Our Marxist Wizard of Oz

Call for the straightjacket, SiriuslyWrong has gone bonkers. Hate will do it to you everytime. :)
Remember this is the guy who believes in Peter Schiff. Yes, that Peter Schiff. The guy who
has gotten almost every one of his predictions wrong for years. He said we would experience
hyperinflation in 2011 (not inflation, hyperinflation. lol). He predicted las year that the Dow will
drop to 1,400 or that gold will rise to $12,000 within the next 2 years.
If you believe in a guy that makes crazy economic predictions no wonder you believe a guy
like Peter Ferrara who calls President Obama a Marxist. Cuckoo for cocoa puffs.


http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the...ama-a-marxist/

The Absurdity of Calling Obama a Marxist
ALEX KNAPP · MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
The above quote is from notorious hardcore lefty Adam Smith, in his famous socialist tract On the Wealth of Nations, where he proposes a progressive taxation, that the government should protect workers from the predations of their employers, and that a government that serves only the interests of the wealthy will suffer economic collapse.
The point is, I’ve noticed a lot of people flinging the word Marxist at President Obama after his speech today proposing higher taxes on the wealthy. Those people need to be hit over the head with a copy of Das Kapital until some of it sinks in through osmosis.
Obama’s proposals are well within the republican tradition, well within the classical liberal tradition, and well within the free-market tradition. You might question the wisdom of particular aspects of his policies given current economic conditions. Or argue that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to raise taxes now when we can borrow cheaply.
But calling the President a Marxist only exposes the speaker’s ignorance of Marxism, the history of capitalist countries, and President Obama.

Obama Previews A Double-Feature Horror Show For Taxpayers

As discussed yesterday, the most important number in President Obama’s budget is that the burden of government spending will be at least $2 trillion higher in 10 years if his is enacted.

But there are also some very unsightly warts in the revenue portion of the president’s budget. Americans for Tax Reform has a good summary of the various tax hikes, most of which are based on punitive, class-warfare ideology.

In this post, I want to focus on the president’s proposals to increase both the capital gains tax rate and the tax rate on dividends.

Most of the discussion is focusing on the big increase in tax rates for 2013, particularly when you include the 3.8 percent tax on investment income that was part of Obamacare. If the president is successful, the tax on capital gains will climb from 15 percent this year to 23.8 percent next year, and the tax on dividends will skyrocket from 15 percent to 43.4 percent.

But these numbers understate the true burden because they don’t include the impact of double taxation, which exists when the government cycles some income through the tax code more than one time. As this chart illustrates, this means a much higher tax burden on income that is saved and invested.

The accounting firm of Ernst and Young just produced a report looking at actual tax rates on capital gains and dividends, once other layers of tax are included. The results are very sobering. The United States already has one of the most punitive tax regimes for saving and investment.

Finish it here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielmi...capital-gains/

Hava-gafa-kasha is not only a tax avoider, but a denier of the obvious.

Damn, I was hoping for more Marxist nonsense from SiriuslyWrong. So disappointing. ;)

I understand that you are embarassed by your embracing of Mr. Schiff. Sorry.
The last person anyone should come to for economic information and analysis is you. lol


Today, 09:00 PM #41
Havakasha
Senior Member

"Call for the straightjacket, SiriuslyWrong has gone bonkers. Hate will do it to you everytime.
Remember this is the guy who believes in Peter Schiff. Yes, that Peter Schiff. The guy who
has gotten almost every one of his economic predictions wrong for years. He said we would experience
hyperinflation in 2011 (not inflation, hyperinflation. lol). He predicted las year that the Dow will
drop to 1,400 or that gold will rise to $12,000 within the next 2 years.
If you believe in a guy that makes crazy economic predictions no wonder you believe a guy
like Peter Ferrara who calls President Obama a Marxist. Cuckoo for cocoa puffs."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...fkE_story.html
Ezra Klein
Obama revealed: A moderate Republican

By Ezra Klein, Published: April 25, 2011

America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early ’90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. “We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance,” he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had signed one individual mandate bill or another.

The story on cap and trade — which conservatives now like to call “cap and tax” — is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was “more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past,” he said. The plan passed easily, with “aye” votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that “if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it’s something I would strongly support.”

As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform,” he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.

Barack Obama’s Arrogant Marxist Rhetoric

So far, the analysis of President Obama’s deficit speech has focused largely on its vagaries, obfuscations, and outright lies. Charles Krauthammer rightly blasted Obama’s speech as “shallow … hyper-partisan … intellectually dishonest.” He cited Obama’s “numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing.” Krauthammer wasn’t alone – many commentators ranging from David Limbaugh to Larry Kudlow have targeted Obama’s woefully un-mathematical statistics, his fiscal magical thinking, and his utter inability to move to the center with regard to deficit reduction.

But the true heart of Obama’s speech wasn’t the faulty budgetary analysis or the demagoguery of attacking Paul Ryan personally. It was Obama’s soaring rhetoric.

Obama is an odd politician. Most politicians see the cloudy phraseology of their speeches as mere throwaway stuff, cotton candy for the simple-minded. Obama sees such gibberish as the soul of his agenda. If we want to examine where Obama truly stands, we must delve into his soaring rhetoric.

And the soaring rhetoric is unvaryingly drawn directly from Saul Alinsky.

As Andrew Breitbart makes clear in his fantastic new book, Righteous Indignation, the father of the contemporary left is Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was an intensely clever fellow with no compunction about exploiting popular sentiment to achieve his ends. One of his favorite methodologies was to use America’s founders to back his own Marxism. As Breitbart writes, “Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego. While championing ‘freedom,’ for example – he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved – he [pushed for] ‘communal freedom,’ which is to say tyranny led by the government.”

Obama was raised in the Alinsky tradition, and he speaks with Alinsky’s forked tongue. Thus, for example, Obama opened his speech by stating that Americans have historically “put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity … we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.”

So far, so good. But Obama continues: “But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.” This is un-American, and it is a lie. American unity doesn’t occur in opposition to free markets, but in defense of them.

This is typical Alinsky. By purposefully confusing principled individualism with principled communitarianism, suggesting that Americans are characterized by both, Obama begins the slow march to fascism. In this section of his speech, Obama essentially turned Americans into corporatists – free marketeers ready, willing, and able to turn over that free market to a well-organized state.

Page 2: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/18/b...st-rhetoric/2/

Is President Obama Truly A Socialist?

Pew Research finds that sixty percent of Americans respond negatively to “socialism.” It is clear why President Barack Obama must avoid that label. Words are important. Political candidates who control the language of political discourse win elections.

Most of our elites would certainly not entertain the question: “Is Obama a socialist?” Only irresponsible fanatics carelessly throw around such epithets, they say. Polite circles ignore such goofiness.

As someone who has professionally studied and written about comparative economics, capitalism, and socialism for almost fifty years, the reticence to probe the core beliefs of a political leader seems odd. The question is perfectly legitimate in both an academic and political context as long as we define terms and place the discussion in proper context.

By “socialist,” I do not mean a Lenin, Castro, or Mao, but whether Obama falls within the mainstream of contemporary socialism as represented, for example, by Germany’s Social Democrats, French Socialists, or Spain’s socialist-workers party?


By this criterion, yes, Obama is a socialist.

The socialist parties of Europe trace their origins to reform Marxism. After Marx’s death in 1883, Europe’s Marxists rejected the Bolsheviks’ call for socialist revolution and worked within the political system for Marxist goals. Marxists, such as Karl Leibknecht, August Bebel, Paul Lafargue, Leon Blum, and others, formed the socialist parties that we know today. Most emerged from the trade-union movement, and they retain close ties with organized labor today, as does Obama’s Democrat Party.

Whereas, the eighteenth century liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith gave us our constitution and limited government, Marxism provided the intellectual foundations of the European welfare state.

The European socialists have their welfare state. Even their conservative opponents no longer question the “social state,” despite rising concern about its affordability. In the United States, we are fighting the battle of the welfare state, and we do not know what the outcome will be.

The European welfare state takes one half of national output to provide state health care, pensions, extended unemployment benefits, income grants, and free higher education. Failed nationalizations taught European socialists to leave enterprise in private hands and coerce it through taxation and regulation to contribute to what the state deems the “social welfare.”

The November 2011 Declaration of Principles of the Party of European Socialists (PES) summarizes the European socialist agenda. I condense its main points and compare them with Obama’s statements and legislative initiatives:

PES: The welfare state and state-provided universal access to education and health care are society’s great achievements.

Obama: Favors universal access to health care and associated benefits as a critical expansion of the welfare state.

Page 2: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrode...a-socialist/2/

What comes first, this thread gets 1000 hits or the debt exceeds $16,000,000,000,000?

Socialism, according to Karl Marx, is the transition between capitalism and communism. To achieve communism, Marx says, there must be continuing revolution in which the fundamental principal is: The end justifies the means.

For more than half a century, capitalism in the United States has taken a beating from the socialist revolution. Despite the best efforts of conservatives since the Roosevelt era, socialists have made great strides toward converting the nation to socialism. Apparently, the majority of Americans either fail to recognize the transition, or welcome it. The enthusiastic support for Barack Obama, especially among young people, is abundant evidence.


Obama has declared that he believes every person has a “right” to health care. The Socialist Party USA believes every person has a “right” to health care.

Obama believes that labor unions should be allowed to organize without a secret ballot. The Socialist Party USA calls for unions to be recognized without a secret ballot. (Hear Obama’s words here.)

The Socialist Party USA recognizes the “right” of adequate housing for everyone. Obama trained ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) workers to secure mortgages for unqualified people in sufficient numbers to collapse the housing and home-financing industries.

The Socialist Party USA believes that “capitalism is fundamentally incompatible” with socialism. For years, Obama worked in Chicago through the Annenberg Challenge, along with Bill Ayers, to funnel more than $50 million to anti-capitalist education projects. In November 2006, Ayers traveled to Venezuela to speak at Hugo Chavez’s Education Forum where he railed against “the failings of capitalist education,” and praised the “Bolivarian Revolution and the profound reforms in education made by Hugo Chavez.”

The Socialist Party USA believes in open borders and six-months residency as the only requirement for U.S. citizenship. Obama marched with illegal aliens in Chicago in support of “comprehensive” immigration reform. Listen to Obama’s promises to La Raza in 2007.

The Socialist Party USA calls for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Obama says, “I will end this war,” with never a reference to “winning” or “victory.”

The Socialist Party USA calls for the “unconditional disarmament” by the United States. Obama has promised to dramatically reduce defense spending. Listen to his words here.

The Socialist Party USA calls for a “livable guaranteed annual income.” Obama trained ACORN members to conduct “Living Wage” campaigns in cities around the country.

The Socialist Party USA calls for a “steeply graduated” tax policy to redistribute wealth. Obama has promised to increase the tax burden on the rich to redistribute wealth to the poor. He revealed his philosophy when answering a question from Joe the plumber, who complained that he was being taxed for his success. Obama said:

It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

Click here to read the rest and see the what the hyperlinks offer: http://www.wnd.com/2008/10/78330/

You can stand with oil companies, or you can stand with the American people

Oh, this isn't divisive........................... then again, Lloyd thrives on this exact tactic..............

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/politi...ss_igoogle_cnn

Now that you "proved" that President Obama is a Marxist, i think its time you took up the matter of his birth certificate. :)


http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...ref=fpnewsfeed

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio dove head first into the birther movement on Thursday, arguing at a news conference in Phoenix that President Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and that crimes were committed in its creation.

By doing so, the Republican joined a fringe group of activists and writers who believe in a conspiracy theory that has been debunked several times over by numerous independent investigations.

“It’s not over,” the sheriff said during the hour-long event. “This investigation is not over.”

Obama and Marxism: A Legitimate Question

By Guest Author on June 13th, 2009

By Victor Morawski

Whether or not Barack Obama is a Marxist is one of the most prevalent philosophically-related questions asked about him. Yet, if we are to go bythe reaction of current Vice President Joe Biden when he was confronted with the question on the campaign trail by Orlando television reporter Barbara West—“Are you joking? Is this a joke?”—the question isn’t even legitimate and is a “ridiculous comparison.”

But the Vice President never gave that particular reporter a good reason why the question is ridiculous. He merely attacked her for asking it.

Many studied philosophers, including myself, think the question is far from ridiculous and can not be dispensed with by mere Ad Hominem attacks against those who ask it. We will deal with it by asking two more questions over the course of the next two Philosopher’s Stone columns: “Can we tell that he is a Marxist from his associations?” and “Can we tell that he is a Marxist from the principles he adopts?”

Attempts to argue that Barack Obama himself is a Marxist, given his past connections with known Marxists, have abounded on the Internet and on conservative talk radio, especially prior to the November election. That those connections do exist is hardly a matter for debate.

Abundant evidence has been cited to show that his long-time mentor and father figure in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, was a full-blown, active member of the Communist Party. After coming to Chicago, Obama for years attended the church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an ardent and vocal advocate of Black Liberation Theology, a movement with its roots planted firmly in Marxism.

Obama also had extensively documented contact in Chicago with Bill Ayers, former member of the Marxist-influenced Weather Underground, and a self-identified Marxist:

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs] We have always been small ‘c’ communists in the sense that we were never in the Communist party and never Stalinists. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”

Obama’s defenders characterize the above charges as mere “guilt by association.” They contend that his connections with known Marxists do not necessarily imply that he shares their views. They claim we can draw no legitimate conclusions about Obama’s own beliefs from the above facts concerning his associations.

In so doing, they are in effect charging his detractors with committing a reasoning error logicians call a “Circumstantial Ad Hominem Argument.” They thus gainsay his opponents’ claims that because of his own special circumstances—in this case that Obama has had ongoing relationships with many known Marxists—he must share certain specific views (namely, Marxist). They argue that these relationships are, in fact, utterly irrelevant to his actual beliefs and should not be cited as evidence of them.

One who commits the above fallacy wrongly assumes that there is a necessary logical connection betweenBeing an A and advocating a particular view. As a textbook example, I would be doing so were I to contend that, because you are a Democrat, you cannot be Pro-Life. Here, I would be assuming wrongly that being Pro-Abortion (or as they would prefer, Pro-Choice) is a necessary aspect of being a Democrat, when it in fact is not. There is no necessary logical connection between your being a Democrat and your abortion views, and it would be wrong for me to assume that there is just because so many with whom you associate are Pro-Abortion.

But, in philosophical terms, the connection claimed to exist between Obama and his Marxist associates is not merely logical, but causal. His life-long, self-selected connections with known Marxists are claimed to have had a causal influence on his own beliefs. And that is a vital distinction when examining one’s resultant behavior patterns.

It is probabilistic, not deductive, reasoning that best deals with causal relationships. While we cannot conclude with certainty from the truth of documented facts concerning his Marxist associations that Barack Obama himself is a Marxist, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a significant probability that he is and doing so commits no logical fallacy. So his associations are not, as his defenders maintain, irrelevant as evidence of his own beliefs. They are, in fact, determinant

Finish it here: http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/o...mate-question/

I started looking into this several years ago and after quite a while I found very intelligent and honest Dr. John C Drew, PhD, who had met with and spoke with quite extensively Barack Obama while he was a student at Occidental College in California.

Dr. Chu states that he knew Obama as “ a radical Marxist, someone who was sure that the revolution would take place in America and that the poor would replace the rich”.

Listen to the interview for yourself–it is truly amazing–it is truly amazing that America could elect such a person into any public office much less the office of the presidency of the United States. Amazing and sad.

http://obama-is-a-marxist.com/here-i...rxist-history/

Published 05:37 02.03.12Latest update 05:37 02.03.12
Spoken by a well respected statesman as opposed to right wing extremists.
Remember Netanyahu wouldnt get involved in politics.

The TRULY DUMB ONES are those few trying to somehow twist themselves into knots
to say President Obama is a Marxist, Kenyan, a Muslim etc. What kind of holes
have these crazies crawled out of.


Peres: Obama is a great president, security ties are 'the best we’ve ever had'
In interview with Charlie Rose in New York, President Shimon Peres says he does not want to interfere in U.S. politics, but is stating his opinion on Obama 'because it’s true.'

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday said that U.S. President Barack Obama is “a great president and a great friend of Israel,” and that security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel is “the best we’ve ever had.”

In an hour-long interview with American broadcaster Charlie Rose, conducted before a large audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Peres said that he does not want to interfere in American politics, but he is stating his opinion on Obama “because it’s true,” adding that he has “the highest respect” for Obama for overseeing the current relationship between the two countries.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Havakasha

Published 05:37 02.03.12Latest update 05:37 02.03.12
Spoken by a well respected statesman as opposed to right wing extremists


Peres: Obama is a great president, security ties are 'the best we’ve ever had'
In interview with Charlie Rose in New York, President Shimon Peres says he does not want to interfere in U.S. politics, but is stating his opinion on Obama 'because it’s true.'

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday said that U.S. President Barack Obama is “a great president and a great friend of Israel,” and that security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel is “the best we’ve ever had.”

In an hour-long interview with American broadcaster Charlie Rose, conducted before a large audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y, Peres said that he does not want to interfere in American politics, but he is stating his opinion on Obama “because it’s true,” adding that he has “the highest respect” for Obama for overseeing the current relationship between the two countries.

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You are dumb, really, really dumb. What would you expect him to say?

http://wrmea.org/component/content/a...4-billion.html

Obama Marxist Quotes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt7zWQMHLFY

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

He didnt have say anything. Like Netanyahu.

Sorry to interrupt the extreme right wing rants posted by who else but
SiriuslyWrong.

Lets start with the lies about Saul Alinsky. Shame, shame.


Fact: Alinsky Was Not "A Marxist Or Communist Or Socialist"

Biographer: Alinsky "Is Routinely Labeled As A Marxist Or Communist Or Socialist, None Of Which He Was." From a May 2010 article by Sanford D. Horwitt for "Just Books," a review published by New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice:

Alinsky's name and Rules for Radicals are a daily presence on the Internet, especially in Tea Party blogs and, periodically, on Rush Limbaugh's and Glenn Beck's web sites. For most of these commentators, Alinsky is caricatured as a dark, sinister force whose spirit comes alive late at night in the Oval office. He is routinely labeled as a Marxist or Communist or Socialist, none of which he was. [BrennanCenter.org, 5/12/10]
Communists Attacked Alinsky For Advocating American Intervention In World War II. From a 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky:

PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?

ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labeled, "This is the face of a warmonger." But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well. Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today. But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depression it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good. [Playboy, March 1972]
Alinsky: "Dogma, Whatever Form It Takes, Is The Ultimate Enemy Of Human Freedom." From the Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: Did you consider becoming a party member prior to the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

ALINSKY: Not at any time. I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today. [Playboy, March 1972]
Alinsky Disparaged Lenin And Those Who Quote "Mao, Castro, And Che Guevara." From Rules for Radicals:

What is the alternative to working "inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about "Burn the system down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide? "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!" is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns! Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport? [Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, Pages xx-xxi]
Biographer: For Alinsky, "Communists Were Trouble That His Community Organizations Could Do Without." From Horwitt's biography of Alinsky, Let Them Call Me Rebel:

Alinsky's own attitude toward communists had changed over the years. In the late 1930s, before the Soviet-German nonaggression pact, Alinsky had been enthusiastic about a United Front strategy, and in the Back of the Yards he had worked amicably enough with the occasional communist. After the war, during the purges of left-wing unions and in the McCarthy period, he was disgusted by the professional Red baiters, spoke out against them frequently, and extended his sympathy and, occasionally, a helping hand to witch-hunt victims whom he knew. Still, he had little patience and sympathy for the relatively few communists he continued to encounter. To be sure, he didn't give more than a scintilla of psychic energy to them, and to the extent he thought about them at all, he held to a very strong stereotype: they were quarrelsome, rigid, dour, humorless. In any event, he thought that to be a communist in the United States was pointless at best and perverse and destructive at worst. In short, communists were trouble that his community organizations could do without. Within an organization, they were apt to be trouble because they were obsessed with pushing ideologically pure issues and otherwise manipulating the agenda for their own narrow interests. They were also trouble, especially if they occupied visible leadership roles, because they made the organization vulnerable to outside attack. In short, he did not like them, did not need them, and as a general matter, wanted them quietly moved out of his community organizations. [Sanford D. Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy, Page 395]

Ah, I knew it. All things lead from Fox News to Siriuslybraindead. No surprise.

Bogeyman: Fox News Attacks Progressives With Fantasy Version Of Saul Alinsky
January 31, 2012 5:34 pm ET — 66 Comments
Fox News personalities have repeated numerous falsehoods about activist Saul Alinsky, including that he was a "Marxist" and that he dedicated his book Rules for Radicals "to Lucifer." Fox has used this false image of Alinsky to attack President Obama.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Havakasha

Ah, I knew it. All things lead from Fox News to Siriuslybraindead. No surprise.

Bogeyman: Fox News Attacks Progressives With Fantasy Version Of Saul Alinsky
January 31, 2012 5:34 pm ET — 66 Comments
Fox News personalities have repeated numerous falsehoods about activist Saul Alinsky, including that he was a "Marxist" and that he dedicated his book Rules for Radicals "to Lucifer." Fox has used this false image of Alinsky to attack President Obama.

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Nice diversion lol. That's what I would expect when you have nothing to say.

Nothing diversionary about it. Dont you read how Fox news tied Saul Alinsky to Marxism and Obama to Alinsky. I knew you would rather avoid it. Par for the course.

Do yourself a favor and educate yourself.

Obama Is A Socialist! Why Are We Afraid To Admit It?

Do we not imperil America more by denying, by repressing Obama’s socialism? Or is it the fear of drawing increasingly negative attention to ourselves by attacking the politics of Obama that we most fear? Shouldn’t we most fear the loss of America itself, and use that as our strength and determination, our rallying call, the reason for our vocal dissent?

Obama gave another speech we all ought to fear. Said Obama:

Remember that in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class – things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security.

If this is true, if this is not just another Obama lie, how does he, how does any liberal, explain the fact that we had under 5% unemployment in those early years?

How does Obama explain that during those years of “expensive tax cuts” and despite the aftermath of 9/11, our war in Iraq and our increased involvement in the Middle East, not only were deficits not “massive”, compared to today’s deficits under Obama, the entire national debt was roughly about a third of what it is now and gas was under $2.00 a gallon?

George Bush did make a fundamental mistake with No Child Left Behind and his Medicare Prescription Drug Modernization Act. However, the Bush tax cuts helped prevent the massive unemployment we are now living with and the recession we are living in. If the Democrats had not taken control of congress in 2006 further cuts could have been made, legislation could have been passed to slow the growth of government, millions of jobs would not have been lost and either we would not have had a recession or it would have been a mild one – and we would have recovered from it by now.

Recessions don’t last for years and years, historically. Yet, this recession has lasted five years, and we are being told it will last for years more, for the “foreseeable future”. When all is said and done, this recession will have lasted longer than our Great Depression!

We are being told by Obama and the Democrat Party that we have to “spend our way” out of this recession. We have been doing precisely that since Obama took office, and the more we have “spent our way” out of this recession, the more deeper we have dug ourselves into this recession. Aren’t we smart enough to see the correlation between “more spending” and how deeper the hole becomes?

Obama says raising taxing on millionaires is the answer to solving our economic crisis; that raising taxes on millionaires will somehow create jobs ( higher paying jobs) and somehow reduce the deficit. Aren’t we smart enough by now to know that millionaires are the ones with the capital to invest in business and the economy? Aren’t we smart enough to know by now that millionaires have access to tax shelters to protect their money from being confiscated by the government? Isn’t Obama smart enough to know that? Aren’t we smart enough to know by now that once taxes are raised on millionaires, Obama will use those extra funds to further expand government, rather than reduce the deficit? Aren’t we smart enough to know by now that there is a direct correlation between raising taxes on the rich, and the rising unemployment rate? Does Obama think we aren’t smart enough by now to know what the real driving force behind our recession is?

Remember, this recession did not occur until after the Democrats took control of congress in 2006. The recession only got worse, deficits dramatically increased, unemployed imploded, government dependence skyrocketed. Conservatives won a victory in 2010 by taking back the House. It was enough to stop Democrats from further destruction, but not enough to reverse the devastation that has laid waste to our economy.

If we continue allowing Obama to trash America, the greatness of America, America’s past greatness which freed hundreds of millions of people from the types of despots and dictators and evil men who held the same socialistic ideals Obama himself praises, and disregard the future greatness that America holds for us, our children and future generations; if we bow to Obama and his agenda of big government, more radical government, more government involvement in our lives; if we bend to Obama’s political will out of some exaggerated fear we will embarrass ourselves, we will discredit ourselves, we will diminish ourselves and our conservative cause – we will ultimately lose that cause. There is no progress in apathy.

Socialism is defined, in part, by a system of wealth redistribution – collected and controlled by government. In the end, however, while the people may have an “equal share” of the pie, it is government itself which controls the biggest portion of that pie; it is government, by socialistic design, which holds the deed for all the wealth, including the wealth they redistributed to the people. It is government, by socialistic design, which has power over the people, because while the people have an “equal share” it is never enough to secure independence. An “equal share” of the wealth does not mean, nor is it ever intended to mean, the people will ever be wealthy.

http://neosecularist.com/2011/12/07/...d-to-admit-it/

I am so glad this thread is getting SO MANY views.