The View From 1776

Faced with a major recession, Obama’s priority was not jobs.  He left it to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to enlarge George W. Bush’s stimulus efforts, to concoct a program of which the main effect has been pork-barreling and spending to benefit Democrat/Socialist special interest groups.

Obama chose, instead, to focus his energies upon socializing medical care.  The president and his Democrat/Socialist colleagues struggled frantically, ahead of upcoming November elections, to enchain the nation with socialistic bureaucracies so broad and so deep that they cannot be undone by future administration, so pervasive and invasive that returning the nation to a new growth path will be impossible.  Socialized medicine, nationalization of the banking system, control of energy sources and uses, flooding the nation with millions more illegal immigrants (who will be converted to Democrat/Socialist voters), resurgence of socialistic labor unions, fortifying the tort bar, subordinating our statute law and the Constitution to the world-government socialist international, and outlawing Judaism and Christianity are more important to them than the economic revival and survival of the United States.

The convergence point of these initiatives is bringing private business under an updated Fascist state corporatism of the sort that Mussolini imposed upon Italy in the 1920s and Franklin Roosevelt instituted here under the, happily, short-lived National Recovery Administration during the 1930s.  In those days, Fascist state corporatism was exercised through government regulated industry councils in which management and labor unions created industry codes of prices, hours of work, workers’ pay rates, and production volumes.

Today’s Fascist state corporatism under Obama involves industry czars calling the shots behind the scenes at banks, automobile companies, and petroleum and coal companies.  The United States government and its labor union proxies take major ownership positions in and becomes the banker for those private enterprises swept into the socialist orbit. 

As Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated in the New Deal, Federal courts eventually will condone almost any degree of stretching the Constitution’s commerce clause. Darwinian evolution implies, as Karl Marx in the 1860s and American progressives in the early 1900s theorized, that the Constitution’s meaning changes from day to day.  Judicial activism becomes a sort of natural selection mechanism to weed out original constitutional conceptions of individual rights against arbitrary government exercise of power.

In addition, under Democrat/Socialists’ liberal-progressivism, the government tries to confiscate as much of income from high net worth, high income citizens as possible, and then to transfer that income to Democrat/Socialist voters.  Among other things, this will reduce or eliminate private savings, and leave the Federal government more firmly ensconced in the economic driver’s seat, free to pick industry winners and losers without interference from a domestic free market.  Having dispensed with the Fifth Amendment’s private property rights and old fashioned concepts such as profitability and return on investment, Democrat/Socialists will be able to promote money-losing, economy-wrecking “green” jobs.

Abetted by our secular and socialist educational system, in another generation Democrat/Socialists will have completed the transformation of the United States into a third-rate, socialist nation like France.  Unless, of course, voters finally come to understand what Franklin Roosevelt set in motion during the 1930s Depression.

Uncovering the Obama Conspiracies
By Jeff Lukens

Our worst suspicions about Barack Obama are coming true. He is not a centrist as he claimed to be. He is a leftist, and he is destroying our way of life. Obama could be perpetrating the greatest fraud in American history. He could be an illegitimate president, and one who intentionally seeks to undermine our country. By the time the truth comes out, the damage to may be irreparable.

Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to power has been truly remarkable. He served a mere 143 days in the U.S. Senate prior to forming an exploratory committee for his presidential candidacy in 2007. He has risen from obscurity to celebrity status in a very short time.

With the multitude of mysteries that surround him, it is a wonder why there has not been the interest in investigating his personal history and nefarious connections at, say, a fraction of the interest of what followed John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The decades of controversy that followed the JFK assassination amounted to nothing more than a misfit named Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone to kill the president. That’s it. There was nothing more to it. No grassy knoll snipers, no mob connection, no Castro connection, no KGB connection, no CIA connection, nothing.

In the end, the investigations into the conspiracies about the JFK assassination were much ado about nothing. The Warren Commission had it right from the beginning. With the multitude of conspiracies pertaining to Obama, however, it is more aptly described as nothing ado about much. Where is Oliver Stone when you need him?

Is Barack Obama some sort of 21st Century Manchurian Candidate writ large? What do we really know about him? Let us start at the beginning.

The Early Years

Barack Obama is alleged to be born in both Hawaii and Kenya. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a student attending the University of Hawaii when she met Barack Obama, Sr., a foreign student from Kenya, in 1960. Obama’s mother and father were married on February 2, 1961. She would later learn that the father was already married, and they separated in 1963.

Barack Obama claims to be born on August 4, 1961 in Hawaii as a natural born citizen and is therefore eligible to be president. His grandmother, Sarah Obama, says she witnessed his birth in Kenya. Even if this is not true, his father was a British citizen making his son a dual, or “naturalized” citizen. The U.S. Constitution reads that a presidential candidate must be “a natural born,” not just a “naturalized” citizen. The Certificate of Live Birth Obama released appears to have been photoshopped, and nonetheless is not an official birth certificate.

In 1967, Anna married Lolo Soetoro, a Malaysian oilman, and moved from Hawaii to Indonesia. Young Obama was enrolled in preschool in Jakarta under the name “Barry Soetoro” and was registered as a citizen of Indonesia and his religion as Islam. Obama’s stepfather was a Muslim, and Indonesia law requires all children to be citizens (or renounce prior citizenship) to attend school. Obama’s mother Anna left him and he never saw her again after 1979.

From 1970 to 1979, Obama attended a private school in Hawaii. During these years, Obama was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, his grandfather’s friend. Davis has even been rumored to be Obama’s father. Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record (a Communist newspaper) and was a member of the Communist Party USA.

In 1979, Obama was admitted to Occidental College in Los Angeles, most likely as a foreign exchange student. By this time, he was already moving down the path to becoming a socialist activist. At Occidental, he was a member of the radical socialist organization Students for Economic Democracy until he transferred to Columbia University in 1981.

There are many unanswered questions about the Obama’s early years. Diana West and John L. Work compiled a list of undisclosed documents on Obama’s background information that we, as an open society, have a right to know about the man who currently occupies the White House.

1) The original, long-form 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate.
2) Marriage license between Obama’s father (Barack Sr.) and mother (Stanley Ann Dunham) — not found, not released
3) Obama’s baptism records — sealed
4) Obama’s adoption records — sealed
5) Records of Obama’s and his mother’s repatriation as US citizens on return from Indonesia — not found, not released
6) Name change (Barry Soetero to Barack Hussein Obama) records — not found, not released
7) Noelani Elementary School (Hawaii) — not released
Punahou School financial aid or school records — not released
9) Occidental College financial aid records — not released. (These records were, however, subpoenaed but Obama lawyers succeeded in quashing the subpoena in court. No other Occidental records have been released.)
10) Columbia College records — not released
11) Columbia senior thesis — not released
12) Harvard Law School records (not mentioned below, but not released)
13) Obama’s law client list — sealed
14) Obama’s files from career as an Illinois State Senator — sealed
15) Obama’s record with Illinois State Bar Association — sealed
16) Obama’s medical records — not released
17) Obama’s passport records — not released

And I will add two more . . .

18) Obama’s 1979 Selective Service Registration.

19) Obama’s true Social Security Number. He is alleged to have more than one.

The Road to the Presidency

In 1983, Obama moved to Chicago where he became Director of the Developing Communities Project where he honed his community organizing skills. In the mid-1980s, Obama was the attorney for ACORN and was a trainer at their annual conferences.

Obama first met William Ayres in 1988. Soon afterwards, Obama returns east to attend Harvard Law School. A wealthy Saudi prince is rumored to have funded his tuition. Obama then became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. For such an ordinary writer, this is amazing too. Other than an unremarkable article published in the Columbia student newspaper, we don’t find anything he has written up to this time, including in the Harvard Law Review.

Obama returned to Chicago to intern at a law firm in 1989 where he met Michelle Robinson. Following graduation, he and Michelle were married in 1992 by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

In 1995, Dreams from My Father was published. Jack Cashill has analyzed the writing style of the book and concluded that it is remarkably similar to other books written by William Ayers. Apparently, Ayres made the effort to ghostwrite the book in 1995 because he and his contacts already had Obama on the fast track to run for high office, and through him advance their radical agenda.

And where else would that be possible but in the machine politics of Chicago? Obama and Ayers served alongside each other on a $100 million education foundation called the “Chicago Annenberg Challenge” from 1995 to 2000. When Obama launched his political career in 1995, the setting for his first fundraiser was the Chicago apartment of Ayers. Obama was the winning candidate for the Illinois 13th District in 1996.

In 2004, Obama ran for and won the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois after his GOP opponent was exposed in a sex scandal. On February 10, 2007, the young Senator announced his presidential candidacy. Senator Obama voted the liberal line on 65 of 66 key votes and he was ranked as “the most liberal Senator of 2007” by the National Journal.

Obama lived by the Alinsky rule that said radicals should cut their hair and put on suits so as not to scare off the middle class. This approach served Obama well through the 2008 “Change We Can Believe In” campaign. And during that campaign, he took down the Clinton machine, which in itself was no small feat. A messianic quality soon surrounded Obama as a fawning media gushed over the spectacle of the first black man seriously contending for the presidency.

As a citizen of the world and a candidate for the presidency, Obama gave a landmark speech in Berlin where he promised to not leave “our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” Even by Obama’s inflated rhetorical standards, this was over the top.

Six weeks before the election, the subprime mortgage crisis forced Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy, and the stock market subsequently lost 25% of its value over the next month. It has never been determined whether Obama’s backers, such as George Soros, were complicit in the market crash in 2008.

But it all fits together so nicely by their profiting while short selling the market and panicking the public to the point that they would consider an unknown leftist Senator for the highest office in the land. The crash essentially handed the presidency to Barack Obama.

The Unfolding Truth

Imagine if it were ever proven that Obama is ineligible to be president. A Constitutional crisis would surely erupt. Every law and Executive Order signed while Obama was acting as president could be invalidated.

Every day we witness another assault by Team Obama to alter our country and grow a culture of dependency. From coercing corporations into adopting progressive policies, to politicizing the census, to seeking to make millions of illegal aliens into voting citizens, to establishing an Internet Kill Switch, to abolishing talk radio, to Cap and Trade, to ObamaCare, the list goes on. The implications of these schemes are grave for freedom loving people everywhere. In Obama’s Alinksyite world, the end always justifies the means. It just comes with an alibi and a smile.

Obama’s runaway spending and anti-business policies could be to purposely driving the nation into bankruptcy. The U.S. economy is already staggering under a mountain of debt and unfunded liabilities. Could Obama’s end game be to sabotage the U.S. and world economies in order to collapse them and create the New World Order that progressives have long sought? We may soon find out. There is already talk of a single world currency as the value of the dollar erodes.

In summary, Barack Obama played down his radical past to appear moderate. Everything the man stands for and has ever done, however, is some deception or lie. He promised to transform our nation with a fresh start. In the time since we have known this man, however, it is clear that his only answer to anything is more government control. He will say or pretend anything to advance that goal.

The president and his socialist brethren are intent on undermining our allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. In 2008, the people were duped into voting for a con man for their president. Now, our very way of life is at risk and the time to correct this deception grows short. We need to expose the truth behind the Obama Administration and its backers before it is too late.

RELATED LINKS:
The Obama Timeline, by Don Fredrick.

Beyond Coincidence, By Lynn M. Stuter.

Few people ever read beyond the stirring opening sentences of the Declaration.  The meat of the document is in the bottom part of the second paragraph:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

This to a considerable extent the situation we the voters have fashioned for ourselves since Franklin Roosevelt’s imposition of welfare-state socialism in the 1930s.  The Obama administration openly and proudly proclaims its intention to impose a New New Deal, the final socialist nails our coffin.

Describing the war that commenced in 1776 as a revolution gives a very erroneous impression.  Revolutions commonly destroy existing power centers, including religion, sovereignty, and the law.  Our War of Independence resulted in none of those things.

State governments, which had already functioned as local colonial governments for as long as 156 years remained in power, usually under their original constitutions, which were derivatives of their colonial charters.  English common law remained the law of the land.  No church properties were seized, no clergymen were imprisoned, as happened 13 years later in the French Revolution.

What did happen was establishment of the principle that states and their citizens were to be free of arbitrary exercise of centralized government power.  That was the meaning of the most popular slogan of the war, “No Taxation Without Representation.”

Subsequent ratification of the Constitution in 1789 did create a stronger Federal government.  But the very name Federal signifies that it was a government in which most of the powers that affected people’s everyday lives, the so-called police powers, were retained by the states and the local governments. 

That was the point of the 9th and 10th Amendments in the Bill of Rights:

Amendment IX:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That was the point in giving equal representation to every state in the Senate and of directing that Senators were to be elected by their own state legislatures (subsequently repealed by the liberal-progressive-socialist sponsored 17th Amendment).

Today our government is very far removed from what was intended in 1776 and 1787, when the Constitution was crafted in Philadelphia.

It’s time for all of us to refocus on original principles, to abandon our greedy pursuit of welfare-state handouts, and to return to the most basic of all underlying principles of the Declaration and the Constitution: Judeo-Christian morality.

Before ratification of the 17th Amendment it’s unlikely that a Senate committee would have needed to raise the sort of question posed by Senator Coburn during confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. A Wall Street Journal editorial reports:

If Congress passed a law saying Americans were required to eat three fruits and three vegetables a day, Mr. Coburn asked, would that be legitimate under the Commerce Clause? It sounds like a “dumb law,” Ms. Kagan wisecracked, which is true enough, but then she added that “courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.” In other words: Congress could do it.

The real question here is whether Ms. Kagan recognizes any limits on the Commerce Clause, which legislators have used as justification to regulate or mandate just about anything, and which the Obama Administration is eyeing as its golden ticket to defend ObamaCare. Some 20 states are challenging the law on the grounds that forcing people to buy health insurance shreds the Constitution.

... Ms. Kagan maintained that in recent years the Commerce Clause has been read broadly, to suggest “that deference should be provided to Congress with respect to matters that affect interstate commerce” and that “the principal protector against bad laws is the political branches themselves.

That one would have made James Madison howl.

I must disagree, however, with the Journal’s understanding.  Abundant evidence from James Madison’s notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention debates, as well as from the Federalist Papers and correspondence and speeches by prominent political leaders of the founding era, make clear that the Senate’s role was to prevent Congress from passing laws that infringed upon powers traditionally reserved to state governments.

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly recognized that the broad language of a constitution cannot prescribe limits upon Congressional legislative power for every one of the myriad occasions in which regulatory questions can arise.  Such questions, the delegates noted, are political in nature, not judicial issues.  Ms. Kagan is correct that the courts have no constitutional authority to reject Congressional enactments solely because judges regard them as “dumb.” Deference to Congress in such matters is a position of proper judicial restraint.

The Senate was intended to be the bulwark against unwise political actions that infringed upon the rights and powers reserved to the states and to the people by the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights.  Because Senators were originally elected by their state legislatures, they had to be attendant to the wishes of the individual states and could not, as now under the 17th Amendment, respond primarily to pressure from national political parties to conform to the dictates of special interest groups such as public employees labor unions or “green” fanatics.

Ratification of the 17th Amendment thrust upon the Supreme Court the burden of attempting to play the role originally intended for the Senate, a role that the courts simply cannot fulfill.  Since 1913 the Supreme Court has twisted and turned, seeking constitutional justifications, however indirect, to impose restraints upon egregiously damaging and unwise legislative action.  It should not have to assume that role.  Without the 17th Amendment, Federal courts would not be the centers of bitter political fights, litmus tests, and poisonous confirmation hearings that destroy reputations and careers.

The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, was one of many initiatives championed by liberal-progressives to facilitate transformation of the Federal government from one limited by constitutional constraints into one with almost unlimited powers to impose new sociological standards.  It was a key piece in the push to neuter states’ rights and to collectivize power at the Federal level.

The commerce clause of the Constitution has been stretched since 1913 to confer upon Congress the power to regulate any action or event anywhere in the universe on the grounds that it might, however indirectly, affect interstate commerce.  The birth of every new baby, for example, indirectly affects interstate commerce, because the parents will need to buy food, clothing, and other items.  Some of such items will surely have been manufactured, warehoused, or shipped from states other than that of the baby’s residence, bringing the birth of a child within the purview of the commerce clause.  There is thus theoretically no constitutional limitation upon Federal power to regulate the number of children a family is permitted to have.

It is noteworthy that very few issues of judicial activism arose prior to ratification of the 17th Amendment, because the Senate generally did its job, which was preventing passage of power-grabbing legislation.  It is also noteworthy that growth of the Federal bureaucracy accelerated only after the 17th Amendment.

Political structural safeguards against arbitrariness were essential aspects of our Constitution.  Increasingly since the 1930s New Deal, under socialist Franklin Roosevelt, those safeguards have been destroyed. Ever more power has been taken from states and local governments and usurped by the Federal government.

That process has reached new depths of degradation in the Obama administration.  Treatment of bondholders in Chrysler and GM was of the same order as arbitrary seizures of money and property by monarchs, from King John to James II.  The proposed effective take-over of Wall Street by Federal bureaucrats is more of the same.

Read Michael Barone’s Gangster Government Becomes a Long-Running Series.