"As a white European, I feel it is my cultural duty to back Obama, in recognition of his white European heritage. Yes, I am a conservative, but some things are more important than party politics. We stand facing a brand new age, where a white man like Obama can stand a real chance of being elected president. Who’d have thought, back in the days of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, that such a thing would be possible?
Sure there will be racists across the country who will never accept Barack simply because he has lighter skin and a white mother, but he has overcome these attitudes and I feel I must support him - not just for the sake of my fellow European whites, but for all Americans" Uptight on Hotair October 13, 2008 at 4:14 PM".
"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things". Russell Baker.
Dig. Now we in Australia, where many seem addicted to the shallow, mediocre and mundane regards anything vaguely requiring analysis, have a sub-Prime Minister in Kevin fluffy Rudd who seems to grasp little of the fundamentals of economics and democracy and especially regards capitalism, perhaps zero. Oh, except for his very rich self. Oh, got it. Semi-socialism for us and capitalist riches for him.
Kev says and I kid you not, that the current crisis is caused by er, "extreme capitalism!" Er, no. Our PM is in many ways if not all, a superficial nasty little boob. Only the absence of capitalism is extreme. The only "flaw" in capitalism is that people and governments won't leave it alone. Anyone who doesn't believe in capitalism doesn't believe freedom works and thus in the abundance of human ingenuity and effort. And the same faux doubters are almost invariably the privileged recipients of its massive success.
As Mark Steyn has said of such folks "they live in a fantasy life completely supported by the system they despise". Here's Steyn's latest via Powerline blog, on ACORN vote stealing to the tune of 100% fraud! I kid you not.
"In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there started reviewing them, and quit after they found that the first 2,100 were all fraudulent. The mind boggles: ACORN turns in thousands of new registrations, and not a single one represents a legitimate voter". Powerline blog.
Steyn: "...the Dems have a glamorous charismatic candidate who, according to the polls, is on course to win. Why do they need ACORN to steal it?" From Mark Steyn.
Back to the infections of socialist left boobery. A reason for the current state of the union is the actual extreme crony corruption and socialized drivel desires of the Clinton's et al, [which the Clinton's et al never want for themselves] while forcing banks under threat of fines and jail to lend money to people out of their economic depth, or even on welfare and without any assets etc, is . The bankrupt mentality of funneling taxpayer money to private developers to fix junk housing estates by Obama is just another disaster among thousands since Wilson in 1913. Thus criminal secret behavior, incompetence and dysfunctional bogus corporations who cheated investors and even the government by manipulating in a doomed attempt to ignore the harsh facts of the market, and all ending in inevitable collapses.
Capitalism is like your Mother when you're five years-old. You can't fool her for long. Act outrageously for too long and eventually you will get a nasty whack.
There's only extreme government or the lack thereof and no such thing as "extreme capitalism" only capitalism and the lack thereof, which is merely the free flow of private capital, and true capitalism is always successful, as the weaker or fraudulent are naturally replaced. All bail outs are the disease and feed the symptoms. Via Christopher Hitchens, it can be summed as socialism for dysfunctional company's and free enterprise for everyone else. Free markets eventually tend to lead to free people. But still, Barack 'ACORN Ayers Rezco Alinsky Annenberg Challenge Farrakhan Wright etc' Obama believes in Marxenomics of the nutty ACORN kind. Oh yes, he duz.
Ah, the monumental ACORN saga. The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate by David Freddoso. At Barnes and Noble.
How Obama’s ACORN friends and supporters use poor blacks to commit voter fraud. Note toward the end of the vid, the classic middle-aged Prince Valiant bob Socialist witch saying that authorities investigating clear evidence of voter fraud is a “witch hunt”. Classic. Remember, if a left liberal does it, this is always for the good of "da peeple.*"
Here Obama explains how how his neo-Zimbabwean Socialist Marxism is good for successful Americans.
Here, successful black Conservative radio host and [sadly] McCain supporter, James T. Harris, asks after blacks giving Democrats "95%” of their vote, how have the Democrats improved black schools, neighbourhoods or anything?
Thus the man gets death threats from er, mutant “progressives”. Apparently black pigmentation means conformity to a group and not any rational thought or free choice. Note how none of James empirical points are answered. He is as per usual subjected to mere ad hominems. And dig the group think mentality of the hack interviewer Don Lemon. One step from “My gang will get you. But that’s just an email response, Mr Harris...”
This video that says it all really. Obama at an ACORN and other radical activist festival! Excellent then… Asked whether as President he will invite all these Leftard Marxist Socialist rabble to the Whitehouse, The Chosen One says “Yes, but let me just say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we’re going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda”.
Check. Nuance. Dig how the hard truth is that Barack Hussein Obama creates all his own “smear campaigns!” The vid text over says: “ACORN and friends, responsible for voter fraud and the sub-prime crisis, are going to be shaping policy for the Obama Presidency”.
"The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it". Carl Becker.
Along with Marxist creep and long-term leader of ACORN Deepak Bhargava, Obama sued banks to force banks to give out bad loans. Barack Obama IS a Leftist Marxist Socialist Radical monster. He has the history, background, agenda, associates and will required.
From an article further down this post by the great Stanley Kurtz: “As these examples make clear, there’s one further crucial respect in which ACORN departs from the old New Left’s playbook. Instead of trying to overturn “the system”—to blow it up, as George Wiley wanted to do—ACORN burrows deep within the system, taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.
Obama, in beret, discussing with a like-minded Marxist hepcat, how uncool and squaresville a self regulating Capitalist Free Market Democracy is.
"I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them". Jane Austen.
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities by Sol Stern.
Excerpts: “ACORN’s detailed and effective manual for organizers points out that mobilizing the religious community imparts the odor of sanctity to a left-wing social agenda. “Religious involvement highlighted the moral and theological reasons for a Living Wage,” the manual observes. Oppose the agenda, and you seem like part of an unholy alliance. There’s nothing mainstream about that agenda, of course. ACORN’s specific policy prescriptions offer a job-killing recipe for urban blight and decline.
...ACORN has never learned the most important lesson from the failures of 1960s radicalism—that there is a tight connection between irresponsible personal behavior and poverty. One can read hundreds of pages of ACORN pronouncements on the problems of inner-city neighborhoods without finding a word about how single-parent households have helped cause and perpetuate them.
...I asked executive director Kest if his organization might be missing something in its refusal to address illegitimacy. He shrugged off my question. “We are more focused on irresponsible behavior in the corporate sector,” he responded. “I don’t think [illegitimacy] comes anywhere close to the irresponsible behavior of people running the largest businesses in this country”—as if the oppressiveness of “crime in the suites,” as Jesse Jackson likes to put it, causes, and thus excuses, self-destructive behavior in the streets.
...ACORN has found a use for it beyond wielding it as a propaganda tool to suggest that “redlining” still exists. ACORN has developed a lucrative niche as an “advisor” to banks seeking regulatory approvals. Thus we have J. P. Morgan & Company, the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN. This act of generosity and civic-mindedness came, interestingly, just as Morgan was asking bank regulators for approval of a merger with Chase Manhattan. Not to be outdone, Chase also decided to grant more than $200,000 to ACORN.
...Some of ACORN’s fellow community activists are even blunter. “ACORN knows that corporate America has no starch in their shorts and, therefore, what they try to do is buy peace from groups that agitate against them,” says Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a community-action group that stresses moral regeneration and individual responsibility rather than government handouts. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN.”
...Such opportunism fits an ACORN pattern. The group regularly takes actions that appear blatantly self-interested or hypocritical, as if their pure motives and laudable ends might justify less than elevated means. For example, even while pushing for living-wage legislation in California, ACORN was paying its workers less than the existing minimum wage—and arguing when the state sued it that the minimum-wage law infringed its First Amendment free-speech right, since paying workers more would hinder it in spreading its message. So, too, many of the living-wage laws it pushes exempt unionized companies from the legislation—a powerful tool for union-organizing efforts and a valuable gift to the unions that are ACORN’s biggest allies. A similar gift is ACORN’s effort to unionize workfare recipients and thus swell union membership rolls.
...ACORN had another ulterior motive for opposing any privatization experiment. ACORN has political ties with teachers’ unions—and they fiercely oppose privatization and vouchers in education, because these reforms might threaten union members’ jobs. It is fitting that leading the anti-Edison campaign was Bertha Lewis, New York ACORN chief and co-chair of the Working Families Party—fast becoming the key vehicle for advancing the political agenda of several of the city’s trade unions. Though ACORN sent hundreds of cadres to demonstrate outside Edison’s headquarters, it has never uttered an unkind word about the teachers’ unions, the main culprit in New York City’s educational failure.
...I spoke to Bertha Lewis about her approach to school improvement. Our polite conversation took a nasty turn when I proposed that ACORN families might benefit by a voucher program for kids in failing schools. She launched into a tirade. Vouchers were just “a hoax to destroy the public schools,” she charged. The voucher movement wasn’t about education, but rather about “race and class.” “This is capitalism at its worst,” she shouted. “You always do it on the backs of the poor. It’s all bullshit, and you know it. I grew up in the ghetto. These vouchers are just a life raft for a few people to get out. It’s another education urban renewal plan. It’s gentrification.
...There may be different approaches to community organizing. But there should also be a community organizers’ version of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.” ACORN founder George Wiley violated that oath when he used the poor as cannon fodder in a misbegotten scheme to throw the capitalist political economy into crisis. Decades later, ACORN leaders are again violating it when they promote an urban economic agenda that would snuff out economic opportunity, when they seek to derail welfare reform, and when they side with a monopolistic education system and its unionized employees against the right of poor families to send their children to schools that actually work. With friends like these, the urban poor don’t need enemies.”
Introduction to ACORN'S Nutty Regime by Sol Stern.
"If you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience. It boasts two radio stations, a housing corporation, a law office, and affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable successes in getting municipalities and state legislatures to enact its radical policy goals into law.
Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.
It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New Left–inspired gospel, since it grew out of one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization. In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley forged an army of tens of thousands of single minority mothers, whom he sent out to disrupt welfare offices through sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the “oppressive” eligibility restrictions that kept down the welfare rolls. His aim: to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America’s unjust capitalist economy.
The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams. From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times.
By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy. Yet far from sparking a restructuring of American capitalism, this explosion of the welfare rolls only helped to create a culture of family disintegration and dependency in inner-city neighborhoods, with rampant illegitimacy, crime, school failure, drug abuse, non-work, and poverty among a fast-growing underclass.
Even Wiley came to see that cramming millions more single mothers and their kids onto the welfare rolls would not produce the desired socialist utopia. Seeking new worlds to conquer, he sent one of his young lieutenants, Wade Rathke, to Little Rock, Arkansas, to launch a new community-organizing group: ACORN. The new group was to build a broad constituency of low-income and working-class people to agitate for social change.
The little ACORN that Wiley planted in the Arkansas soil flourished. As Rathke expanded it into a national organization, the “A” in its name—Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now—came to stand for “Association of” instead of “Arkansas.” And as it grew, it retained the core assumptions of the old New Left but radically transformed the New Left’s methods to produce something truly original.
ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak.
“We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom . . . . We have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor”—claptrap that not only falsifies the relative comfort of the poor in America but that also is a classic example of chutzpah, given ACORN’s origins in a movement that undermined the work ethic of the poor. But never mind—ACORN claims that it “stands virtually alone in its dedication to organizing the poor and powerless.”
It organizes them to push for ever more government control of the economy, as if it had learned no lessons about the free-market magic that made American cities unexampled engines of job creation for more than a century, proliferating opportunity and catapulting millions out of misery.
But look beyond the stale rhetoric, and you’ll see that what is new in ACORN’s approach is its focus on the local rather than the national or the global. It is an ingenious approach, for the political culture of cities tends to be further to the left than the nation’s, making them less resistant to ACORN’s worldview. City legislators and local reporters are often less sophisticated than their national counterparts and have been slow to grasp how radical ACORN’s positions really are". Continue vomiting and shaking your fist in impotent rage here...
Hat tip to Politically Drunk On Power! blog for links.
Stanley Kurtz all about ACORN & Obama.
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.”
In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.
While Acorn holds to NWRO’s radical economic framework and its confrontational 1960’s-style tactics, the targets and strategy have changed. Acorn prefers to fly under the national radar, organizing locally in liberal urban areas — where, Stern observes, local legislators and reporters are often “slow to grasp how radical Acorn’s positions really are.”
Acorn’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids.
Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.
But don’t let the disruptive tactics fool you. Acorn is a savvy and exceedingly effective political player. Stern says that Acorn’s key post–New Left innovation is its determination to take over the system from within, rather than futilely try to overthrow it from without. Stern calls this strategy a political version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Take Atlas and Dreier at their word: Acorn has an openly aggressive and intimidating side, but a sophisticated inside game, as well. Chicago’s Acorn leader, for example, won a seat on the Board of Aldermen as the candidate of a leftist “New Party.”
Do Atlas and Dreier [ACORN supporting academics]dismiss Stern’s catalogue of Acorn’s disruptive and intentionally intimidating tactics as a set of regrettable exceptions to Acorn’s rule of civility? Not a chance. Atlas and Dreier are at pains to point out that intimidation works. They proudly reel off the increased memberships that follow in the wake of high-profile disruptions, and clearly imply that the same public officials who object most vociferously to intimidation are the ones most likely to cave as a result. What really upsets Atlas and Dreier is that Stern misses the subtle national hand directing Acorn’s various local campaigns. This is radicalism unashamed.
Colonel Neville: Read the whole article via the following "Radical Obama" high lighted link for the swingin’ Obama connection. Especially with one Madeleine Talbot, Marxist ACORN activist and Leftard loon. Ah, the taste of a Madeleine. Obama must remember it well, surely?
I really liked this last bit by Kurtz:
“Radical Obama.
Important as these questions of funding and partisanship are, the larger point is that Obama’s ties to Acorn — arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country — are wide, deep, and longstanding. If Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself.
This is hardly a coincidence: Obama helped train Acorn’s leaders in how to play this game. For the most part, Obama seems to have favored the political-insider strategy, yet it’s clear that he knew how to play the in-your-face “direct action” game as well. And surely during his many years of close association with Acorn, Obama had to know what the group was all about.
The shame of it is that when the L. A. Times returned to Obama’s stomping grounds, it found the park he’d helped renovate reclaimed by drug dealers and thugs. The community organizer strategy may generate feel-good moments and best-selling books, but I suspect a Wal-Mart as the seed-bed of a larger shopping complex would have done far more to save the neighborhood where Obama worked to organize in the “progressive” fashion. Unfortunately, Obama’s Acorn cronies have blocked that solution.
In any case, if you’re looking for the piece of the puzzle that confirms and explains Obama’s network of radical ties, gather your Acorns this spring. Or next winter, you may just be left watching the “President from Acorn” at his feast”.
Colonel Neville: Oh yes, and here is the recent ACORN endorsement for Obama and his continued mutual thanks. Terrific eh? Beyond belief really. Obama IS a Marxist Socialist Leftard, folks. No, really.
“Alicia Russell of Arizona, ACORN’s western regional representative, said Obama relates to the issues facing low- and moderate-income people. “I think he will commit himself to providing us the necessary path for the low-income and moderate-income families to improve their lives,” Russell said. “He’s on the same level as we are, and sees our issues as we do.”
In the past three weeks, Sen. Obama has met with ACORN leaders regarding foreclosure prevention solutions, including a roundtable discussion on Tuesday in San Antonio”.
Colonel Neville: And finally, here's some er, Acorn Squash
August 26, 2006 By Steven Malanga.
"When Chicago's city council this summer required big-box stores to pay new employees at least $10 an hour, supporters of the legislation held an impromptu celebration in the council galleries. The hoopla was reminiscent of another scene five years earlier in New York, when opponents of Rudy Giuliani's effort to privatize failing public schools embraced in the streets after parents rejected the idea.
What linked these celebrations was the left-wing Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), which led the campaign for the legislation and against privatization. And in each case its efforts represented Pyrrhic victories for the poor. Anti-big-box legislation does little more than limit shopping choices and raise prices for inner-city residents, while parents who celebrated Acorn's defeat of Mr. Giuliani were left with their same old failing public schools.
No one should be surprised, for this organization grew out of some of the most counterproductive ideas of 1960s radicalism. Acorn's roots are in the National Welfare Rights Organization, whose leader, George Wiley, believed he could use poor, unwed mothers to foment a revolution.
The NWRO agitated for unlimited welfare benefits for those mothers and persuaded many urban politicians to loosen welfare eligibility requirements. This led to a more-than doubling of the welfare roles and strained local budgets. Wiley hoped to persuade the federal government to come to the rescue with massive aid. Instead NWRO's strategy prompted a backlash against "welfare mothers" and politicians in free-spending cities like New York.
When Wiley's welfare strategy reached a dead end he moved on to other ventures, including sending some of his troops to form a new community organization in Arkansas, infused with the same radicalism. It was a brilliant stroke: By the early '70s billions of dollars in federal and state aid was streaming to these local groups, spurred by Republicans in Washington who reasoned that it was better to fund nonprofits than create giant federal bureaucracies to run burgeoning antipoverty programs. Little did the GOP understand that the money would finance a nationwide network of organizations that for decades have mobilized urban residents against the party's candidates and agenda.
Then came the Community Reinvestment Act. Passed in 1977 to prompt banks to lend money in underserved communities, the CRA allowed community groups to file complaints that could hold up or even scuttle bank mergers. As one nonprofit umbrella group observed: "To avoid the possibility of a denied or delayed application, lending institutions have an incentive to make formal agreements with community organizations."
Acorn became among the most successful at exploiting the law, especially after the Clinton administration set up tough new CRA standards. In 1993 Acorn crafted a $55 million, 11-city lending program administered by it and financed by 14 major banks eager to avoid CRA woes.
In 1998 Acorn activists disrupted Federal Reserve hearings on the proposed Citicorp merger with Travelers, waving red umbrellas, a corporate symbol of Travelers, and then later protested Citigroup's acquisition of Associates First Capital Corp. Eventually Citigroup signed an agreement to provide mortgages through Acorn counseling centers, including home loans to undocumented aliens in California.
In 2000 a U.S. Senate subcommittee estimated that such CRA deals had directed at least $9.5 billion through nonprofits, making the CRA the second-most important funder of social advocacy groups next to the government itself.
While Acorn now operates in more than 100 cities with a national budget of $37 million, it never truly left behind the welfare-rights mentality. One is hard-pressed to find in the organization's many antipoverty initiatives any programs that address social dysfunctions like illegitimacy and single parenthood.
Instead, as Acorn's executive director, Steven Kest, said several years ago, "We are more focused on irresponsible behavior in the corporate sector. I don't think [illegitimacy] comes anywhere close to the irresponsible behavior of people running the largest businesses in this country."
...The movement is not always what it appears to be. Though Acorn touts living-wage laws as a way to lift the working poor into the middle class, the vast body of academic work on wage laws shows that they end up hurting the poor by forcing businesses to eliminate some low-wage jobs. Acorn's own leadership understands this principle perfectly. When California regulators sued Acorn for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, Acorn argued that this would endanger its mission—because it would have to hire fewer workers.
One of Acorn's real intentions with this legislation is to help its public-sector union allies. By artificially raising the cost of outsourcing until it is just as costly as work done by government employees, "the Living Wage undercuts the incentive to privatize," Acorn proclaims in its manual on how to run a living-wage campaign. Some living-wage efforts have gone one cynical step further—with laws that specifically exempt unionized companies from adhering to the new wage standards”.
And here they are! Some relief at last! The Nutty Squirrels! "Uh uh uh uh uh oh, uh oh uh oh, doo bee wah!"
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