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Iconoclast's Blog
November 2008
Sunday November 30, 2008
Posted by: Iconoclast at 9:15AM CST on November 30, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for USBy Christopher Booker Last Updated: 11:01pm GMT 29/11/2008
If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.
Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year's UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to "save the planet" from global warming.
Tuesday November 4, 2008
Posted by: Iconoclast at 1:16AM CST on November 4, 2008
What you don't know about Barack Obama Black liberation theology, birthplace, religion still remain question marks Posted: November 03, 2008 11:18 pm Eastern By Jerome R. Corsi
NEW YORK – Birthplace, religion, black liberation theology, passport, Pakistan, school expenses and records, house deal, friends, mentors and clients. These are among the questions that despite months of campaigning for the presidency of the United States, thousands of hours in front of reporters and cameras, and hundreds of members of a massive campaign staff, the public still doesn't have fully answered about Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Just four years ago, Obama essentially was an unknown state legislator who with the help of the Chicago political system took over a seat in the U.S. Senate. He stated then he was unqualified for national office, but within about two years launched his bid for the White House, knocking off one of the powerhouses of Democratic politics, Sen. Hillary Clinton, in the primaries. The questions, then, abound as he's proposed giving the United Nations hundreds of billions of dollars, promised 95 percent of Americans a tax cut and pledged to pursue environmental campaigns even if coal companies go bankrupt because of that. He's also stated the U.S. Supreme Court should have stepped beyond the Constitution and ventured into plans for wealth redistribution, he's told a plumber his goal is just to "spread the wealth," and his wife has said people will need to give up their piece of the pie so that others can have more. All without answers to key questions. Among those issues remaining to be explained fully are his acquaintances in his Chicago political career, who include:
Then also there are the influences on Obama's career, from the one-time writer of a sex novel, Frank Marshall Davis, to unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, with whom Obama served on boards. This is significant since voters have only a few years of Obama's U.S. Senate record on which to judge him, and while a state legislator he voted dozens of times "present" in moves that would not reveal support for or opposition to an issue or position. Among the subjects of those questions are:
Finally, these are the top questions about Obama that remain unanswered:
While no campaign probably ever will put to rest every question voters may have, these are significant in that the next occupant of the White House will be making decisions on the security of the nation and the life and death issues of society, decisions that in all likelihood will be influenced by the beliefs and positions of the president. Monday November 3, 2008
Posted by: Iconoclast at 8:25AM CST on November 3, 2008
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all
ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes,it
would go something like this: Keep in mind, this is to happen EVERY
DAY!
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth man would pay $1. The sixth man would pay $3. The seventh man would pay $7. The eighth man would pay $12. The ninth man would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59. So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80 instead of $100 The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. The poorest four would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man currently paying $1 and the sixth man currently paying $3 would each end up being PAID to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so: The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100%savings). The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings). The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings). The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings). The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings). Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I got’ ‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’ ‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’ The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something. They didn’t have enough money between all 9 of them for even Half of the bill! And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works!! (And this is BEFORE Obama raises the job creating so called “Wealthy” even more!!) The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. (DUH) Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier. And this in turn will take money away from America, away from job creation, away from everything that makes America great! Given the facts without fancy words, would you vote for Obama? Obama's Hug-a-Thug Crime Policy
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:47AM CST on November 3, 2008
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, November 03, 2008 The triple homicide of actress-singer Jennifer Hudson's kin has thrown crime into the national spotlight – along with Barack Obama's hometown, which is the new murder capital of the U.S. Chicago has seen more murders this year than both New York and Los Angeles. Yet you won't hear Obama talk about crime or his policy to fight it. That's because he doesn't have one – unless you call hugging thugs a crime policy. One of the first things Obama would do as president is repeal mandatory minimum sentences for crack and other drug offenders to "reduce the ineffective warehousing" of such criminals, according to his website. He favors "drug rehabilitation" over incarceration for even "a second-time offender," according to a 2007 interview he gave to the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit's second-largest African-American newspaper. Decriminalizing pot is also on the table. "We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws," said Obama, who admits to smoking weed and doing "a little blow" as a young man. As an Illinois state senator, Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal drugs in schools. He also wants to rehabilitate inmates through prison-to-work programs. Obama's pet charity, ACORN, has such a program. It hired 59 inmates at its Las Vegas office this year. They proceeded to fraudulently register voters using the names of Dallas Cowboys football stars. A police affidavit quoted a supervisor describing them as "lazy crack-heads" who just wanted money for drugs. ACORN and Obama have been working to restore voting rights for felons, which would be another priority of his administration. "At a minimum," Obama told the black Detroit paper, "those who serve their sentences should be re-enfranchised." In Illinois, he unsuccessfully sponsored a measure to expunge some criminal records. He thinks they are used as a "stigma" against blacks. Obama also wants to outlaw police use of racial descriptions as a means to capture suspects, including Middle-Eastern terrorists. As a U.S. senator, he's already co-sponsored federal legislation to ban "racial profiling." At the same time, he wants to limit your right to protect yourself from criminals by permanently banning assault weapons, among other gun-control measures to de-"cling" you from your guns. As a state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on the sale and transfer of all forms of semi-automatic firearms, along with a bill limiting handgun purchases to one a month. In a 1996 questionnaire supplied by a liberal Chicago nonprofit group, he answered "yes" to supporting legislation to "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns." Obama fought a bill in the Illinois senate that would send youth who commit a second violent felony to prison. He fought to keep even the most violent juvenile offenders out of the adult system. Instead, "We must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime," he said at the Denver convention. One ladder he has in mind is funding contractors who train "ex-felons on projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps." Terrorists could also catch a break. "I would vote to repeal the U.S. Patriot Act," he said in 2003. Now he says he would merely repeal the parts of it that are "just plain wrong," whatever those are. Obama, who would as president have the power to pardon criminals, isn't a big fan of U.S. laws in general, at least not as currently written. He thinks they are racist, along with the courts. "We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like," he told Howard University students last year. "It's time to seek a new dawn of justice." "Laws are sometimes malleable," he wrote two years ago, and he plans to "fix" what he sees as a "broken" criminal justice system. And he favors judges with the "empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American." That worries some legal analysts. "If Obama wins," warns Northwestern University law professor Steven Calabresi, "we could possibly see the abolition of capital punishment and mass freeing of criminal defendants." In fact, Obama in the 1996 questionnaire responded "no" to supporting capital punishment. His website now calls for unspecified "reform" of the death penalty, which he contended in his book "does little to deter crime." Obama will, however, get tough on "hate crimes." He plans to pack the criminal section of Justice's Civil Rights Division with African-American prosecutors, and make "hate crime a priority." He will "reinvigorate federal civil-rights enforcement" by prosecuting alleged civil-rights abuses by local officials, such as the Jena, La., district attorney. "As president," his website says, "Obama will ensure that the section vigorously pursues such cases." Suburban employers won't be safe from Obama's race cops, either. "Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there," Obama complained in his 2006 autobiography. And woe to suspected disenfranchisers. "When fliers are placed in our neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day, that won't only be an injustice, it will be a crime," he promised black graduates at Howard. Also, "I will crack down on predatory lenders who all too often target the African-American community," Obama vowed, "with tough penalties that treat mortgage fraud like the crime it is." It's plain where Obama's priorities lie. "Jesus has a soft spot for thugs," preaches Rev. Otis Moss, the "wonderful young pastor," as Obama described him, who took over the pulpit from retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Obama's longtime church in Chicago. Apparently so does Obama. Spreading Around the Wealth
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:44AM CST on November 3, 2008
Spreading Around
the Wealth
If the democrats manage to obtain an overwhelming majority in both houses of congress, and fill the White House with Obama and Biden, our nation will rapidly begin a downward spiral from which we may never recover. So, just what can happen if Obama wins and the democrats have a filibuster proof majority?
Simply put, Socialism doesn’t work. It’s been tried in numerous nations around the globe and has failed in every country that was reckless enough to implement the idiocy and fallacies of such a flawed system. There are only two examples I can think of, where Socialism almost worked. Both were in Germany. The German Democratic Republic, or the GDR as it was once known embarked on socialism under the guise of a Communist form of government imposed on it by victorious Soviet forces following World War II.
While Socialism in the Soviet Union failed to produce a worker’s paradise as espoused by Marx, Lenin and Stalin, the industrious and loyal Germans almost made it work. I said almost made it work. Even the Germans failed to make an unworkable system work.
Earlier, the Germans once again, voted in National Socialism for their nation. Adolf Hitler and his Nazis won the 1932 elections in Germany, promising change and security for the German nation. The Nazis rapidly enacted laws and regulation designed to fully integrate the German people into a National Socialist system. Whatever you might think about the Nazis and their policies, the cold fact remains that Nazism was and remains a form of SOCIALISM.
It was also well thought of by American Liberals and Socialists. National Socialism WORKED and for the first time, Liberals thought they had the real deal! The Nazis used public work projects to put the German worker back to work, initiated massive construction projects such as the Autobahn system as well as numerous government construction goals in order to stimulate the economy and bring prosperity back to Germany. They inserted party hacks in German boardrooms and supervised every aspect of business and industry. They set limits on salaries and benefits and established official prices for everything from bread to brassieres.
Adolf Hitler was thought of as a great leader, not only in Germany but also in many parts of the world to include the United States. Despite a Liberal re-write of history, following the German defeat in 1945, the fact remains that many Americans thought that the National Socialists had the right idea regarding intrusive big government.
National Socialism had a number of flaws however and it along with other forms of Socialism failed to work past the initial successes and early triumphs. The gains of the early 1930’s could only be sustained through a massive military build-up, the expenditure of billions of Reichsmarks. Incidentally, the Reichsmark was a fiat currency, which was the creation of the National Socialist regime. It was backed by nothing, much like our US Dollar, also a fiat currency, today. Hitler took Germany off of the Gold Standard. Roosevelt followed his lead and took the USA off of the Gold Standard.
The most serious flaw with National Socialism was the only way it could be sustained was through war! Had the Germans not waged war the system would have collapsed as it too, along with other Socialist systems would have proved impossible to continue for the long run. Without war, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany might have continued for a few more years, yet it would have been forced to evolve into a more Capitalistic government, much as the communist government in China, Vietnam and other such countries. Communist Cuba has failed to move toward the reinstatement of Capitalism and continues to be the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only Haiti exceeds the oppressed Cubans in poverty and despair.
The American people should know better than to elect Obama and a Liberal-Socialist congress, but we haven’t apparently learned anything from history or the reality of our world. Our education system, thoroughly Liberal-Socialist and rotten to the core has produced a nation of near illiterates who blindly follow the Liberal agenda at every turn. Liberal teachers have so corrupted the minds of a generation of Americans and instilled in them the stench of class warfare to the point where we will soon, blindly turn down the road of Socialism.
Not that George W. Bush has done our nation many favors. Bush put his “legacy” above the good of the nation in signing legislation, which essentially nationalized our banking system. He might have good intentions that this is only a temporary step, but with Obama and a Liberal-Socialism congress, the banking system will be a nationalized system once and for good.
Congress has now enacted legislation, which is in contravention of the US Constitution. They will continue to do so at every turn, with Obama in the Oval Office, ready and willing to sign and enact more and more Socialist laws, regulations and policies.
Already, Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy (D-MA) is crafting his National Healthcare Act, which will nationalize our health and medical system. It’s coming at us like a runaway freight train with no headlight. Obama will gladly sign the bill into law once he has a filibuster proof majority in both houses of congress.
The House Democrats are now, as I write, contemplating the takeover of all private pension funds, IRAs Keoghs and 401(k) funds. The Social Security Administration would then be the sole proprietor of all retirement systems in the United States!
Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) has already, publicly proposing a whopping 25% reduction in defense spending. With Obama in the White House, it will likely become reality. Actually, I foresee even deeper cuts in defense than Frank’s proposal. After all, Liberal-Socialists despise the military.
What about taxes? Obama promises tax cuts for “95% of all Americans.” This is an unmitigated crock of horse dung! Under Obama, your taxes will increase to the point that they are “higher than the Supreme Court,” and that is about as high as you can get!
A President Obama will pack the Supreme Court with the most Liberal-Socialist justices he can find. No doubt the more Liberal justices such as Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, Paul Stevens will retire so that much younger Liberal-Socialists can be added to the Court. David Souter only 68 years old, a “flaming lib” has stated his desire to return to his home and retire. On the conservative side, both Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas aren’t exactly kids. They may have to be replaced as well. With a filibuster proof Senate, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) will ramrod through any and all nominations to the nations’ highest court. There will be no public spectacle as has been the case where conservatives were nominated and publicly interrogated by such luminaries as Joe Biden (D-CT) and other Liberal activist Senators. The congress may well allow President Obama to add justices to the court in order to insure a Liberal-Socialist majority for many years to come.
A radical Socialist America is in the making. Our partisan media in cahoots with the dark forces of Liberal-Socialism is in the process of dismantling our American system and initiating a SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE. The ramifications of electing Obama and majority democrat congress will spell the end of our nation, as we know it. And, our enemies are already savoring the final decline of America. They relish the thought of an Obama presidency as they know that the time has come for our demise. Without the United States to put the check on rogue nations such as Iran, Syria, North Korea and now to a lesser extent, Russia, not only is the United States in for a rough ride, but so is the entire world!
We are soon to be plunged into the darkest period our nation has ever seen. Economic disasters ALWAYS bring about changes in governments. The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930’s ushered in both German and Japanese militarism. War resulted and 56-millions died! We in the USA got Roosevelt’s “New Deal” which was really a RAW DEAL. Our undoing as a nation really began with Roosevelt. It will likely end with Obama. We have many enemies in the world and they won’t be placated by Obama’s willingness to sit down without preconditions and sing kumbaya!
Our old friend John F. Kerry (did you know he served in Vietnam) has openly called for a NEW New Deal. That’s right. Kerry, the wealthiest Senator in history wants to spread your money around too. I doubt he will donate any of HIS billions, but he’ll be more than happy to take yours!
Barack Obama revealed his true intentions when he answered “Joe the Plumber’s” question and revealed his intention to “spread the wealth.” Unfortunately, Obama and his Democrat Party have embraced the Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara approach to a national economy.
In 1959, shortly after seizing power in Cuba, both Fidel and “Che” realized that they would never be able to raise Cuba’s uneducated, poor, and disgruntled to the level of prosperity enjoyed by most Cubans under the Batista government.
Accordingly, the decision was made to make things “fair” by destroying the upper and middle classes and lowering everyone to poverty. Thus, Cuba today has only two classes of citizens. The vast majority of Cubans are as poor as dirt. They have no running water. Electricity is iffy and available for only a few hours per day, if at all. Cubans haven’t seen toilet paper for years, unless they are fortunate enough to obtain employment in one of Castro’s luxury tourist hotels. Eggs? What are eggs?
Then, there is the communist elite; essentially a “royal family” of selected party hacks and officials who oversee the destitute Cuban people. When the United States is impoverished by our elected Liberal-Socialists, you can bet there will be an “elite” such as the Obamas Kennedys, Kerrys, Clintons, Reids, Pelosis etc. Socialists such as Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Bernardine Dohrn et al. will be heroes in the new Socialist States of America. They will be entitled to all the luxury items and foodstuffs they desire. After all, they will be looking out for the people! Obama will no doubt initiate a new slogan. Socialists always need and use slogans. His slogan will be, “We do it for the PEOPLE.” After all, isn’t that what Americans wanted all along? Isn’t that why we will elect a filibuster proof DEMOCRAT Congress, so they will do it to the people? Think America. Voting for Liberals, whether for president or anything will result in a disaster of Biblical proportions. Think hard on Election Day. Think very hard about your choice. Dreams of My Father?
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:44AM CST on November 3, 2008
Like Father, Like SonBy INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT Election '08: Barack Obama's economic blueprint sounds like one his communist father tried to foist on Kenya 40 years ago, with massive taxes and succor shrouded as "investments." IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism
As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. advised the pro-Western Kenyan government there to "redistribute" income through higher taxes. He also demonized corporations and called for massive government "investment" in social programs. 
Barack Obama Sr., who died in 1982 at age 46 in a Kenya car crash. Writing in a 1965 scholarly paper, Obama's late father slammed the administration of then-President Jomo Kenyatta for moving the Third World country away from socialism toward capitalism. He chafed at the idea of relying on private investors — who earn "dividends" on their venture capital — to develop the country's fledgling economy. "What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all," said the senior Obama, a Harvard-educated economist. "This is the government's obligation." The "means" he had in mind were confiscatory taxes on a scale that redefines the term "progressive taxation." "Theoretically," he wrote, "there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed." Therefore, he added, "I do not see why the government cannot tax those who have more and syphon some of these revenues into savings which can be utilized in investment for future development." As Obama's father saw it, taxes couldn't be high enough, so long as the collective benefited. "Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to pay," he said. "It is a fallacy to say that there is this limit, and it is a fallacy to rely mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings." His son is also pushing massive taxes and "investments" in social programs — at the expense of free enterprise. Sen. Obama wants to raise the top marginal income-tax rate to at least 39%, while increasing Social Security taxes on those with higher incomes by completely removing the payroll cap. That means many entrepreneurs would be paying 12.4% (6.2% on employer and 6.2% on employee) on Social Security payroll taxes alone, plus the 2.9% on Medicare taxes, for a total federal tax rate of 54%. In addition, Obama wants to jack up the capital-gains tax rate and reinstate the death tax. Echoing his father, he argues that the government should impose "tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth." And likewise, he asserts that the nation's wealth ought to be rechanneled by government into "investments" in the economy and welfare programs that create "a new American social compact." "We can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance" in the global economy, the Democrat presidential hopeful said in his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." "And if we know that our families have some net beneath which they cannot fall." "Training must be expanded," his father proposed as one of his government "investments." Likewise, Sen. Obama wants to "invest" billions more in federal jobs retraining. His father's critique of Kenya's economic policy was published in the East Africa Journal under the title "Problems Facing Our Socialism." One discovers — after reading just a few pages into his eight-page tract, where he waxes quixotic about "communal ownership of major means of production" — that he wasn't criticizing the government for being too socialistic, but not socialistic enough. Obama Sr. described his own economic plan, his counterproposal, as it were, as "scientific socialism — inter alia — communism." Yes, Obama's father was a communist who wanted to put socialist theory into action — by "force." He trusted the collective over the individual, a theme he successfully instilled in his son, also Harvard-educated, with whom he visited once for a full month in Hawaii, even speaking to his prep school class. He kept up correspondence with his son through his college years. (Media accounts portray Obama's father as being completely out of his life after leaving his mother and him at age 2. But Obama's first book, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that he remained an influential force in his life. Obama's first autobiography was devoted to "my father.") Listen to what "the Old Man," as Obama and his siblings called him, wrote in proposing government-run farms: "If left to the individual, consolidation will take a long time to come. We have to look at priorities in terms of what is good for society, and on this basis we may find it necessary to force people to do things they would not do otherwise." He explained that "the government should restrict the size of farms that can be owned by one individual throughout the country." More evil than individuals, Obama's father believed, are heads of corporations. More evil still are the bankers and investors, who conspire to control the world through their evil capitalist system. "One who has read Marx cannot fail to see that corporations are not only what Marx referred to as the advanced stage of capitalism," he wrote. "But Marx even called it finance capitalism by which a few would control the finances of so many, and through this, have not only economic power but political power as well." It's clear from Sen. Obama's own writings and speeches that he too is no fan of business or our system of "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism," as he wrote in "Audacity." He's fond of bashing Wall Street "greed" and the post-Reagan rise of individual investing over government investing. He wants to roll back the "Ownership Society." He resents the profit motive and individuals "on the make." "Rather than vilify the rich," he laments, "we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make." This is no small point. The man who wants to be the nation's CEO actually believes we're living in a feudal society where the rich plunder the poor. And he thinks they should not only be vilified but punished. "The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed are rooted in the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost," he wrote. "Solving these problems will require changes in government policy." That is, massive taxation, among other things (or "inter alia," as his "brilliant" father would say). Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" that he was trying to impress his father by taking a low-paying job organizing and agitating in the Chicago ghetto right out of college. "I did feel that there was something to prove to my father," he said. Yet, suspiciously, he does not once mention his father's communist leanings in an entire book dedicated to his memory. No doubt he wanted to keep that hidden. All he tells readers is that his father was pushed out of the Kenyatta administration. He does not explain why. "Word got back to Kenyatta that the Old Man was a troublemaker and he was called in to see the president," Obama wrote, quoting his half-sister, "because he could not keep his mouth shut." About what, we aren't told. However, Obama writes sympathetically of a comrade of his father, Oginga Odinga, who stepped down as vice president and tried to start his own party. He too was angry that President Kenyatta was letting private investors buy up businesses and land "that should be redistributed to the people," Obama said. By 1967, two years after Obama Sr. penned his paper, Odinga had been placed under house arrest for holding a rally that turned into a riot. Like Obama's father, Odinga was a member of the Luo tribe of Kenya. His son, Raila Odinga, ran for president in 2006. That year, Obama traveled to Kenya and appeared with Odinga at rallies where he criticized the pro-U.S. government Odinga wanted to oust. When he lost the election the next year, despite Obama's tacit endorsement, angry Odinga supporters crying fraud sparked riots that resulted in some 1,500 deaths. Amid his ancestral country's civil unrest, Obama took time out from the campaign trail to phone Odinga to voice his support. After weeks of violence, Odinga was granted a power-sharing deal. He's now acting prime minister. He's also a something of a communist like his father. An East German-trained engineer, he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro. Paralleling him, Sen. Obama wants to open dialogue with Cuba and once proposed lifting the trade embargo. The two sons have much in common. However, the son who would lead the U.S. learned from his father's mistakes and keeps his "mouth shut." Obama learned that revealing his real beliefs can jeopardize his quest for the power needed to put his "redistribution" plans into action. Obama: those who don't want higher taxes 'selfishness'
Posted by: Iconoclast at 7:43AM CST on November 3, 2008
Obama: those who don't want higher taxes 'selfishness' Posted October 31, 2008 9 :10 PM By Salena Zito
ABC
News Reporter Jake Tapper's Political Punch Blog has a report on Sen.
Barack Obama's push-back on John McCain's description of his tax
policies, Tapper begins with a quote from Obama in Florida, here is the
whole report: "The reason that we want to do this, change our tax code, is not
because I have anything against the rich," Obama said in Sarasota,
Fla., yesterday. "I love rich people! I want all of you to be rich. Go
for it. That's the American dream, that's the American way, that's
terrific. "The point is, though, that -- and it's not just charity, it's not
just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are
trying to get in the middle class -- it's that when we actually make
sure that everybody's got a shot -- when young people can all go to
college, when everybody's got decent health care, when everybody's got
a little more money at the end of the month -- then guess what?
Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a
new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the
products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is
better off. All boats rise. That's what happened in the 1990s, that's
what we need to restore. And that's what I'm gonna do as president of
the United States of America. "John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic," Obama
continued. "You know I don't know when, when they decided they wanted
to make a virtue out of selfishness." It's unclear if this was a nod to the Ayn Rand book "The Virtue of Selfishness," with all that the invocation of Rand implies. It would seem to be, given the themes of Rand's work, what happens when independent achievers are demonized. Which would fit with this description of those who want to keep their hard-earned tax dollars as "selfish." Atlas may not be shrugging, but Obama is. Sunday November 2, 2008
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:36AM CST on November 2, 2008
Obama is a 'liar' on abortionSunday, November 2, 2008If you want to know Barack Obama's real views on abortion, you should meet registered nurse Jill Stanek. Mrs. Stanek worked at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois from 1993 to 2001. When she worked in the hospital's Labor and Delivery Department she saw that babies who survived abortion attempts were left to die alone in supply rooms. They could linger for as long as eight hours, without medical care, without even the dignity of a warm blanket or a soft touch. Their tiny bodies were then dumped in the trash. Mr. Obama's spiritual mentor served on the board of the hospital. Mrs. Stanek went on a public crusade to protect these children. At a 2001 Illinois legislature hearing, Mr. Obama questioned Mrs. Stanek. She insisted that children needed medical care if they were born alive. Mr. Obama said: "Ms. Stanek, your initial testimony last year showed your dismay at the lack of regard for human life. I agreed with you last year and we suggested that there be a Comfort Room or something of that nature be done. The hospital acknowledged that and changes were made and you are still unimpressed. It sounds to me like you are really not interested in how these fetus [es] are treated, but rather not providing absolutely any medical care or life to them." Mrs. Stanek replied: "What the hospital did was try to make things look better. What it really is, is that the baby is still dead." In committee testimony, Mr. Obama said it was sufficient to give "comfort care" to a baby that is born despite all the efforts to kill it. "Comfort care" means giving the infant a warm blanket and permitting the baby to be held by someone as it dies. This is the most Mr. Obama could find in his heart to provide - a warm blanket for a child grasping for life. Mrs. Stanek told The Washington Times that Mr. Obama showed callousness when he questioned her in committee testimony: His inability to grasp that babies born alive need medical care was disturbing. Despite all the details Mrs. Stanek provided in her testimony, Mr. Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act in the Illinois legislature in 2002 - a bill that would give legal protection and medical assistance to a baby born from a botched abortion. Mr. Obama stated that he feared the bill could undermine Roe v. Wade. When a similar bill was put to Congress, other lawmakers had better sense and bigger hearts: The Born Alive Infants Protection Act passed the Senate with a vote of 98-0. It was signed into law by President Bush on Aug. 5, 2002. Infants born alive are now recognized as legal persons with full rights. Mr. Obama even voted against banning partial-birth abortion - a radical procedure - in the Senate, in October, 2007. Since 2005, he has a 100 percent rating on pro-choice votes by NARAL, a leading, national pro-choice organization. There is no doubt that Mr. Obama wants not only to uphold existing abortion laws, but a more radical view. At an address before Planned Parenthood on July 17, 2007, Mr. Obama said: "The first thing I will do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." He received a standing ovation. FOCA was introduced in Congress in November 1989 by Rep. Don Edwards, California Democrat. The legislation has since been a focal point for staunch pro-choicers. The bill would codify the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, into law in all the states. This would overturn state laws that have been passed to limit or delay abortions. Contrary to Mr. Obama's pledges to reduce the number of abortions, he really wants to make them easier to get - while overriding state and federal laws. Mr. Obama wants to uphold an abortion policy that has a disproportionate impact on blacks. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, finds that 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, but 37 percent of all abortions are performed on black women and teens: Blacks are 4.8 times as likely as whites to have an abortion. A vote for Mr. Obama is, in effect, a vote that permits the disproportionate elimination of blacks in America. Mr. McCain believes unequivocally that life begins at conception. Mr. McCain even supports requiring parental notification for underage girls who want to abort the fetus. His 0 percent rating by NARAL is perhaps one of his greatest achievements as a senator. On one of the fundamental moral questions of our time, the choice is clear: One man favors life, the other prefers a society that permits the death of the most innocent and vulnerable of us. Mrs. Stanek told The Times that Mr. Obama's talk of compassion for the weak and underprivileged rings hollow to her: "Frankly, I think he is a liar." ACORN's Senator
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:31AM CST on November 2, 2008
ACORN's SenatorBy INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2008 4:20 PM PT Election '08: Barack Obama wasn't just the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions. He was also the senator from ACORN, the activist leader for risky "affirmative action" loans. Despite efforts to blame the rescue bill's failure on the GOP, it should be remembered that 95 Democrats — some 40% of the Democratic Caucus — withheld support. Obama himself also deserves blame — not only for the bill's failure, but also for the crisis it was designed to solve. As the New York Times reports, "Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure." Is the reason the fact that the slush fund for ACORN in the original bill, siphoning off 20% of any future profits for such activist groups, was trimmed from the tree? Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers' homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism. In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago's ACORN to run training sessions in "direct action." That's the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called "Ninja" loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn't afford them. CRA was designed to increase minority homeownership. Whenever a bank wanted to grow or expand, ACORN would file complaints that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities in providing home loans. Agitators would then be unleashed. Chicago's ACORN used Alinsky's tactics against institutions such as Bell Federal Savings and Loan and Avondale Federal Savings. In September 1992, the Chicago Tribune described the group's agenda as "affirmative action lending." Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda. In 1995, Kurtz reports, Obama chaired the committee that increased funding of ACORN and other community organizers. The committee report boasted that the fund's "non-ideological" image "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and governmental 'establishments' without undue risk of being accused of partisanship." The CRA empowered regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority and distressed neighborhoods." It gave groups such as ACORN a license and a means to intimidate banks, claiming they were "redlining" poor and minority neighborhoods. ACORN employed its tactics in 1991 by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. As a former White House staff economist writes in the American Thinker, Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 suit against redlining. ACORN was also a driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton administration that greatly expanded the CRA and helped spawn the current financial crisis. Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. Last November, he told the group, "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career." Indeed he has. Obama was and is fully aware of what ACORN was doing with the money and expertise he provided. The voters should be aware on Nov. 4 of the roles of both in creating the current crisis. How a Young Chicago Litigator Helped Create the Subprime Housing Crisis
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:30AM CST on November 2, 2008
How a Young Chicago Litigator Helped Create the Subprime Housing CrisisBarack
H. Obama is running around telling everyone that the housing mortgage
market collapsed primarily because of some vaguely described
"deregulation" that took place sometime under George Bush--or maybe
under Clinton; I'm not clear on that. I'm not sure he is. Who were these mortgage extortionists? These guys, to name a few:  Yes, that "Barack H. Obama." (READ MORE BELOW) Here's what they were suing about:  OK, fair enough. Poor folks shouldn't be automatically denied loans, right?  But here's the thing: according to Obama's legal team, FIFTY-EIGHT PERCENT of a certain class of loan applicants living in 80%+ minority neighborhoods were approved for a loan. Far from being automatically denied, most of these applicants were approved. Also according to Obama's team, EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT of similar loan applicants living in 90%+ "white" (defined as European and Asian) neighborhoods were approved--and this is the source of the theory of harm put forth by the legal team.  Under the theory put forward, it wasn't enough, apparently, that most of the identified mortgage applicants in the minority neighborhoods were approved. The theory demanded parity in the statistics, despite the fact that properties in very different neighborhoods necessarily present very different risk situations. In other words, the lawyers sued Citibank because Citibank was, on balance, somewhat more likely to approve a loan for a property in a predominantly white neighborhood than on one in a predominantly black neighborhood. Given that predominantly black neighborhoods tend to be low-income neighborhoods characterized by low property values, was this phenomenon evidence of evil racism or just reasonable risk avoidance? I'll leave that to your judgment. Ultimately, Citibank settled with Obama's firm rather than incur the expense of a protracted litigation. I haven't been able to locate a copy of the settlement agreement (it's likely sealed), but we can surmise as to what hoops it required Citibank to jump through going forward. The net result of this sort of litigation was, of course, that banks like Citibank started approving more subprime loans in the 1990s in order to avoid frivolous litigation brought by activists like Barack H. Obama. The ultimate result of Obama's litigation and the banks' "litigation-avoidance" behavior is now reflected in your declining stock portfolio. And no, you probably won't hear much about this in the mainstream media. Obama and Odinga: The True Story
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:29AM CST on November 2, 2008
Senator Barack Obama in Kenya > Obama and Odinga: The True StoryPosted by africanpress on August 10, 2008 By Paula Abeles Friday, August 8, 2008
However, the underlying (more important issues) are verifiably true. In August and September 2006, Senator Barack Obama traveled to South Africa, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Chad and Kenya as a congressional delegation of one (Codel Obama) (“Codel Obama” The Hill 9/7/2006) While in Kenya, Obama consistently appeared at the side of fellow Luo Raila Odinga (“your agent for change’), who was running for President. (“Senator Rebukes Kenya’s Corruption” Chicago Sun Times 8/29/2006) Because of his African heritage, Obama was treated as a virtual “Head of State” in Kenya While campaigning with Odinga, Obama was openly critical of governmental corruption under President Mibaki –usually a fair, if undiplomatic, criticism from an objective observer. However, Kibaki’s government has been better than most—and Odinga has his own corruption issues.( Obama’s partisan support for Odinga was considered so transparent, that the Kenyan Government spokesman, Alfred Matua, complained of political posturing to aid Odinga’s election chances: “It is very clear that the senator has been used as a puppet to perpetuate opposition politics,”(“Walking The World Stage” Newsweek 9/11/06) And, “…we earlier thought he was mature in his assessment of Kenyan and African politics,” Mutua told AFP.”We forgive him because it is his first time in the Senate and he is yet to mature into understanding issues of foreign policy,” he said.”(“Obama’s Kenya Honeymoon Ends Abruptly After Graft Rebuke” 8/29/06) Subsequently, Ambassador Ogingo Ogego made a public complaint to the US.(“Kenyan Envoy Kicks Off Diplomatic Row” My Africa 9/27/2006) Raila Odinga subsequently lost the controversial (probably rigged) presidential election. In what appeared to many—including Human Rights Watch– as a coordinated strategy from the top, (“Violence We Fled was Planned, Say Kenyan Refugees” Reuters 1/26/2008 and “Kenya: Violence Planned Before Poll, Says Report” The Nation 3/18/2008) his Luo supporters (a core of whom call themselves The Taliban”(“Ethnic Gangs Rile Kenyan Slums” Newsweek 1/10/08)) engaged in what US Envoy Jendayi Frazer called “clear ethnic cleansing” (“US Envoy Calls Violence in Kenya ‘Ethnic Cleansing’” USA Today 1/30/2008) of the Kikuyu opposition. Odinga’s supporters went on a rampage—burning Kikuyu homes and businesses, (“Ethnic Cleansing in Luoland” The Economist 2/7/2008) raping Kikuyu women, and murdering everyone in their path—including at least 50 Christian Kikuyu woman & children who had sought refuge in a church. They burned them alive. (“Mob Burns Kenyans Seeking Refuge In Church” CNN 1/10/2008) “We have evidence that ODM [Odinga’s party] politicians and local leaders actively fomented some post-election violence,” Georgette Gagnon, acting Africa director for the New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW), said on Thursday.” (Violence We Fled was Planned, Say Kenyan Refugees” Ibid) So: who is Raila Odinga that Senator Obama would expend his political capital and risk the goodwill of half the population of Kenya?Their relationship is unclear. The BBC initially reported that Obama and Odinga were first cousins.(“Odinga Says Obama is His Cousin” 1/8/2008) The Obama campaign has since denied a familial relationship. Raila Odinga’s father Oginga Odinga was leader of the “Kenya People’s Union” and perceived as a “committed socialist” (“Oginga Odinga: Kenya’s Most Persecuted Politician” Kenya: Key Issues 8/21.2002). Odinga Sr. was also the political ally of fellow Luo; Barack Obama Sr.(The Risks of Knowledge (Ohio University Press, 2004) p. 182) What we do know about Odinga is not good. A former Minister of Energy, Odinga is reported to have been set up in the oil business by the al Bakri Group and Muammar Quaddafi (“How Rich is Raila-The ODM Kenya Presidential Aspirant?” African Press 4/26/2007) Abdel Qader Bakri (or- Abdulkader al Bakri) was listed on the infamous “Golden Chain”–an internal Al-Queda list of wealthy Saudi financial sponsors seized by Bosnian police in a Islamic “charity” raid in 2001. (“Terrorist Financing Staff Monograph 9/11 Commission and “The Golden Chain”) According to his website, Odinga was educated in Communist East Germany, (Herder Institute, Leipzig & Otto von Guericke Tech. Institute, Magdeburg) (http://www.raila07.com) Odinga’s eldest son is named “Fidel” (http://www.raila07.com) Perhaps most troubling is Odinga’s links to Islamic extremists in Kenya. According to Voice of America and the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, on 8/29/07, Odinga signed a secret agreement (exposed 11/27) with Sheikh Abdullah Abdi of the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF) in which he agreed to institute Islamic law in exchange for Abdi’s support (eakenya.org)–thereby potentially disenfranchising and curtailing the liberties of millions of Christian Kenyan women. Further, he promised that Muslims suspected of terrorism would be safe from extradition—thereby establishing a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists in Kenya. After the public outcry, Odinga denied signing a secret agreement. Angry at Odinga’s apparent repudiation, a member of NAMLEF subsequently released the agreement to the press. Odinga then claimed the document was a forgery, but acknowledged a secret agreement had been signed in exchange for Muslim support. Finally, under constant pressure, Odinga released what he claimed was the actual document (“Real” MOU) a considerably watered down version of the original; but still anathema to many Christian groups. “In response to the revelations, The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Raila, in both MOUs, ‘comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law’” (“Concerns Raised Over Alleged Vow To Enforce Islamic Law in Kenya” Christian Post 12/18/2007) To many westerners, the idea of imposing Sharia in a predominantly Christian country may have seemed fanciful. However, Kenya has had Sharia courts for family law (not criminal law)—called Khadi courts—since 1963. For the US and “the war on terror”—the most worrisome
section—contained in both agreements– concerns extradition (or
renditions) of suspected terrorists to the US and So, how much of a national security concern is this? Well, actually: huge “…proximity to the volatile states…including Somalia and Sudan have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counterterrorism experts, to the call for jihad. Since the early 1990s, the mosques of Mombasa and other towns have resonated with militant Islamic rhetoric. Radical imams have preached violence against Westerners, attacked the Kenyan government as the lackey of the United States and Israel and called for the implementation of Shariah. Members of the Qaeda cells that blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania…were recruited in mosques near the Indian Ocean beaches [in Kenya]“ (“The African Front” , ibid) At no point has Senator Obama tried to distance himself from Odinga. Odinga visited Obama on a fundraising tour of the US in 2007 and it is believed that political strategist Dick Morris assisted in Odinga’s presidential campaign- gratis- at Obama’s request (Morris only acknowledged the suggestion came through “mutual friends”). (“Bridges Burned in US, Political Kingmaker Hits Africa” ABC News 11/20/2007) Odinga has claimed that he and Obama speak regularly and whether this is true or not– the similarities between their campaigns are startling. (“Kenya Tests New Style of Politicking” The Washington Post, 12/22/2007) In fairness to Senator Obama, after Kenya erupted into violence ( and at the request of Condoleezza Rice), Obama did record a message “. …calling for calm…” and had “..near daily conversations with the US Ambassador…and Raila Odinga” (“The Demons That Still Haunt Africa” TIME magazine 1/10/2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, President Kibaki apparently declined to take his call. Kibaki’s not the only one no longer filled with enthusiasm for Senator Obama’s brand of diplomacy. As Nicholas Kristof reported (with some surprise) in February: “You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Mr. Obama. But Kenya has been fractured along ethnic lines in the last two months, so now Mr. Obama draws frenzied support from the Luos ethnic group of his ancestors, while many members of the rival Kikuyu group fervently support Hillary Rodham Clinton. (“Obama’s Kenya Roots” New York Times 2/24/2008) Curiously, it has been the Kenyan press (almost alone) who have realized the potential implications: “… this is what may be the most memorable effect of the ODM’s [Odinga’s party] post-election campaign for State House. The longer their protests last, and the less disciplined they are - or the more atrocities like Eldoret [church massacre] are conducted in the party’s name- the more likely Kenya is to be stuck on the front pages of the world’s media and the more embarrassment it will bring to the Senator.” (“The Kiss of Death, How Kenya Could Spoil It For Obama” KenyaImagine 1/13/2008) Clearly, Obama campaigned for someone who is corrupt, ruthless and has financial ties to terrorists. More importantly, Obama campaigned for a candidate who had the stated objective of dismantling US & Kenyan government efforts to root out Al Queda and other terrorist organizations. Organizations that had already caused the deaths of hundreds of Americans and Africans in embassy bombings. Senator Obama’s actions—intentional or not—were in direct conflict with the efforts and interests of US national security. I think this raises serious questions about the judgment, maturity and readiness of Senator Obama.
Here's more on Obama and Odinga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QcpdUtxNQ Tax the EVIL Rich!
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:28AM CST on November 2, 2008
<WWW.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.HTML> Taxes under CLINTON-1999 Taxes under BUSH-2008 Single earning: Single earning: 30K - taxed- $ 8,400 30K - taxed $ 4,500 50K - taxed $ 14,000 50K - taxed $ 12,500 75K - taxed $ 23,250 75K - taxed $ 18,750 Married earning: Married earning: 60K - taxed $ 16,800 60K - taxed $ 9,000 75K - taxed $ 21,000 75K - taxed $ 18,750 125K - taxed $ 38,750 125K - taxed $ 31,250 Barack Obama on the Redistribution of Wealth
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:27AM CST on November 2, 2008
Transcript of Barack "Spread the Wealth" Obama interview from 2001. He's disappointed that we've been unable to "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution" and redistribute the wealth, the income, that most of us work hard to accumulate. Work overtime to put a little money away for a rainy day? Inherit the family farm? Struggled to get through school and build your career, and now reaping the benefits of your sacrifice? How dare you? Why, you must have exploited someone to have a nice house, or a nice car, or money in the bank. Don't worry, Barack's "reparative justice" will take your money from you and give it to all the people that you surely must have stepped on getting to where you are.
The transcript is below. MODERATOR: Good morning and welcome to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM and we’re joined by Barack Obama who is Illinois State Senator from the 13th district and senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. <b>But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth</b> and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. <b>It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution</b>, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground <b>that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change</b> and in some ways we still suffer from that. MODERATOR: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio. KAREN: Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point? OBAMA: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts. Spread the what?
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:27AM CST on November 2, 2008
Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he's the typical product of money." Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile. "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? "When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil? "Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth. "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced. "To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil? "But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind. "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil? "Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil? "Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money? "Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. "Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. "Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun. "But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves. "Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter. "Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot. "Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.' "When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are. "You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists. "To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist. "If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality. "Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will. "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out." From the novel "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand Obama and ACORN's Food Stamp Mortgages
Posted by: Iconoclast at 6:26AM CST on November 2, 2008
ACORN's Food Stamp Mortgages
With wanton disregard for the economic well being of America, a decade ago the social justice entrepreneurs of the ultra-leftist Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) let Americans know their strategy for bringing equality of result to the housing market -- at all costs. In a circa 1999 document, "To Each Their Home: Success Stories from the ACORN Housing Corporation," the ACORN affiliate called the American Dream a sham and bragged about undermining banks' underwriting standards. The brochure acknowledged there may be scattered "stories of hope and success" in ACORN-targeted communities, but "they also belie the supposition that if you simply work hard, sacrifice and save, you can easily buy a home of your own." (The document is available here.)
ACORN Housing took credit for developing "several innovative
strategies" to get around pesky traditional lending guidelines,
which were unfair because they "were geared to middle class
borrowers." Instead of using passé measures of creditworthiness such as, say, credit history and having an adequate income, ACORN convinced lenders to adopt "more flexible underwriting criteria that take into account the realities of lower income communities." Henceforth, some banks serving inner cities would accept "less traditional income sources such as food stamps." (See Foundation Watch, November 2008.) It's unclear why ACORN stopped there. Perhaps the rent-a-mob group, renowned for occupying banks, disrupting legislative hearings and emergency medical facilities, surrounding the homes of politicians and CEOs, and annoying trapped motorists into paying tribute as part of its "toll roads" program, could have convinced narrow-minded bankers to accept another financial innovation. How about accepting "Monopoly" money for down payments? Financial tomfoolery like including food stamps on loan applications was encouraged by the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which opened banking to ACORN-style agitation that over time weakened underwriting criteria and helped to alter the culture of financial institutions in the U.S. This 1977 law, whose enactment ACORN lobbied for, punishes lenders for limiting loans to wealthier, more creditworthy markets, a practice called "redlining." It gives banking regulators discretionary authority to make trouble for banks that fail to lend enough money to "underserved" minority communities. After the CRA went into effect, Saul Alinsky-inspired groups such as ACORN and the Greenlining Institute used the law to get into the shakedown business. Rev. Jesse Jackson egged them on at an ACORN "banking summit" in 1992, asking rhetorically, "Why did Jesse James rob banks? Because that's where the money was." The shaking down of lenders intensified when then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin presided over the Clinton administration's effort to put the CRA on steroids. Banks began to make risky subprime loans and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aggregated them for sale in the secondary market as mortgage-backed securities. These practices made it easier for banks to give in to ACORN's demands to originate more and more doomed mortgages because they knew they could offload their high-risk debt on quasi-governmental suckers Fannie and Freddie, which were under intense political pressure to service the subprime market. Economists like Stanley Liebowitz of the University of Texas blame the CRA for helping to cause Wall Street's current problems. He writes that the current mortgage market debacle is "a direct result of an intentional loosening of underwriting standards – done in the name of ending discrimination, despite warnings that it could lead to wide-scale defaults." Liebowitz is hardly alone in pointing out that U.S. financial markets are now being strangled by a terrible credit crunch that might have been avoided if lenders had refrained from doling out loans they ought to have known were doomed to default. Of course, even now as the economic fallout from the collapse of the housing market spreads, getting class-warriors to admit they're wrong about anything is an exercise in futility. Liberals, who reflexively defend ACORN, have twisted themselves into rhetorical pretzels in recent weeks while defending the catastrophic economic egalitarianism of the CRA. An ardent proponent of the CRA, ACORN benefactor, organizer, and trainer Barack H. Obama, Esq., contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented the plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that the bank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. The bank settled the case three years later and reportedly agreed to beef up its lending to unqualified applicants. ACORN refuses to acknowledge the role that it and the CRA played in the current crisis on Wall Street, and as recently as Jan. 21 Obama said in a candidates' debate that the CRA should be more strictly enforced. Michael Ettlinger of John Podesta's Center for American Progress feverishly derides CRA critics as "antigovernment ideologues," while Business Week's Aaron Pressman calls them "know-nothings." Not to be outdone, ACORN ally House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) says criticism of the law is tantamount to attacking poor people and minorities. Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution concurs, arguing that pointing out the flaws of the CRA constitutes "playing the race card." ACORN's overall strategy has a name. It's called the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" of manufactured crisis (named after two anti-capitalist sociologists) and it calls for packing the welfare rolls to encourage dependency on the government and to overload it with financial demands in order to hasten the collapse of American capitalism. ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who created ACORN in 1970, was previously an organizer for the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) that was founded in 1967 by the two sociologists. Not surprisingly, ACORN's "People's Platform," inveighs against the perceived injustices inherent in the American system: "Enough is enough. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America's door. We will not be meek, but mighty. We will not starve on past promises, but feast on future dreams." The CRA and ACORN aren't wholly to blame for the meltdown on Wall Street, but they played a starring role. Saturday November 1, 2008
Posted by: Iconoclast at 1:43AM CST on November 1, 2008
Study: Media coverage has favored Obama campaignNEW YORK – John McCain supporters who believe they haven't gotten a fair shake from the media during the Republican's candidacy against Barack Obama have a new study to point to. Comments made by sources, voters, reporters and anchors that aired on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts over the past two months reflected positively on Obama in 65 percent of cases, compared to 31 percent of cases with regards to McCain, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. ABC's "World News" had more balance than NBC's "Nightly News" or the "CBS Evening News," the group said. Meanwhile, the first half of Fox News Channel's "Special Report" with Brit Hume showed more balance than any of the network broadcasters, although it was dominated by negative evaluations of both campaigns. The center didn't evaluate programs on CNN or MSNBC. "For whatever reason, the media are portraying Barack Obama as a better choice for president than John McCain," said Robert Lichter, a George Mason University professor and head of the center. "If you watch the evening news, you'd think you should vote for Obama." The center analyzed 979 separate news stories shown between Aug. 23 and Oct. 24, and excluded evaluations based on the campaign horse race, including mention of how the candidates were doing in polls. For instance, when a voter was interviewed on CBS Oct. 14 saying he thought Obama brought a freshness to Washington, that was chalked up as a pro-Obama comment. When NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported Oct. 1 that some conservatives say that Sarah Palin is not ready for prime-time, that's marked in the negative column for McCain. ABC recorded 57 percent favorable comments toward the Democrats, and 42 percent positive for the Republicans. NBC had 56 percent positive for the Democrats, 16 percent for the Republicans. CBS had 73 percent positive (Obama), versus 31 percent (McCain). Hume's telecast had 39 percent favorable comments for McCain and 28 percent positive for the Democratic ticket. It was the second study in two weeks to remark upon negative coverage for the McCain-Palin ticket. The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain's coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama's has been more mixed. Meanwhile, another survey issued Friday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed that television continues to be Americans' main source for campaign news, particularly the cable news networks. But there were clear partisan differences in where people turned. For instance, of the people who said they got most of their campaign news from Fox News Channel, 52 percent identified themselves as Republican, 17 percent as Democrats and 30 percent as independents, the Pew center said. MSNBC viewers interested in campaign news identified themselves at 11 percent Republican, 50 percent Democratic and 36 percent independent. The breakdown for CNN: 13 percent Republican, 45 percent Democrat, 38 percent independent. The study was based on a survey of 2,011 people taken Oct. 17-20 and 24-27. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent. |
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The mainstream media has justified ignoring this story based on a “conspiracy theory” chain email (