Speaking of secession 299
The great divide between those who want socialism and those who want freedom is unbridgeable. The federal government is imposing socialism, the American people are determined to resist it. What remedies do the people have?
A year ago, Governor Rick Perry mentioned the possibility that Texas might secede from the union, but added that he “saw no reason why it should”.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry fired up an anti-tax “tea party” Wednesday with his stance against the federal government and for states’ rights as some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, “Secede!”
An animated Perry told the crowd at Austin City Hall — one of three tea parties he was attending across the state — that officials in Washington have abandoned the country’s founding principles of limited government. He said the federal government is strangling Americans with taxation, spending and debt. …
Later, answering news reporters’ questions, Perry suggested Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to secede from the union, though he said he sees no reason why Texas should do that.
“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”
Washington has continued to “thumb its nose” at the people. Now 13 [update, 18] states, including Texas, are suing the federal government over issues raised by the health care legislation it pushed through against the will of the majority of Americans. And there is talk of 37 states doing so.
Is secession again in the air?
The Tea Party movement is named to revive the memory of revolutionary secession.
Walter Williams, not for the first time, raises the topic of secession, considers the idea favorably, and comes close to advocating it – though he stops just short of doing so.
Ten years ago I asked the following question in a column titled “It’s Time To Part Company”:
“If one group of people prefers government control and management of people’s lives and another prefers liberty and a desire to be left alone, should they be required to fight, antagonize one another, risk bloodshed and loss of life in order to impose their preferences or should they be able to peaceably part company and go their separate ways?”
The problem that our nation faces is very much like a marriage where one partner has broken, and has no intention of keeping, the marital vows. Of course, the marriage can remain intact and one party tries to impose his will on the other and engage in the deviousness of one-upmanship. Rather than submission by one party or domestic violence, a more peaceable alternative is separation.
I believe we are nearing a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative. Just as in a marriage, where vows are broken, our human rights protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them.
The Democrat-controlled Washington is simply an escalation of a process that has been in full stride for at least two decades. There is no evidence that Americans who are responsible for and support constitutional abrogation have any intention of mending their ways.
You say, “Williams, what do you mean by constitutional abrogation?” Let’s look at just some of the magnitude of the violations.
Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution lists the activities for which Congress is authorized to tax and spend. Nowhere on that list is authority for Congress to tax and spend for: prescription drugs, Social Security, public education, farm subsidies, bank and business bailouts, food stamps and other activities that represent roughly two-thirds of the federal budget.
Neither is there authority for congressional mandates to the states and people about how they may use their land, the speed at which they can drive, whether a library has wheelchair ramps and the gallons of water used per toilet flush.
The list of congressional violations of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution is virtually without end. Our derelict Supreme Court has given Congress sanction to do anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.
James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist Paper No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
Americans who wish to live free have several options. We can submit to those who have constitutional contempt and want to run our lives. We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed and death in an attempt to force America’s tyrants to respect our liberties and human rights. We can seek a peaceful resolution of our irreconcilable differences by separating.
Some independence movements, such as our 1776 war with England and our 1861 War Between the States, have been violent, but they need not be. In 1905, Norway seceded from Sweden; Panama seceded from Columbia (1903), and West Virginia from Virginia (1863). Nonetheless, violent secession can lead to great friendships. England is probably our greatest ally.
The bottom-line question for all of us is: Should we part company or continue trying to forcibly impose our wills on one another? My preference is a restoration of the constitutional values of limited government that made us a great nation.
British Conservatives embrace Marxism 125
Shock? Horror? Or did some see it coming?
Under the leadership of David Cameron, who now emerges as extremely dangerous, or stunningly stupid and ignorant, or both, the BRITISH CONSERVATIVE PARTY has moved to the left of the Labour Party!
The Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has been won over by the revolutionary theories of Saul Alinsky, of whom Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are disciples [see our post The radicals who rule, March 31, 2010].
The Conservatives have totally abandoned their traditional adherence to the principle of individual freedom and embraced egalitarian collectivism.
This is from the Conservative Party’s website:
The new policies announced as part of the Big Society plan include:
“Neighbourhood army” of 5,000 full-time, professional community organisers who will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems. This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama.
This is from the speech in which David Cameron announced his big idea, to turn the whole of Britain over to what Americans will recognize as a government-sponsored version of ACORN:
In the United States the energy, enthusiasm and passion of community organisers has fired up whole neighbourhoods to take control of their destiny.
We want to see that right across the UK.
So we will use revenue from the Cabinet Office FutureBuilders programme, a programme the National Audit Office has criticised for its poor delivery, and redirect it to training thousands of new community organisers in the years ahead. …
To teach potential community organisers how to identify the doers and the go-getters in each neighbourhood and recruit them to their cause.
To teach them them how to bang heads together to get things done.
Indeed, Barack Obama trained as a community organiser in Chicago.
And I hope that in the years to come, a similar inspirational figure will emerge from community work in our inner cities – and go from the back streets of Bradford or Bolton or Birmingham all the way to Downing Street.
But I know the arguments that some people make – that this sort of community co-operation will only happen in the richest areas. (?! -JB]
In building the big society, I want to make sure that Britain’s poorest areas do not get left behind as they too often are today.
So again, we will take money from the Futurebuilders programme, and direct it to community organisers, social enterprises and neighbourhood groups in our most disadvantaged areas.
This is the big society made real – devolving power to the people while using the state to encourage social action and help the poorest.
And this is from Melanie Phillips’s comment in the Spectator:
Ye gods. Rub your eyes, folks. Saul Alinsky?? …
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.
Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors…
The British Conservative party has signed up to the revolutionary Marxist politics of Saul Alinsky and his seditious strategy of using ‘community organisers’ to turn the people against the state and against the bedrock moral and social values of their country – and it is almost certainly too ignorant, lazy or stupid to realise that this is what it means.
British voters might now decide to return the Labour Party to power after all, as the lesser of two leftist evils! But it’s more than probable that Gordon Brown, or whoever succeeds him, will also embrace the community organizing idea.
So expect the launching of the USK – the United Soviet Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
After which, the ESU – the European Soviet Union?
Strengthen the government and bring it down 147
At Townhall today, George Will expresses this opinion:
There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive.
His timidity was displayed when he flinched from fighting for the boldness the nation needs — a transition from the irrationality of employer-provided health insurance. His progressivism is an attitude of genteel regret about the persistence of politics.
On this judgment we cannot agree with George Will (unless he is intending to be ironic, which we suspect and hope he is).
Obama is insisting almost hysterically on health legislation being passed, no matter what horrors it foists on the people of the United States provided only that it delivers control of a sizable portion of the economy into the hands of his government.
Now one has only to read what has been published about Obama’s parents, upbringing, and career to see that he is a born, bred, and thoroughly committed Marxist radical. Why otherwise would he appoint radical leftists, including self-confessed Communists of various stripes, some of them Maoists, to advisory posts and “Czardoms” in the White House?
And while this sort of thing, reported and discussed by Scott Wheeler, is happening under his administration, it’s hard to believe he has faded into nothing more dangerous than a “timid progressive”:
A Marxist group that has demanded the “destruction” of the U.S. and issued a call “to bring this government down” is the recipient of stimulus funds from the Obama American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). This same group, the Brecht Forum, has also called for the complete takeover of insurance companies and farms [!] in America.
The controversial stimulus bill, as ARRA is better known, provided funds for the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), which promptly granted the New York City-based Brecht Forum $5,000 in 2009 and $9,000 in 2010. The NYSCA had previously announced in 2008 that due to state budget cuts it would no longer be able to fund 573 organizations that it had previously funded. One of the groups on the list to be slashed was the Brecht Forum. After NYSCA secured $399,000 in stimulus money, the Brecht Forum once again had funding.
The Brecht Forum is host to the New York Marxist School and displays this statement on their website:
“Can society be changed significantly for the better? What kind of changes would be needed? and, Who could bring about such changes?” …
In 1975, a group of civil rights, community, labor, and student activists came together to found The Brecht Forum’s New York Marxist School. They saw the study of Marxism as central, not as a dogma but as a living current of thought and as a vital tool for understanding capitalist society.
In a September 2009 lecture at the Brecht Forum, Jed Brandt, a longtime communist, political activist and outspoken atheist [at least he has this much common sense – JB] offered the following instructions:
“We have to bring this Government down! We have to help destroy this system and that requires increasing the alienation that working people and oppressed people feel. The way this change is going to happen is the destruction of The United States of America!” [“Increasing the alienation”, ie deliberately piling misery on the underclass until they rise in revolutionary rebellion, continues to be an orthodox formula of Marxist theory though it has never, fortunately, worked that way in practice – JB]
Fox News Channel picked up on Brandt’s call to action and played clips several times the week of March 1st. My own investigation uncovered the link to federal stimulus dollars providing financial support for the Brecht Forum. The grants from NYSCA were ostensibly provided for artistic projects, for example, the NYSCA website shows the following as the description for the Brecht Forum grant:
“The Brecht Forum’s 09-10 program features workshops in the participatory theater techniques developed by the noted Brazilian director Augusto Boal. The program includes monthly workshops led by members of the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory and two master workshops led by Augusto Boal.” …
“Augusto Boal has defined Theater of the Oppressed as a rehearsal for revolution.”
The website further describes its mission as using “interactive theater as an organizing tool” and works with “educators, human service and healthcare workers, union organizers and community activists” to solve perceived problems.
Almost choking on Communist jargon, the Brecht Forum is shouting its revolutionary intentions. The NYSCA obviously knows exactly what it’s subsidizing. The Obama administration knows what the NYSCA’s political agenda is. It gets its grants because it has that agenda. It is radically leftist. There’s nothing timid about it.
Grow and strengthen government, or bring it down? Is President Obama conscious of being caught on the horns of a remarkable dilemma – how to square his office with his ideology? How does he reconcile his present job with his old objectives? Does it trouble him that he is the power Jed Brandt wants to overthrow?
A mind even more suspicious than ours might wonder whether the New Left program of “the long march through the institutions” set Obama climbing to the pinnacle of power with the intention of bringing about “the destruction of the United States of America”. But surely Obama is not as extreme as all that – is he?
Have they won? 20
With the federal government taking control of one sixth of the economy by means of ‘health care reform’, America is on the road to socialism and consequent decline, and it’s hard to see how the damage can be undone. Once entitlements are granted in law it becomes well nigh impossible to take them away again, as Europe has learnt the hard way.
Has America gone over the ‘precipice’, to use Obama’s word for this change? (We suspect he didn’t know what the word means, but it’s more apt than he could have intended.)
What sort of world is emerging with the connivance, or the capitulation, of the new weaker socialist America, which will no longer protect Western civilization?
Will America no longer be ‘the last best hope on earth’?
Is global government, the tyranny from which there can be no escape, inevitable?
Is there anything dissenting Americans – apparently a majority if the polls are right – can do to recover their liberty? Or is it too late to do anything?
Is there any point in looking to the Republican Party? Seems not, with its present leaders.
What if it had stronger leadership?
Here’s a suggestion by JB Williams at Canada Free Press:
This morning on Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) conceded that Republican senators won’t be able to stop Democratic health care reform legislation from passing the Senate before Christmas.
“We will fight until the last vote,” McCain told Chris Wallace. “We owe that to our constituents, because we must do everything—we must look back and say we did everything to prevent this terrible mistake from taking place.”
I beg to differ with Senator John McCain… (which is nothing new) …
Another useless NAY vote is NOT everything they can do! …
McCain is right about one thing… Congressional Republicans have NO “legislative” POWER to stop the current assault on all things American taking place in Washington DC today. That’s because there is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today.
In the good old days, when the three administrative branches of the federal government kept independent checks upon each other, politicians were able to hide behind their NAY vote as a demonstration of opposition to anti-American and unconstitutional policies.
Those days are gone!
There is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today and even those who support this anti-American nonsense know it. More than 60% of American citizens strongly oppose every policy coming out of DC today – President Obama’s personal approval rating is in the toilet and still sinking, as is the approval rating of the leftist controlled congress.
Still, the left accelerates its rush into unbridled Global Marxism as if totally unconcerned with the “will of the people”, their limited constitutional authority, or the objections of Republicans in congress.
Republicans have only ONE chance left!
To save themselves from being painted with the same Marxist brush appropriate for today’s Democrats, stop the current slaughter of Americans sovereignty, security and prosperity, and unite the 60% of Americans in desperate need of leadership, congressional Republicans have ONE play remaining.
WALK OUT and STAY OUT!
Walk out of congress TODAY!
Force leftist Democrats to destroy this nation all alone!
Publicly name every vote bought off with state pork in the last ten months!
Call it what it is, a complete sham and rape of this nation!
Refuse to provide any form of cover for this sham and return home!
Once home, meet with state legislators to erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines!
Once state defenses are erected, begin meeting with Tea Party and Town Hall patriots to begin the process of reclaiming the free republic.
Your Alternative?
Go down in flames with all other anti-American leftists in DC, currently running roughshod over the vast majority of American citizens opposed to everything going on in that sinking cesspool of political corruption called the federal government. …
Obama’s policies are set to tip these states and maybe others, over the brink in early 2010!
Trust me when I tell you, Congressional Republicans have NO other viable options.
But we have entered a new era in America… The enemies of freedom and liberty are in full control of all three branches of the federal government. There is NO legitimate constitutional process in Washington DC today. Republicans have NO “in chamber” power to stop the dismantling of America and only three defenses of the free republic remain.
Republicans MUST separate themselves from the sham immediately or go down in flames with the Democratic Socialists of America in charge!
The state legislatures MUST erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines.
The people MUST unite in patriotic resistance, with or without Republicans!
The Republicans in Congress are very unlikely to take such bold action. So what remains? Many recognize that this is a critical moment for America and the world. Even among the well-behaved, mild-mannered Tea Party protestors there are some who talk of secession, and some even of revolution.
Many Americans are arming themselves. Is the revolution, if it comes, likely to be a violent one?
Ayers and Obama: ‘Education is revolution’ 617
The University of Illinois wanted to employ Jack the Ripper as Professor of Criminology and Ethics, and was disappointed to learn that he was not available for the post as he died some time ago. Just kidding. But take the case of William Ayers.
William Ayers the terrorist (and proud of it) is a tenured professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and much more than that – as this Investor’s Business Daily article reports:
Ayers told [his friend] the great humanitarian Chavez: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion." It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.
Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.
As [Sol] Stern points out, "Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children in the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive."
If Ayers was just another nutty professor, we’d be lucky. But he wields great influence in academic circles and has had Obama’s ear. He’s the author or editor of 15 books. Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans.
Just last month, Ayers was elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. AERA is the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers.
Know your candidate 251
Here is a detailed summary of the life, political activities, and associates of one cadidate for the presidency of the United States: Barack Obama.
When you’ve read it you will know why the likes of Castro, Chavez, the leader of Hamas and no doubt Osama bin Laden would just love to see him become President.
Unless you are a far-left revolutionary, an Islamofascist, a hater of freedom, or sadly dim-witted, it ought to scare the marrow out of your bones!