It evolved that you, the American People, ultimately defeated the Axis Powers. This was a war you never asked for, tried to avoid and had it thrust upon you by the feckless efforts of others at appeasement and compromise with those who for years made clear their intentions and determination to conquer and impose their will on others.

In winning the War, you freed millions from tyranny and certain death, established democratic governments in the lands of your former enemies, rebuilt entire countries and above all showed the world the true power of liberty and freedom.

I am among those this nation liberated. I do not know where, when or to whom I was born, except to estimate that it occurred sometime in the later years of the War. My memory begins being alone in a room with a recently deceased woman; I have no knowledge of whom she was. I then began my life of survival of the streets of a totally destroyed city somewhere in central Europe. During this period I was shot and left for dead, rescued, placed in a military hospital and in due course put on a ship bound for the United States. I did not speak English and had no name until I was given one by the first of a number of foster families I lived with. Thanks to the efforts of the Catholic Church I was eventually adopted and put on the road to becoming an American citizen.

On the anniversary of the event that made World War ll and the postwar world inevitable, I want to express, on behalf of myself and all who were set free, our gratitude for the sacrifices, determination and leadership of the American people.

Many years ago, in our darkest hour, millions of us were able to look to the United States for deliverance. However, in the worst of times in the future, there will be no one for our nation to turn to but ourselves. Our ability to deal with the many challenges our country will face is very much in question as the vast majority of our political and intellectual elites, similar to their counterparts in Europe in the 1920's and 30's, have adopted internationalism and pacifism as a way to deal with threats from abroad and Euro-Socialism to solve problems at home.

Our primary international challenge is to live in peace in a world of easily obtained weapons of unimaginable destruction. The territorial and economic ambitions of totalitarian nations will continue to be a primary threat; however, these same countries choosing to arm terrorist groups either recruited or created as their surrogates will be an equal menace.

The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq has forced the largest of these groups to stand and fight thus virtually destroying their viability while confirming to rogue nations that we will not tolerate their alliances with terrorists or the development of nuclear weapons. I have no doubt that if this interventionist philosophy had existed among the leaders of Europe during the 1930's, my life and those of hundreds of millions would have been far different and the world a much safer place today.

Despite the lessons of history and success in Iraq, many in our political ruling class want to return to a European reliance on internationalism, open-ended negotiations, overwrought concern for the dubious claims and rights of the enemy and a belief in a unique ability to convince the most brutal of adversaries to live in peace. This reversion to failed strategy will only succeed in putting us at greater risk while emboldening those who wish us harm.

Within our borders, due to government policies, laws and regulations, we are faced with enormous national debt, unmanageable long term financial commitments and erosion of our economic base and societal foundations. Using the power of government to coerce lending for "fair and affordable housing" our financial markets are now under the control of bureaucrats and politicians in Washington.

Nonetheless many are willing to surrender more of their freedom and fortune in the vain hope that the same government and its attendant ruling class can solve the problems they created. Their proposed solution is to continue adopting European socialism while dramatically weakening our economy and enriching potential enemies as these same elites in their worship of radical environmentalism and the power to tax and regulate free enterprise refuse to allow any practical solution to our energy and wealth creation needs.

One need only to look across the ocean to the countries of Western Europe to see the failure of socialism: inevitable bankruptcy due to excessive entitlements, high unemployment, a declining birth rate, total dependence on others for defense and a rapidly diminishing role in world affairs.

Our country was established on the principle that the citizen and not the state was paramount, it was understood that the more government was empowered the greater the loss of individual freedom and wealth. The founding fathers did not intend to exchange the tyranny of a monarchy with that of today's theoretically well intentioned oligarchy made up of tenured politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, doctrinaire judges and self serving educators who in their governance have betrayed the long term interests of the most magnificent people on the face of the earth.

The critical years that will determine the country's ultimate course are upon us. We can proceed down the road emulating and compounding European failures thus condemning our nation to lose control of the future as we will no longer be able to finance our ability to remain a super power and have the will survive in a hostile world. Beginning with this election, the people must take back the reins of government at all levels, return to the principles that made this the extraordinary country that it is and stay master of our destiny.

It is my fervent prayer that this nation never experiences what the victims and survivors of World War ll endured. We can continue to live in peace but only if the United States is a dominant moral and economic force able to underwrite being the unrivaled military power in the world and be willing to use those strengths to aggressively confront potential adversaries before they metastasize into a far greater threat.

By Steve McCann
October 25, 2008

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/europes_sorry_lesson.html

Hat tip: Len Salonsky

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I have seen for quite some time that although we won the Cold War -- and defeated the Soviet communist empire -- America is vulnerable to varying degrees of collectivism, wealth redistribution, "creeping socialism" (Ronald Reagan's phrase), class-warfare rhetoric, and generally milder, more palatable (but still dangerous) forms of disguised Marxism. Why? How? The answer is simple: The history and truth about communism is not taught by our educators.

That total failure to remind and understand means that Americans are painfully vulnerable to repeat mistakes that should have been forever tossed onto the ash-heap of history.

Communism and the Cold War has been my area of research for years. I've written books on the subject. I lecture on the subject at Grove City College and around the country. The book I'm currently researching with Peter Schweizer is a Cold War book, which, ironically, inevitably brought us into contact with Marxist characters who allied with and even mentored Barack Obama.

Of all the lectures that I do around the country, none seem to rivet the audience as much as my discourse on the horrors of communism. In these lectures, which are usually connected to my books on Ronald Reagan, I do a 10-15 minute backgrounder on the crimes of communists-from their militant attacks on private property, on members of all religious faiths, and on basic civil liberties, to their total death toll of over 100 million bloodied, emaciated corpses in the 20th century.

As I do these presentations, the young people, especially on college campuses, are locked in, amazed at what they are hearing. I think they are especially struck that I always ground every fact and figure in reliable research and authorities -- books published by Harvard University Press and Yale University Press, quotes from the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel and Alexander Yakovlev, anti-Soviet appraisals from certain Cold War Democrats like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and even early liberals like Woodrow Wilson. I rarely use right-wing sources because I don't want the professors of these students to be able to later shoot a single hole in my presentation -- a potential tactic to undermine the overall thesis.

And speaking of those professors, that gets to my point here: As the young people in my audience are fully engaged, hands in the air with question after question -- obviously hearing all of these things for the first time in their lives, from K-12 to college, as they are eager to inform me after my talk -- the professors often stare at me with contempt. In one case, a British professor, who could not stop sighing, squirming, and rolling her eyes as I quoted the most heinous assessments of religion by Marx and Lenin, got up and stormed out of the room.

These professors glare at me as if the ghost of Joe McCarthy has flown into the room and leapt inside of my body. In fact, that's the essence of their criticism: It is not so much that these professors approve of communism as much as they disapprove of -- actually, utterly despise -- anti-communism. They areanti-anti-communist more so than pro-communist. Conservatives need to understand this, so as to avoid broad-brushing and losing credibility. Sure, a lot of professors are Marxists, and many more share the utopian goals of Marxism, but the vast majority are simply leftists.

Being on the left entails many strange contradictions and political pathologies, one of which is this bizarre revulsion toward anti-communists. These leftists -- to their credit -- despise fascism, and will preach anti-fascism until they're blue in the face. They are as appalled by fascism as conservatives are by communism. But while conservatives detest bothcommunism and fascism, liberals only detest one of the two.

For instance, I recently saw that Human Events created a list of the top 10 worst books ever written, which included, as the top two, Marx's Communist Manifesto (#1), followed by Hitler's Mein Kampf (#2). That ranking is easily defended solely on numbers: Hitler killed at least 10 million; communism killed at least 100 million. Either way, kudos toHuman Events, a conservative newspaper, for putting both communism and fascism in its top two. Yet, conversely, any liberal version of such a list would not even place theCommunist Manifesto in the top 10. I guarantee that liberals who read the Human Events list will snicker at its alleged Neanderthal anti-communism.

The leftist intelligentsia that dominates higher education, and which writes the civics texts used in high schools -- I've read and studied these texts -- and which trains the teachers who teach in high schools, is not in the slightest bit notably anti-communist. These liberals do not teach the lessons of communism.

What's more, aside from failing to instruct their students in the crass facts about communism's unprecedented destruction -- its purges, mass famines, show trials, killing fields, concentration camps -- these educators are negligent in failing to teach the essential, non-emotional, but crucial Econ 101 basics that contrast capitalism and communism and, thus, that get at the heart of how and why command economies simply do not work. Each semester in my Comparative Politics course at Grove City College, it takes no more than 50 minutes to matter-of-factly lay out the rudimentary differences. Whereas capitalist systems are based on the market forces of supply and demand, which dictate prices and production levels and targets, communist systems are based on central planning, by which a government bureau attempts to manage such things. Capitalism is based on private ownership; communism on public ownership. Capitalism thrives on small government and taxes; communism on large government and taxes, typically progressive income-tax rates and estate taxes -- both advocated explicitly by Marx -- and much more.

This stuff isn't rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn't being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people. (Nazism sought genocide based on ethnicity; communism sought genocide based on class.)

Most Americans generally know that the USSR was a bad place and that it was good that the Berlin Wall fell; they lived through that. But they know little beyond that, especially young Americans in college today, born around the time the wall fell -- Obama's biggest supporters. Nowhere in America is Barack Obama worshipped as he is on college campuses, by students and professors alike.

What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don't care; they don't get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment -- from academia to media to Hollywood -- will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left's reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys.

When the leftists of the ‘60s took over higher education and the media, they really knew what they were doing. This was brilliant, masterful, a tactical slam-dunk, a tremendous coup for them and their worldview, with ripple effects we can scarcely imagine.

Does this mean that the McCain camp, talk radio and conservatives generally shouldn't bother exposing these things? Not at all. The truth is the truth, and needs to be told. Moderates especially need to be informed that Barack Obama is not your typical liberal: he is the most hard-left Democrat that his party has ever nominated for the presidency. It is absolutely not a coincidence that the man with these far-left associations just so happens to be ranked -- quantifiably, objectively, by non-partisan, respected sources like National Journal -- the most far-left member of the U.S. Senate, which is no small thing given the leftward drift of the modern Democratic Party. In other words, Obama's extremist associations matter; they are fully revealing, illustrative of the political-ideological realities that the pro-Obama media will not expose. His voting record bears this out.

That said, I warn my fellow conservatives: Be prepared to be really, really frustrated when few people seem to care.

The Santayana aphorism is correct: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. For decades now, we haven't taught the next generation what it needs to know from its immediate past. And now, to borrow from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, America's chickens have come home to roost.

By Paul Kengor
October 10, 2008

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science at Grove City College. His latest book is The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007).

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/why_obamas_communist_connectio.html

Hat tip: Len Salonsky

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. ~ Winston Churchill

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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But even this doesn't fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress - with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit. (emphasis added)

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:

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

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can.

The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits.

The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."

According to another City Journal article titled "Compassion Gone Mad":

The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.

The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists indefinitely."

ACORN, the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear

In 1970, one of George Wiley's protégés, Wade Rathke -- like Bill Ayers, a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- was sent to found the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now. While NWRO had made a good start, it alone couldn't accomplish the Cloward-Piven goals. Rathke's group broadened the offensive to include a wide array of low income "rights." Shortly thereafter they changed "Arkansas" to "Association of" and ACORN went nationwide.

Today ACORN is involved in a wide array of activities, including housing, voting rights, illegal immigration and other issues. According to ACORN's website: "ACORN is the nation's largest grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country," It is perhaps the largest radical group in the U.S. and has been cited for widespread criminal activity on many fronts.

Voting

On voting rights, ACORN and its voter mobilization subsidiary, Project Vote, have been involved nationwide in efforts to grant felons the vote and lobbied heavily for the Motor Voter Act of 1993, a law allowing people to register at motor vehicle departments, schools, libraries and other public places. That law had been sought by Cloward and Piven since the early1980s and they were present, standing behind President Clinton at the signing ceremony.

ACORN's voter rights tactics follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy:

1. Register as many Democrat voters as possible, legal or otherwise and help them vote, multiple times if possible.
2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased, random names from the phone book, even contrived names.
3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards.

In this effort, ACORN sets up registration sites all over the country and has been frequently cited for turning in fraudulent registrations, as well as destroying republican applications. In the 2004-2006 election cycles alone, ACORN was accused of widespread voter fraud in 12 states. It may have swung the election for one state governor.

ACORN's website brags: "Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote." Project vote boasts 4 million. I wonder how many of them are dead? For the 2008 cycle, ACORN and Project Vote have pulled out all the stops. Given their furious nationwide effort, it is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone.

Barack Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago and his highly successful voter registration drive was credited with getting the disgraced former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun elected. Newsmax reiterates Cloward and Piven's aspirations for ACORN's voter registration efforts:

By advocating massive, no-holds-barred voter registration campaigns, they [Cloward & Piven] sought a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. that would re-distribute the nation's wealth and lead to a totalitarian socialist state.

Illegal Immigration

As I have written elsewhere, the Radical Left's offensive to promote illegal immigration is "Cloward-Piven on steroids." ACORN is at the forefront of this movement as well, and was a leading organization among a broad coalition of radical groups, including Soros' Open Society Institute, the Service Employees International Union (ACORN founder Wade Rathke also runs a SEIU chapter), and others, that became the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. CCIR fortunately failed to gain passage for the 2007 illegal immigrant amnesty bill, but its goals have not changed.

The burden of illegal immigration on our already overstressed welfare system has been widely documented. Some towns in California have even been taken over by illegal immigrant drug cartels. The disease, crime and overcrowding brought by illegal immigrants places a heavy burden on every segment of society and every level of government, threatening to split this country apart at the seams. In the meantime, radical leftist efforts to grant illegal immigrants citizenship guarantee a huge pool of new democrat voters. With little border control, terrorists can also filter in.

Obama aided ACORN as their lead attorney in a successful suit he brought against the Illinois state government to implement the Motor Voter law there. The law had been resisted by Republican Governor Jim Edgars, who feared the law was an opening to widespread vote fraud.

His fears were warranted as the Motor Voter law has since been cited as a major opportunity for vote fraud, especially for illegal immigrants, even terrorists. According to the Wall Street Journal: "After 9/11, the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote..."

ACORN's dual offensives on voting and illegal immigration are handy complements. Both swell the voter rolls with reliable democrats while assaulting the country ACORN seeks to destroy with overwhelming new problems.

Mortgage Crisis

And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago. It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."

ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

As a New York Post article describes it:

A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report it on your tax returns." Credit counseling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor's Business Daily added:

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."

And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN's negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an "Affordable Housing Trust Fund," granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.

Even now, unbelievably -- on the brink of national disaster -- Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!

This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN's efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.

Enter Barack Obama

In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who's who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.

Saul Alinsky

Most people are unaware that Barack Obama received his training in "community organizing" from Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. But he did. In and of itself that marks his heritage and training as that of a radical activist. One really needs go no further. But we have.

Bill Ayers

Obama objects to being associated with SDS bomber Bill Ayers, claiming he is being smeared with "guilt by association." But they worked together at the Woods Fund. The Wall Street Journal added substantially to our knowledge by describing in great detail Obama's work over five years with SDS bomber Bill Ayers on the board of a non-profit, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to push a radical agenda on public school children. As Stanley Kurtz states:

"...the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."

Also included in the mix is Theresa Heinz Kerry's favorite charity, the Tides Foundation. A partial list of Tides grants tells you all you need to know: ACLU, ACORN, Center for American Progress, Center for Constitutional Rights (a communist front,) CAIR, Earth Justice, Institute for Policy Studies (KGB spy nest), National Lawyers Guild (oldest communist front in U.S.), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and practically every other radical group there is. ACORN's Wade Rathke runs a Tides subsidiary, the Tides Center.

Carl Davidson and the New Party

We have heard about Bomber Bill, but we hear little about fellow SDS member Carl Davidson. According to Discover the Networks, Davidson was an early supporter of Barack Obama and a prominent member of Chicago's New Party, a synthesis of CPUSA members, Socialists, ACORN veterans and other radicals. Obama sought and received the New Party's endorsement, and they assisted with his campaign. The New Party also developed a strong relationship with ACORN. As an excellent article on the New Party observes: "Barack Obama knew what he was getting into and remains an ideal New Party candidate."

George Soros

The chart also suggests the reason for George Soros' fervent support of Obama. The President of his Open Society Institute is Aryeh Neier, founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As mentioned above, three other former SDS members had extensive contact with Obama: Bill Ayers, Carl Davidson and Wade Rathke. Surely Aryeh Neier would have heard from his former colleagues of the promising new politician. More to the point, Neier is firmly committed to supporting the hugely successful radical organization, ACORN, and would be certain back their favored candidate, Barack Obama.

ACORN

Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz's excellent National Review article, "Inside Obama's Acorn." also describes Obama's ACORN connection in detail. But I can't improve on Obama's own words:

I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. - Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)

In another excellent article on Obama's ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:

It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?

As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN's Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN's successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN's representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns -- both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN's true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus "our family" and "the conscience of Fannie Mae."

In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.

In his few years as a U.S. senator, Obama has received campaign contributions of $126,349, from Fannie and Freddie, second only to the $165,400 received by Senator Chris Dodd, who has been getting donations from them since 1988. What makes Obama so special?

His closest advisers are a dirty laundry list of individuals at the heart of the financial crisis: former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson; Former Fannie Mae CEO and former Clinton Budget Director Frank Raines; and billionaire failed Superior Bank of Chicago Board Chair Penny Pritzker.

Johnson had to step down as adviser on Obama's V.P. search after this gem came out:

An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) report[1] from September 2004 found that, during Johnson's tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses in 1998.[2] A 2006 OFHEO report[3] found that Fannie Mae had substantially under-reported Johnson's compensation. Originally reported as $6-7 million, Johnson actually received approximately $21 million.

Obama denies ties to Raines but the Washington Post calls him a member of "Obama's political circle." Raines and Johnson were fined $3 million by the Office of Federal Housing Oversight for their manipulation of Fannie books. The fine is small change however, compared to the $50 million Raines was able to obtain in improper bonuses as a result of juggling the books.

Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama's presidential campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn't seem to have come out of it too badly.

As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.

Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did.

Barack Obama, the Cloward-Piven candidate, no matter how he describes himself, has been a radical activist for most of his political career. That activism has been in support of organizations and initiatives that at their heart seek to tear the pillars of this nation asunder in order to replace them with their demented socialist vision. Their influence has spread so far and so wide that despite their blatant culpability in the current financial crisis, they are able to manipulate Capital Hill politicians to cut them into $140 billion of the bailout pie!

God grant those few responsible yet remaining in Washington, DC the strength to prevent this massive fraud from occurring. God grant them the courage to stand up in the face of this Marxist tidal wave.

By James Simpson

Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. His writings have been published in American Thinker, Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, DefenseWatch, Soldier of Fortune and others. His blog is Truth and Consequences..

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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The Community Reinvestment Act was pushed hard by Bill Clinton, although it originated under Jimmy Carter. Asked about it the other day on one of the morning TV talk shows, Clinton said times back then were different. Fannie and Freddie had lots of money and he (in his infinite wisdom) decided that the money should not go to share holders or to executive compensation, but should be used to put the poor into homes.

As you can imagine, wonderful things happen when the government strong arms corporations as to how they should spend their money and, better yet, how they should assess the qualifications of home buyers. So the country's biggest buyers of mortgages were pressured into lowering the qualifications of applicants, in order to increase the percentage of poor that got mortgages. By 2006, 30% of all mortgages went to people who in any other circumstances wouldn't qualify.

Now the political left would like you to know that the CRA-controlled institutions did not lend the largest percentage of sub-prime mortgages. But that's information by deception, because the mortgage business is a competitive business. If the government strong arms one part of the business, the other part will respond. And strong arm was what the Clinton administration did, even using the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to pressure banks to lend more money to the disadvantaged. Caught in the act, a spokesman for the office noted that its abuse of power was "for the best of intentions:" the same inclination used to pave the road to hell.

In the short run, all sorts of money was to be made by lowering standards and processing sub-prime loans for the poor. The Wall Street Journal raised concerns about Fannie's and Freddie's capital requirements. Senator Phil Gramm (R, TX) raised issues about community pressure groups, such as Barack Obama's ACORN, extorting money from banks by holding their feet to the CRA fire, and threatening to militate against mergers and acquisitions unless the banks entered into preferential agreements with community groups.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act cut down on CRA reporting requirements and upped the ante for groups such as ACORN, forcing them to disclose their relationships with local banks.

Fannie and Freddie became big contributors to the Democratic Party. The sub-prime business paid off-at least while the bubble was growing. And the Kerry, Hillary and Obama campaigns have numbered among the leading recipients of the largess of the two mortgage lenders.

Franklin Raines, the Fannie Mae C.E.O. from 1999 to 2004, had been budget director in the Clinton administration. The left would not like you to be reminded that Raines has been a consultant to the Obama campaign, according to theWashington Post, and that Freddie and Fannie number among the top 5 contributors to Obama's run for the presidency. Raines is being sued for the recovery of 50 million in compensation acquired by the alleged manipulation of Fannie's books. Now, that's not change we can believe in. That's Washington as we have come to know and "love" it.

The Bush administration in 2003 tried to change the system, to no avail. Congressman Barney Frank, (D, MA ) was in the forefront of stopping the Bush proposal to take control out of Fannie and Freddie and put it into a third overseeing organization. Frank too has emerged in the current crisis as one of the major critics of the administration.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continued to raise the alarm over Fannie's and Freddie's weak capitalization. His concerns were ignored.

Former Congressman Michael Oxley (R,OH), then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and co-author of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, introduced a bill in 2005 in response to the growing problem, but Fannie and Freddie put their lobbyists to work and the bill died.

Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, who is now Chairman of the Banking Committee and who appears along side Majority Leader Harry Reid on television to discuss the current bailout negotiations, has had harsh words for the Bush administration for its alleged role in the crisis.

But the rest of us should have some harsh words for Senator Dodd. After all, the Bush administration in 2003 and Senator Phil Gramm even earlier, in 1999, had been working to change the system. Dodd, like Obama, has been a big recipient of campaign funds from Fannie and Freddie, organizations that Dodd oversees. Dodd has apparently been more consumed with campaign contributions from the mortgage giants than the responsibilities of oversight.

When I point out the long trail of Obama's corruption stretching back to his days in the Illinois legislature, my liberal friends invoke moral equivalence, "They're all corrupt."

There is no shame among the left. When they think Bush is responsible for the collapse of the banking system, they scream at you. When you point out that the Community Reinvestment Act created a pattern of abuse that now threatens the entire financial system, without hesitation liberals say, "They're all corrupt."

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation even has a web site so you could see how well your bank is meeting its obligations under the CRA. Those of you who had money in Washington Mutual, which just went belly up, will be happy to know that WaMu, over the five individual reporting periods, had almost exemplary ratings on its commitment to CRA. That should give WaMu depositors great joy, to compensate for the financial mess they may be in. If WaMu had been less responsive to the CRA and more responsive to the market, maybe it wouldn't be insolvent.

I am not suggesting that the CRA by itself led to the current crisis, but the CRA was the first and most important part of the food chain. The CRA caused the expansion in the number of questionable loans that lending institutions made, but Wall Street and insurance underwriters were all to willing to package these loans, enhance their ratings through convenient exercises in fantasy, sell them, and insure them with reserves that were more inadequate than the incomes of the people who got the loans in the first place..

The best thing that can emerge from the current financial crisis is the realization that the government needs to stop directing economic decision making. In a sense, the government is putting out a fire it started when it both created the CRA and assessed lending institutions by how well they were doing in response to the program. When Clinton decided, in his usual arrogance, that he knew better than the market how banks should lend money, the seeds were sown for the current financial disaster.

If you want to blame Bush for the current crisis, it might make you feel good, reinforce your sense of how the world works, enable you to find a meeting of the minds when you next engage your liberal friends over wine and quiche, but like so many things you believe and which make you feel good, it has no correspondence to reality.

By Abraham H. Miller
Abraham H. Miller is emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/the_financial_mess_how_we_got.html

Hat tip: Len Salonsky

"It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as it is to administer medication to the dead." ~~ Thomas Jefferson

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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