We strongly recommend a book on life in North Korea: Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick .

Her highly credible account shows that most of the population goes hungry most of the time.

Here is a quotation, describing, as a common event, the death of a prisoner who has been worked and slowly starved to death. Prisoners are needed to work as slaves in the mines and other industries, so people are arrested on flimsy excuses:

[The prisoners were] mostly “economic criminals” who’d gotten in trouble at the border or the market. The actual thieves among them had stolen nothing more than food. One of them was a forty-year old rancher who had worked on a collective farm raising cattle. His crime was that he had failed to report the birth of a dead calf, instead taking the stillborn home to feed his wife and two young children. By the time Hyuck [who relates this story to the author] met him, he had served five years of a ten-year term. … The rancher was gentle and soft-spoken, but one of the senior guards took a strong dislike to him. His wife and children came twice to visit, but were not allowed in to see him or to send gifts of food, privileges allowed some of the more favored prisoners.

The rancher died of starvation. It happened quietly; he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. It was a common occurrence that somebody would die in the night. Often it was obvious in the close sleeping-quarters, because the dying man would evacuate his bladder and tiny bubbles would appear on his lips as fluid seeped out of the body.

As in all collectivist systems, the community of North Korea is organized for slavery, want, and death.

Barack Obama’s autobiographical book Dreams from My Father is a quietly self-vaunting ‘tell-all’ mixture of narrative, nostalgia, apparent confession, disguised complaint and unfocussed accusation. As the self-portrait of a young man it is fondly self-indulgent, allowing a few small warts – or perhaps one should say acne spots – to show, just enough to deflect accusations of self-flattery. It emerges from the narrative, rather than it is said, that the young Obama resented being black. He implies that someone must be to blame for his having to feel like that. The self-pity is kept, however, as subdued as the self-flattery.

The story wears a candid expression on its face, so to speak, but gives itself away by inevitably raising questions which beg for answers not given. For instance, and significantly, Obama does not say who paid him to work as a ‘community organizer’, or why. A man, an ‘organizer’, named Marty Kaufman phones him out of the blue, meets him at a coffee shop and offers him the undefined job for a rather low wage. What this man’s interest in the work might be is not explained, other than that he’s been vaguely idealistic ever since the student protest movement of the 1960s. One is left to assume that this fellow ‘in a rumpled suit’, although he shows no signs of having disposable funds of his own, is some sort of selfless philanthropist nobly intent on alleviating difficult living conditions for the poor black tenants of a crumbling building in a seedy area of Chicago.

Now the truth is out. David Horowitz is providing the answer.

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked.  As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only partly visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes — radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  The guru of Sixties radicals, Alinsky urged his followers to be flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power, which they can then use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.  Alinsky died in 1972, but left behind an organization in Chicago dedicated to his malicious ideas.  This team hired Barack Obama in 1986 when he was 23 and taught him how to organize for radical transformation.

In this insightful new booklet, Horowitz discusses Alinsky’s work in the 60s — and his advice to radicals to seize any weapon to advance their cause.  This became the philosophy of Alinskyite organizations such as ACORN and to Alinsky disciple Van Jones, a self described “communist” who served as President Obama’s “Green Czar” until he was forced to resign when his extremist ideas became public.

After his analysis of Saul Alinsky, Horowitz points out what the grandfather of “social organizing” created “is not salvation but chaos.” Then he asks the crucial question: “And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?”

Thomas Sowell writes against the notion that Obama is a ‘post-racial’ president:

For “community organizers” … racial resentments are a stock in trade. President Obama’s background as a community organizer has received far too little attention, though it should have been a high-alert warning that this was no post-racial figure.

What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.

To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.

The dear leader Obama knows what is best for you, folks!

The Community Organizer that America has elected as its supreme leader is acquiring totalitarian powers to keep all Americans in the shape, physically and mentally, that he deems correct.

Terry Jeffrey writes in Townhall:

The Senate Health committee’s bill includes a section — “Creating Healthier Communities” — that authorizes paying tax dollars to so-called community-based organizations so they can monitor individual behavior patterns on the neighborhood level — and in schools — in the name of reducing “health disparities.”

They will be government-funded busybodies paid to monitor the personal behavior of a once proud and free people who surrendered an irretrievable measure of their liberty to a government-run health-care system spawned by the redistributionist vision of Barack Obama and his allies in the Congress.

Only community-based organizations that are part of a “national network of community-based organizations” will be eligible for these grants.

“In carrying out subparagraph (A),” says page 386 of the bill, “the eligible entity shall, with respect to residents in the community, measure — (i) decreases in weight; (ii) increases in proper nutrition; (iii) increases in physical activity; (iv) decreases in tobacco use prevalence; (v) other factors using community specific data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey; and (vi) other factors as determined by the Secretary.”

So, what will these government-funded, national networks of community-based organizations monitor in American neighborhoods in the interest of reducing “health disparities”?