Often described as “the journal of record” (for the socialist international its critics would say), the New York Times recaps questions raised by critics of Dinesh D’Sousa’s cover article for Forbes Magazine.
The essay in Forbes was adapted from Mr. D
Monday, September 27, 2010
Liberal-Progressive Critique of D’Sousa’s Analysis
Columbia University’s Journalism Review blog spews invective without addressing the substance of Dinesh D’Sousa’s cover article in Forbes Magazine. The Columbia staff writer assumes, it appears, that anyone questioning Obama’s political mindset is ipso facto a racist or an idiot whose views can be dismissed out of hand.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan in her August 27, 2010, column (We Just Don’t Understand: Americans look at the president and see a stranger) expressed the growing puzzlement of a majority of voters about the wide gulf between the expectations evoked during the 2008 presidential campaign and the policies and actions of President Obama in office.
Quote:
“Underscoring the unknowns is the continuing question about him and those around him: How did they read the public mood so well before the presidency and so poorly after? ...“All of this strikes people, understandably, as perplexing. “I don’t get what he’s doing.” Which becomes, in time, “I don’t get who he is.” ...“When the American people have looked at the presidents of the past few decades they could always sort of say, “I know that guy.” Bill Clinton: Southern governor. Good ol’ boy, drawlin’, flirtin’, got himself a Rhodes Scholarship. “I know that guy.” George W. Bush: Texan, little rough around the edges, good family, youthful high jinks, stopped drinking, got serious. “I know that guy.” Ronald Reagan was harder to peg, but you still knew him: small-town Midwesterner, moved on and up, serious about politics, humorous, patriotic. “I know that guy.” Barack Obama? Sleek, cerebral, detached, an academic from Chicago by way of Hawaii and Indonesia. “You know what? I don’t know that guy!”
Continued decline of the president’s voter approval ratings in all opinion polls can’t be refuted simply by imputing racism or ignorance to his critics. Mr. Obama in office is not the man liberal-progressives or independents thought him to be.
To account for the perceptual gulf, Dinesh D’Sousa’s cover article for Forbes Magazine makes a detailed case that President Obama’s deepest political convictions arise, not from the traditional ethos described as the American dream, but from the African-socialist anti-colonialism espoused by the president’s father.
Durrie Monsma alerted me to a critique of Mr. D’Sousa’s article that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, written by Ryan Chittum, deputy editor of the Review’s business section. See this and this.
The closest Mr. Chittum comes to dealing with the central thrust of Mr. D’Sousa’s argument is, “So Barack Obama, who falls somewhere on the middle or right side of the spectrum of modern American liberalism, is now an outsider motivated by anti-American ideals. The birthers got nothin
Back to summary...
Thursday, September 23, 2010
General Electric CEO Calls For More Big-Business Socialism
As did one of his predecessors during the imposition of socialism under President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, General Electric chief Jeff Immelt called for a bigger role for the Federal government, in this case, controlling the nation’s energy uses and sources.
At the outset of the 1930s Depression, General Electric president Owen D. Young was among the heads of major corporations who advocated more government controls of wages and prices to help big business regain its economic footing.
Since the days of the railroads, the first great, interstate corporations, many of our largest corporations have maintained an uneasy, often close relationship with the Federal government. Large, interstate corporations prefer working with a single set of national regulations, rather than with 50 different sets of state regulations. Their smaller competitors are less able to bear the monstrous compliance costs that result. Business that are big enough, as we have seen, can secure special financial and regulatory dispensations from the Federal government.
Just as Wall Street clamors for the Fed to flood the market with yet more fiat money to inflate the stock market, General Electric wants special favors from the government to give it competitive advantages, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2010, 4:11 P.M. ET
GE CEO Says U.S. Is Falling Behind in Energy
By PAUL GLADER
General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeff Immelt warned that the lack of a comprehensive U.S. energy policy and the “stupid” current structure of the industry are causing America to fall behind in new energy fields.
In sharply worded comments at an energy event in Washington, Mr. Immelt on Thursday praised China’s approach to energy and criticized what he called a stalled effort to revamp U.S. energy policy. The remarks came as GE is facing tougher competition around the world from rivals in the markets for renewable and nuclear energy that the company believes get more help from their governments.
“The rest of the world is moving 10 times faster than we are,” Mr. Immelt said, referring to the U.S. during a speech at the Gridwise Global Forum. “This is a great country. But, you know, we have to have an energy policy. This is just stupid what we have today.”
The head of the Fairfield, Conn., conglomerate said China is moving faster to develop clean technologies such as nuclear power, electric vehicles and wind power. He also said China has the right mix of a big local market, innovation in technology, a low-cost supply chain and government policy support. China’s State Grid utility, he said, is larger than nearly all U.S. utilities combined.
Meanwhile, Mr. Immelt characterized the energy regulatory system in the U.S.
Back to summary...
Monday, September 20, 2010
What Makes Obama Tick
Dinesh D’Sousa suggests that it’s the anti-colonialism that President Obama absorbed from his late father, an orientation that accounts for the president’s antipathy toward our nation’s history and founding ethos.
Proclaiming himself a citizen of the world, President Obama seems more comfortable with the barbarism and authoritarianism of the Muslim and socialist worlds than with the ethos of arms-bearing and Bible-reading citizens who fought in 1776 for independence from arbitrary government power. Witness his coziness with enemies of the United States in socialist Venezuela and Cuba, as well as his unwillingness to stand up against Islamic Iran and Syria. Domestically, add to it his institution of the most radical and pervasive web of social and economic controls since the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.
In a Forbes Magazine cover article, Mr. D’Sousa describes the close links between the anti-colonialism that animated President Obama’s father and the president’s repeated apologies to other nations for what he appears to regard as imperial, and therefore criminal, past foreign policies of the United States.
Anti-colonialism historically is entwined with both socialism and Islam, one the epitome of economic tyranny, the other a societal ethos in which all aspects of government and economy are subordinated to the religion of jihad and sharia.
Socialism, of course, is a secular religion, and Islam a theistic one. Authoritarian political control is the common aspect, as it is with the actions and aims of the Obama administration.
Most of the African nations gaining independence after World War II are or have been devotees of so-called African socialism and believers in planned economies. President Obama’s father was a Kenyan advocate of African socialism.
Inherent in the doctrines of socialism and Islam is the necessity to eradicate traditional religious and political structures of Christian Western Europe and the United States. The Koran commands Muslims to conquer and subject all peoples to Islam. Both socialism and Islam require exercise of arbitrary political power at the expense of individual liberty.
African nations fancied, and President Obama apparently still does, that eradicating existing social and political structures leads to social and economic perfection: economic egalitarianism. Obama blames the George W. Bush administration for failure of his socialistic economic and political policies; African socialist nations blamed their difficulties on the legacy of European colonialism.
This piece of historicist rationalization originated in the modern world with Voltaire and his fellow French philosophes of the 1789 revolution, who blamed French society’s problems on the Roman Catholic Church. Confiscation of the church’s property and suppression of Catholicism, instead of ushering in social harmony, opened the gates in 1793 for the bloody Reign of Terror under Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety.
Underlying Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign rhetoric and his program in office is the secular religious doctrine enunciated by Jean Jacques Rousseau in mid-18th century France. In addition to his thesis that humans are inherently good unless corrupted by a society that protects private property rights, Rousseau’s conception of the general will seems to be fundamental to Obama and his Democrat/Socialist Party congressional leaders.
People in Rousseau’s idyllic state of nature were all free, lived in harmony, and enjoyed readily abundant sustenance. That ended with the advent of private property and the organization of political societies by the strong to protect their property against the weak.
For Rousseau, an ideal society would be one in which the law and political institutions instead created and protected economic equality. Instituting such a society demands subordination of all citizens to the general will. Capitalistic individualism stands in the way of this version of social perfection.
In Rousseau’s words, “...whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free…for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence.” The welfare state trumps individual political and economic liberties.
Such is the secular religiosity supporting the confidence of Obama and his Democrat/Socialist Party colleagues that massively intrusive programs such as Obamacare are to be crammed down the throats of the objecting majority of voters, for their own good. It is the rationalization for a regime aiming to collectivize control of the nation in the hands of a socialist elite, an elite that controls the financial sector, healthcare, major manufacturers, and energy production.
Back to summary...
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Belated Understanding
Former Fed chairman Greenspan seems finally to have grasped the historically demonstrable truth that an over-expanded economy will rebound more swiftly and on sounder footing when the government stays out of the picture.
Alan Greenspan’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve was marked repeatedly, after the 1987 stock market crash, by his flooding the financial system with fiat money to offset declines in the stock market. Famously he chastised excessive financial market exuberance, while, in effect, pouring gasoline on a raging financial fire.
That is exactly the monetary policy, in spades, that current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is pursuing. Coupling it with an excessive and misdirected barrel of congressional pork, the so-called stimulus program, has dug a deeper hole for the economy to climb out of and has made economic recovery unnecessarily difficult.
A Wall Street Journal article in the September 15, 2010, edition reports:
The former head of the Federal Reserve said fiscal stimulus efforts have fallen far short of expectations, and the government now needs to get out of the way and allow businesses and markets to power the recovery.
Back to summary...
Friday, September 10, 2010
Castro’s Confession
Cuba’s dictator, beloved of American liberal-progressives from Hollywood to Washington, DC, repudiates their secular religious faith.
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Obamacare Pushes Healthcare Costs Higher
A Wall Street Journal article in the September 8, 2010, edition reports that the Federal government’s own analysis rebuts cost-saving claims by Democrat-Socialist leaders. Healthcare cost increases are projected to be almost 40% higher in 2014 under Obamacare than they would have been without it.
Read excerpts below, if you are not an online subscriber to the Journal.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2010
Health Outlays Still Seen Rising
By Janet Adamy
The health-care overhaul enacted last spring won’t significantly change national health spending over the next decade compared with projections before the law was passed, according to government figures released Thursday.
The report by federal number-crunchers casts fresh doubt on Democrats’ argument that the health-care law would curb the sharp increase in costs over the long term, the second setback this week for one of the party’s biggest legislative achievements…
The law’s early provisions will increase overall health-care spending, the report says, while adding to benefits for consumers. The creation of new high-risk insurance pools, a requirement that children can stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26 and other early provisions will increase U.S. health expenditures by $10.2 billion through 2013, the report says…
U.S. health spending is projected to rise 9.2% in 2014, up from the 6.6% projected before the law took effect [i.e., 39.4% higher].
Back to summary...
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Labor Union Parasites
The definition of a biological parasite is directly applicable to labor unions: An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
A current example is the Postal Workers union.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Barack: The Buck Stop With No Backstop
Our socialistic Savior of Humanity inherited a mess created by a Democrat-Socialist-controlled Congress. George W. Bush did not create it.
