Could be the most important read of the year

[SpringerRider]

Sadly, the readership of these forums have gone entirely down the toilet. That is too bad since it can be such an avenue for education. Many of our followers strongly support the 9-12 movement yet still lack grounding and a more fundamental understanding of the isues. Forums such as this one could be a valuable resource - but not if it sits idle.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/05/the-united-socialist-states-of-america-40348471/

I normally do not post complete articles, wishing readers to seek out the source. Yet this one is so informative and insightful that I want to expose as many as possible to its motif. I don't think anyone has ever exposed the mind of our mad-boy president better.


KUHNER: The United Socialist States of America

The president intends to overthrow American capitalism.

By Jeffrey T. Kuhner

President Obama is close to completing his socialist revolution. Since coming to power last year, he has sought relentlessly to transform America. From his days as a student radical, Mr. Obama has been obsessed with smashing the traditional free-market system. Like most leftists, he thinks capitalism is the enemy.

"He was a Marxist-socialist in college," said John C. Drew, who knew Mr. Obama as a university student, in an interview. "He kept talking about the need to overthrow capitalism in favor of a working-class revolution."

One of Mr. Obama's favorite philosophers was Frantz Fanon, a post-colonial Marxist who championed Third World liberation movements. Fanon argued that the West - led by America - was based on racism, imperialism and the economic exploitation of the world's poor. The only remedy was authoritarian socialism and a massive redistribution of wealth from Western nations to developing countries.

Throughout his career, Mr. Obama has had radical associations. At Columbia University, while teaching constitutional law, he embraced postmodernist legal theory that maintains that the U.S. constitutional system presents an artificial veneer for liberty while actually advancing the economic interests of powerful white males. As a community organizer in Chicago, he studied and tried to mimic the activism of Saul Alinsky - a neo-Trotskyite who championed "permanent revolution." His longtime associates, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are supporters of Marxist liberation and share a deep hatred for the United States. They believe only fundamental, sweeping change can redeem America.

Rather than being a pragmatic centrist - as the mainstream media insists on portraying him - Mr. Obama is the very opposite: an ideologue who is pursuing his political project even at the risk of badly damaging the Democratic Party.

This explains his bizarre, almost reckless desire to ram Obamacare through Congress. The president has said he wants an "up-or-down vote" on his health care overhaul - preferably by the end of this month, before the Easter recess. In other words, he has given the green light to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, to use reconciliation, a parliamentary process designed to fast-track budgetary measures. Under these arcane rules, a simple majority in the Senate of 50 Democratic votes plus a tie-breaker from Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be enough to pass health care reform. The filibuster will be rendered impotent.

This is unprecedented. Never in our history has reconciliation been used to pass a major piece of social legislation on a narrow partisan majority. Obamacare will overhaul nearly one-sixth of the U.S. economy. By contrast, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid passed with overwhelming bipartisan consensus. Contrary to popular myth, numerous Republicans endorsed the New Deal-Great Society welfare state. This is why repealing it has been so difficult (if not impossible).

The White House and its media allies claim that the 1996 welfare reform bill, the 1997 children's health insurance program and the 2001 Bush tax cuts were passed using reconciliation. This is misleading. Every one of these measures had strong Democratic support - especially in the Senate.

Mr. Obama is engaged in an abuse of power. He is thwarting the will of the majority of the American people who do not want socialized medicine. They rightly fear that the proposal's massive $1 trillion price tag will add to our skyrocketing national debt, which has brought us to the brink of ruin. They understand it will stifle medical innovation and reduce the quality of care, leading to rationing and longer waiting lines. It represents the greatest expansion of entitlement spending since the 1960s.

Moreover, Mr. Obama's actions are undermining the traditional system of checks and balances established by the Founding Fathers. The institutional role of the Senate is to serve as a bulwark against raw majority rule. By circumventing the filibuster, Mr. Obama is not only thumbing his nose at the voters - including those in Massachusetts who elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown - but the very constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this kind of usurpation of power.

His proposal seeks to create a centrally planned medical economy that will erect a gigantic government bureaucracy based on massive taxes, subsidies and regulations. Mr. Obama is willing to sacrifice his party's political fortunes in November - and even his own re-election in 2012 - because he understands one fundamental fact: Nationalized health care is the heart of cradle-to-grave statism. No country that has ever embraced socialized medicine - Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy - has ever been able to regain economic freedom.

This is not because government-run health care is so effective or beloved; rather, it fosters a debilitating spirit of dependency that is fatal to a self-governing people. In short, it kills the self-reliance and individualism critical to a free-market democracy.

For Mr. Obama, that is precisely the point. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, laid out the Marxist blueprint that has been followed by the radical left since 1917. Lenin urged that any disaster should be exploited to "hasten the destruction ... of the capitalist class." The 2008 Great Recession brought Mr. Obama to power. He has been seizing this crisis in order to overthrow the old capitalist order.

Mr. Obama is relentlessly giving birth to a new nation: the United Socialist States of America - the U.S.S.A.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the daily radio host of the "Kuhner Show" on WTNT 570-AM (http://www.talk570.com) from noon until 3 p.m.

[Whrlwnd13]

I agree what Obama is doing is intentionally geared at creating a socialist welfare state. I have firsthand experience with members of the Socialist movement and the Communist party USA and thier goals were to create a utopian society where everyone was equal. Their idea of equality was not the same as most peoples, they wanted not only equal opportunities, but equality of wealth (regarlesss whether they worked hard for it or not). They felt that those that would be considered as not contributing to the society were the victims of some past or current transgression of the capitalist society.

A government controlled healthcare system would be the foot in the door for the socialist agenda. That is why I feel that there can be no compromise legislation. I fear that whatever bill is passed, those promoting Obama's socialist agenda will eventually modify it enough to where our current healthcare system is unrecognizable.

We must stop this nightmare!
Whrl

[SpringerRider]

No two people are equal. That is a mathematical construct that makes no sense outside of that realm. What stands is that we are all to be regarded equally under the law, though we rarely are.

I have not interest whether I am equal to another. I just try to be the best at who I am. My client must not think I was equal to all the others who sought the same contract. He choose me! My wife was the pick of the litter. She has no equal (in my eyes).

There is an argument that communism is a perfect system but that people are an imperfect beast. It is similar to "we have communism and one end on and fascism on the other" or "if it saves just one life, isn't it worth it?". I hate the later the most. I would get this crap in HS and college. I call them synthetic false dichotomies. If you allow yourself to be trapped in one, you have lost from the start. I keep saying that I am going to write more on how to frame liberal arguments to win but I have been terribly amiss in my promises.

The simple answer is that statism which encompasses communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism and any other form is collectivism is a form of slavery when lawfully imposed and an attack on individualism at a minimum.

The basic argument will always be the relationship of the individual to the tribe. The tribe can be the state, country, society or mob. That will always be the crux of any argument between the Right and the Left.