. US Foods Univar, Inc. Kiewit Corporation Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. Great company really bad leadership W.W. Grainger, Inc. Too bad, no more money. Avery Dennison Corporation Humana Inc. Novelis, Inc. The Williams Companies, Inc. Avaya Inc. Computer Sciences Corporation Honeywell International Inc. International Paper Company All they do is cut down trees, cut your cash flow to them Dover Corporation Danaher Corporation TRW Automotive Analog Devices, Inc. Ecolab, Inc. Avnet, Inc. White Lodging Corporation Coca-Cola Enterprises, Inc. Simon Property Group Daikin McQuay Americas Continental Grain Company MSC Industrial Direct Co., Inc. Hospira, Inc. Cigna Corporation The ServiceMaster Company Automatic Data Processing, Inc. Bloomin' Brands Inc. Fiserv, Inc. Carolinas HealthCare System SRA International Emerson Rockwell Automation, Inc. Parker Hannifin Corporationm Saint-Gobain Corporation General Dynamics Corporation A. O. Smith Corporation Praxair, Inc. HCA Inc. Eastman Chemical Company ManpowerGroup Fifth Third Bank Pitney Bowes Inc. Express Scripts, Inc. Cardinal Health, Inc. Aleris International, Inc. DTE Energy Company U.S. Steel Corporation Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation Cargill, Incorporated Assurant, Inc. XL Global Services, Inc Texas Instruments Incorporated ATK WESCO International
