Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
This is the fifth year of the Age of Obama. It is the fifth freaking year of a failed president whose only talent is blaming others for his massive failures.
Let’s break those words from Zuniga down:
“The economy is doing poorly.”
That is something that literally every single person who is not a demon-possessed liar and hypocrite without shame (i.e. a Democrat) knows as a fact. Obama promised the world; he has delivered economic manure.
What else does Zuniga say?
“Everything is expensive.”
Well, thanks for noticing that little factoid, Francisco. I’ve written ad nauseum about the Obama Federal Reserve policies that were necessary to “fund” Obama’s reckless and morally and fiscally insane federal spending. We’ve had Quantitative Easing, we’ve had QE2, we’ve had Operation Twist, we’ve had QE3, and now we’re at “QE Forever.” And these policies have basically arbitrarily added zeroes to the money supply computers. As of March of this year, Obama’s chief Fedthug had added over $2 trillion to the money supply – a beyond insane 240 percent increase.
Let me put it this way: when Obama took office from George W. Bush, the Federal Reserve balance sheet was $800 billion; it is now $3,601,523 BILLION under Barack Obama.
An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.
THAT is why we haven’t yet experienced truly catastrophic hyperinflation YET. But the moment we ever actually start to get out of the economic hellhole Obama has dug us into, we will see inflation at levels that will shock and dismay you. You mark my words. And what we’ve now learned is that having become hooked on the hardcore narcotic known as QE crack, we can’t get off of it – because if we try the stock market will crash and people will start to panic.
Nobody’s talking about what that massive devaluation of our currency is going to ultimately cost us. Nobody is talking about the fact that the people who are going to pay the highest tax as a result of this action – and it ISa regressive tax – will be retirees who will see the value of their savings drop even as they look at interest rates and pension funds that pay them nothing. Retirees are not in a position to snort the crack of quantitative easing; they depend mostly on bonds. And the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve have decided to stab the bond market that older investors necessarily depend upon in the heart to artificially inflate the stock market. Until they have to do it again. And again. And of course pretty soon again and again after that.
Commodities like oil and food – which conveniently are being ignored as proof positive that we are already seeing MASSIVE inflation – will continue to go up and up and up (see here and here and here for examples). The fact of the matter is that prices are rising dramatically and HAVE BEENrising dramatically, and what just happened today will sure that they CONTINUE to rise dramatically. And everybody but Obama and the Federal Reserve know it.
And everything I predicted in that article and one I wrote back in 2011 turned out to be right. Except I used the term “QE 4” and Obama’s economic wizards called it “QE Forever” instead. And all the way back in 2010 I said it would fail, as it HAS failed. You need to understand: as I pointed out in May 2011, quantitative easing is the economic equivalent of feeding a diabetic lots of sugar. It is incredibly unhealthy and will ultimately kill the patient, but once you start feeding that sugar you can’t stop or the patient will crash and die for sure, just as Wall Street will crash and die if Obama stops giving them free sugar candy money.
Let me add another group of people to retirees I described above, Francisco: THE POOR. Because most of the poor are on fixed incomes every bit as much as retirees are. And their low wages, their welfare and their food stamps just aint going to keep up with the inflation that has resulted from printing money. When you print money out of thin air, and you’ve got trillions more dollars chasing the same amount of finite resources, the value of those dollars goes down, down, DOWN.
It turns out that “free money” isn’t really so damn free, after all.
You aint seen nothing yet, Francisco. Thanks to Obama, your hell is going to get a lot more hellish.
What else did Francisco tell us? He told us that Obama’s economy was crappy and thanks to Obama’s moral and fiscal idiocy, everything was more expensive now due to inflation. What else did he say?
“With high taxes, we’re not going to be able to pay rent.”
I don’t need to point out which party and which failed president of which damn party is behind all those taxes, of course.
Let’s try to put this in terms that Francisco will understand if he doesn’t already: who owns your house you’re paying that rent on? And what do you think happens when liberal demagogues “tax the rich”??? Here’s what will happen: when Obama and Democrats viciously tax “the rich” who own that house you rent, what’s that high-taxed owner going to do? He’s going to raise your damn rent, THAT’S what he’s going to do. And if you don’t like paying more in rent, you’d better show up with a huge mob of likeminded enraged sufferers with pitchforks and torches to drive Obama out of Washington before he creates another monster and kills again.
But you won’t, will you?
I want you to consider something about Obama’s “housing recovery” within Obama’s “economic recovery.” They’re both radically and wildly FAILED. I want you to consider, Mr. Zuniga, the ramifications of the fact that SIXTY PERCENT OF HOMES SOLD IN 2013 WENT TO CASH BUYERS. Before I point out what that means, let me first point out how connected it is with the radically failed Obama Fed policies that have kept the money printing presses going night and day and day and night:
There was an odd sort of myth floating around the market that the cash buyer crowd was somehow a tiny portion of the market, like a drop of water in the vast ocean of home buying. This delusional dream played into the fantasy that this housing market was naturally rising because of overall household demand when in reality, it is being driven by investors leveraging the artificial low rates created by the Fed. The flood of money from Wall Street has been large. Even anecdotally, it was apparent that cash buyers were driving the market given that housing is a margin driven market. That is, at any given time only a small portion of all homes are on the market for sale. However, an analysis by non-other than Goldman Sachs shows that 60 percent of all 2013 home sales are being driven by cash buyers. That is, the middle class is largely being pushed out of this game and has become the minority in this real estate market.
You see, Mr. Zuniga, these rich people are taking advantage of the crony capitalism (fascism) of Obama that has helped the elite investor class at the expense of the poor. They’re snapping up the homes that YOU’RE going to rent. And then they’re socking you with higher and higher rents. Meanwhile, you’ve got virtually no change to ever own a home thanks to Obama. The American dream is dead meat. And did I mention this is the FIFTH year of the Age of Obama??? But it’s all Bush’s fault, much the way in the Big Brother society of 1984 it was all “Emmanuel Goldstein’s” fault.
Meanwhile, Mr. Zuniga, it’s getting harder and harder for you to even GET a job in Obama’s wildly failed economy. The jobless rate just went down to 7.4%. Hip-hip-hooray. Only it did so as still MORE of the decimated American working class were destroyed into hopelessness at EVER finding a job.
There is an incredibly significant labor measure called the “labor participation rate.” It is the percentage of working-age Americans who actually have a damn JOB.
There’s an article I wrote a little over a year ago that you ought to consider. I detailed then the catastrophic plunge in the rate of Americans who actually have a job in the miserably failed Obama economy during and throughout the Obama regime. At that time, it was the worst it had been in thirty years. And I noted how each year under Obama’s failed Marxist State, it had just gotten worse and worse. As an example, I recorded that in November 2010 – and note this AFTER the so-called “recovery” – the labor participation rate was the worst it had been in 25 years. Which is to say far, FAR worse than anything Bush had ever done, you Democrat ideologues. The next year, by August 2011, it was the worst in 27 years. And by May of 2012, it was the worst due to Obama in 31 years.
Although the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.3% last month — the lowest level since December 2008 — it fell largely for the wrong reason. More discouraged Americans gave up looking for work as the percentage of the population in the labor force dropped for the third consecutive month to its worst point in 35 years.
The unemployment rate has been dropping – which has been as good for Obama politically as it has been catastrophic for the rest of America economically. I predicted a year and a half ago:
At the rate we’re going in Obama’s God damn America, we will have zero percent unemployment and nobody will actually have a damn job.
And, yep, that’s the way we’re headed.
Democrats are demon-possessed bureaucrats. That’s where they get their name from. They claim that the labor participation rate is falling as older baby boomers retire. But that is a LIE FROM HELL. As an example, it is YOUNG ADULTS who are suffering the most due to Obamanomics. People cannot find a job who need to work.
And because of ObamaCare, full-time jobs have been “fundamentally transformed” by Obama into part-time jobs with no health benefits.
When you and the President sought our support for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat. Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.
The letter from these liberal unions points out the obvious fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge about their demonic ObamaCare takeover of healthcare:
First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.
Second, millions of Americans are covered by non-profit health insurance plans like the ones in which most of our members participate. These non-profit plans are governed jointly by unions and companies under
the Taft-Hartley Act. Our health plans have been built over decades by working men and women. Under the ACA as interpreted by the Administration, our employees will treated differently and not be eligible for subsidies afforded other citizens. As such, many employees will be relegated to second-class status and shut out of the help the law offers to for-profit insurance plans.
And finally, even though non-profit plans like ours won’t receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they’ll be taxed to pay for those subsidies. Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies.
You want to know who is killing your dreams, Mr. Zuniga? Democrats.
But you keep voting for them anyway, because you prefer lies and more socialism and more welfare and then more lies and still more socialism and still more welfare, to the truth that would set you free if you were willing to finally act like a man and be determined to stand up on your own two feet and demand an economic system that enables you to do that.
You’re siding with the wrong people, the wrong party, the wrong political philosophy. You’re siding with the people who keep HURTING you. As you’d understand if you stopped and thought about your own words.
You’re one of those people who still idiotically believes that when Obama “gives” you “free stuff,” it’s actually FREE. Let me pop your bubble, Francisco: when ObamaCare taxes insurance companies, taxes drugs, taxes medical devices, and mandates (that means forces) the health industry to pay for all of these “free” benefits such as free birth control and 26-year-olds staying on mom and dad’s health plan, the cost of medical care rises FOR EVERYBODY. And at the same time the quality of health care goes up for EVERYBODY.
And that has had the result that people are getting kicked off health plans rather than all the lies Obama promised.
You don’t understand that everything you and your Democrats want to do – such as force businesses to raise the minimum wage whether they can afford to do so or not, whether they will cut their work forces or not, whether they will be forced to raise prices (which will reduce demand and thus reduce jobs) on poor people who buy from them or not – undermines the economy and hurts the very poor people Democrats dishonestly claim to be trying to help. Back in 2009, I predicted that Obamanomics with its totalitarian dictate on employers to pay higher wages would be a holocaust for minimum wage workers. And I was right. And I just keep being more and more right as Obama’s devastating and disastrous impact on the economy spreads like the cancer that it is.
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, 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. […]
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-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.
Newsmax offers a further description of Clowar-Piven, and raises the very real possibility that Obama not only studied the strategy, but in fact even studied under Richard Cloward:
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 newsmedia to force a re-distribution of the nation’s wealth. It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.
On my own view, Obama has a “win we win, lose we win” strategy. To wit, the Obama administration and the Democrat Party are pursuing incredibly risky policies across the board. If the country and the economy somehow manages to survive these measures (which I would compare to a man surviving a poisoning), Obama and the Democrats will claim victory. If, on the other hand, the entire national system collapses due to these shockingly terrible policies, the liberals believe that a terrified, hungry public will turn to the government for help – and allow the statists to restructure the nation into a completely socialist system.
A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.
The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government.
The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.
The Blaze procured what appears to be a tape of Lerner’s remarks. Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support them. Still, the “destabilization” plan is startling in its specificity, especially coming so close on the heels of the financial crisis.
Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore–the redistribution of wealth and the return of “$17 trillion” stolen from the middle class by Wall Street–is to “destabilize the country.”
Lerner’s plan is to organize a mass, coordinated “strike” on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments–thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.
Lerner’s plan starts by attacking JP Morgan Chase in early May, with demonstrations on Wall Street, protests at the annual shareholder meeting, and then calls for a coordinated mortgage strike.
Lerner also says explicitly that, although the attack will benefit labor unions, it cannot be seen as being organized by them. It must therefore be run by community organizations.
In former SEIU Lerner’s own words at this liberal think-tank event:
Unions are almost dead we cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also and if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability
Every time there is a crisis in the world they say, well, the markets are stable.
I have repeatedly documented and explained how the 2008 financial crisis was created almost ENTIRELY by Democrats who repeatedly refused to allow Bush or Republicans in Congress to do ANYTHING to avert a disaster they saw coming:
With that accusation in mind, here is a liberal SEIU guy – and let’s not forget what Obama had to say about his intimate relationship with SEIU –
Obama to SEIU: “Your agenda is my agenda.” And as you shall see, their “agenda” which is being pursued by proxy is to implode America.
– saying the following.
The recorded words of now former senior level SEIU official Stephen Lerner at Pace University:
“Unions are almost dead we cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also and if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability.
Every time there is a crisis in the world they say, well, the markets are stable.
What’s changed in America is the economy doing well has nothing to do with the rest of us
They figured out that they don’t need us to be rich they can do very well in a global market without us so what does this have to do with community and labor organizing more.
We need to figure out in a much more through direct action more concrete way how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital for how corporations operate.
The thing about a boom and bust economy is it is actually incredibly fragile.
There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up.
If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.
Students have a trillion dollar debt
We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new financial crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything.
In other words, I have often contended that Democrats created the 2008 crisis. And I literally have them ON TAPEstrategizing about trying to do the same thing again.
I’ve directly stated that ObamaCare was an example of a Cloward and Piven-style strategy that would bankrupt America and thus create the need for the government to nationalize and take over the entire health care system.
The Obama administration said will implement parts of its health care law, even if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down major portions of the legislation.
The high court is set to release its decision in coming days, and it may strike down the whole law or just the individual mandate that requires Americans to buy health care insurance.
If only the mandate is struck down, that will still leave in place a major expansion of Medicaid and federal tax credits to help people purchase insurance.
Critics say those policies will lead to a huge increase in the federal debt.
But the administration said it is moving forward to put those policies in place no matter what the court decides.
“We do believe it’s constitutional, and we … hope and expect that’s the decision the court will render,” senior adviser David Plouffe told ABC News on Sunday.
“We obviously will be prepared for whatever decision the court renders,” he said.
Administration officials have declined to discuss contingency plans to avoid creating the impression that the president is preparing for a high court rebuke.
If ObamaCare gets struck down, Obama – who is now being described as an “imperial president” and “another Nixon” even by the left – is going to simply ignore the Supreme Court and abrogate the power of Congress and enact it anyway.
I’ve also repeatedly pointed out that Barack Hussein Obama is a raw, naked fascist. There is no question that Obama has disregarded both Congress and the Supreme Court and imposed himself as an emperor. Consider that Obama made what he called “recess appointments” when Congress by its own Democrat Party-passed rules wasn’t even in recess; consider how Obama issued waivers to the No Child Left Behind LAW if states followed Obama’s policies instead; consider Obama declaring that he would simply ignore constitutionally passed by Congress and signed by the President such as the Defense of Marriage Act; consider how Obama first forced loans to campaign contributors at green firms such as Solyndra and then pressured the Solyndra Board to hold off on layoffs until it was more politically convenient for him; consider how Obama has outright refused any and all oversight by the Congressional Oversight Committee on matters such as Fast and Furious. All that and more in addition to what he just did ignoring the LAW on illegal immigration and imposing his own substitute for binding law by act of executive tyranny. And I was right about that, too. But let’s stick to ObamaCare for the time being.
What’s going to happen if the Supreme Court strikes down ObamaCare and Obama ignores the Constitution, the rule of law, the Supreme Court and Congress and imposes it anyway is this: it will force the private insurance industry to either go bankrupt (as he also verbally promised to do to energy providers once, for what that’s worth) or they will be forced out of the industry altogether.
If – or we can now still say “when” given what Democrats are saying Obama is going to do – that happens, the health care delivery system will completely implode and either millions of Americans will literally die deaths caused by medical neglect or the government will be “forced” to step in and nationalize health care.
I say “forced” in quotes because it will be analogous to Adolf Hitler being “forced” to attack Poland after fabricating a ruse of a Polish attack to rhetorically justify his action. Obama will have fabricated the very conditions that would “force” him to take this action.
I state as a fact that Democrats have degenerated into the sort of weasels who will deliberately create economic or medial catastrophes and then impose their government fascism while blaming the very opposition that tried – albeit at times gutlessly – to prevent the collapse that Democrats created.
Richard Andrew Cloward would have been thrilled at the impending collapse. Frances Fox Piven is still calling for the Arab Spring- style popular uprising and its accompanying reign of terror complete with violence, and it’s looking more and more like she’ll be getting her wish.
It is past obvious that this country can not survive as a democratic republic with this “imperial president” in power. It is also past obvious that if Americans re-elect Obama this year, it will be “fundamentally transformed” from the most powerful nation in the history of the world to just another banana republic by the time he leaves office.
Obama’s campaign bully brigade rides again
by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2012
They’re baaaaaaack. Barack Obama’s election-year goon squad kicked into high gear this week by kicking the president’s fiercest opponents in the teeth and targeting their pocketbooks. Returning to bully business as usual, the Obama campaign launched a brazen salvo against two prominent conservative critics and their legions of private citizen donors.
Let’s be clear (to use Obama’s favorite phrase): This is not just the politics of personal destruction. It’s a vendetta of campaign finance destruction. Under the guise of “disclosure,” Team Obama is exploiting the power of high government office to intimidate lawful, peaceful contributors who support limited-government causes.
In a scathing fundraising e-mail appeal, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina name-checked wealthy free-market philanthropists Charles and David Koch — along with a growing movement of grassroots conservatives who have freely, voluntarily and legally given money to the Koch-founded nonprofit activist group Americans for Prosperity and its sister foundation. As a speaker at several AFP events over the past three years, I’ve met thousands of like-minded, hardworking Americans who support their work at the local, state and federal levels.
The Koches’ sins are to 1. follow tax law and protect the identities of donors to their charitable organizations, and 2. exercise their free speech by funding advocacy ads informing the public about the Obama administration’s jobs toll destruction and failed green energy “investments.” (Their most recent TV spot zeroed in on the taxpayer-funded Solyndra bankruptcy.)
“When you attempt to drown out (Americans’) voices through unlimited, secret contributions to pursue a special-interest agenda that conflicts with what’s best for our nation, you must expect some scrutiny of your actions,” Messina railed. The threat of scrutiny was backed by Obama himself, whose official campaign Twitter account directed 12 million-plus followers this week to “add your name to demand that the Koch brothers make their donors public.”
But Obama’s own former top officials run a so-called super PAC (Priorities USA) that also maintains nonprofit status and subsidizes advocacy ads while protecting its donor base. The White House, of course, is mum on the unlimited, secret contributions that Obama is now encouraging wealthy liberals and lobbyists to make in pursuit of his own special-interest agenda — i.e., re-election.
The president’s flapping lips are also sealed when it comes to applying his disclosure standards to the shadowy, George Soros-backed Center for American Progress, which has supplied the Obama administration with countless top policy staffers, including special Department of Health and Human Services assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. CAP founder John Podesta was Obama’s transition chief, overseeing the backroom process of rewarding friends and allies with plum positions. CAP flacks shrugged off conflict-of-interest questions: “We respect the privacy of supporters who have chosen not to make their donations public,” CAP spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said.
As for respecting the privacy rights of Obama’s foes? Not so much.
It seems to me no small coincidence that this disclosure charade comes just as numerous tea party organizations are reporting that the Internal Revenue Service has targeted them for audits. According to Colleen Owens of the Richmond (Va.) Tea Party, several fiscal-conservative activist groups in Virginia, Hawaii, Ohio and Texas have received a spate of IRS letters. The missives demand extensive requests to identity volunteers, board members and … donors.
This is B.O.’s M.O. His bully brigade did the same to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its donors during the November 2010 midterms as payback for the organization’s ads opposing the federal health care takeover. And in 2008, Obama’s allies at a Soros-tied outfit sent out “warning” letters to 10,000 top GOP givers “hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.” Witch hunt leader Tom Matzzie, formerly of Soros-funded MoveOn.org, bragged of “going for the jugular” and said the warning letter was just the first step, “alerting donors who might be considering giving to right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.”
Matzzie also advertised a $100,000 bounty for dirt on conservative political groups “to create a sense of scandal around the groups” and dissuade donors from giving money. The effort was cheered by Accountable America adviser Judd Legum, founder of Think Progress — the same group that led the attack on the Chamber of Commerce and is run by Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Just as with the Obama super PAC led by former White House officials, Matzzie’s group “Accountable America” was a 501(c)(4) nonprofit entity that shielded the identity of its donors.
Oh, and remember this? In 2008, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, both Obama promoters, threatened to bring criminal libel charges against anyone who spread what they considered “false criticisms” of their Dear Leader.
It is no small exaggeration to conclude that Team Obama’s dead aim is to chill conservative speech and criminalize conservative dissent. All Americans for prosperity must push back with one voice:
No, you can’t.
But keep reading to find out about how pathologically secretive Obama’s own supporters are:
“This Is Our DC” activists hold “We are the 99%” and mix with “Occupy DC” protesters during a protest outside the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. (Reason TV)
This is the first in a Daily Caller investigative series.
The politically aggressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has quietly created a national network of at least eight community-organizing groups, some of which function alongside the Occupy Wall Street movement, a Daily Caller investigation shows.
Incorporated by the SEIU as local non-profits, the groups are waging concerted local political campaigns to publicly attack conservative political figures, banks, energy companies and other corporations.
Each local group has portrayed itself as an independent community organization not tied to any special interest. But they were founded, incorporated, and led by SEIU personnel.
In reality, they are creations of the wealthy and influential labor union, amounting to a secret network of new SEIU front groups.
On two occasions in 2011, approximately 30 Our DC protesters descended on the congressional office of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The first of those two December efforts was part of a “Take Back the Capital” campaign orchestrated by union officials and coinciding with an Occupy DC rally.
A source told the Daily Caller that while African-American and Hispanic protesters sat in McConnell’s office, two Caucasian women from Our DC directed the protesters from the hallway. The staffers called reporters, operated laptops and posted messages to Twitter.
That event was promoted through a “99% in DC” website, which Internet Web server records indicate was managed by the union. But Our DC activists were quick to advise local media outlets not to confuse them with the Occupy movement.
Still, Washington activists themselves reported on an “Occupy K Street” rally later that same weekend in which Occupy DC and Our DC groups marched side by side.
Other protest events organized by Our DC have targeted House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf.
In the months since Occupy DC began growing in numbers and influence, Our DC has cooperated with that movement at several protest rallies.
Another was the series of demonstrations against the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. At that event, Our DC members wearing the group’s t-shirts carried “We are the 99%” signs alongside Occupy DC protesters.
A YouTube video titled “Occupy CPAC” shows an “Our DC member speak[ing]” through a megaphone in front of several “99%” signs.
Another video, shot at the same location and published by The Huffington Post, shows a giant “Occupy United” banner in front of protesters waving identical “99%” signs.
It’s just weird how Obama is capable of demonizing his opponents for acting like Obama’s supporters – especially given the fact that Obama’s opponents are FAR more ethical than Obama’s supporters.
The mainstream media would never make this connection (at least, not until a Republican is president again), but let it be known that the slaughter of the 30-year long bond was the DIRECT RESULT of Barack Obama saying he will veto any bill that seeks to balance the federal budget.
Obama wants reckless spending until America financially implodes. Investors are going to get wise to the fact that there won’t BE a 30-year Treasury bond in thirty years. Because there won’t be a viable United States to make good on it.
Just because someone is dead set on making Apple the only flight to safety in the world (and Gold of course, but unlike the iPad one can’t really eat this particular tradition), around the time (10 minutes ago) Obama threatened he would veto the Republican proposed vote to raise the debt ceiling coupled with a cap on spending and balanced budget amendment to the constitution, the selling off spilled over to Treasurys, which as the chart below demonstrates are broadly lower across the curve, but most emphasized at the 30 Year spot, which as Russ Certo says (see below) is being “dragged to the slaughter house.” Alas, judging by bank trading today the 2s30s steepening is completely irrelevant for bank stocks, for the simple reason that i) nobody needs any new mortgages and ii) nobody actually pays their mortgages. This is the second day since last week in which there is coordinated selling in stocks and bonds. Expect much more bond weakness with each day there is no bond deal.
Commenting on the move, Gleacher’s Russ Certo told Bloomberg that “vigilantes make a symbolic statement” about debt ceiling negotiations. “It’s the issue most sensitive to government ineptitude” Certo says of 30-yr bond “It’s all about the long bond as the 10-yr is being dragged to the slaughter house.” We couldn’t have said it better.
It’s long past time to realize that Barack Obama is an enemy to business, he is an enemy to the U.S. economy. And either Obama goes or America goes.
I’ve been pointing out that business leaders have predicted that Barack Obama would destroy the U.S. economy. I can literally quote myself quoting myself quoting those business leaders on that. From my February 13, 2009 article titled, As Economy Tanks Under Obama, CEOs, Investors Say, “We TOLD You So”:
And what is causing this incredible momentum to the economic meltdown under Obama’s watch?
People are most concerned about jobs right now; maybe they should stop listening to mainstream media ideologues and start listening to the people who actually create jobs:
Chief ExecutiveMagazine’s most recent polling of 751 CEOs shows that GOP presidential candidate John McCain is the preferred choice for CEOs. According to the poll, which is featured on the cover of Chief Executive’s most recent issue, by a four-to-one margin, CEOs support Senator John McCain over Senator Barack Obama.Moreover, 74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.
“The stakes for this presidential election are higher than they’ve ever been in recent memory,” said Edward M. Kopko, CEO and Publisher of Chief Executive magazine. “We’ve been experiencing consecutive job losses for nine months now. There’s no doubt that reviving the job market will be a top priority for the incoming president. And job creating CEOs repeatedly tell us that McCain’s policies are far more conducive to a more positive employment environment than Obama’s.”
“Disastrous for the country.” That doesn’t sound good. And that’s about as optimistic as the CEO’s get about Barack Obama:
“I’m not terribly excited about McCain being president, but I’m sure that Obama, if elected, will have a negative impact on business and the economy,” said one CEO voicing his lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, but particularly Obama.
In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.
“Bankrupt the country within three years.” There. You want socialism, you can have it. “Spread the wealth around” so that country itself ultimately becomes as broke as the defaulting homeowners and the defaulting mortgage houses we keep hearing about.
The Chief Executive Officers were very clear in their assessment: an election of Barack Obama would result in an economic disaster. And don’t think that a significant part right now of the terrible climate for the economy, and for business and jobs, is who is running the show.
Obama’s disastrous economic policies would “bankrupt the country within three years.” And here we are, two years and seven months later, facing default. We’re right on schedule. And the CEOs had the economic understanding to recognize that it would ALL be Obama’s fault.
Now, the only thing that Democrats are skilled in (to put it the other way, they are incompetent at everything else), is demonization. Democrats know how to demonize, demagogue, fearmonger and backstab better than anyone on the planet, bar none.
But business experts PREDICTED we would be in this situation; and they well understood and continue to understand who is causing this crisis: Barack Hussein Obama.
This is why I have been so angry. When I heard those Jeremiah Wright tapes (the racist, Marxist, anti-American “reverend” whom Obama called his “spiritual mentor” for over 20 years), I knew that Barack Obama was a truly evil man. You don’t sit in a toxic, poisonous, hateful environement like that for that long if you aren’t genuinely evil yourself. And I knew that we were headed for “God damn America.” It was as though I had had a vivid vision of the future – culminating in the implosion and collapse of the country that I have loved and served.
John Edwards ran a campaign of “two Americas” in 2004 and again in 2008. This particularly disgusting species of vermin could have been our president; he certainly could have been our vice president.
Now decent Americans know they would NEVER want to belong to “John Edwards’ America” if there was any possible other one to belong to. The man is pure slime, as are the “values” he ran on.
John Edwards was right, though: there REALLY ARE “two Americas” being fought over right now. They are the United States of America that our founding fathers fought for and created based on a profound Judeo-Christian view of the world, versus the Union of Soviet Socialist States of America dreamed of by the left. The former has an economic basis of free market capitalism; the latter has an economic basis of a hybrid mixture of crony capitalism (i.e. fascism) and communism. The former is based on individual liberties balanced by duties based on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition; the latter is based on a Marxist/fascist notion of statism balanced by nothing but their own lust for power.
At a rally in New Jersey protesting Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s deal to reform New Jersey’s state pension system, a union leader charged Christie with acting like a Nazi. And not any ordinary Nazi, but Adolf Hitler himself.
“Good afternoon brothers and sisters. Welcome to Nazi Germany,” Communications Workers of America District 1 Vice President Christopher Shelton is seen raving at a Thursday rally in a video posted on YouTube.
“We have Adolf Christie and his two generals trying to make New Jersey Nazi Germany.”
After ranting more about “Adolf Christie,” the YouTube video shows Shelton comparing the pension battle in New Jersey to World War II.
“Brothers and sisters, this is not going to be an easy fight,” he shrieked. “It took World War II to get rid of the last Adolf Hitler. It is going to take World War III to get rid of Adolf Christie. Are you ready for World War III?”
Rally attendees are seen wildly cheering Shelton’s speech in the video.
There’s a couple of major problems with Christopher Shelton’s thesis: one is that Adolf Hitler was a socialist: “NAZI” stood for “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party“; and the second is that it was Adolf Hitler and those who thought like him who started that terrible war. Just like the REAL Nazis in Shelton and the leftists who think like him are angling to start the NEXT world war.
When you look at the Nazi Party platform, you see hardened socialism all over it:
The abolition of unearned income;
Nationalization of trusts;
Inclusion into profit-sharing;
Increase in old-age pensions;
Creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class;
Aguarian reform, which included the siezing of land without compensation;
State control of education;
Creation of a “folk” army to supplant or replace the regular army;
State control of the press
Leftwing socialist is in the Nazis’ own words:
– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:
– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.
– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
You look at this platform and you explain to me how “the National Socialist American Workers Party” wouldn’t be the DEMOCRATS.
“I am convinced that we cannot possibly dispense with the trades unions. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation.”
Read up on the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF): “DAF membership was theoretically voluntary, but any workers in any area of German commerce or industry would have found it hard to get a job without being a member.” That is NOT the “right-to-work” policies of conservatives; IT IS THE UNION AGENDA OF LIBERALS. Read up on the Obama NLRB lawsuit against Boeing for daring to open a plant in a non-union right to work state and explain how we’re not seeing the same story all over again. Obama is dictating (like the dictator he is) to a private company while unions say “if you aint union, then you don’t get no job.”
Nietzsche – a hero of Nazis AND leftists ever since – put it best. He pointed out that the artist was not only the creator of beautiful objects but of values. He pointed out that cultural change requires artistic change: “Change of values – that is a change of creators.” And this change to new values had to involve the breaking of old values. As Nietzsche put it, “Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.” Destroying the old order and giving birth to the new attracted ALL the cutting-edge leftists of the day.
Homosexuals, artists, and all the other leftists and leftist movements of the day joyfully joined Hitler. But once Hitler gained power and forged his own social order, many of these began to encounter brutal censorship. Why? Simply because when these people and movements were attacking the old order, they were useful, but once Hitler began to impose his own order, they who attacked order became a threat to be repressed. To put it in other words, they were hung on their own petard.
To whatever extent that Hitler crushed the trade unions that had eagerly helped him gain power, he crushed many other useful idiots the same way. That participation in their own destruction is part of the ultimate death-wish that is liberalism. We’re seeing it now as liberals routinely support Islamic radicals who would gleefully murder every single one of these tools the moment they gain real power.
That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left. If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS. They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda. They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.
And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.
The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America. Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example. Whad did she say of the oil companies?
“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”
THAT’S what Hitler did, too. Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has repeatedly done.
Here are some pictures from the latest May Day rally, along with a brief description of what is going on. For the record, this is from an email that was forwarded to me. I did not write it or generate the pictures, but could not provide a “link”:
When I tell people that public political rallies are
more and more being led by communists and socialists, most folks simply don’t
believe me. Aw, come on, you’re just giving decent protesters an extreme
label, they say. No, actually, I’m not: The communists freely and proudly
declare their affiliation.
And the SEIU has no problem marching arm-in-arm
with them.
“Smash Capitalism” is a slogan the SEIU apparently
endorses — or at least doesn’t mind marching behind.
In case you think the
SEIU is some peripheral out-of-the-mainstream organization:
The SEIU devoted $28 million to
Obama’s campaign, making the
SEIU “the organization that
spent the most to help Barack Obama get elected president.” Furthermore, who is Obama’s favorite White House guest and one of his
closest confidants?
The individual who has visited the Obama White House the
most: SEIU President Andy Stern, who has visited
53 times.
Obama is closely linked with the SEIU.
The SEIU is closely
linked with communists.
You do the math.
Did I say communists? Sorry, I meant Communists (with a capital “C”).
Note how the
Communists that day (like the women on the right in this photo) carried solid
red flags symbolizing their ideology. Keep that in mind as you view the next
photo…
One of the SEIU leaders picked up a Communist flag and
led a contingent of rank-and-file SEIU members. Everyone was OK with
that.
The way you can identify the SEIU members in all these
pictures: They’re the ones in purple t-shirts carrying blue-and-yellow
signs.
So, as you can see, the communists and the union
members intermingled as the march progressed.
In case you were wondering what
the SEIU was saying during all of this, here’s a video of the SEIU
chanting “Legalization or REVOLUTION!” Clear enough?
And it wasn’t just the SEIU at the march — other
“normal” unions like the AFL-CIO were on hand as well.
There were plenty of
teachers’ unions attending too, and they brought along many of their public
school students for some good old-fashioned communist indoctrination,.
Most of the idiots in the US who walk around with Che
buttons or Che shirts do so simply because they foolishly think he’s “cool.”
These hardcore communists carry his image not because he’s “cool,” but because
he was one of the most radical revolutionaries who ever lived. Right up there
with Lenin, apparently.
In order to have a more “civil dialogue” with their
political opponents, the marchers made a puppet of a demonic Statue of Liberty
aligned with the “Tea Bag Party.”
OK, I guess Hitler comparisons are off the table for
now — too many people have called it taboo. So what’s second best? The
Devil!
Tell me the honest truth: If the Tea Party had marched in a rally
behind a banner held up by fascists or neo-Nazis, don’t you think it would have
been national news? But the nation’s biggest Obama-supporting political
organization marched behind banners like these, and not a peep about it in the
media. Hmmmm….
Until recently, the average American has regarded
fascists and communists as equally noxious and equally malignant. As well they
should have. But the drive these days by the left side of the spectrum is to
make communism and socialism somewhat less remarkable and more palatable. For
two years they angrily denied the Tea Party accusation that Obama’s policies and
supporters had a socialist bent. But in recent months, as the accusation had
started to gain traction, the new leftist tactic has become: “What’s so bad
about socialism after all? You’re demonizing a very popular and respectable
ideology!”
These are people with no morals beyond the morality of fascism. They want to impose their will on you. They want to take what is yours and give it to themselves. They want to make the state god while THEY run that state; and then force you to come to them and devote yourself to “the state” in order to have a job, health care, food, life itself.
The beast is coming. And when he comes, Democrats will be the Party that cheers him and votes for him.
The Democrat Party has become the party of genuine evil in America. A vote for Democrats has become a vote for hell itself.
Which of these “two Americas” is fascist? The one that wants to kill America and impose a totalitarian system in its place, or the one that is trying to embrace the vision of our founding fathers just short of way too late?
Update, June 20: The overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled New Jersey Senate just agreed with Governor Chris Christie on the reforms that he was called a “Nazi” for proposing. If you want to see the Nazis in the story, look at Christopher Shelton, look at his union and look at the Democrat Party that is controlled by these unions. THAT’S where you’ll find all the Nazis.
The White House has been hiding behind the assertion that the National Labor Relations Board is an “independent” agency, and that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the lawsuit attacking Boeing for building a new plant in right-to-work state South Carolina:
Q Boeing CEO Jim McNerney, who chairs the President’s Export Council, said the National Labor Relations Board suit against his company for building a plant in a right-to-work state is a fundamental assault on capitalism. I’m wondering is the President aware of the issue, and does he think the government should be involved in how businesses allocate capital or resources?MR. CARNEY: Well, it’s obviously been in the news, so we are aware of it, but I would refer any questions about it to the NLRB because it is an independent agency, and we do not get involved in particular enforcement matters of independent agencies.
Q The President has weighed in on outside issues before, though. I mean is this something — it’s also coming from someone who is chairing the Export Council, who’s saying this is hurting job creation.
MR. CARNEY: I don’t have a reaction to this from the President. And I think the fact that he’s weighed in on outside issues doesn’t mean that he will weigh in on an independent agency’s enforcement action.
Carney then changed the subject to tout the President’s record on the auto industry and hail the growth of manufacturing.
Well, first of all, let me take a moment to ask a question: why is Obama dodging this issue rather than claiming credit for it? Because it’s wrong; it is un-American; and this radical hard-core union agenda action will hurt the economy by forcing businesses to locate overseas. If they can’t build factories where they want to in America, then they will go overseas to where they have the freedoms our soldiers fought for. Amazingly, communist China is actually far more free market and pro-capitalist than the Obama administration.
Now let me get to my main point.
Like absolutely everything else from this lying president and this lying White House, BULLCRAP. Not only is it absolutely true that Obama has weighed in on virtually every issue under the sun – including bizarre issues such as the “stupidity” of the Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts – but we now have it in WRITING that the NLRB is anything but an “independent agency.”
Let’s take a look at just how “independent” the NLRB actually is. First, we find that the agency’s top officials are literally partisan political hacks out there taking partisan political sides to attack Obama’s Republican opponents. Then – given that obvious appearance of any lack of “independence” – the White House’s OMB literally orders the NLRB to take down the attacking memo and demands that they clear everything with them first. Which actually goes about as far as you can go to demonstrate that the National Labor Relations Board – which Obama PACKED with radical leftist union types by bypassing even a Democrat-controlled US Senate – is marching to Obama’s drumbeat. And then, if that isn’t enough, when the NLRB did Obama’s bidding to take down the partisan hack memo, the notice basically said, “The content in this statement has been removed. For further information on this subject, please see what our Messiah Obama says, as we’re really just his minions anyway.”
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had an independent agency take down a stinging press release aimed at the House Republicans’ budget proposal, according to a newly released document.
In an e-mail obtained by The Hill under a Freedom of Information Act request, an OMB official told a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officer she should have checked before sending out a Feb. 18 press release titled, “Top NLRB officials respond to House budget proposal.”
The NLRB statement slammed what was then the GOP’s proposed continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2011.
On the day the labor board’s statement was published, Michael Lazzeri, OMB’s examiner for the NRLB, wrote to Shanti Ananthanayagam, the labor board’s budget officer, and asked her to take it down.
“In case didn’t get my vmail. That press release needs to come down from your website. In the future you guys have to clear that stuff with us,” Lazzeri wrote to Ananthanayagam in the e-mail.
The press release quoted NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman and Lafe Solomon, the board’s acting general counsel, as saying the funding cuts would lead to agency delays and “would occur at a great cost to working people and responsible employers trying to survive in this difficult economic climate, and would have the potential to destabilize relations between labor and business.”
They also said the proposed budget cuts would reduce the agency’s annual funding by 18 percent, or $50 million, which could lead to furloughs for all of the labor board’s 1,665 employees for 55 workdays.
The press release was subsequently taken down. In its place on the labor board’s website is a bland statement that says, “The content in this statement has been removed. For further information on this subject, please see the President’s Statement of Administration Policy (SAP) regarding the budget, which can be found on the OMB website.”
OMB asking the labor board to take down the press release was first reported by The Huffington Post.
Asked why the press release was taken down, a spokeswoman for the labor board referred questions to OMB.
“In accordance with longstanding clearance procedures in Circular A-11, agencies are asked to clear such comments through OMB. In this case, the language on budget-related legislation had not been cleared, so it was taken down,” said Meg Reilly, an OMB spokeswoman.
Circular A-11 is a memo sent by OMB to federal agencies regarding the president’s budget proposal. The memo states that communications to Congress or the media about the president’s budget proposal need to receive clearance from OMB before being sent out, including “proposed press releases relating to the president’s budget.”
Despite the fears the labor board expressed in the original press release, the Republican-proposed budget cuts for the agency did not come to pass.
In the compromise deal to prevent the government shutdown, the labor board’s annual $282 million budget received only a 0.2 percent haircut — a reduction in line with other administrative agencies. The cut took $500,000 from the NRLB’s fiscal year 2011 funding.
Further, an amendment to the continuing resolution by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) that would have defunded the labor board entirely failed to pass earlier this year. Sixty House Republicans voted against axing the labor board’s budget in a 176-250 vote.
The agency has recently become a source of controversy. NRLB’s April 20 complaint against Boeing for allegedly retaliating against union workers has incensed GOP lawmakers and business groups.
Under scrutiny is Boeing’s decision to establish a second production line for its new Dreamliner jet in South Carolina — a right-to-work state that generally prohibits mandatory union membership or dues — instead of in Washington state, where Boeing has unionized operations.
The labor board cited statements made by Boeing executives expressing fear that work stoppages could hurt production as the reason the complaint was issued.
Republicans in both the House and Senate have threatened to hold up Solomon’s nomination as general counsel over the Boeing complaint and are pressing the NRLB to hand over the documents that explain the reasoning behind it.
Democrats have defended the labor board from the attacks. They say it is an independent agency that is performing a law enforcement action and should be free of political pressure.
The complaint is set to go before an administrative law judge at a June 14 hearing in Seattle.
And to the extent that Obama is dishonest about his deep involvement in hard-core leftist union agenda issues, that aint a good thing.
Obama, the White House, and Democrats in general ROUTINELY lie. These are the type of people who disingenuously, falsely and maliciously attack Republicans with “Mediscare” tactics when in fact Republicans are trying to save Medicare while Democrats are intent on seeing the system collapse into total bankruptcy while they attack anybody who tries to prevent that documented future fact from happening.
I can understand why this fascist president wouldn’t want the American people to really know what he stands for and what he is doing to destroy their way of life.
I rather routinely call Obama the F-word. No, not that F-word (although the ability to resist doing so is dwindling); the other F-word: Fascist. Barack Obama is a fascist.
I have had quite a few liberals fixate on this word, and – while ignoring the rest of my arguments – proceed to give me a lecture about how my extremism undermines my positions and arguments (which they don’t bother to consider).
I’d like to respond to that. At length.
There are many who would argue that if a politician is not as rabid as Adolf Hitler, that one cannot use this label of “fascist” – at least not unless the target is a Republican (see below). Barack Obama is not a “dictator,” these would argue. He hasn’t launched the world into global war and he hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews (at least, he hasn’t yet). So he can’t be a “fascist.” This argument fails on two parts. First of all, by such a metric, Benito Mussolini wouldn’t be a “fascist” either (except for the “dictator” part). One of the reasons it is hard to have an easy definition of “fascist” is because fascism has taken a different character in every country and culture in which it has been embraced. Hitler is not the norm or standard of fascism; he is merely the most extreme example of its virulence and danger. Secondly, even if we were to take a Hitler as our example, let us realize that Adolf Hitler was a very cunning politician who managed to gain power in a Germany that was THE most sophisticated, educated and scientific nation and culture of its day. What I am asserting is that if an Adolf Hitler were to run for the presidency of the United States in 2012, he would run a platform that we could very easily label as “hope and change,” he would demagogue his adversaries as being the cause for the nation’s plight, he would lie both cynically and outrageously to win votes and he would then proceed to push the country as far as he possibly could toward his agenda. And so here, from the outset, I am claiming that the suggestion that either Barack Obama or anyone else does not qualify as a “fascist” simply because he or she can’t be directly compared to Adolf Hitler is nothing but a straw man.
The question thus becomes, what is fascism, and then it is what is Obama steering us toward?
THE WORD “fascism” is used broadly on the left as a term of abuse. Sometimes it is used to refer to any repressive government, whatever its political form. Most commonly on the left in the U.S., it is used to describe any Republican government–in particular, any Republican government or candidate on the eve of a presidential election.
As an experiment, I typed the words “Bush fascist” and then “Obama fascist” sans quotes. I got 3,280,000 Google hits for Bush fascist (and keep in mind an awful lot of hits would have vanished in the last 11 years as domains purged articles or simply ceased to exist) versus only 2,490,000 for Obama. That means liberals were over 45% more likely to call Bush a fascist than conservatives have been to call Obama one.
And when these liberals express their outrage that I would dare call Obama a fascist and thus lower the discourse, I invariably ask them just where the hell they were when their side was teeing off on Bush for eight unrelenting years of Bush derangement syndrome??? It was rare indeed to see a liberal excoriate his fellow liberals for demonizing the president of the United States.
With all due respect, the left started this form of “discourse.” They turned it into an art form. And how dare these hypocrites dare to tell me not to do unto Obama as they did unto Bush???
That might only be a rhetorical argument, as two wrongs clearly don’t make a right. But it remains a powerful one. Liberals have forfeited any moral right to criticize conservatives for using their own tactics against them.
But I don’t simply call Obama a fascist because liberals called Bush one. I call him one because he has exhibited all kinds of fascistic tendencies, which I shall in time describe.
But fascism has a far more precise definition. Historically, fascism is a far-right movementof the middle classes (shopkeepers, professionals, civil servants) who are economically ruined by severe economic crisis and driven to “frenzy.”
In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky, fascism brings “to their feet those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them…and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”
I have no doubt that the irony of these words were entirely lost to the “Socialist Worker” who wrote the article. But allow me to illuminate it for you: think of the most infamous fascists of all time, the Nazis. What did the word “Nazi” stand for? It was the “acronym for the ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’.” Let me try that again, just in case you missed these precious little details: “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party.”
But ask the “Socialist Workers” and they’ll assure you that the “Socialist Workers Party” had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Socialist Workers. Because that would certainly be awkward, wouldn’t it???
It is rather fascinating that “Socialist Worker” would cite as his authority on fascism and who should be labeled as a “fascist” the Marxist thinker . Allow me to provide one counter statement which is based not on the “brilliant words” of a Marxist, but on the plain simple facts:
“Part of the problem in recognizing fascism is the assumption that it is conservative. [Zeev] Sternhell has observed how study of the ideology has been obscured by “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism.” Marxism defines fascism as its polar opposite. If Marxism is progressive, fascism is conservative. If Marxism is left wing, fascism is right wing. If Marxism champions the proletariat, fascism champions the bourgeoisie. If Marxism is socialist, fascism is capitalist.
The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
So depending on Leon Trotsky or any other Marxist-inspired academic who merely parrots “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism” has rather serious intellectual drawbacks. And yet that is largely what we get. Far too many American academics wouldn’t be so obvious as to use the phrase, “In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky,” but they give his ideas, theories and talking points total credence, nonetheless. The term “useful idiots” was literally coined to describe these Western “intellectuals.” And their being “useful idiots” is every bit as true today as it ever was in the past.
Consider the REAL “polar opposite”: American conservatives are capitalists, not socialists. They demand a limited national/federal government, not a massive centrally planned state as does socialism, communism and fascism. They prefer the federalist idea of powerful states’ rights against a weakened federal government, not some all-powerful Führer. And to try to force conservatives into some Nazi mold invariably means either creating straw men arguments or citing irrelevant facts (such as that conservatives favor a large military just like the Nazis did, as though virtually every single communist state does not similarly favor a large military “just like the Nazis did”). If you want an all-powerful national government that gets to decide who wins and who loses, if you want to see a system where you have to come to your government for assistance and resources with all manner of strings attached rather than being allowed to depend on yourself, your family and your community, you should embrace the political left, not the right.
By the way, another favorite idiotic red herring for liberals asserting that “Nazism was right wing” was that the Nazis hated the admittedly left wing communists. But consider the fact that Coke hates Pepsi and Barbie Doll makers hate Bratz Doll makers. Are we supposed to believe that Coke is the opposite of Pepsi as opposed to water, milk or orange juice? The fact of the matter is that Nazis and Soviet Communists hated each other because both movements had a global agenda of totalitarian dominion, and both movements were competing for the same rabidly left wing converts.
Pardon me for the following insult, but the only people who believe garbage arguments like these are ignorant fools who live in a world of straw men. Even if they have the title “PhD.” after their names.
It is for that reason that I can state categorically that Marxism and fascism are not “polar opposites” at all. They are merely two potentially complementary species of socialism. That is why China has been able to easily weave blatantly fascistic (national socialist/corporatist) elements into its Maoist communism. It is also why Joseph Stalin was able to go from being an international socialist (i.e. a communist) and then appeal to nationalism (i.e., national socialism or “fascism”) when he needed to fight Hitler, only to switch back to “international socialism” after the war, as a few lines from Wikipedia on “Russian nationalism” point out:
The newborn communist republic under Vladimir Lenin proclaimed internationalism as its official ideology[4]. Russian nationalism was discouraged, as were any remnants of Imperial patriotism, such as wearing military awards received before Civil War….
The 1930s saw the evolution of the new concept of Soviet nationalism under Joseph Stalin, based on both Russian nationalism and communist internationalism. Official communist ideology always stated that Russia was the most progressive state, because it adopted socialism as its basis (which, according to the writings of Karl Marx, is the inevitable future of world socio-economic systems). Under Lenin, the USSR believed its duty to help other nations to arrange socialist revolutions (the concept of World Revolution), and made close ties with labor movements around the world[4].
[…]
The Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany became known as the Great Patriotic War, hearkening back to the previous use of the term in the Napoleonic Wars. The Soviet state called for Soviet citizens to defend the ‘Motherland’, a matrilineal term used to describe Russia in the past.
[…]
In 1944, the Soviet Union abandoned its communist anthem, The International, and adopted a new national anthem which citizens of the Soviet Union could identify with.
And then, with the victory secured over fascism, the Stalinist “national socialism” (a.k.a. “fascism”) suddenly became international socialism again. The Nazis’ very name was Nationalsozialistische.
One can be a “Marxist-fascist” and combine and blend elements of both totalitarian socialist systems quite easily, as both the Russian and then the Chinese communists proved. Communism and fascism have far more in common with one another than they have in opposition; especially when you examine the fact that both political systems invariably end up becoming the same big-government totalitarian police state.
So for my first two points – namely that 1) the left has routinely demagogically labeled the right “fascist” even when 2) it is clearly the left that owes far and away the most to fascistic elements – I am going to continue to shout from the rooftops who are the real fascists in America.
That said, it is still not enough to merely point out the FACT that American liberalism has much in common with fascism. And there is a lot more yet to say.
Before I begin spouting particular examples, I therefore need to further approach just what it is that would constitute a “fascist.” And then see who and how the label fits. From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
The best example of a fascist economy is the regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Holding that liberalism (by which he meant freedom and free markets) had “reached the end of its historical function,” Mussolini wrote: “To Fascism the world is not this material world, as it appears on the surface, where Man is an individual separated from all others and left to himself…. Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
This collectivism is captured in the word fascism, which comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of rods with an axe in it. In economics, fascism was seen as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Fascist thought acknowledged the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity—provided that they did not conflict with the interests of the state.
[…]
Mussolini’s fascism took another step at this time with the advent of the Corporative State, a supposedly pragmatic arrangement under which economic decisions were made by councils composed of workers and employers who represented trades and industries. By this device the presumed economic rivalry between employers and employees was to be resolved, preventing the class struggle from undermining the national struggle. In the Corporative State, for example, strikes would be illegal and labor disputes would be mediated by a state agency.
Theoretically, the fascist economy was to be guided by a complex network of employer, worker, and jointly run organizations representing crafts and industries at the local, provincial, and national levels. At the summit of this network was the National Council of Corporations. But although syndicalism and corporativism had a place in fascist ideology and were critical to building a consensus in support of the regime, the council did little to steer the economy. The real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, or IRI), mediating among interest groups.
[…]
Mussolini also eliminated the ability of business to make independent decisions: the government controlled all prices and wages, and firms in any industry could be forced into a cartel when the majority voted for it. The well-connected heads of big business had a hand in making policy, but most smaller businessmen were effectively turned into state employees contending with corrupt bureaucracies. They acquiesced, hoping that the restrictions would be temporary. Land being fundamental to the nation, the fascist state regimented agriculture even more fully, dictating crops, breaking up farms, and threatening expropriation to enforce its commands.
Banking also came under extraordinary control. As Italy’s industrial and banking system sank under the weight of depression and regulation, and as unemployment rose, the government set up public works programs and took control over decisions about building and expanding factories. The government created the Istituto Mobiliare in 1931 to control credit, and the IRI later acquired all shares held by banks in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises.
The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933…
Fascism is all about the “community,” not the individual. Its message is about the good of the nation, or the people (or the Volk), or the community, rather than the good of a nation’s individual citizens. It is about distributing and then redistributing the wealth and returning it to “its rightful owners” under the guise of an all-powerful state rather than recognizing and rewarding individual achievement. In short, when Hillary Clinton explained that, “It takes a village,” an educated Nazi would have snapped his fingers and excitedly shouted, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!”
For Obama, the collectivism, community or “village” thing is such a profound part of him that he has literally made it an integral part of his very heretical form of “Christianity,” which very much stresses individual salvation and individual responsibility. Obama has on several occasions put it this way:
For example, in 1995, Obama said, “my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country…” and again in May of 2008, “our individual salvation depends of collective salvation.”
In the Christian faith, there is no such thing as collective salvation. Salvation is an individual choice. It is personal acceptance of Jesus as savior, Son of the living God.
Obama’s is a wildly perverted view of orthodox Christianity. It so distorts true Christianity at such a fundamental level, in fact, that one literally has to go to Hitler to find a suitable similar parallel from a “Christian” national leader. The great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther – the most famous German prior to Hitler – had written the most monumental text of German culture prior to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was called “The Bondage of the Will,” which was considered THE manifesto of the Reformation. According to Luther, the human will was in bondage to sin. The fallen will, if left to itself, will choose what is evil. The human will has been perversely set against the righteous will of God. For sinful human beings, the will is not in a state of liberty but is in bondage to its worst impulses. Luther wrote in this work, “When our liberty is lost we are compelled to serve sin: that is, we will sin and evil, we speak sin and evil, we do sin and evil.” Adolf Hitler infamously turned that key doctrine of Christianity on its head in his “The Triumph of the Will,” in which he exalted depraved human will to an altogether different level of human depravity. Which is to say that Hitler was so profoundly wrong that he proved Luther right.
But getting back to Obama’s profoundly anti-Christian concept of “collective salvation,” the Nazis would have been all over that, enthusiastically shouting their agreement, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!” Recall the encyclopedia entry on fascism stating that, “Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual,” which was then further defined as “collectivism.” And the Nazis repeatedly called upon loyal Germans to make horrendous sacrifices in the name of that collective.
What the Nazis pursued was a form of anti-capitalist anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.”
From the Nazi Party Platform:
– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:
– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.
– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
Ah, yes, the Nazis had their “Fairness Doctrine” long before this current generation of liberals had theirs.
You read that Nazi Party Platform carefully, and you tell me if you see small government conservative Republicans or big government liberal Democrats written all over it.
Now, you read the Nazi Party Platform, and given what American liberals want and what American conservatism opposes, it is so obvious which party is “fascist” that it isn’t even silly. Then you ADD to that the fact that fascism and American progressivism (which is liberalism) were so similar that the great fascists of the age couldn’t tell the damn difference.
Since you point out Nazism was fascist, let’s look at some history as to WHO was recognized as fascist in America.
Fascism sought to eliminate class differences and to destroy/replace capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
H.G. Wells, a great admirer of FDR and an extremely close personal friend of his, was also a great progressive of his day. He summed it up this way in a major speech at Oxford to the YOUNG LIBERALS organization under the banner of “Liberal Fascism”: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” He said, “And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you” and then said:
These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions…the days of that sort of amateurism are over – they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of democracy. The world is sick of parliamentary politics…The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on still a vaster scale…They must begin as a disciplined sect, but must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.”
H.G. Wells pronounced FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” And of course, we easily see that the new world order Wells wanted was a fascist one. In 1941, George Orwell concluded, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”
It was from the lips of liberal progressive H.G. Wells that Jonah Goldberg got the title of his book, Liberal Fascism. Goldberg didn’t just invent this connection: H.G. Wells flagrantly admitted it and George Orwell called him on it. All Goldberg did was rediscover history that liberals buried and have used every trick imaginable to keep buried.
And as a tie-in to our modern day, who more than Barack Obama has been more associated with said FDR?
But let me move on to some real red meat. In just what specific, concrete ways can I call Obama a fascist?
Well, to begin with, there is the signature achievement of his entire presidency, his national health care system (ObamaCare). For liberals, it is nothing but the most bizarre coincidence that Nazi culture had a national health care system that was quite rightly considered the wonder of its day by socialists in America. It is the most despicable of insults that Sarah Palin excoriated ObamaCare as “death panels” – even though it is more precisely a bureaucratic maze consisting of more like 160 separate death panels:
And the “czar” thing hits a very fascist nerve, too. Obama has appointed 39 czars who are completely outside our Constitutional process. Obama signed a budget bill into law that required him to remove these czars, but why would a fascist trouble himself with outmoded things like “laws”? One of the enraged Republicans responded, “The president knew that the czar amendment was part of the overall budget deal he agreed to, and if he cannot be trusted to keep his word on this, then how can he be trusted as we negotiate on larger issues like federal spending and the economy.” And of course, he’s right.
But why do I say it’s financial fascism in 20/20 hindsight? Because of what we just learned: in spite of all the bogus lying promises and the massive takeover “for our own good,” Obama didn’t fix anything. Instead he made it WORSE:
The financial system poses an even greater risk to taxpayers than before the crisis, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The next rescue could be about a trillion dollars costlier, the credit rating agency warned.
S&P put policymakers on notice, saying there’s “at least a one-in-three” chance that the U.S. government may lose its coveted AAA credit rating. Various risks could lead the agency to downgrade the Treasury’s credit worthiness, including policymakers’ penchant for rescuing bankers and traders from their failures.
“The potential for further extraordinary official assistance to large players in the U.S. financial sector poses a negative risk to the government’s credit rating,” S&P said in its Monday report.
But, the agency’s analysts warned, “we believe the risks from the U.S. financial sector are higher than we considered them to be before 2008.”
Because of the increased risk, S&P forecasts the potential initial cost to taxpayers of the next crisis cleanup to approach 34 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or gross domestic product. In 2007, the agency’s analysts estimated it could cost 26 percent of GDP.
Last year, U.S. output neared $14.7 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. By S&P’s estimate, that means taxpayers could be hit with $5 trillion in costs in the event of another financial collapse.
Experts said that while the cost estimate seems unusually high, there’s little dispute that when the next crisis hits, it will not be anticipated — and it will likely hurt the economy more than the last financial crisis.
So much for the massive and unprecedented fascist government takeover.
Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says.
The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010.
Nobody here but us fascists. And we sure aint talking.
Then there are other issues that the left usually uses to attack conservatives, such as racism. Wasn’t Hitler a racist, just like conservatives? The problem is, the liberals are as usual upside-down here. After running as the man to create racial harmony, Barack Obama has instead done more to racially polarize America than any president since other famous progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Frankly, if one were to conduct a major study of racial politics, and the setting up in opposition of one racial group against another, just which party has emphasized race and race-baiting more?
Hitler’s Jew-baiting was all about the idea that one race had taken over the culture, had the money and the power, and was using its influence to oppress the people in the banking system and anywhere else that mattered. And Hitler’s constant screed was that Germany needed to confiscate the Jews’ wealth and then redistribute it. With all respect, all the left has done is replace “Jew” with “Caucasian” and making the exact same claims.
And with all this hard-core racist demagoguing, I’m supposed to say that, “Oh, yes, it’s the conservatives who are guilty of demagoguing race”??? Seriously???
Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?
But it’s only fascist if Republicans do it, of course.
Also in yesterday’s news is the fact that Obama is the perpetual demagogue– which is a quintessentially fascist tactic. Obama demonized Bush for trying to raise the debt ceiling until he needed to raise it. Now it would be un-American for Republicans to act the same exact way Obama acted. In the same demagogic spirit, Obama personally invited Paul Ryan to a speech just so he could personally demonize him. The same Obama who lectured Republicans that it would be counter-productive to rely on name-calling and accusations in the health care debate launched into a vicious demagogic attack. Ryan correctly said that “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said is necessary to fix this problem.” But that is par for the golf course for a fascist. If that wasn’t enough, Obama held a White House conference for “stake holders” in the immigration debate and refused to invite a single governor from a border state.
A Republican equivalent would have had to come out of a deep involvement with some vile racist militia organization to approximate Obama’s background. And liberals would rightly label such a politician a fascist for his past alone.
Here’s a recent Youtube video of Obama’s key union allies on camera saying, “We’re not going to rely on the law,” and, “Forget about the law” as they seek to impose their unions basically whether workers want them or not:
Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on. Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:
As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.
That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.
“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.
The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they occur.
The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.
“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion, remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.
“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits to do so,” he warned.
In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams listed both an official accounting and an alternative.
“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently enacted health care legislation.”
U.S. Government GAAP Accounting Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States, 2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)
Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy, even before we take into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health care.
“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100 percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”
Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.
“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”
He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”
“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset of hyperinflation in the near-term.”
Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to unfold in response to QE2.
“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving wealth and assets,” he advises.
Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.
And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.
$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot. And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness. But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:
Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way. Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.
For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”
Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”
This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.
Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.
“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”
He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.
One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.
Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.
Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.
He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.
Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.
As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.
Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.
But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.
It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.
It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold. It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.
If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek. That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”
Other than the fact that the left – liberals, progressive, Democrats, unions, the whole enchilada – are genuinely depraved un-American traitors, they really aren’t so bad.
Here it is. And by that I mean both, “Here’s the article revealing Obama’s SEIU’s plan to destroy America,” and “Here’s Obama’s and the SEIU’s Cloward-Piven plan”:
A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.
The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government.
The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.
The Blaze procured what appears to be a tape of Lerner’s remarks. Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support them. Still, the “destabilization” plan is startling in its specificity, especially coming so close on the heels of the financial crisis.
Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore–the redistribution of wealth and the return of “$17 trillion” stolen from the middle class by Wall Street–is to “destabilize the country.”
Lerner’s plan is to organize a mass, coordinated “strike” on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments–thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.
Lerner’s plan starts by attacking JP Morgan Chase in early May, with demonstrations on Wall Street, protests at the annual shareholder meeting, and then calls for a coordinated mortgage strike.
Lerner also says explicitly that, although the attack will benefit labor unions, it cannot be seen as being organized by them. It must therefore be run by community organizations.
Lerner was ousted from SEIU last November, reportedly for spending millions of the union’s dollars trying to pursue a plan like the one he details here. It is not clear what, if any, power and influence he currently wields. His main message–that Wall Street won the financial crisis, that inequality in this country is hitting record levels, and that there appears to be no other way to stop the trend–will almost certainly resonate.
A transcript of Lerner’s full reported remarks is below, courtesy of The Blaze. We have heard the tape, but we have not independently verified that the voice is Lerner’s. You can listen to the tape here.
Here are the key remarks:
Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also. And if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability.
There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up
If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.
Students have a trillion dollar debt
We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything…
We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says in they rioted in Greece the markets went down
The folks that control this country care about one thing how the stock market goes what the bond market does how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:
How do we bring down the stock market
How do we bring down their bonuses
How do we interfere with there ability to be rich…
So a bunch of us around the country think who would be a really good company to hate we decided that would be JP Morgan Chase and so we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street.
And so what we are looking at is the first week in May can we get enough people together starting now to really have an week of action in New York I don’t want to give any details because I don’t know if there are any police agents in the room.
The goal would be that we will roll out of New York the first week of May. We will connect three ideas
that we are not broke there is plenty of money
they have the money – we need to get it back
and that they are using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and destroy us
And so we need to take on those folks at the same time. And that we will start here we are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over the city. Then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.
There is going to be a ten state mobilization to try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense
Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself that community groups can’t do themselves but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.
FULL TRANSCRIPT FROM THE BLAZE
SPEAKER: Stephen Lerner. Speaker at the Left Forum 2011 “Towards a Politics of Solidarity” Pace University March 19, 2011
Speaker Bio: Stephen Lerner is the architect of the SEIU’s groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign. He led the union’s banking and finance campaign and has partnered with unions and groups in Europe, South American and elsewhere in campaigns to hold financial institutions accountable. As director of the union’s private equity project, he launched a long campaign to expose the over-leveraged feeding frenzy of private equity firms during the boom years that led to the ensuing economic disaster.
TRANSCRIPT:
It feels to me after a long time of being on defense that something is starting to turn in the world and we just have to decide if we are on defense or offense
Maybe there is a different way to look at some of theses questions it’s hard for me to think about any part of organizing without thinking what just happened with this economic crisis and what it means
I don’t know how to have a discussion about labor and community if we don’t first say what do we need to do at this time in history what is the strategy that gives us some chance of winning because I spent my life time as a union organizer justice for janitors a lot of things
It seems we are at a moment where the world is going to get much much worse or much much better
Unions are almost dead we cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also and if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability
Every time there is a crisis in the world they say, well, the markets are stable.
What’s changed in America is the economy doing well has nothing to do with the rest of us
They figured out that they don’t need us to be rich they can do very well in a global market without us so what does this have to do with community and labor organizing more.
We need to figure out in a much more through direct action more concrete way how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital for how corporations operate
The thing about a boom and bust economy is it is actually incredibly fragile.
There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up
If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.
Students have a trillion dollar debt
We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything.
Government is being strangled by debt
The four things we could do that could really upset wall street
One is if city and state and other government entities demanded to renegotiate their debt
and you might say why would the banks ever do it – because city and counties could say we won’t do business with you in the future if you won’t renegotiate the debt now
So we could leverage the power we have of government and say two things we won’t do business with you JP Morgan Chase anymore unless you do two things: you reduce the price of our interest and second you rewrite the mortgages for everybody in the communities
We could make them do that
The second thing is there is a whole question in Europe about students’ rates in debt structure. What would happen if students said we are not going to pay. It’s a trillion dollars. Think about republicans screaming about debt a trillion dollars in student debt
There is a third thing we can think about what if public employee unions instead of just being on the defensive put on the collective bargaining table when they negotiate they say we demand as a condition of negotiation that the government renegotiate – it’s crazy that you’re paying too much interest to your buddies the bankers it’s a strike issue – we will strike unless you force the banks to renegotiate/
Then if you add on top of that if we really thought about moving the kind of disruption in Madison but moving that to Wall Street and moving that to other cities around the country
We basically said you stole seventeen trillion dollars – you’ve improvised us and we are going to make it impossible for you to operate
Labor can’t lead this right now so if labor can’t lead but we are a critical part of it we do have money we have millions of members who are furious
But I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless community groups and other activists take the lead.
If we really believe that we are in a transformative stage of what’s happening in capitalism
Then we need to confront this in a serious way and develop really ability to put a boot in the wheel then we have to think not about labor and community alliances we have to think about how together we are building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates
We need to think about a whole new way of thinking about this not as a partnership but building something new.
We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says in they rioted in Greece the markets went down
The folks that control this country care about one thing how the stock market goes what the bond market does how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:
How do we bring down the stock market
How do we bring down their bonuses
How do we interfere with there ability to be rich
And that means we have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them
It’s not all theory i’ll do a pitch.
So a bunch of us around the country think who would be a really good company to hate we decided that would be JP Morgan Chase and so we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street.
And so what we are looking at is the first week in May can we get enough people together starting now to really have an week of action in New York I don’t want to give any details because I don’t know if there are any police agents in the room.
The goal would be that we will roll out of New York the first week of May. We will connect three ideas
that we are not broke there is plenty of money
they have the money – we need to get it back
and that they are using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and destroy us
And so we need to take on those folks at the same time
and that we will start here we are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over the city
then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.
There is going to be a ten state mobilization it try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense
Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself that community groups can’t do themselves but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.
People just can’t bring themselves to believe that their leaders are evil people with wicked agendas. It’s that, “Oh, no, Chester isn’t molesting my little boy; he loves him” sort of thing. It doesn’t seem to matter how much evidence there is, they just won’t believe it until it’s too late and the damage is done. It wasn’t just German Aryans who bought Adolf Hitler; a lot of JEWS enthusiastically voted for him. They thought, “This Antisemitic stuff is just party rhetoric; Hitler will put it aside as soon as he’s in power.” And all of the adoring masses just refused to realize that they were anointing a monster and giving him their sons.
You can read and watch and listen to what the left has been trying to do for more than five decades. That’s how old this Cloward and Piven agenda is. You can listen to what the SEIU is trying to do. It’s right in front of your face. You can see all the evidence that Barack Obama is their man, and how committed he is to their agenda, in his own words.
Then there’s that someone somewhere who might be out there saying, “Gosh, I kind of agree with that Steven Lerner guy. The rich have lots of money, and I’d like to have their money. Maybe he isn’t so utterly depraved after all.” Think about this: Steven Lerner of the SEIU is demonizing capitalism, the system which has been proven by 200 years of history to be the freest and most successful – not to mention most profitable and most powerful – system in the history of the entire world.
And what are these people basically suggesting as his model for replacement? Something that oozed right out of the pits of hell into Karl Marx’s vile brain. And from there it oozed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then the National Socialist German Workers Party, then the number-one-humanity-massacring People’s Republic of China, and from there to hellholes in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, etcetera.
These are truly bad, depraved, vile, wicked, evil people. And if they get their way, not only will your children die lingering deaths, but you probably will too.