To : Carteret County News-Times                              Letter to The Editor

Does Our Flag Still Wave?

Some years ago, a Cuban refugee lady came to work at my office. When I expressed regret that she had to flee her homeland she replied with a statement I’ve never forgotten:

“Don’t feel sorry for me. I had a place to flee to. When the Marxists come for you,

you’ll have no where to run.”

Now, in my seventies, I feel very fortunate to have lived when I have. I’m afraid that

I have lived in the best of times, and I am now seeing a change in my country that may

mean it will never again be as it was. 

I believe that our country is being led by a Marxist (i.e.) “the holder of a belief in which the class struggle is the central force for change.”  I come to that conclusion with great

regret. I do wish the best for our country, and to our likeable, charismatic President Obama, but his background and his actions lead me to a conclusion that seems inescapable.

I would like to think that President Obama is simply another power grubbing Chicago politician who would live without rules except for winning. I could live with someone

I would dislike but could understand since I was once the suburban version of a ward boss in Cook County in the late 1960’s.  

The most classic expression, to date, of Chicago style politics I knew, is the White House wanting to grab the census machinery to build the new Democrat hegemony. Chief of Staff Rohm Emanuel is expert in the “no holds barred” and “win at any cost” style of Chicago politics. He is the Felix Dzerzhinsky of the Obama cabinet.

But there is a lot worse, I fear, to come.

The main stream media hasn’t told us very much about President Obama’s past. His neighbors in Chicago, like Ayers, are from the University of Chicago, long a hot-bed of American Marxism. Who did he work for in his early years and what did he do as a community organizer?

Did Obama’s campaign exchange with Joe the Plumber had a familiar ring, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need?”   

Obama is the product of the Industrial Areas Foundation operating in South Chicago, an activist group started by a Marxist named Saul Alinsky who died in 1971. Alinsky helped establish the confrontational politics of the 1960’s and currently his two most notable disciples are Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama. Read Alinsky’s book called “Rules for Radicals” and you’ll begin to understand where Mr. Obama is coming from, and what he truly believes. 

For openers, understand that the term “Community Organizer,” Obama’s job, is a soft version of what Alinsky characterizes as “revolutionaries.”

Reading Alinsky, one appreciates the need for “bad guy” opponents,  ranging from President Bush and Wall Street to “the rich.”  It is interesting to see the Obama folks continue to pound on their inherited “Bush recession.” What a contrast to George W. who tried to fight two wars with an under-strength army without ever blaming his predecessor. 

Have you ever wondered why we could muster 500,000 troops in the first Gulf War and had less than 200,000 for the second. Bill Clinton produced budget surpluses on the backs of the military, and reduced the number of U.S. Army divisions by one-half.  Why was this never reported in the main stream media. Bush, sadly, was too much a gentleman to blame Clinton. (Not a problem with Obama.)

Obama will trim the military budget the same way as Clinton to balance the budget. Note the new talks with the Taliban and a troop surge in Afghanistan far less than requested.  I fear for the brave Afghan men and women I met in Afghanistan who are betting their lives on the U.S. I haven’t forgotten some other folks, in Southeast Asia, who made the same bet and lost.

A footnote on “the rich:” I have been amused for years to find that political definitions of the rich is set at an amount a bit higher than the salary of Congress. It’s always been that way.

But, I digress. Let’s return to our Marxist friend, Saul Alinsky.   

Alinsky divides Americans into the “Haves,” the “Have Nots,” and the “Have A Little, Want More.” The third group is the great middle class on which political success clearly resides and the critical vehicle in achieving the overthrow of “The Haves.” 

Let’s look at some of the rules learned by young Obama and then taught by him as an instructor:

“The third rule of ethics of ways and means is that in war, the end justifies almost any means.”

“To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control.”

“The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The leader is driven by the desire for power while the organizer is driven to create [like a new society]. The organizer is reaching to be a great Creator, to play God.”

“Before men can act, they must be polarized.” Oh how useful are those Wall Street bonuses and corporate jets to create distaste and distrust of “the haves.”

“People do not know what they want.” [We’ll teach them!]

“The first step in community organization is community disorganization. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.”

“An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel in which people can pour out their frustrations.” 

“First rule is that power is not only what you have, but what your enemy thinks you have.

“Third rule is whenever possible go outside the experience of your enemy”. [As in theforeclosure and banking crises.]

“The fourth rule is make your enemy live up to his book of own rules.” A classic Obama example was the campaign finance rules followed by John McCain and ignored by Obama.

“The fifth rule is ridicule as man’s most potent weapon.” This one is used by the White House every day and a favorite of most socialist/Marxists.

The eighth rule is “keep the pressure on.” This is why Obama seems to be engaged almost daily in a political campaign that was supposed to be over. Alinsky also taught that “organizers” focus on multiple crusades and approaches utilizing all possible issues at the same time. Pundits have asked why Obama doesn’t hold some issues, like the impossibly expensive national health care, until the financial crisis is past. Obama will follow Alinsky, not the pundits.

“The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” The need for targets is key to focusing successful attacks. Freezing means you disregard other causes for a problem, blaming only the target. (Ignore the politician culprits and focus on “greedy bankers..”)

Forgive me, friends, I don’t mean to repeat the book. Read it for yourself. Make up your own mind. Does Alinksky’s training explain, to you, some of the more inexplicable, and dangerous, of Obama’s actions?

How does one explain a policy which runs contrary to the experience of successfully dealing with previous recessions going back to John F. Kennedy? Obama tells us instead that reducing spending and taxes “has never worked.” He seems enamored of the failed experiments of the Great Depression and ignores the lessons that they, and Jimmy Carter, taught.  He has a doctrinaire set of beliefs, based on his Marxist training from Alinsky.  Obama is a classic “True Believer,” within the definitions of author Erich Hoffer, another “must read” to understand our president.

Who in their right mind would raise taxes on the very people, small businesses, likely to create new jobs – and ignore them in the so-called stimulus plan? 

Who would decrease the deductions for charitable giving in the midst of a near depression, when the need for charitable giving is far greater than before? (Did you know that non-profits produce benefits at costs of 25 cents or less per dollar, government requires 75 cents per dollar?) 

Who would impose a new, high cost to consumers in the midst of a recession

by imposing “Cap and Trade” taxes on energy emissions to appease the environmentalists in the name of one of the greatest frauds of our time – “global warming?”

(You remember the environmentalists, those lobbyists who refused to allow construction of new levees in New Orleans by the Corps of Engineers twenty years ago and block oil exploration and nuclear energy today.)

What thinking person can be willing to embrace nationalized health care in the midst of a recession? Without us, where will wealthy Canadians go for the best medicine available anywhere in the world? I wish some of you had my own experience, waiting with a Canadian friend, dying of cancer, sitting for hours to get a refill on pain medicine. Where, in a recession, or afterward, will the money come from? Try rationing, my friends.

Who would persist in policies which seem to perpetuate the housing and banking crises without solving them? (Who in their right mind would look to leadership by Barney Franks and Chris Dodd, those Democrat chairs of key banking committees and creators of the frauds of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the real culprits of the “Bush financial crisis” who promoted home ownership as a new entitlement. Those two successfully resisted Republican efforts to reform Fannie and Freddie two years ago, unnoticed by the press or, sadly, much of the electorate.) 

Which idiots in the financial regulatory community, uncorrected by Obama, will continue to insist on keeping “mark to market” accounting rules that create fictional losses in the many billions for banks?

Who want to make our industry less competitive in world markets by insisting on removing secret ballots for union elections? 

Who now believes in Obama promises such as “transparency” after a stimulus bill that no one had time to read? Who believes that “earmarks” have been banned from budgets, after seeing 8,400 earmarks in the current Omnibus bill?

When will Obama realize that when Wall Street is failing so is Main Street? Some 60 million Americans invested in the stock market are pinning their future retirement hopes on the market’s recovery. Or do some social planners want all of us entirely dependent on the government? 

Is Obama invested in failure and continuing crisis? Is he counting on continued crisis to get the country, or at least the Democrats, to adopt radical “change” such as national health care and trillion dollar budgets.   Normally, a new president will try to get one major new program adopted. This president may be counting on failure and continuing crisis to get through many more than one or two radical programs. He is following the rules of Marxist Alinsky!

Maybe the 23 per cent of Americans who believe that government is the source of money will believe it even after we begin paying by inflation for the trillions we are so blithely borrowing. (Isn’t there anyone now alive who went through the Carter experience? Where we are going will resemble more the Weimar Republic of the 1920s than Jimmy Carter.)

Who wants this country to fail as a free, capitalist society? Obama must have had some powerful mentors since his early days. You don’t jump from community organizer to State Senator, then U.S. Congress, and then Presidential Candidate in four short years without some very powerful help. Do we know who those helpers were? It wasn’t light weights like Ayers or Rev. Wright. What do these helper want? Are they fellow Marxists? Or, does Alinsky tell us all we need to know? 

Saul Alinsky and his kind knew very well and trained others in how to start revolutions. Marxists are good at that. But they have never had a clue on how free markets work, and will prove that once again.

I find the last verse of the opening stanza of our national anthem to be prophetic when it asks, “Does our flag still wave …?”

Dr. Walt Schaw

March 12, 2009

Published 3/18/09